Remember Hans Blix? He was the international nuclear expert tasked with inspecting Iraq facilities for evidence that weapons of mass distruction were being created, and concluded there weren't any.
Anyway, Hans wrote this editorial last week, calling for nuclear power to be part of our plans for meeting energy needs while addressing CO2 emissions.
http://time.com/5547063/hans-blix-nuclear-energy-environment/It's pollution-free and CO2-free. Blix argues that we have much less to fear from the waste of nuclear plants than from the waste of conventional power plants:
Frankly, it is not the waste from existing or expanded use of nuclear power that threatens our planet. One might even say that the nuclear waste is one of the greatest assets of nuclear power, as it is so small in volume that it can be — and is — safely taken care of in its entirety. On the other hand, the waste of fossil fuels, especially carbon dioxide, is so huge that (despite much experimenting) we do not know how to handle it.
We should not be shutting down nuclear plants to make way for
Some people claim we can manage the world’s great and increasing hunger for energy by using wind and solar power. The call for “renewable energy sources” excludes fossil fuels, but it also excludes nuclear power, which is based on non-renewable uranium resources. It has been a smart but facile message, and we should be grateful that the world’s two most populous countries — China and India — are fast expanding their use of nuclear power as well as of renewables. Solar and wind power are great in many places and have gone down in cost. However, getting rid of technically sound carbon dioxide-free nuclear power plants, to replace them with carbon dioxide-free wind and solar plants, does not make environmental sense. And to reject nuclear power because uranium is not renewable is silly. With modern technology the global resources of uranium and thorium could fuel thousands of years of expanded use of nuclear power. Is it not enough that they are sustainable?
New technologies could make nuclear even better. Thorium, for example, could become a viable fuel as technology develops. Thorium is far more plentiful than uranium, and safer to mine and work with, doesn't need to go through an enrichment process, and it can't be turned into weapons. New reactor designs are meltdown-proof and designed to make events like Chernobyl and Fukushima impossible.
I was reading this company's spiel for their emerging technology--
https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/technology/versatile/using sealed cores with molten salt rather than heavy water as the heat exchange medium. They promise "walk away safe", and the ability to integrate with renewable systems. Molten salt is one of the energy storage mechanisms being studied as a way of storing excess power generated from wind and solar plants, so being able to integrate with a molten salt heat storage system could unite nuclear alongside wind and solar.
Imagine the possibilities-- pollution-free power that could last thousands of years! It's time to say "Yes!" to nuclear power!
-k