Im already pretty vocal about my advocation and belief in nuclear power and I have been for years, but I saw something a few weeks ago that just
It so perfectly sums up everything that’s wrong, but also it’s incredibly horrifying
So, basically, someone not very involved in nuclear science but still discussing it posed the question “could we retrofit coal power plants to be nuclear power plants?”. And on the face, this is a fairly good idea actually. Coal and nuclear power both generate electricity the same way (heated water turns to steam which turns a turbine) so you would only need to do some modifications, making new nuclear reactors much cheaper, and killing coal plants.
Well, someone actually involved in the nuclear industry (I think they were a researcher but I might be misremmebering) responded to the question with (paraphrased from memory)
“that’s something many of us have proposed in the past, and unfortunately we can’t do that, because coal plants currently have much higher radiation levels than the EPA allowed a nuclear plant to be operated at. And cleaning up the site would cost more than just building a new plant in an uncontaminated site.”
Not only is coal so much more dangerous in so many other ways, but the very thing people worry about with nuclear power is higher because coal isn’t regulated at all.
