Geekman's World: Nuclear Clean

A recent striking trend among veteran environmentalists is a switch to endorsing nuclear power as the most environmental solution for meeting the vast energy needs of the modern world. Accidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have stalled any further expansion of nuclear energy. However, its easy to argue that Chernobyl was the result of typically poor Soviet safety standards and dangerously underqualified personnel. Sound design prevented the release of any radiation at the Three Mile Island plant. Today, nuclear fuel can be continually recycled, and while waste fuel does remain radioactive for thousands of years, it looses 99.9% of its radioactivity within 40 years.

This pales in stark contrast to the effects of fossil fuels. Not only are they drastically changing our climate, but they are becoming expensive and scarce. 5,000 people are killed annually in coal-mining accidents, to say nothing of those who suffer long-term health problems from inhaled dust.

Patrick Moore, a co-founder of GreenPeace, makes the case for nuclear in this article in the Washington Post. The points he makes are very interesting. For the moment, sustaining our way of life whilst doing the least harm to the planet may require an environmentally-unorthodox solution.

I read the second article on Tuesday as well as yesterday and I'd have to say that it sounds like the way to go, and as long as the forerunners of it set standards for safety and containment AND recycling (! - I had not known that 95% of the potential energy was still left after the first cycle) and their practices are emulated elsewhere in the world it would be work quite well.
As for the terrorist/political issues of it, I believe he addressed it and made some good suggestions towards the end of his article.
There seem to be a couple global scale organizations from what I can find in a quick search, IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)and the US based GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy Partnership), and reading some of the information on the GNEP site they've already got the basic ideas of "keeping track of where the materials are/who has them" and ideas on how to recycle the used material.
So, if the people in power and the people with influence keep up with these ideas and guidelines they've set out, it's just a matter of time before we see it all happen.
Also, in case you haven't seen NEI's site, it has many links to articles and said previous site and just some good general information.


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