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Originally Posted by cfg83
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Good research
I'm about to begin work in Bioinformatics (Biology tied with computer science, roughly).
You can actually see the evolution of my viewpoint on this. A few years ago I was somewhat ambivalent about the issue, but the more research I did the more I came to see that groups like Greenpeace massively over-simplified the ease and cost of wind and solar while bing wildly pessimistic about nuclear and all too often outright wrong or alarmist.
I have a few friends who are going into the industry, it has great job opportunities, but no I have no personal financial interest in it (Beyond liking cheap environmentally friendly power).
If you're interested about potential positions I recommend you check out
http://nukeworker.com/, the nuclear industry is one of the safest industries to work in (with respect to on the job accidents). Also many companies pay for training and offer pretty well paying jobs once you complete that training (60k+), no college degree required. They mostly focus on people coming out of high school, but that's just because they think they have the greatest potential recruiting there. They're also willing to train older people since the labor force needs to be expanded so much.
Once you get some experience in the US you can earn some serious cash in China, they are massively expanding their nuclear capacity and need experienced people from the US to help train their labor force (if you might one day be interested in staying in China for a few years whilst earning a bundle).
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Originally Posted by Me
Sure, there’s some risk (not really to our generation), but solar panels have risks too, every single truck transporting solar panels for the next year could crash into a school bus filled with children and kill them all.
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I should clarify two points, by "not really our generation" I mean the risk is essentially non-existent for
any single generation. If you take the lifespan of all isotopes to be undetectable then you're talking about 16,000 generations, but for all those generations in aggregate there is a risk. Like your chances of winning the lottery are basically zilch, but if you play it a million times it might jump to be over 1% (again, still less then Yucca mountain blowing up).
And solar panels falling off trucks, though unlikely, is just mentioned to underlie the fact that everything we do has risk, so the whole "no risk is acceptable" line just doesn't fly. Notably sixty people have been killed during the installation of wind mills in Germany alone, more than have died in the entire history of the US nuclear industry.
http://members.aol.com/fswemedien/ZZUnfalldatei.htm
^^ Sorry, in German. Don't know of another source. I don't think the US compiles data like this, Germans are obsessive about organizing and collecting data like this.