An excerpt from a long piece in GQ making the case for nuclear electricity generation. Those who oppose nukes have the burden of explaining what other source(s) of electricity can meet the demand as efficiently and at such a low cost.
I'm sorry, but wind and solar don't make the cut, although continued growth in these two expensive sources will contribute a very small fraction of the demand...when the wind blows and the sun shines.
"Still, for nearly thirty years, the psychological fallout from TMI has metastasized into something much more difficult to measure or explain. In the aftermath of the meltdown, the number of Americans who support nuclear-power plants has dropped from a high of 70 percent before the accident to around 40 percent, and today one in ten people would like to eliminate the nation’s fleet of nuclear plants entirely. What drives this opposition, in many cases, is the conflation of magnitude with probability. That is, when people worry about nuclear power, what they worry about is the scale of an accident, not the likelihood. In this regard, nuclear power is just the opposite of the nation’s coal-fired plants, where harm to the environment is both ruinous and certain but comfortingly slow. It may take decades or even centuries for the effects of particle soot, acid rain, and global warming to claim a million lives. By contrast, the nightmare scenario with nuclear power is decades of cheap, plentiful, pollution-free energy—followed by a sudden meltdown that wipes out a city. For most people, the reality that coal-based pollutants like mercury and sulfur dioxide are killing us every day—taking as many as 24,000 lives per year, according to nonpartisan researchers (that’s a Chernobyl disaster every eleven hours), while nuclear plants have never claimed an American life—is beside the point. The image of a city disappearing in a nuclear haze, however improbable it may be, trumps everything else. Many people, according to polls, not only oppose building new nuclear plants; they oppose the ones we already have. Unfortunately, since nuclear energy currently makes up about 20 percent of the nation’s electrical supply, in order to eliminate it, the rest of the nation’s power suppliers would have to amplify their own production by 25 percent of existing levels. Since that’s not possible for most current renewables—like wind, solar, and hydroelectric farms, which are already maxed out—the real cost of eliminating today’s nuclear-power supply would be an immediate 30 percent increase in the nation’s coal, gas, and oil plants. That’s 30 percent more sulfur dioxide, mercury, and nitrogen oxide in the air than we’re emitting today. Also, since those plants make up nearly 40 percent of the nation’s total carbon dioxide output, that means an instantaneous, and permanent, 12 percent rise in carbon emissions. If only the GNP did so well.
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