...spent fuel rods would have mattered quite as much to your family as the normal operations of a coal plant would have.
The supposed risks of used nuclear fuel are always exaggerated and always reported, almost 100% of the time using conditional words, "could have," "might have," etc. Deaths from dangerous fossil fuels are not, even though conditional words are not required to show they kill people.
If FPL had built a coal plant where Turkey Point is, there would have been no effort to improve "safety," at all. A coal plant kills people whenever it operates normally, not just in a theoretical "safety issue" raised about used nuclear fuel. There is NO safety in coal operations. These operations always result in fatalities.
Used nuclear fuel is different than used fossil fuel in that it has a spectacular record in not killing anyone, anywhere, at any time in this country, whereas used fossil fuel, aka air pollution, has killed tens of millions of people in this country and continues to do so.
If I lived in Florida, I'd be far more worried about seawater than I would be about Turkey Point. Disasters associated with the former are now extremely likely, whereas a disaster at Turkey Point involving fatalities, while certainly not impossible, are extremely unlikely.
I remarked on the cooling rates of used nuclear fuel elsewhere: Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine.
This gives rationale to the previous figure in Dr. Yancey (Spencer)'s thesis, figure 20. Note that the ordinate in this graphic, which is apparently the sum of the heat load of all the used nuclear fuel in the United States, is logarithmic: The sum of zeroth day heat loads is 387.1 MW; the sum of one year later fuels is 11.9 MW. In the "percent talk" often utilized by anti-nukes to obscure the complete and total failure of so called "renewable energy" to do anything to address climate change, the heat load is 3.07% of what it was a year earlier. After 20 years, this figure has dropped in "percent talk" to 0.54% of the zeroth year head load. The nuclides generating more than 10% of the heat individually (figure 21 (b)) all have half-lives on the order of decades with one exception, Am-241, a wonderful nuclide of which I'm rather fond: It has a half-life of 432.6 years, it's longer half-life being offset by its very high decay energy, 5.628 MeV. (For this reason it has often been discussed as fuel for deep space missions, since it will last longer than Pu-238 now generally used in these settings.)
I personally think the storage of used nuclear fuels in pools is a wasteful, bad idea, even though the practice is widely used, in fact, used almost exclusively. I would prefer that they be stored in thermoelectric devices designed to be air cooled, or, even better, reprocessed on site while still hot in a pyro-processing scheme.
I would be very happy to have a nuclear plant in my town, especially one with in line reprocessing. I'd feel proud that my community is involved in saving human lives and ecosystems. I'm a little sad because I used to take my kids to the beach here in New Jersey in sight of the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant, which has regrettably been shut and displace by dangerous natural gas, the waste of which, as I'm sure you know, creates significant risk for anyone living at low elevations, including but not limited to Florida. I used to tell my boys how important that Oyster Creek plant was, and one of them grew up to be entered into a nuclear engineering Ph.D. program. I hope that the time will come that he'll participate in putting the used nuclear fuel still stored there to use.
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