On the nuclear thing. there is a problem with fission.
Sorry this is an ideological site, but its right. (sez he believing himself to totally neutral and obviously completely rational in his agreement)
http://www.ccnr.org/hlw_chart.html
When you look at that list (if so moved to go there) what you see is the end result of the failure of the fission process to productively convert a major slab of the energy which should have been released in the primary fission of the fuel (which is usually uranium, but if you really want to piss George B off use Pu) (but its Ok if youre French) (something about the War of Independence I think) (or Japanese, though the right wing there does want its own bomb but dont tell anyone, they wont believe you)
the problem is fissioning the primary fuel results in the production of energy and fission products.
The fission products list (what uranium turns into once its fissioned) (its a cascade one thing leads to another). If the output was all energy fine, but it aint. the element uranium once split turns into one element then another and so on and these elements are radioactive, which means they have their own decay processes so you end up with a "fission product cross section" thing which consists of more than the 150 longer radioactive elements listed at that web site above. Scroll down the list on that web page til you get to Sr. It lists 2 isotopes of radio strontium 90, and 89. OK its ten year old spent fuel. Sr89 has a half life of 52 days from memory and Sr90 has a half life of 28. something years. So which is more energtic folks? Which one is the immediate threat and which one the long term threat and the energy they ouput (radiation) (what the reactor fails to utilise at the time) (waste & danger Will Robertson danger) (waves arms, looks startled) Its strontium 89 . It is produces in far greater radiological abundance than Sr90. Hundreds of times more Curies (Ds/sec) than Sr90.
Yet, us poor souls, we've been conditioned to think its Sr90 thats the immediate danger. Whereas actually its a long term one of soft beta and some gamma (the Y step) whereas with Sr89 its all hard beta and step to stable Y. No gamma. And as we all know cause they are so honest that its alpha and beta as internal hazards which have a much higher ionisation rate per mm of tissue than gamma any day of the week. Gamma has no size, charge or mass. Its thus less likely per track to knock the bollocks off any atom in your body. In the search for equivalence the, measure for it is the Sv and there are certain assumptions in the very unity of measure. If a single will do it, hey, you need a bloody buzzer, no a moving dial. But with alpha a single track will do it. There is no safe dose. So why do they waste so much energy only to dump in the biosphere.
But then again, coal miners love uranium, they dont need to dig nearly so much of the stuff. If E = Mc squared was anywhere near being fulfilled with nuke power plants, a matchbox full of U would run Sydney for a month and my G4 eMac for 6000 bleeding years. At minimum. Intel sucks.
End of thought. CP was right. but he died too soon. If you dont get dont worry, Im obviously mad. Its a problem with old rank and file soldiers. We've seen too much for our station in life.