We don't have to ignore depleted nuke-fuel. For one thing, there are regen/breeder reactors. For another, fuel usage per year is much less than the environmental damage from fossils. Lastly, we only need the nukes until fusion plants are developed. They're working on NIF just down the street, at LLNL. The point is that, the enviros won't let us build fossils and the anti-nukes wont let us build nukes. NIMBYs wont let us build either one. Until that's settled, we wont get any new plants of either stripe. a.k.a. a self-destructive deadlock. I reiterate that it will be more than 5 years before we can get the first batch of new power plants online. The next sucking sound you hear will be businesses evacuating California, once they figure this out. "No tickee, no laundry" and no power, no business. By the time you figure out you need new plants, it's 4 years past starting to build one. Ironically, American companies are building and selling pocket nuke plants that are safe as houses ... for sale to North Korea and Russia. The $4.5B we just paid to the generator companies would have bought 5 or 6 of those. Maybe, the rest of the world deserves better than we do ... But, I digress ... you have been an excellent example of what I wrote about, thank you kindly. Anyway, I wont reply on this thread, on NANOG, anymore. It's getting too far O/T. It has been suggested that we find another list for those that want to discuss this further. I may post on that tomorrow.

From: Roger Marquis [mailto:marquis@roble.com] Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 10:25 PM

All true, but irrelevant to the people with cancer in the Ukraine and elsewhere. Still, having worked in rnd.pge.com back when it was a state of the art department, the consensus there was that small nuclear plants were far safer than the large one's in vogue before 3 mile island (whose core is now encased in concrete for thousands of years).

No question nuclear is clean but only if you carefully ignore the danger of depleted uranium. But I digress, that's a problem for future generations (if we're lucky).

Roger

...

Sorry, but nukes are clean and safe. Sure people have died from nukes, but millions have died from producing coal for plants. Why do we build coal plants and not nukes? Because people don't care if OTHERS die, if 100,000 people a year die from digging coal they are not in your community, that is better then the risk to THEM however small.