Nuclear Power? Good or Bad?

No they'll slaughter us by the billions when they have the chance.

I know I don't, because then they'll take over the world!

And there we have it, the crux of any solid argument against nuclear power.

It's buried extremely deep underground in lead containers what the hell can it do?

Well, at that point I'd assume the main concern would be contaminating the watershed, but even if this is a viable solution it must be economical on a large scale and for every country that has reactors or wishes to build them. I'd assume the process of building such a storage facility would be a huge engineering task, cost lots of capital and take a lot of time. This is why I'm not arguing that nuclear power is useless, just that it needs to be used very selectively.

As we said before, unless we can find a better solution of what to do with Nuclear waste, or find a way of producing less of it, Nuclear energy can never be our primary energy source.

Well at the nearest nuclear plant to me they store it on site in lead containers in a hole that goes extremely far down so there is no risk of it contaminating the water. It's apparently a rather cheap method of doing it it just prone earthquakes as you could probably imagine places like Japan need other energy sources but in places like Europe and Canada there is no danger of it.

I was never arguing against all nuclear power, my point has always been that it needs to be used selectively. I just fell that a lot can happen over hundreds of millennial, if you've got something that's highly dangerous and around that long then you'd better know what to do with it. Just realize that no piece of human engineering is perfect, when you are dealing with nuclear waste there is not single solution because even with the waste that deep underground and in lead containers you still have to have it last hundreds of thousands of years.

But technology can only improve in the future there will probably be some technology invented that will render it entirely harmless so it probably not be thousands of years but probably a hundred.

Sure, but that's projecting a lot. You'd be assuming that technology would be progressing at the same pace it is now, besides, who's to say what the political and social world may look like hundreds if not thousands of years from now, governments and such institutions may not have the means to use technology that's available to them due to resource restrictions. It's very similar to the predicament that the Ukrainian government is in right now but more long term. Even after the Ukraine's current government is gone the waste will still be there, we'll be banking on that next government to have the means to at least keep the waste contained. This would continue until there is both the technological, political and economic means to truly clean up the waste.

I'm pretty sure unless there is there is an all out nuclear war technology will improve quick enough.

Okay, still that leaves an unknown amount of time during which these reactors and their waste require constant maintenance. You also have to factor in that we don''t know for sure what is going to advance technologically. By that I mean that despite all our best efforts we still don't have cures for cancer or aids even though previously our medicine has improved leaps and bounds since 1900 onward. Who knows what we will ever be able to do, it's entirely possible that solutions to a nuclear waste problem may crop up in a few decades, it's also entirely possible it is still many centuries away. Besides, during that time you're still going to have decaying facilities under the management of governments that are too poor to properly maintain them.

That is why you need an international authority on nuclear power to make sure they are maintained and are disposing of waste safely.

I think at this point we are in total agreement, I was never arguing that nuclear power should never be used, I was arguing that it should be highly regulated and only account for a part of our energy. As long as you build reactors in areas that are not prone to major natural disasters and consistently monitor them and their waste, preferably with an international body (IAEA) then everything is fine. That just means that it's never likely to be one of our main power sources yet it's still a good auxiliary source of energy.

Except I think it should be the main source of energy everywhere possible.

But it's not possible everywhere so it won't be our main source of power.

In the places it is possible it should be the main power source.

Okay, yes I agree with that.

I live right next to America's largest nuclear plant facility.. So im not alarmed, they do siren tests every now and then.

I think the incident in Japan only proved how safe modern nuclear plants are. Those were the ones that shut themselves down after the earthquake and tsunami, the older and outdated ones broke down and caused the trouble. The only other incidents were caused by human errors, I believe.