It's not just the burning of coal that causes the problems. As you pointed out with nuclear about the waste storage, coal has a much bigger or more human and environmentally dangerous waste storage problem called ash ponds.

Nuclear waste, on the other hand, has never been the source of human illness or injury in the US.

[earthjustice.org]

@Bagger_Vince You are correct that ash ponds require additional regulation, and that is now happening [en.wikipedia.org] . The safety record so far of handling nuclear waste in the US is excellent. But the risk remains uninsurable due to the astronomical "worst case accident" liability. I still say yes to coal and no to additional nuke plant building.

@Bagger_Vince Oops! it was bound to happen sometime [yahoo.com]

@doug6352 oh ye of little knowledge.

1st: Yes radiation exposure to employees who work at a nuclear plant is going to happen. We have federal limits and more restrictive site limits to radiation exposure of different particles such as beta and gammas. We wear thermoluminescent radiation detectors known as TLDs to monitor for this. In addition, when higher radiation exposure is expected for specific jobs, such as with the work of this contractor, we wear additional radiation detection equipment known as electronic dosimetry known as EPDs. To enter an area with elevated radiation levels, you must sign in to a radiation work package which lists hot spots, expected radiation exposure and limits for which the worker is required to leave the area.

2nd: the specifics of this report are exactly the opposite of that...specific. If this worker was not following the guidelines as specified in the RWP (radiation work package) it is not the fault of nuclear power for his exposure.

3rd: I don't know why people trying to prove a point to a 15 year experienced nuclear power operator, like myself, would google search an article he has knowledge of to try and justify a point he doesn't have all the facts on. Good job on your research though. Man I'm glad the public wasn't harmed in this incident. Silly.

Fusion is the solution to fission's waste problem.
[green.blogs.nytimes.com]

You speak the truth my friend.

Yes some renewables have a smaller overall footprint, but let's look at wind for example.

Wind turbines cost more to maintain than they do to erect. Many times companies will just abandon them rather than repair them. In addition, the cost per gigawatt is only in the red due to government subsidies. Without the subsidies there would be no companies making a profit from wind turbines and they would discontinue usage. I agree that in a perfect world all electric generation would be green and have 0 footprint from carbon and any other harmful byproducts but in reality this is impossible in a capitalism focused society where profits drive the industry.

Also, I forgot to discuss the "Heavy water". Heav water is a tem that is used to describe water that has a higher than normal tritium ratio than normal H2O. Tritium is H3O. The neutron flux produced around a nuclear core can both separate hydrogen from the water molecule making in Hrydoxide which in turn can cause the hydrogen to recombine with another water molecule making tritium. Tritium is also found in drinking water because it is naturally occurring. We refuse all water in the plant and have an environmental department specifically to for any offsite water discharges.

@Bagger_Vince Your responds does not factor in the long term costs of dealing with the nuclear waste, that's an extremely high maintenance cost that you have left out of your calculations. The same applies to the cost of creating the heavy water and the carbon foot print associated with that process. As for subsidies, the nuclear industry has received far more from the Feds than renewables.
[taxpayer.net]

Nuclear insurance is not provided by the federal government. There are highly specialized insurance companies for that. These insurance companies require an extra level of compliance and therefore provide an extra layer of safety regulation. The insurance is very expensive, but % compliance precludes rate hikes. Nuclear plants that fail small compliance issues, have a steep fine from the government and from the insurance provider. These issues can be as small as someone working too many hours in a row. The scrutiny is justified and quite stringent.

About the waste...see my response to @mtnhome below. It is as valid concern that has been wrangled at least to some extent.

@Bagger_Vince I went online to government websites to fact check the insurance requirements concerning nuclear waste. Evidently the Price Anderson Act of 1958 require some private insurance, but the coverage required seemed way too low for me.

I tried to check out who paid hte difference between wht ws covered and actual costs of damages to property and health, and liek many other government web pages mostly on the EPA website, evidently this was yet other web pages that the Trump administration deleted. The only other pages that came up regarding this was put out by nuclear power companies and/or their lobbyists. So at present actual information of whether or not the government subsidizes insurance for nucler power plants is no longer available from any reliable source.

This is a very common concern among people who are not in the nuclear electric generation industry.

1. Uranium is a naturally occurring atom with almost all common isotopes already in the dirt and earth we live on now in some quantity.

2. The original plan for nuclear waste (since once used has a larger emission of radioactive particles like neutrons, beta and gammas) was to return the material back to the earth at a facility in Yucca mountain. Therefore removing the potential for human interaction and causing no harm to the environment, considering the earth is where it came from in the first place.

