It poured a heavy, muggy rain all day today. I spent half of it sloshing around the grounds of a nuclear power plant. Duke Energy operates two of them within 30 miles of my home and nuclear accounts for about half of the power in the region. While nuclear energy doesn't emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (yay!), it does create some pretty nasty leftovers. The most radioactive of the stuff is stashed in concrete and steel containers on the plant site - again, just 30 miles from my house. The lowest-level stuff is still too radioactive to send to the local dump, so the company puts it on trucks and trains and sends it off to the Energy Solutions dump just outside Salt Lake City. How's THAT for a strange Utah/Charlotte connection?
I've actually been to the EnergySolutions site, too, and seen how they dispose of the waste from my nuclear-generated electricity in a big dusty lasagna of radioactive waste and clay.
What a strange thing to have nuclear plants here in my backyard sending their waste to be stored in my old backyard.
And did you know that most of the country's nuclear plants are concentrated in the southeast? I'm told that's because nuclear plants started coming online with a vengeance in the 70s - which coincided with the widespread installation of A/C in homes here.
Yet another reminder that my pleasant-weather honeymoon in Charlotte will soon come to an end.
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