The Nuclear Argument

I just watched a documentary on Netflix about nuclear power, hoping to get some more information on the science of it all, because of all the issues in the world, from homelessness to war in the Middle East, it’s the one on which I don’t have a fixed opinion.
On the one hand, I’m much more an advocate of solar and wind power, which are perfectly clean and could probably give us all the power we need, if enough of them were deployed. On the other, nuclear plants can deliver much more energy for the amount of land needed, and also don’t release carbons into the air, making them much cleaner than coal or oil burning electrical plants which, despite Chernobyl and Fukushima, have killed far more people.
But, the documentary was much more about tracing the history of nuclear energy, and the opposition to it, with the implication that there are honest and decent people on both sides. On this issue, I actually believe that to be true. I don’t want to be friends with people who love war and urge more of it, or who think police should be allowed to murder all the black people they want, but I can totally be friends with people who are pro-nuclear.
There were a couple of things in the doc, however, which pushed me in the anti-nuke direction. One was a nuclear scientist talking about ‘the lesson to be learned from Fukushima,’ which was, in his opinion, that better safety procedures were needed. I thought, dude, you may have a PhD in nuclear physics and I don’t, but that is absolutely not the lesson to be learned from Fukushima. The lesson of Fukushima is that nuclear power plants should not be built near fault lines, and probably not near coastlines, either. In fact, Japan is not a good place for nuclear energy at all. Sorry, Japan.
The other was the fact that usually when they cited a politician who was supportive of nuclear energy, it was some corrupt, war mongering asshole. Republicans and Tories were there in abundance, but so was Tony Blair, who turned out to be as big a war monger as any of them.
Still, there wasn’t enough science in the program to sway my opinion one way or another. I still say IF it could be proven safe, then I’d be for it. But that’s very much a question for scientists to decide, and I don’t think they have a clear consensus on this issue yet. So, let’s keep pushing for more solar and wind energy. Unless a wind turbine happens to fall over and land on a passing cow, there isn’t much danger in them at all.