The biggest misconception is that it’s uncontrollably dangerous. Yes, like all sources of power, it can be dangerous, if not used responsibly. Coal and electricity kill you, too. But the fossil fuel industry has been waging a disinformation campaign against nuclear energy for decades.
The truth is that France has used nuclear for most of it’s energy needs for more than half a century. The US Navy has run 1st generation reactors for even longer, without incident. And the design of the fourth generation reactors is built to be passively safe. Unlike Chernobyl, if you cut power to them, they simply shut off, not melt down.
Another misconception is regarding nuclear waste. Current fourth generation reactors use the “spent” fuel rods of our first generation reactors as their fuel! This transmutes them from isotopes with ten thousand year half-lives to much more manageable isotopes with fifty year half-lives. So the solution to the nuclear waste disposal problem we already have now is to generate even more zero-carbon power from nuclear energy!
The biggest misconception is that it’s uncontrollably dangerous
Emphasis on the work uncontrollably. Chernobyl and nuclear bombs seem to have given people the impression that if/when an accident does occur, it is inevitably going to be massive, devastating, with effects lasting for generations, like a sort of unintentional nuclear bomb. The very word “nuclear” has a meaning of something drastic, explosive and extreme.
Undoubtedly the biggest misconception, from which many others derive, is to lump civil nuclear energy and nuclear weapons together. Although both use the same principle (obtaining energy by nuclear fission), the purposes and consequences of each are very different from each other.
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