Nuclear power's time has come

[RRhoads]

link here

[Benwah033]

This man's responses to these questions are exactly what anyone who did their research would end up saying. 

I maintain that the biggest problem facing the nuclear industry is the ignorance of general public.  People fear what they don't understand, and they don't understand nuclear power.  I have given many presentations as part of public outreach for my job, and cannot count on both hands (and probably feet) how many times I have been asked:

Q) What about terrorists making bombs from the spent fuel?
A) I would like to see anyone sneak a fuel bundle out of the plant alive and undetected.

Q) What about the 34723889490376237 tons of highly radioactive waste that takes 1457289384902028930 years to decay?
A) We already have the technology to reprocess the fuel and significantly reduce the amount of high level waste, and there are already storage options for what remains.

Q) People who live anywhere near nuclear plants all die of cancer at a young age right?
A) Come on...

etc etc etc.  The list goes on and on.  The reason people are so mis-informed in my opinion is that for every source of factual information about nuclear power, there are 3 sources that are full of disinformation that lead people to believe this stuff.

As an industry, if we want to move forward, we need to do a much better job of educating the public.

[RDTroja]

About 25 years ago I was on the Board of Directors of the Michigan Chapter of the American Nuclear Society in Ann Arbor. I also gave presentations to the public and the press about nuclear power and while I expected the public to be somewhat ignorant about the subject, I was absolutely dumbfounded by how little the press knew ...  and they could not believe that we considered them part of the problem. Even the ones that thought that nuclear power was a good idea were totally clueless. And these were the people that supposedly had done some research on the subject.

It is a daunting challenge to properly educate the public and we have little or no support. The utilities won't take on the task (as I have posted before) because to make nuclear look better, you have to make fossil fuels look as bad as they are and the utilities still use fossil fuels for 80% of the country's power... so they can't shoot themselves in the foot to educate the public. The antinuclear faction gets all the free publicity they can handle from celebrities that don't have a clue but have a 7/24/365 built-in audience. It will take a group of dedicated, tireless, grassroots workers (us, if you didn't catch on) to get the word out if the industry is going to have public backing.

Sorry, stepping off of soapbox now.

[SloGlo]

newclears time came a long time ago.  itz gist that thees united states turned aweigh from nuke power.  no buddy else did.  now they have all the most current technology active in the market.  go finger.