Quote:
Originally Posted by JMintzer
Wasn't Chernobyl in Russia? It was actually worse than a meltdown...
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No, I was referring to Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. They have their own "problems", but don't create the fuel rod disposal problem and can't "melt down".
Another solution is micro-plants. I worked as a consultant at the Palo Verde Nuclear plant in AZ for a couple years. It is the safest plant in the US, having operated for a LONG time with no serious incidents - less incidents than coal.
But, one of the thing we were investigating at the time was a study being done in the Northwest to look into distributed generation instead of centralized generation. Centralized generation is really bad at almost everything, but makes the owners very rich. Distributed generation is not perfect but solves a lot of the problems with "terrorist attack" security issues, wide spread outages, and on and on. The idea is to produce electricity at or close to the point of usage. Neighborhood or even individual houses producing their own and feeding any excess into a shared grid. Very robust structurally. The obvious methods of decentralized generation are things like small gas fired turbines, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, hydrogen fueled turbines, fuel cells, etc. There is (has been?) research done on micro nukes also.
There are MANY possibilities that are safer, more robust and in the long run less expensive. But power companies don't want them, they can't control decentralized generation for profits.