3. Due to former Senator Harry Reid, the original plan was delayed and nuclear plants developed there own means of long term containment known as dry cask storage. The amount of waste that would be produced for the foreseeable future will be able to be contained in nuclear sites without risking the health and safety of the public until a site has been arranged to return the used product back to mother nature.

I hope that gives you more understanding of what the actual process is without lessening your opinion, because it is a valid concern.

@Bagger_Vince I knew all of that, but thanks... others needed that info. My comment stands as written. The "storage" method we have today just isn't sustainable for thousands of years. Admittedly it's the result of people getting in the way but I don't see that changing. Reid was responding to his constituents' fears and demands. And then there's the issues of overall safety and lifetime costs associated with the several devastating power plant mishaps... PA, Ukraine, Japan. There are bound to be more. How much radiation are we willing to accept in the air and water?

@mtnhome I guess the only retort I can make to that point is tha in all of those instances the industry as a whole has taken notice and are constantly looking for and correcting weaknesses. In the example of TMI in PA, the lessons the industry has taken away is nuclear fundamental understanding when it comes to steam properties vs. Pressure indicatuins when in superheated conditions.

In the case of Chernibyl in Ukraine, there plant was fundamentally flawed due to using graphite as a neutron moderator, that combined with the operational pressures applied by the Ukrainian government and the plant department heads resulted in unnecessary testing of plant responses during times when safety systems were not operational. The US government in the form of the NRC would never allow us to conduct any such testing, and if we even tried we would be fined or even shutdown.

In the case of Fukushima in Japan, we are not subjected to unprecedented tsunamis but none the less as a result have implanted beyond design basis casualty response plans to mitigate situations that may arise from unforeseen circumstances. In addition the US nuclear community has stationed centralized response centers to assist stations in the event that we lose all normal, back up and back up back up power required to shutdown the plant.

@Bagger_Vince You obviously know your stuff, but we don't know what we don't yet know. The risks with bigger and bigger nuclear plants become exponentially larger and as has been proven in the past, there's always a new way the plant can become a multi-billion dollar environmental disaster... one we couldn't anticipate or chose to ignore. Any risks larger than ZERO with nuclear power are just not worth it... and there will never be zero risk.

@mtnhome I disagree about the risks. Risks, as a unit of math, are present everywhere for everything. We have an airline industry that, on occasion, has a malfunction or an act of terrorism that causes a disaster and in response we try to sew up the hole that allowed it to happen. This is the same with any industry that an accident is possible, such as the railroad industry or even the housing industry in areas with wild fires, hurricanes and other natural disasters. These are the reasons that all of these industries have insurance companies that calculate the risk and impose fees based on the risk and the financial obligation required in the unlikely e ent that some unforeseen does happen.

@Bagger_Vince Insurance might adequately cover rail accidents, wildfires and natural disasters, but it can never cover the lifelong risk of early cancer and death from eating, breathing and drinking radioactive particles for 40-years. Nobody EVER covers the big down-the-road effects. The polluters always just get away with the long-term social costs and let the gov't cover it. Nope... no nuclear for me, please.

@mtnhome I am with @Bagger_Vince, on this. Some of the radioactive material remains dangerous to human lif for over 100,000 years, and the material is concentrated.

Under groudn storage means nuclear materil can get into the water table, perhaps not immediately, but over time there is no safe way to store material over the long term.

I am a person who got leukemia, form just normal exposure to X-rays at eh doctor'e and dentist offices. So-called "sfe" levels of radiation woudl more accurately be described as what would be best termed as a determined "acceptable risk of radiation" I now reguse most X-rays and at the airport I opt for a pat down rather than to get irradiated by one of those new scanners.

Back to nuclear wste. There is the factor that corporations will always, at some point, take short cuts to increase profits. We deal with illegal toxic waste dumping over and over again. I have no doubt they would dump radioactive waste illegally if it increased their profit margins. Wthi the Trump administration, they may well be doing just that.

@snytiger6 I agree completely with everything you said. I think nuclear power is akin to magic and the power plants are wonderful monuments to engineering... all very impressive, BUT, we're dealing with greedy humans here managing these facilities and the waste they produce, so they're the weak link in the system and always will be. Have we EVER once completely and successfully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and safely secured the waste for the next 100,000 years? I think not. It's a failed model when we have so many other better choices being developed today. Regardless of how hard they are, or how inefficient they are, they're safer. Much safer. There's where the research is needed. California is requiring solar cells on most new homes built after 2020. This is a HUGE leap forward.