Why Sustainable Power is Unsustainable

Gary Fusion (man-made) would be great, but, as a recent article about current efforts at CERN pointed out, for the past 40 years every question about when fusion would be ready to produce usable energy for general use has gotten the same answer: in about 30 years. Its hard to count on a technology that stubbornly resists being translated from theory to practice. --Mark

Nuclear power plants have an excellent safety record and 90% availability. Newer models that have been and will be designed in the future are even safer, many with an inherent invulnerability to "meltdown."

Even in what is the virtually absolute-worst-case of Chernobyl, a grand total of fifty people have died from that catastrophe thus far. Compare that with the death toll from coal mining not to speak of the from the dirty particulates as well as substantial radioactivity emitted from coal-fired power plants. and the problems of nuclear waste disposal.
The waste problem has been enormously over-hyped. The idea that we must come up with a "solution" to the waste that must work without any human intervention whatsoever (or even looking in to see how things are going) for hundreds of thousands of years is ludicrous and purely an artificial problem. A workable solution in my view would be to simply put all the waste (all the highly radioactive waste generated in the industry's history by all the nuclear plants in the United States -- 20% of the nation's power supply -- would fit within a 250 ft. cube) in one spot and put a guard on it. However, going well beyond that, the waste depository under construction at Yucca Mountain in Nevada appears to be an excellent solution for the time being. The fact that none of the nuclear plants on the drawing board in the U.S. is now under construction underlines those problems.
It underlines the political problems that the U.S. and other countries have faced due to anti-nuke hystericists, not technical problems.
As one who lives near a nuclear plant which recently was forced to shut down because of the corrosion of the reactor lid which endangered the entire community,
And precisely how much "danger" was the community in, pray tell? Not very much I'd be willing to bet.
I am especially conscious of those issues. Politically, I don't believe we "can" build that number of nuclear plants in the U.S.
On the contrary, all it takes is the will.

Michael McNeil