Obama giving go ahead for Georgia nuke

[Lissa]

[quote name='eppie' date='Feb 16 2010, 04:48 AM' post='177747']
Here in Sweden they have to shut down reactors a few times per year, because of 'issues'.[/quote]

Sweden? I thought you were in the Netherlands. Anyway...

Issues can be anything from a short lived spike (a non-event) to a work slipping on a wet floor.

As an anecdote, in the US, if there is an explosion at a coal fire power plant where several works die, it ends up buried 7 to 8 pages back in the newspaper. At a nuclear plant, a turbine shaking itself apart with no injuries (uncommon, but does happen at any type of power plant) is front page news.

Southern europeans tend to kill a large number of migrant birds.....the kinds that we in the north try to protect.[/quote

Trust me, wind turbines have destroyed whole flocks of birds that happened to use a migrant route. For most wind turbines, they can produce a foul wind for fowl.

[quote]Fishing and polution causes issues with fish stocks. We don't have that issue in the baltic at least because you are not supposed to eat to much of it (radioactive and heavy metal polution)

Here in the US, we have large numbers of migrating fish that travel from their birth streams to the oceans and then back to mate and die (see Salmon). On the Columbia River of Washington state, after the Aswell Dam, the Salmon cannot travel further up to their ancestoral streams deep into northeastern Washington. Now the Salmon run up the Methow and Okanogan rivers instead of going deeper up the Columbia. After the Chief Joseph dam, the ecology of eastern Washington state has changed greatly due to the loss of the Salmon run there.

I cannnot say I am 100% against nuclear, but I think we can do so much better. I mean if we would have spend all the money that was paid to bail out the banks last year on production of windturbines and solar-pannels we would have covered a significant amount of our energy need. And as a bonus we would have jobs for many, many people.

Again, Solar takes too much room on a large scale. Solar works very well for a single house, but when you are trying to also power industry, it doesn't function as well. Wind, as I noted, has other problems. And let's face it, the fuel that goes into a reactor was radioactive when it came out of the ground, so putting the waste back shouldn't be an issue, so long as it's reprocessed (cause we do have the technology to immobilize and contain the waste for 1000 years without issue).