Ask and you shall receive.
Can I
please have a nuclear reactor built to replace the coal one currently spewing mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, uranium, SO2, NOx, CO, VOC, etc... into the air I breath?
Like Bridewalker said, at least the waste from a nuke plant is
contained.
Not one single american nuclear powerplant in history has ever paid for itself.
As far as I knew, all of the 100 or so currently operating plants paid for themselves a long time ago. Yes, there were some that rather spectacularly didn't - in a time when construction could be shut down by a letter written by a high school dropout.
They are a fascinating technology but they are far from practical.
The same could be said of Solar - and to a lesser extend wind. Hint: Try stripping out all the subsidization and see what your install costs for a solar system go up to and whether it still pays itself off. I spend $50-$100/month on electricity. More in the winter. That's $900/year in electricity. If the solar system costs $25k, at 7.5% and 40 years my monthly cost to pay the loan off is $164.52. Costing me nearly $100/month!
Before I'd buy that $25k system you'd have to guarantee that it'd work for 40 years, at no more than 2% interest. Heck, I could do better putting the $25k into the bank, and pay the electricity bill off the interest. Then buy solar panels or a wind turbine if it ever makes sense.
issue of the radio active waste. There is just no rational argument for the production of nuclear waste. There is just no way to get rid of it. It is the ultimate case of crapping where you live.
Hmmm... How about 'less polluting than coal!'. Getting rid of it: Bury it for 10k years. Unlike Arsenic, Lead, Mercury, or the rest, it'll be significantly less dangerous then.
Or you know, call it by it's alternate name: 'Fuel'. What we're calling 'nuclear waste' right now is still 90% fuel.
The remaining isotopes have shorter halflifes - meaning storage doesn't have to last nearly as long. So, between reprocessing reducing your true 'waste' to 10% of it's previous volume(extending Yucca 10X), and the shortened halflife, most of the problem is gone. That's without getting into some of the new techs that are promising to be able to artificially accelerate the decomposition - I think it was called electron bombardment. Bonus: Turns even the remaining waste into fuel.
You've never seen a coal ash tail, have you?