Greed in the upper echelons was always a bane of society.
Having the plants back would be great for the economy and save the country heaven knows how much on energy costs. Money comes before people, of course.
Although nuclear is brilliant in the aspect of producing zero carbon emissions (heheh, at least at the power generation stage), even I admit that problems associated with disposal of waste, (spent/)fuel falling into the wrong hands and the consequences of possible accidents reduce its viability as a large-scale solution.
The nuclear fuel in power plants can't explode.
The fuel used in most plants (some use plutonium) is enriched to 3% uranium-235. This is enough to sustain a chain reaction and get very hot, but it won't explode. Military-grade uranium is at least 80% (now it's more like 90%) uranium-235. The other isotope present, U-238, absorbs neutrons before the chain reaction can get out of control. As the majority of atoms in nuclear fuel are U-238, the fuel physically cannot explode.
But if it overheats and melts down the reactor, it can cause other things like hydrogen to do so instead. That's what happened when something(s) got blown up at Fukushima.
Fire away with your questions, I'll do my best to answer them.
Well I'm glad that you're finding it interesting.
I know all these "basics" of particle physics off the top of my head (it starts to get fun later on, lol) because once you get into the harder problems you pretty much have to use this information in every second sentence/equation. But when we get to pair production and the energies involved, or particle accelerators or calculating the range of virtual exchange particles, I'll probably have to consult my book.
The Higgs boson was indeed named after Peter Higgs, the guy who proposed its existence (and probably played a role in discovering it too, lol. Scientific discoveries are no longer solitary ventures, there would've been a colossal team working on the problem at CERN.)
Yep, I guess you could say a quark is just a little packet of energy. That's the same with all the other elementary particles. My physics teacher used to describe them as "mathematical points" - they have no internal structure, which sounds confusing because that would mean there was actually nothing there. Then how would they have mass? That's a property (resistance to acceleration - inertia) that they apparently acquire through interaction with the Higgs field.
Anyway, the topic of "what are particles" is kind of vague and I'm not sure I can provide a fully comprehensive answer.
Particle physics as a field is still changing, as you can see by the recent discovery of Higgs boson, and what people were trying to do with string theory earlier. There are still a lot of problems with the "Standard Model" (everything being composed of leptons, quarks and exchange bosons) which haven't been resolved, such as unifying gravity with the other three forces (interesting topic coming up, lol). Maybe at some point in the future, the Standard Model will be overturned or expanded upon. The things that we "know" now are based upon experimental and theoretical evidence. Nothing is 100% concrete when you get down to elementary particle scale.
So anyway, elementary particles.
Here's a list of the elementary particles.
Leptons:
Electron
Electron neutrino (electron and electron neutrinos are the only stable ones)
Muon
Muon neutrino
Tau
Tau neutrino
Quarks: (each of these is known as a "flavour" of quark)
Up
Down (up and down are stable and make up matter that we see around us - the other four only last for fractions of a second)
Charm
Strange
Top
Bottom
Elementary exchange bosons:
Photon (exchange particle in the electromagnetic interaction)
Gluon (exchange particle in the Strong force)
W+, W- and Z0 (exchange particles in the Weak force)
Graviton (exchange particle in gravitational force)
These are the four fundamental forces of nature. Every other force you can think of is pretty much a manifestation of one of these.
and of course,
Higgs boson (responsible for mass).
Every particle - including composite ones - has specific properties (such as charge, spin - angular momentum, we weren't taught about that until later in the course though, it's important for some things that are coming up but don't worry about it too much for now - baryon number, lepton number, strangeness, etc.) and they can be expressed using a set of "quantum numbers", which are different for different particles.
For example, the electron has quantum numbers
-1 for charge
+/- 1/2 for spin (plus or minus a half)
1 for electron lepton number (because it's a lepton and it's in the electron class, which it shares with the electron neutrino)
0 for baryon number (because it's not a baryon)
etc. etc.
Up quark has quantum numbers
+2/3 for charge (plus two-thirds)
+/- 1/2 spin
0 lepton number
1/3 baryon number (because it's a third of a baryon, lol)
etc.
The down quark is the same, except it has charge -1/3.
Two up quarks and a down quark make a proton (add up the charge and it comes to one.)
The proton has numbers:
+1 for charge
+/- 1/2 for spin (it's only a proton if the spins of the three quarks add up to either +1/2 or -1/2. Therefore they must have different spins. If they all have the same spin and the spin of the resulting particle is +3/2 or -3/2, the particle has more mass, because it has more energy as angular momentum is pretty much energy - you know e=mc^2, mass is energy etc.etc. and it's no longer a proton because it's heavier. In this case it becomes a... Delta particle, I think it is.)
0 lepton number
1 baryon number (because it is a baryon - it has three quarks)
...Man, that post is so long. o.o Have fun trying to learn some of those facts! I hope it makes sense, our booklet taught all this to us in a pretty good order, but I can't remember what it was so I'm just saying things randomly.
