Quote:

---

Originally posted by Bytemite:
Utah doesn't get a whole lot of attention from the rest of the United States, so I don't know how aware the rest of the nation is, but Utah has been at the center of a lot of conflict over energy. You might have heard about our state BLM auctioning off public land leases to oil companies, or the fights about transport of nuclear waste using our highways, or nuclear waste storage.

Since we're upstream of California, who is among the biggest energy users in the nation, we kind of supply power to them, and with Colorado and a few other Rocky Mountain states, to a lot of the west.

And we do it with coal. We don't have the population of the east that gives us the huge pollution that the east gets in regards to coal power plants, but there is a desire here to try to move towards alternative sources of energy. But people are split between wind/solar energy and nuclear power.

And our Senate just passed a resolution for deveolping nuclear power in Utah.

http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_11725136 (liberal)

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705288731,00.html (conservative)

I'll admit that wind and solar power faces some challenges to meeting all of our energy needs, and we do need to develop some other option besides them. Perhaps California ought to look into some deep ocean current turbines or the like to make everyone else's power situation more manageable.

But nuclear power, even though safety has improved greatly since three-mile island (which wasn't even that bad of an event anyway), is far from being perfect. We still have no good, safe, guaranteed leak free way of storing fuel. And worse, here in Utah, most of our major cities, and were nuclear power plants will likely be built lie along a major active fault with a tendency towards magntitude 7 earthquakes. What's more, that fault is building up a BIG one because it hasn't slipped in recent time, and most of the surface around those faults is unconsolidated sediment. If it slips, we're looking at jello-like soil liquification and downslope movement.

So, I don't think it's such a good idea for around here.

---