Uh, nuclear power plants produce plenty of extremely dangerous by-products. Those cooling rods have to be replaced periodically and they are very dangerous to deal with.
Nuclear power plants also have a shelf life. After they are shutdown, they are left to rot where they stand. They cannot be rebuilt or refurbished as the core materials have all started breaking down to thier elemental components.
Nuclear is not cheap. It is not free and no one has made any profit from them to date. If they were not government subsidized, they would bankrupt the companies that run them.
I am not saying wind power is a solution. The current implementations are poorly thought out. They could do much better.
I work in the Nuclear Industry Skuzzy.
There is great care taken in the very few reactors that have been shut down, they are very far from being left to rot where they stand.
Nuclear fuel actually is very cheap, considering a typical reactor has 3 sections of fuel, each section lasts for 6 years. We buy a lot of fuel from old Soviet nuclear weapons as well, on the cheap. To say that no one has made money on them is absolutely positively wrong. In fact, the nuclear plant I worked at, made around $2 million dollars a day while running, we lost close to $1 million a day when we shut down to refuel, but refueling outages these days take on average under 28 days, and those only happen once every two years. For a plant with a dual reactor setup, they lose even less, as they can keep one reactor running while the other is refueled.
We are using 1950s, and 1960s technology. Even to this day, quite a bit of the plants' systems have yet to be digitized. My plant was the last licensed nuclear power plant in the country, also, the largest one to date. When I came in around 2003, we were putting out around 1200 megawatts, in 2007, we had upgraded enough to be able to start putting out close to 1600 megawatts. Almost every plant in the country was undergoing the same upgrades, so 100 or 101 civilian nuclear plants all adding around 200-400 megawatts to their output, not bad considering the typical coal plant puts out around 600-800. The newest designs being built in Japan and elsewhere in the world are even more efficient, even more inherently safe, as well.
And, we produce no greenhouse gases. The water we return to the atmosphere, or lakes\rivers\oceans is cleaner than when we took it in.
Every amount of nuclear fuel we have EVER spent in our reactor, is sitting in a containment pool on site. No nuclear plants in this country have yet to run out of room on their premises to store spent fuel. This is why Yucca Mountain is a must, we need a single secure location to start storing this stuff.
Nuclear power is the most logical, profitable source of energy we have. Nothing else out there currently can even come close to the raw power it can create, and minus wind\water\solar, nothing is as clean or safe.
Wind Energy just does not hold up to what a single nuclear power plant can produce. To equal one single nuclear plant with a wind farm, you're talking a farm the size of a state. Now imagine trying to hook that mega wind farm up to the grid, we just don't have the infrastructure to properly use wind\water\solar in a capacity to solve our energy crisis.
What we currently need is a nationwide Grid Upgrade. Plants are selling energy over thousands of miles these days, money is being lost in the transmission, and as we get closer and closer to the day when we take in more than we put out (estimated from 10-25 years), we are going to start having regular massive scale black outs. Even if we do starting building new nuclear plants, there is a limit to what the grid is going to be able to take. This is not theory, it is fact. Building wind farms and other renewable resource power plants is not going to solve that. We need more power, and a new grid to handle it.
Once we can get started on that, I would be a huge proponent of using wind\water\solar plants to start getting rid of coal plants.
