If something like Three Mile Island, or the Japanese plants happened at Indian Point it shouldn't be necessary to evacuate NYC, which is almost 40 miles away at its closest point. But if that's still too close then it only provides an argument for shutting down Indian Point, not a general argument about nuclear power in the US.
Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant is only designed to withstand a 6.0 earthquake, and even that is doubtfull
Why do you think that?
It's time to rethink nuclear.
Why? You make no arguments about nuclear power in general, you give us no reason to rethink it, you only mention Indian Point.
We put a man on the moon, we can move beyond nuclear power
That's a silly argument. In general most "we put a man on the moon, so we can do X" arguments are silly, since the X is normally very different than putting a man on the moon. Putting a man on the moon was a pure engineering problem, no really no science, and no need for an economic return from the attempt. We put a dozen men on the moon and then stopped going there, and we had little long term pay off in terms of development of human activity in space from the project. Power plants have to actually be cost effective, and they have to serve many people (hundreds of millions in the whole country, potentially millions just from one power plant), they have to be done in a practical way, not as big showy short term extravaganzas like the moon landing.
Its not technically hard at all to not use nuclear power. You just don't build any new nuclear plants and in a few decades you don't have any more nuclear plants operating. Or if you don't mind adding a lot of cost, and/or possibly supply problems that could lead to service disruptions, you just start taking the plants off line much sooner. The issue is not that its a hard technical achievement, in technical terms its trivial. The issue is how desirable the effort is. Your just assert we should do it, but you make no argument for your point.
or at least replace current reactors with passively safe ones
That will probably be done as the current reactors reach there useful lifetime and get decommissioned. The less safe generation 2 reactors should be decommissioned first. The partially passively safe Gen3 reactors will be around a bit longer, but I would like to see efforts for new reactors move to new fourth generation designs. |
