Nuclear Power

I cover energy issues for a living and once I went to this big symposium in DC involving just about every major agency and top expert they could assemble and DoD etc. The topic was solar flares and the risk they present to the power grid. They fry substations.

Anyhow these guys were saying that the backup power at US nuclear plants is in the form of diesel generators. Of course what happened at Fukushima was the generators got overwhelmed by water and destroyed.
The problem is that if the power grid goes down and you go to generators at the nuke plants, you need diesel fuel. Most plants keep about 30 days supply. Any major grid-wide outage would present major problems in getting additional fuel to those generators.

So we are relying on diesel generators to prevent nuclear meltdowns. It's sketchy as hell. It's stupid and dangerous. Plus, we don't even have anywhere to put the waste. So it is stacking up on-site. The technology is sound but we aren't even close to controlling this tiger by the tail.

Bottom line...humans have fucked up., are fucking up., or are about to fuck up every thing they touch. As a species our science is beyond our capacity to 100% control. Consequences get serious real fast when our flawed capacity meets atomic energy...hell., the same can be said for fossil fuels. Honestly...humans are really quite ignorant. I FULLY include myself in that description.

I have already explained it but ill repeat (this is for New Zealand, not anywhere else, your first post said that everywhere in the world should go)

NZ is on a fault line, Earthquakes are comman and the risk is high,
NZ is anti nuclear, in fact we have been nuclear free since 1984, and we have had strained relationship with the US miltary ever since, but in the last 5 years it has become better, although US warships do not visit here as they will not say if they are nuclear free or not,

with only 4 million people, and large sea mass all around us, and most of our energy (over 70% already coming from renewable energy, we do not need the capacity that nuclear provides,

I'm a HUGE fan of Nuclear Power...we should be using it more in this country.

The problem is that there is one genre of environmentalism or another that puts up a HUGE fight any time there is any form of proposed energy development (from coal to oil to natural gas to solar to wind to hydro to nuclear)...it doesn't matter, the environmentalists don't want it. Apparently, they want us all to live like the Native Americans did 200+ years ago, except the modern environmentalists wouldn't let us have fires because of the smoke and we'd have to cut down trees.

Environmentalism, in moderation (as it was originally indented) is a great thing...but it has been perverted beyond extreme by power hungry individuals and is now used as a fear mongering tool to control people.

As for "global warming" or "climate change" or "climate disruption" whatever its called today...YES, without a doubt its happening...NO, humans aren't causing it or speeding it up/slowing it down. Humans are along for the ride...George Carlin said I best...


https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4

You would be surprised how much oil seeps into the ocean naturally....google is your friend.

While oil spills are a problem when they occur...they pale in comparison to the problems associated with the dumping of plastic and other non naturally occurring chemicals/compounds in bodies of water. There are microbes that consume a large portion of natural and accidental oil spills.