getting it out of the mix, sucking all the air out to the room now, will get something done. The world needs to research and develop alternates to both fossil and nuclear energy and as long as the nuke boys is around the money won't be coming for the necessary R&D for alternates.
The only time that nuclear is co2 less is during the production of electricity. The rest of the time nuclear is a co2 creating monster just like all other industrial projects are. Trouble is it takes years to build a nuclear power plant and all this construction is co2 intensive, from making the huge amounts of cement to the refining the iron and making it into steel suitable to build with, All this is a huge co2 producer. Now you have the huge amount of uranium to be mined to get the ingredients it takes to make the fuel that powers the nuke plant, Every bit of all this is co2 intensive. For instance a lot more co2 is created making cement than is produced burning fossil fuels, especially if you add NG to the mix. The local cement plant uses old tires to fuel their kilns with and by design of a cement kiln it doesn't allow for burning the old car tires cleanly at all.
I'll take my chances going forward with alternates to both Fossil and Nuclear
We need to convert as many coal plant to natural gas as is possible, possibly convert some ot them to using a gasifier to extract the energy from coal while we're building out more and more wind turbines and solar power plants, Oh and geothermal needs to get on the front burner as it is our best bet for a large percentage of our energy mix that is relatively clean. The water from most geothermal plants can be mined for precious metals as a bonus, something we need lots of and are dependent on the Chinese for most of ours or if not most then a large percentage.
Nuclear is not the future. There is too many dangers and too big a chance that when something unthinkable does happen no one knows what to do and in many cases there isn't much that can be done. Whats going on in Japan and still going on in Russia even after all these years is a testament to what I'm saying. Its too freaking dangerous when things go wrong. Like in Japan I don't believe the human factor has a lot of control on what is going on, I think the human factor is helping to keep it from being worse than it is but other than that not much else. We don't need to be relying on something that is as dangerous as these plants are.
And I haven't even mentioned the waste problem yet. Its been going on as far back as nuclear has existed, what to do with the waste. They lied to us when PSO tried to cram one down our throats here in northeast Oklahoma back in the '70s and they're still lying to us now. Dropping it off in international waters is not the answer either.
Sometime google nuclear waste, mafia and France and see what you get, (for those of you who haven't heard of this angle yet.) Enough to piss you right off if you're truly concerned with all parts of our ecosystem, not just select parts such our air.
Shut them down and ration my power if need be while they ramp up production thats cleaner, I won't mind.
Nuclear energy is not clean except during the actual time it is producing electricity. The rest of its cycle its pretty dirty
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