Why do people fear nuclear power?

But cheaper than nukes.

No not even that.

The concept is "marginal rate of return" - basically, every dollar spent on nukes that could have been spent on various efficiency improvements and so forth is fifty cents less energy demand met. Make the high-payoff conservation investments first, the cheaper power investments second, and nukes if you have a few hundred billion left over.

Again these are not competitive avenues: power plants are being decommissions and need to be replaced, sure efficiency can reduced the number of new plants needed but we are always going to need new powerplants.

We can't even get socialist medicine in this country - socializing the entire electrical power system would require a new Congress.

We don't need to "socials" the grid, just upgrade it.
 
in answer to the topic's question I would say because of how reative it is. If I was in a car that was nuclear powered I'd be afraid of it blowing up on me at any given second.

To me it all would depend on how it was nuclear power?
 
huh? what do you mean?

Well how is it nuclear power? Radioisotopic: Pu 238, Polonium or Tritium? Nuclear fission, fast or slow neutrons just simply won't fit in a car. Somekind of future compact aneutratic Nuclear fission like a working dense plasma focus reactor might fit but the shielding weight for the x-rays/gamma rays would simply be to heavy as well.

The only thing I would see as possible would be a radioisotope trickle charging an electric battery, Pu238 would be very expensive, Polonium would be too hot and too radio toxic. Tritium would have the lowest radiation and toxicity issues heck its been used to make glowing dots on rifle sights for decades, but enough to even trickle charge and electric car have never been tried.

A nuclear car is a radical engineering challenge let alone safety risk: worry about its safety if it could even be done. If the tritium was stored in something inert like silicone or ceramic I guess it would be safe enough, but where are you going to get enough?

As for every day nuclear items: fire detectors, and again these tritium self-lighting paints:

scaledlumetest01mins-1.jpg


But enough glowing paint to power a photovoltaic converter to powers a car... fuck the whole tritium industry is just 400 grams a year and a kg would only give off a few dozen watts!
 
Back
Top