What technological advance has caused more harm than good?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by GeorgeTheEng

I'd contend though that if it were utilized more, Nuclean Power would be a real benefit to the planet. It's cleaner and fairly safe (when people are not cheap and/or lax).

Indeed, an article in this month's MIT Technology Review by Stewart Brand, a prominent environmentalist, does a good job of explaining why nuclear power shouldn't be ignored as an alternative to fossil fuel-burning power plants. Many environmental experts are now saying that the problems of waste storage/disposal and proliferation issues should be addressed rather than rejecting nuclear power outright.

The regulatory issues need to be worked on as well -- as long as it's essentially forbidden to do anything with the radwaste except sequester it, nobody will be able to come up with a better solution. The most promising technology is "forced transmutation", but the only available place to do experiments on it is the French Phenix breeder reactor, which is reaching the end of its useful life and should be decommissioned in the next few years.

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

The breeder reactors that France is so fond of are another source of fear in many repsects. The fact that they produce additional radioactive material as a product of operation and that sodium is used as the primary coolant scares me.

The last time I checked, there was only one sodium-cooled breeder reactor operating in France, and it's being kept in operation mostly because it's the only source of the kind of fast neutrons that can transmute long-lived radwaste into less problematic elements -- it's the one I mentioned before. Besides the Phenix, all of France's nuclear power plants use pressurized-water reactors.