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Originally Posted by HarryT
Not just "reduced carbon", but "zero carbon". Nuclear power generation is currently the only viable "base load" power generation technology that does not produce nasty greenhouse gases. You can't use such things as wind and solar power, because it's not always sunny or windy. Wave power is more reliable, but can only be used in a relatively few locations, as can such things as hydroelectric or geothermal generation too. Nuclear plants can be built anywhere close to a source of water for cooling.
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I would point out that the wind and cloud arguments are not as big a problem for wind and solar power as many might think. The basic reason is that as you scale up your power generation over thousands of locations, you can start accurately predicting what percentage will be able to generate power at any given time.
That being said, Nuclear has some great advantages, the most important being its much smaller actual foot print. I was reading yesterday about a new generation reactor that was about 5 feet across and under 10 feet high and which could power 10-20,000 homes for 10 years before it would need refueling.
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I worked in the UK's nuclear power industry for many years, and I can tell you that waste disposal is a much over-rated "problem". The UK has been successfully reprocessing nuclear fuel for 50-odd years.
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Yeah, nuclear waste is a much smaller problem once reprocessing fuel is routine.
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That's a matter of political will. France, for example, currently generates around 80% of its electricity from nuclear power stations; the UK around 30% (and we're about to start building a new generation of nuclear stations).
The role that government has to play is to educate the public that nuclear power stations are not the "bogey man" that many think they are, and that they can't "blow up" like atomic bombs.
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And actually more importantly, the newest generation of nuclear power stations can be made far more safely than the ones constructed in the 60s and 70s.
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Bill