"Next Friday we will try to have a little debate on the advantages and disadvantages of Nuclear power. I will randomly allot you a side (for/against) so you should be making a list or arguments for defending either of those points of view.
As inspiration, I am passing you the following videos to watch. You can share your notes on them (and on any other stuff you read/watch) with me, and with the others (through a convenient post in the unit forum)."
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The four suggested videos are:
There are countless more:
I watched the four videos and a few more like this one:
I have for many years been anti nuclear power. Nuclear power just simply poses more risks and questions to humanity than answers energy questions.
Obviously the terrible accidents that have occurred in the past sound still very scary. But the main problem to me is the nuclear waste management. We are talking about tens of thousands of years. That is starting to sound like geological age to me. It is the risk of that unknown that scares me the most.
However, things are rapidly changing in this world. We are now faced with a carbon climate change catastrophe and we are running out of time.
The use of fossil fuels simply has to stop. Renewable energy is the long term solution, but the big ones currently in use, namely wind and solar, do not provide the resilience that we need. We need another clean alternative for base line energy production.
Could nuclear energy provide us with a stop gap answer? Maybe.
Technology has improved and it could be said that modern nuclear power stations are much safer. So maybe nuclear accidents would not occur as often and maybe they would not be as terrifying.
We still have the issue of nuclear waste.
Watching some videos on using Thorium as nuclear fuel I learned that we could drastically cut the half life of nuclear waste to a few hundred years, something like five hundred or so. That is a vast improvement on Uranium fuel. Still quite high, but a more manageable risk.
But, unfortunately, nuclear power requires a very big investment in terms of money but most importantly in terms of time. Building safe nuclear stations is not something that can be done in a year or so. It takes something like nine or ten years to build a nuclear power station.
New technologies on new fuels and safety of nuclear stations are still being developed and need proper testing. Adding more time to the equation.
We simply don't have the time.
Then there is the big one. Nuclear fusion.
Since we would have to invest plenty of money and time on the current model of nuclear (fission) and we are quickly running out of time ... Wouldn't it be better if we threw all those money and time resources into fusion research?
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