From a Slashdot post of mine:
" There are certianly potential serious risk associated with nuclear power.
The point was that as it stands right now it is one of the safest sources of power generation with the least environmental impact per kilowatt hour produced.
Another little tidbit that tends to be forgotten regarding our largest current power source, coal, is that we are pumping enormous amounts of U-238, U-235, and other heavy metals into the air as we burn this fuel.
Nuclear is by far not the end-all-be-all of eletrical power generation, but it is the best overall choice for the immeadiate future for large scale power consumption needs."
Longer post (complete with a dumb error where my brain died and I typed Yucatan instead of Yucca) with a whole ton of informative links can be found here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=35694&cid=3855735One of these days it would be nice to see this sort of information get on the news instead of the paranoid fears of people trying to stop a nuclear powered interplanetary probe from being launched. The closest I've seen was a rather detailed and well done "Nova" episode.