a reply to:
DigginFoTroof
The thing is, that when the companies in question were saying these things, they were lying. There was NO reason, either during the beginning of the
Nuclear Age, or when it became a commercial, rather than a military research issue, for any person involved with that industry, to turn to a
government official and declare "Why, in a few short years, it will be more hassle than it is worth to even record how much energy a household uses!".
That was NEVER on the cards in a realistic fashion, but it may well have been a timely ploy on the part of energy companies to con their way into a
new way to screw the people they supply. Realistically, there ARE specific issues with operating a nuclear plant, which mean that costs will
necessarily be high. It simply is NOT accurate to suggest that the infrastructural elements of a nuclear power plant, and a coal fired plant, are "the
same" after a certain point, because they simply are not.
Furthermore, there ARE very significant differences, when it comes to the threat posed by the waste created by nuclear fuel use. Sure, no one wants
to choke down a hole heap of toxic gas from a coal fired station, but nuclear materials getting into the wrong places, or the wrong hands, or both, is
a potentially nation ending threat, and not by way of some soft, slow event like climate change. No, if nuclear material gets into the water in some
places, or into the food chain in others, or worse, gets dispersed into the atmosphere by underground fires which burn the place it has been dumped
in, then people will start dying of radiation exposure, horrific, rapid growing tumours, skin lesions, and the like. Crops will be contaminated,
livestock damaged or killed by the same radiation, entire ecosystems going the way of the dodo, purely because some gormless halfwit thought nuclear
power was a good idea.
This planet is already under significant threat from nuclear fuel use, as the frankly pathetic disposal strategies of yesteryear, and the utterly
inadequate methods of disposal used today, only really amount to burying the waste in one form or another. There are no methods currently in
commercial use, which accelerate the decomposition of decayed fuels, into harmless materials. There are no methods currently in commercial use, which
render the threat of decades of buried fuel anything less than still utterly terrifying.
This SHOULD cost money to oversee, and it does.
However, its not sustainable, and frankly, no power production method which requires any use of fuel at all, is legitimate in this era. If you cannot
get power from the sun, the geothermal vents in the Earth, from the tide or by way of other hydro electric methods, or by way of wind power then you
should not damned well be using it at all, because all the other options are just cutting the viability of life as we know it on the surface of Earth,
by years, decades or centuries, and this must stop.