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The nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 put a fork in that idea....
The partial meltdown that spawned a variety of epidemiology studies which concluded that the accident had no observable long term health effects, but like a book about bird eggs that was junk science, it was enough to get dumb***** politicians and media personalities to effectively kill a perfectly viable and important industry.
If you look at the number of reactors, military and civilian, in operation in the US since the 1960s, and take the operational hours versus number of incidents/accidents, the operational safety record of US nuclear power is remarkable bordering on statistically perfect. We are that good at running nuclear plants. You could say the same thing about France. Their operational safety record for nuclear power is pretty rock solid as well.
Nuclear power is as good as electricity generation gets, and it's too bad that more than half the population of the world's greatest economic power thinks all reactors, their engineers and operators, and the program operational safety records are like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Trump is not interested anything but panders to his loyal cult. and they are mostly low information voters who think they can rewind the clock to a time when their skills were valued.
Because Trump is heavily invested in taking his base back to the 50s and he's not smart enough to figure this stuff out. He's our Hoover.
This.
The Trump base wants a 1950s economy. Coal, manufacturing, low-skilled manual labor, etc. They see the 1950s as America's "Golden Age" in every way. They don't realize that the world has moved on. Coal isn't coming back. More and more manufacturing is going to be automated. The future is high tech.
OP: China Gets That Going Green Is A Win For Job Creation. Why Doesn't Trump?
You can substitute California for China in your headline as well. One of the reasons California's economy has been so strong over the last several years is the state's big push for renewable energy. Solar power created a lot of well-paying jobs, both for residential installs and for large-scale utility projects.
There are new nuclear reactor designs that are much safer. NuScale Power has recently submitted a new design to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: NuScale Power - SMR Nuclear Technology
As much as I'd like to rely on wind and solar power, we don't (yet) have batteries that are cheap enough to make wind and solar economical.
I don't doubt that the current nuclear technology is safe. But the problem is spent nuclear fuel rods and the other radioactive liquids are accumulating, and being stored in the nuclear plant site. That is unsafe. The plan to dispose it deep inside Yucatan mountains was derailed by Harry Reid.
Unless we can come up with a plan to dispose of the spent fuel and start implementing the disposal of waste we already have we should not be building any more new plants.
OP: China Gets That Going Green Is A Win For Job Creation. Why Doesn't Trump?
You can substitute California for China in your headline as well. One of the reasons California's economy has been so strong over the last several years is the state's big push for renewable energy. Solar power created a lot of well-paying jobs, both for residential installs and for large-scale utility projects.
It's a jobs program funded by the government. Which is fine IMO. During the worst depression since the Great Depression, we need jobs programs.
My question is this: what will happen to California electricity rates? In most places that have pushed for wind and solar (like Germany and Denmark), rates have gone up dramatically.
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