My Head is About To Explode

My buddy is doing a great job taking notes and sorting out the facts in regards to the nuclear plant emergency at Fukushima (I'll also link to a great forum thread with actual scientists posting about Fukushima and Nuclear Plants on Ars Technica - hoping to steal a bit of Google traffic away from idiots for them).

If I hear one more "environmentalist" talk about shutting down nuclear power, I'm going to go apopletic. Here are the facts:

  • We use energy. A LOT of energy.This number is going up, not down.
  • ALL power sources have upsides and downsides. ALL OF THEM.
  • Coal spews more nasty shit into the air (!!) than a nuclear plant PRODUCES (in contained vessels) during its lifetime - including radioactivity.
  • "Moving everything to solar/wind/hydro" is a nice pipe dream but 20 years off before such a move would not shut down our economy due to the 4x cost per watt.
  • Even if you evened the price per kWh tomorrow, you still have 20 years to build the new plants all over the world (let alone, new grid and battery tech to support night time generation).

In short, shut up.