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Nuclear answer
Forgive the bandwidth, Fred, but I was busy and did not get to respond to the Nukes debate of a few days ago. People were ignorant of nuclear accidents, and the costs of the nuclear industry, mistakenly believing that Chernobyl is about the only Nuke accident ever. Here are some facts and resources for people. Bear in mind this is brief: what I found in 5 mins on the internet. I once had far more resources at my disposal once but at present I am far from home.

HEALTH EFFECTS of exposure to radiation:
“Radiation exposure, like exposure to the sun, is cumulative.”
Source: CDC

CUMULATIVE means that the harmful effects build up over time they don’t go away. Every small bit of radiation you are exposed to increases your chances of getting cancer or passing on genetic defects to your children. There is NO SAFE DOSE OF RADIATION. It is a lottery as to whether the radiation strikes out a gene in your DNA that is harmless or one that causes the cell to malfunction and become cancerous.
SOURCE: greenie site but medical doctors agree and despite controversy evidence is good.

People already suffer cancers simply as a result of the background radiation that everyone is exposed to from the Sun and radioactive particles in the air and water. This is unavoidable. But even small leaks of radioactivity from nuclear power plants increase the background level of radiation. As it is CUMULATIVE, this increases the rates of cancer and birth defects in populations exposed to it. You cannot get it out of the environment either once it’s out there in the food chain. Here’s a brief discussion of some of the health effects of radiation written about the Hanford accident:
Link

NUCLEAR REACTORS HAVE PLENTY OF ACCIDENTS NOT JUST CHERNOBYL:
In response to the poster who made the claim that France relies on N-power and has no accidents: The froggies have never been ones to admit when they make mistakes. They’d much rather cover it up. But in case you think the French are so superior that unlike the other developed nations that use N-power and have had thousands of accidents, they have had none, here are a selection (ie: not all just some):
22-09-1980: Pump failure causes accidental release of radioactive water at La Hague reprocessing plant (France)

6-01-1981: Accident at La Hague reprocessing plant (France)

1-10-1983: Technical failure and human error cause accident at Blayas nuclear power plant(France)

19-08-1986: Flooding at the Cattenom nuclear power plant (France)

28-04-1988: Release of 5000 Curies of tritium gas from the Bruyere le Chatel military nuclear complex (France)

1-04-1989: Control rod failure at Gravelines nuclear power plant (France)

28-01-1990: Pump failure during a shut-down at Gravelines nuclear power plant (France)

26-05-1990: During refuelling, five cubic meters of radioactive water spilled at the Fessenheim nuclear power plant (France)

16-09-1990: Superphenix Fast Breeder Reactor is closed down due to technical failures (France)

4-12-1990: 2 workers irradiated during refuelling at Blayais nuclear power plant (France)

1-06-1991: Failure of core cooling system at Belleville nuclear power plant (France)

22-07-1992: Two workers contaminated at Dampierre nuclear power plant (France)

20-01-1993: Technical failure at Paluel causes subcooling accident (France)

22-10-1993: Instrumentation and Control failure at Saint Alban nuclear power plant (France)
SOURCE:
Note: this is sourced from Greenpeace who I disagree with on many issues (eg: global warming), but this is a simple list of facts that are easily independently checkable: Link

EXPENSIVE INEFFICIENCY OF REACTORS:
Unlike conventional power plants, nuclear plants have a relatively short life-span -- 30 years -- before critical reactor components become irreparably radioactive. At that point the plant must be decommissioned (`mothballed’) at a cost of over $100 million, or else its entire reactor core replaced.
[oh, so cheap, so efficient!]
Compounding the storage problem is an accumulation of spent radioactive fuel rods, which have a life-span of only three years.
[Oh but they’re so small, they hardly take up any space!!!! Just a little problem, easily solvable
 just not in my backyard, thanks!] SOURCE: as below.

PARTIAL LIST OF ACCIDENTS AT US REACTORS (there have been thousands of minor and mid-level accidents but for brevity and laziness here are just a few.) SOURCE: Link


28 March 1979
A major accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. At 4:00 a.m. a series of human and mechanical failures nearly triggered a nuclear disaster. By 8:00 a.m., after cooling water was lost and temperatures soared above 5,000 degrees, the top half of the reactor’s 150-ton core collapsed and melted. Contaminated coolant water escaped into a nearby building, releasing radioactive gasses, leading as many as 200,000 people to flee the region. Despite claims by the nuclear industry that "no one died at Three Mile Island," a study by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, professor of radiation physics at the University of Pittsburgh, showed that the accident led to a minimum of 430 infant deaths.

11 February 1981
An Auxiliary Unit Operator, working his first day on the new job without proper training, inadvertently opened a valve which led to the contamination of eight men by 110,000 gallons of radioactive coolant sprayed into the containment building of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Sequoyah I plant in Tennessee.

25 January 1982
A steam generator pipe broke at the Rochester Gas & Electric Company’s Ginna plant near Rochester, New York. Fifteen thousand gallons of radioactive coolant spilled onto the plant floor, and small amounts of radioactive steam escaped into the air.

15-16 January 1983
Nearly 208,000 gallons of water with low-level radioactive contamination was accidentally dumped into the Tennesee River at the Browns Ferry power plant.

1988
It was reported that there were 2,810 accidents in U.S. commercial nuclear power plants in 1987, down slightly from the 2,836 accidents reported in 1986, according to a report issued by the Critical Mass Energy Project of Public Citizen, Inc.

25 February 1993A catastrophe at the Salem 1 reactor in New Jersey was averted by just 90 seconds when the plant was shut down manually, following the failure of automatic shutdown systems to act properly. The same automatic systems had failed to respond in an incident three days before, and other problems plagued this plant as well, such as a 3,000 gallon leak of radioactive water in June 1981 at the Salem 2 reactor, a 23,000 gallon leak of "mildly" radioactive water (which splashed onto 16 workers) in February 1982, and radioactive gas leaks in March 1981 and September 1982 from Salem 1.

28 May 1993
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a warning to the operators of 34 nuclear reactors around the country that the instruments used to measure levels of water in the reactor could give false readings during routine shutdowns and fail to detect important leaks. The problem was first bought to light by an engineer at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut who had been harassed for raising safety questions. The flawed instruments at boiling-water reactors designed by General Electric utilize pipes which were prone to being blocked by gas bubbles; a failure to detect falling water levels could have resulted, potentially leading to a meltdown.

HERE’S A LIST OF MORE ACCIDENTS FROM THE 1990s
Link including that of Hanford, Washington, where wildfires burnt the reactor.

GIVE UP on the nuclear fantasy, it isn’t the great powersource of the future that it’s cracked up to be. The other alternatives may not ALL be applicable in EVERY situation. They may not be cheap – in fact they are expensive. But they come without the social cost of Nukes. This fantasy is a dead-end path. Forget it, it’s over. Nobody wants the waste, it cannot be safely stored and even if you can guarantee that you can store it for a thousand years you cannot guarantee that human beings will remember where it is or understand that they cannot go digging there. As Gandalf said (loosely paraphrased) in Lord of the Rings: “you think only of yourselves, and this time. But there are people yet to be born and time still to be. They are also my concern.”

You cannot guarantee against human error. You cannot guarantee against outside events such as the fire that caused the Hanford disaster: sabotage, flooding, earthquake, terrorist strikes. You cannot guarantee the stability of civic society beyond the next 100 years let alone the next 10,000. This means that you cannot guarantee the safety and efficiency of Nuclear reactors as a source of power. They are too expensive and I’m not willing to pay the price! Find another way.
Posted by: Anon1 2004-06-07
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=34927