Unreasonable fear of Nuclear Reactors
Nuclearphobia?
Many fear nuclear power plants without understanding it and knowing what types there are. Just because the ones from history broke down does not mean there are alternatives. People (or Germany) opt to choose coal energy instead, killing with its pollution much more people than nuclear reactors.
Mostly the ones from history are actually using water to slow down neutrons and act as a coolant. Due to the low boiling point of water, it leaves danger that radioactive steam escapes and it creates waste that can only broken down by fast neutrons. Molten salt fast neutron reactors use salts as a coolant, which typically have a much higher melting and boiling point. They operate at higher temperatures and the fast neutrons allow waste that has a half life of tens of thousand of years to break down to waste with a half life of hundreds of years. Also this way almost all Uranium is bred to become fissile, hence the amount of waste generated is only a tenth of a percentage of the light water nuclear reactors.
Soon thorium reactors would be an even cheaper alternative not creating heavier long half life waste products in the first place, and hence using up all of the fuel. Thorium is also much more abundant on this planet making the energy cheaper.
Sadly our politicians, when talking about nuclear reactors talk about light water reactors, putting all nuclear reactors into one basket. All ruling parties in the German Parliament aim to abandon nuclear power by 2022 and keep coal power by 2030 (the "Green" party), 2035 (the left party) or 2038 (social democrats and christian conservatives).
Surely banning nuclear energy is not the right move. Banning light water reactors would be more sensible.
The only party that aims to bring back nuclear reactors is the Party. And I guess the AFD that does not even believe in climate change, so they would be out of the question.
