People always seem to forget that nuclear power runs on uranium which is also a limited resource on this plant.
Also regarding Uranium.
It's mining is disastrous for the areas where that happens and the people that do it.
And the nuclear waste is impossible to store safely for thousands of years...
you are spot on, but your post does not seem to win any approval. The simple fact is that a nuclear reactor is ecological, but the mining and enriching of uranium hardly is. Uranium is not something you just "find", and getting it out of the ground is a tremendous hassle (read: costs huge amount of CO2). Combine that with the fact that half-life of nuclear waste is inconceivably problematic and you have a recipe for disaster. Processing nuclear waste amounts to storing it and making sure the building doesn't collapse due to radiation effects. And that will continue for many, many more generations. I'm not necessarily pro or con nuclear. However, I am very strongly against building new nuclear plants. Why would we? The only passive design (which would be safe-ish in case of a meltdown) is barely tested. The cost of a new plant can finance research and development of new, far better ways of generating energy. So why bother at all with this (hopefully!) dying technology?
And please, don't blame everything on fear of things we don't understand, or bad engineering/politics. I fully understand nuclear power, with all its benefits and all its downsides. Sadly, it are those benefits that simply do not outweight the downsides. Nuclear power just isn't much better than fossil fuels on an ecological level if things go well, and the design is just too sensitive to human error.
Uranium isn't the only fuel that is fissile, and not even the most ideal for power. The only reason that U235 was chosen over Thorium, which is 99% useful isotope in it's refined state (as opposed to less than 2% for Uranium, one reason it's so dangerous to deal with) is that nuclear weapons cannot be made from thorium, because it has known delays in it's cascading fissile reaction, which makes a catastrophic cascade for an explosion impossible. It's also notoriously difficult to make thorium into plutonium. It's also so abundant, that it's considered a waste metal, often used in industrial ship ballasts; but due to it's low level of natural radioactivity, cannot be used in modern products. It used to be used in paints and ceramics, though, so it's not actually terriblely dangerous. It's so commonly found in rocks, that it's the primary reason that concrete is radioactive at all, and also the primary component of coal that is the cause of the radioactive nature of coal ash, since it is also non-reactive and won't burn.
As to the issue of processing spent uranium fuel; it's a dangerous process, but nearly all spent fuel is re-refined in Europe, and made into new fuel rods. What cannot be included in the new rods, mostly the most radioactive substances known to man, are typically incased in leaded glass balls about the size of a softball, and stored in casks. They don't need to be stored for nearly as long as most people believe, because the more "hot" the radioactive substance is, the shorter it's half-life, generally speaking. The glass balls are likely to be safely handled by human hands in century or so. The US doesn't do things this way for political reasons, namely that the never built long-term storage vault was intended to be an artifical mine, in the event our sources were cut off for political or military reasons. You see, the US doesn't actually have any uranium mines of any account. There are minor mines in Canada, but almost all of the U235 for US and Western European nuclear plants were mined in Australia prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is a uranium deposit there so large and dense, that it contains a slow, naturally occurring reactor estimated to have been fissile and reacting for millions of years. That thing puts all human activity in the field to shame for it's magnitude. Even the spent fuel rods that were to be put into the long term storage facilty in Navada were never expected to actually stay there for the design life of the place, since the economic value of the un-refined fuel rods would increase beyond that of natural uranium once the other, much more dangerous isotopes, half-lifed away in a century or so.
http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/oklo-reactor.htmlTell me, did you know any of that?
EDIT: Sorry, West Africa, apparently.