Expensive initially, but very cheap after the set-up.
I like your position on this one. I have discussed the NIMBY thing above, briefly.
Rossatom, the Russian company which is the leader now in developing nuclear power facilities.... and which was the beneficieary of Hillary Clintons sell-out of US resources for an amazingly politically-successful and personally-enriching load of payola only because of her position in the Obama administration and her prospected Presidency, is designing plants for a number of Mideastern countries which will come online in the near future. People in these countries are not expected to raise any unwanted protests over their governments decisions.....
These plants do not have anything like the safety engineering we would require here.
I think it's necessary to over-engineer on safety issues. The latest plans include huge water reservoirs physically located so that if the power goes off and other controls are disabled for any reason, the reactor will be automatically inundated with a sufficient quantity of water to cool the reactor and keep it cool enough to prevent structural meltdown. The floodgates are designed to stay shut on a positive power control so that if power fails they will automatically open.
This requires a larger plant "footprint" in design, but the elevated lake will look pretty.
multiple other control designs will be required here in the USA. And yes, the initial costs will be high, but the useful plant lifetime will be very long. I may not know everything.... this is conversational sort of fodder, not industrial trade secrets. But it is encouraging.
windmills kill migrating birds....solar panel expanses fry them. Neither is really all that good a plan.
Here in the Great Basin, we have a geological sheet of hot rock practically everywhere within reach of piping that could circulate water into it and produce steam. We also have immense high-quality(low sulfur) coal beds... enough to fuel the earth for 500 years, not to mention the oil shale or the natural gas, or the oil.
I had a neighbor who was in the oil exploration business, a consultant for major oil companies. His office was pretty huge, and the walls had maps of the US West, from Texas to California. On the occasion of my visit I was interviewing him about the Grand Staircase National Monument. He was very firm about the need to keep the Dutch from developing the Coal in the monument. Chevron had hosted Bill Clinton for a week in the Rockefeller Ranch near Grand Teton before he went to the South Rim to wave his hands across the Grand Canyon to announce the Monument. It was a politically bought-and-paid-for Rockefeller monopoly move, to kick the Dutch outta this country. Hey this is Our Coal. When I commented on how much coal was being locked up, he went to his wall and described the immense oil resources we have, saying it would be hundreds of years before we would need it.
With the Global Warming gambit..... it will be thousands of years before we need it.
even without nuclear resources.
No, this whole show is cartelism at its finest. Big Oil, bro. With a neat little trick in Carbon Credits, which will be issued to oil and coal players for not using their stuff, while they build the wind the solar. And human life will be engineered to forever need a minimal amount of very high priced carbon fuels, forever. Well, until the good folks of globalism carve out monopolies in the other energy resources, carefully minding the store so nobody can get a foot in the door, through governmental regulation.
And that's why nuclear has a bad rap, and why it is regulated outta the business now.
