@MookyTroubadour Oh, and to give a little more perspective... if both had the same energy output, in the same time it'd take 1 person to die from something related to nuclear energy... approximately 1100 would've died because of the impacts of brown coal.

In other news, this is how Germany's move to shut down all their nuclear plants & replace them with brown coal qualifies as murdering their citizens. The resulting externalities of brown coal have killed well over 10,000 people already.

@MookyTroubadour I don't like Microsoft *at all* (in fact I've been boycotting them for over a decade now), but this isn't the issue to hammer them on.

@IrelandTorin Nuclear technology in and of itself isn’t the problem. It’s when you mix it with capitalism and the pursuit for the greatest profits that they thin out needed technology that increases safety, and then things get sketchy. It reminds me of what BP did in the gulf, there was supposed to be a better safety valves system than the one that dumped untold gallons of oil into our beautiful ocean, but it cost more.

@MidnightRider Most developed countries have now have strong nuclear regulators (because of what's happened in the past) which seem to be more than capable of keeping a lid on that.

Still, I'm not at all opposed with the idea of nationalizing nuclear and having it operate as state industry.

@IrelandTorin tell me about the half life on the spent fuel rods.

@MookyTroubadour At the end of the day, it's largely irrelevant.

Since the vast majority of the fissile element(s) in a "spent" fuel rod are intact, they can be reprocessed (1970s tech) to produce new fuel - with the fission products separated out + processed to create medically & industrially useful isotopes.

The remainder, the real waste, will be far less than 1% the mass of the original fuel - & can be buried so deep that the only fate it could ever experience is resorption into the mantle.