Besides Japan's earthquake, tsunami, and on-going nuclear crisis, there is another problem. Where do you store nuclear waste? It takes 10,000 years for it to be safe enough to stand next to the stuff without losing your hair and/or your life.
This is not disputed by any expert in the field. There is a lot of talk about building more nuclear power reactors in this country. The industry has had many problems with the security of the sites in general, at least the terrorism fear-mongers have been yammering at us about this for years.
March 8, 2011 (three days before the earthquake and tsunami) the Nuclear Power industry sued the U.S. Dept of Energy to stop taxing it with a fee that raises $750 million a year for the Nuclear Waste Fund, managed by the U.S. Treasury. There is $24 billion in the NWF right now, which is supposed to be used for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site, 100 miles from Las Vegas, or for any other that might be created (don't hold your breath, you might need to learn to like the color blue...).
The longest-lasting governments we've ever had were the Chinese dynasties running that empire, the Egyptian dynasties, and the Roman Empire (which split into two empires...), none of them going much more than 1,000 to 2,000 years. Iceland's "Thing", or Parliament, has lasted 1,000 years. The average of more common empire-like power structures is a few centuries.
Ten thousand years is a lot longer than humans have been able to stay focused on running a government, or a religion. The U.S. Government's code phrase for a lost nuclear weapon is Broken Arrow, and there have a been a few broken arrows that have never been recovered.
This elder skolah has learned a few things here and there. The Public Library is one of them, the internet is the other. I get angry about stuff like this, especially when people challenge me on facts that are easy to prove. You don't need a Ph.D in nuclear physics to figure this stuff out.
There's only two types of nuclear power that have no waste. One is real, one is theoretical. The real one, which is still years away from being a reality, is fusion. The theoretical one is anti-matter, which will take a lot longer because it takes so much energy to produce even tiny amounts of the stuff, although scientists recently discovered that thunderstorms make the stuff all the time.
San Francisco's Navy Yard, owned by the Lennar Corporation, is a case in point. It is contaminated, and some of that contamination is nuclear--the result of sand-blasting Navy ships exposed to nuclear bomb tests near the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean decades ago. Lennar says they can clean the Navy Yard by putting a concrete cap over the contamination. There have been five previous attempts to do this, what's one more among friends and neighbors made chronically ill because of this?
The Bayview-Hunter's Point area, where the Navy Yard is, has the highest amount of cancer, still-births, and similar problems, per capita, in this country. This is a 5-square-miles chunk of the 49-square-miles of San Francisco.
Nuclear power generates nuclear waste, and what happens when you create something that dangerous? The poor live near it, the people with money don't--they don't want to, and they don't have to.
