nuclear power?

Should we be promoting the use of nuclear power in this day and age of being "Green" and the continuing rise of the price of oil? It really is a clean energy alternative.

Canada has a whack load of uranium, why shouldn't we use it?

Obvisouly, I can see some issues here such as political and strategic? If we use it freely who are we to say counties like North Korea cannot use it?

Another issue is the waste. But is it really all that bad in comparison to some of the other crap we are putting in our air and water? At least nuclear waste is just put into a deep hole in the ground.

Discuss, this is something I've been thinking of for a while and would like to hear others' input.

Deffinite yes. Cleanest and most efficient form of energy available.

can you put the waste into space

16 Dirty Secrets About Nuclear Power

I think so. Where are we going to get the electricity for the electric cars everyone seems to want…

There actually isn't a lot of Uranium available. Most estimates state that we've already peaked in production capacity.

If you really look into the energy problem it's obvious that there is nothing to prevent a massive rape of every part of the world that has natural resources left. Then a long desperate deterioration into a type of dark ages.

maybe the indians were better off without us.. who knew..

Lack of Uranium's a technical challenge, but one breeder reactor can actually produce enough Uranium (as well as power) to power quite a few other reactors.

BTW, 16 Dirty Secrets? 16 Leading Questions, more like:

1) Isn't France almost entirely dependent on nuclear power?
2) Don't nuclear submarines prove the technology works?
3) Nukes are getting safer all the time, aren't they?
4) Can't nuclear power solve the problem of Global Warming?
5) What exactly IS radiation and how does it harm us?
6) Won't Yucca Mountain solve the nuclear waste problem?
7) Science will surely cure cancer some day, and isn't that the main danger from radiation?
8) Doesn't the nuclear industry protect humans from all its radioactive waste?
9) Isn't our other choice coal, and isn't that even worse?
10) Don't some people say that a little radiation might actually be GOOD for you? WTFBBQLOL???
11) Aren't we desperate for energy?
12) What about reprocessing? Can't we just "recycle" the waste?
13) Are nuclear power plants responsible for nuclear weapons proliferation?
14) Why does the industry keep going, if it's SO bad?
15) Is the threat from terrorism real?
16) Are people who oppose nuclear power simply opposed to ALL technology?
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i think its sweet that it has a half life of like 2 billion year and we cant safely get rid of the waste … go nuclear, yay!!!!

half life is a dope game

how do they get rid of the waste?

I will describe four of the most dangerous elements made in nuclear power plants.

Iodine 131, which was released at the nuclear accidents at Sellafield in Britain, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the US, is radioactive for only six weeks and it bio-concentrates in leafy vegetables and milk. When it enters the human body via the gut and the lung, it migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck, where it can later induce thyroid cancer. In Belarus more than 2000 children have had their thyroids removed for thyroid cancer, a situation never before recorded in pediatric literature.

Strontium 90 lasts for 600 years. As a calcium analogue, it concentrates in cow and goat milk. It accumulates in the human breast during lactation, and in bone, where it can later induce breast cancer, bone cancer and leukemia.

Cesium 137, which also lasts for 600 years, concentrates in the food chain, particularly meat. On entering the human body, it locates in muscle, where it can induce a malignant muscle cancer called a sarcoma.

Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is made annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is handled like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone cancer and blood malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It also crosses the placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can cause severe congenital deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations. Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans.

Dr. Helen Caldicott

how do they get rid of the waste?

The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever, addressed by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 33tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per year.

Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it travels through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years.

But the long-term storage of radioactive waste continues to pose a problem. The US Congress in 1987 chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 150km northwest of Las Vegas, as a repository for America's high-level waste. But Yucca Mountain has subsequently been found to be unsuitable for the long-term storage of high-level waste because it is a volcanic mountain made of permeable pumice stone and it is transected by 32 earthquake faults. Last week a congressional committee discovered fabricated data about water infiltration and cask corrosion in Yucca Mountain that had been produced by personnel in the US Geological Survey. These startling revelations, according to most experts, have almost disqualified Yucca Mountain as a waste repository, meaning that the US now has nowhere to deposit its expanding nuclear waste inventory.

To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation - significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to some scientists.

See Caldicott link above………

how do they get rid of the waste?

send it to sooke?