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Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that, even if e

Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that, even if everything in this article is correct most people won't listen. Look at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island (study after study found no major exposure by anyone). The hysteria over this is caused by the anti-nuclear people and groups trying to use this as a case against nuclear power, blowing everything out of proportion before any facts are known. I think a few articles calling for calm balances the shrieking cries of "meltdown imminent".

hartror 16y ago
I consider myself a leftie greenie politically, and I am pro nuclear (with some small reservations). It pisses me off no end to see the same people campaigning for action on climate change campaigning against the one proven at scale technology that can help us out of the climate change mess.
- billybob 16y ago
  I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will be dead and every government in the world will have changed. Our current languages won't be spoken anymore. The location of the waste deposits will likely be forgotten. There is absolutely no way to predict what will happen to the waste, and it seems awfully selfish to foist that kind of problem on people in the future to solve our very short-term energy needs. If there is a form of nuclear power that completely expends its fuel to the point where its demonstrably not dangerous TODAY, or if we can launch the waste into the sun, I'm all for it. But lets not pretend we can control the damage from things that will persist for thousands of years after we're dead.
  - knieveltech 16y ago
    The thing is, it doesn't take hordes of engineers nearly a decade to design your web server.
    - whyenot 16y ago
      If his webserver goes down he doesn't need to evacuate everyone in a 30km radius. Apples and oranges.
      - knieveltech 16y ago
        We're in violent agreement here.
    - sutro 16y ago
      Good point. It took hordes of engineers almost two decades to design his web server. http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html
      - hartror 16y ago
        Sure, but those hordes who designed it didn't spend time training him to set it up and run it correctly. Just face that it is a horrible analogy and move on.
  - amalcon 16y ago
    That sets the bar too high, though. It doesn't need to be perfectly safe. It need only be safer than the alternatives.
  - natnat 16y ago
    Before saying that nuclear power isn't safe enough, consider where we get most of our electricity from today: coal. Coal may have been around a long time, but it is far more dangerous than nuclear power. The fly ash produced by coal burning often contains substantial concentrations of uranium (not too bad) and radium (very bad), as well as all sorts of other toxic but non-radioactive chemicals like lead. Although there is a lot more net radiation coming from all the fly ash we produce that there is from our nuclear reactors, the EPA doesn't bother to treat fly ash as hazardous waste, so most people don't think it's scary. This means we already have a bunch of radioactive waste dumped into our landfills without much oversight at all. While nuclear waste is very dangerous, there isn't a whole lot of it, and it's quite safe when it's stored properly in a radiation-sealed container. It doesn't end up in our landfills, or our air supply. It's a point source of pollution, which makes it much easier to take care of, and it is much nicer to leave future generations some concentrated, shielded radioactive waste in remote areas than to leave them tons of low-level waste in their water supply. I'm an advocate of solar energy, and nuclear power is a hell of a lot less safe than I'd like. But as long as we're burning coal, we should be worried more about the risks of that, even though they may be less scary-seeming, because they truly are more dangerous.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  The reason they campaign against that is that they don't want us to continue running around in this stage of sin (technological development), but to return to grace (in this case back to working 18 hour days with a single failed harvest killing us). Much of the hardcore environmental movement is using it as a substitute for religion, except in an even more insane way.
  - gmac 16y ago
    I'm not advocating a 'return to grace', but you picked a rather selective definition of 'grace'. Looking further back (or elsewhere) than subsistence agriculture, hunter-gathering is potentially a pretty leisurely lifestyle: the 'original affluent society' (http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html).
  - michaeldhopkins 16y ago
    More like 4-12 hours per day depending on the age of the farm (startups take work), the quality of the land and the crop season. More hours during planting and harvesting, and almost nothing during the winter. The number didn't really depend on technology past a certain point of desperation (passed well before recorded history.) For example, the gothic cultures farmed before they borrowed the plow from the Romans. Post-plow they became richer instead of cutting back hours. No different than today. There were many provisions for crop failure, including crop variety, raising animals, preserving food, fishing and trading with luckier regions. Like today. Pro-agrarian looking to set the record straight. I'm also in favor of nuclear power!
bluedanieru 16y ago
Just a quick point of order: study after study on Chernobyl found major exposure by just about everyone. It was serious business. This is where, without any containment vessel at all, the fuel caught fire and the radioactive ash spread all over the place. But you are right about Three-Mile Island.
- dublinclontarf 16y ago
  Yes there was exposure, certainly those 4000 children recieved high enough levels. However this is a far cry of hundreds of thousands of dangerous exposures, massive increases of cancer rates and birth defects that are still happening that most people think of. I myself thought just that until recently after investigating it.
  - sterling 16y ago
    I was studying in Russia when Chernobyl occurred, and I dated a woman from northern Ukraine who was a teenager at the time of the accident. I saw the results of the accident firsthand - basically everyone under the age of 10 was affected - hair loss, skin rashes and nausea in the immediate years after, cancer and early death later. But even so it isn't fair to judge the safety of nuclear power by Chernobyl. Chernobyl happened because the Soviet system had become incredibly incompetent, and technical decisions were being made by thugs.
    - brazzy 16y ago
      The capitalist system quite often also becomes incredibly incompetent and has its technical decisions made by thugs. Tepco, the company that runs the Fukushima plant, has a long history of corruption, faked security reports and blatant incompetence. What makes nuclear power unsafe is human error more than technical failure. That's the aspect the naive technocrats (like the guy who wrote this article) always ignore.
  - jshen 16y ago
    Are you saying that only 4000 people were affected?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
kmfrk 16y ago
>Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that, even if everything in this article is correct most people won't listen. NYT, Guardian, Spiegel, Mother Jones, The Atlantic (every online publication there is), every news TV channel (except Al Jazeera). Greenpeace are all over the place with their campaigning. The hysteria isn't imminent - it's happening right now. If people don't fight the campaign to stop nuclear energy, the factoids are going to dominate the discourse in many years to come.
- nakkiel 16y ago
  I deeply agree with that. At the same time, I believe it's time to forcefully put other energy sources to use, make them work and more generally give them their chance. I'd go as far as saying this would draw a lot of economical activity world-wide and get us out of the economical crisis for good. In a way, I see this event as an opportunity. It's just been demonstrated that Nuclear Energy is safe enough (at least, that's how I see things) but I still believe we deserve greener energies.
  - Robin_Message 16y ago
    Hang on, I'm confused. If you think nuclear energy is good, why should the others get a chance? Surely we should go with the best option (which obviously includes diversity, but ought to have the overall best as its main component.) I don't mean to be rude, but this isn't a playground. Solar power will not get a complex if nuclear is chosen instead. Our way of life depends on energy, and just hoping other sources will work out seems naive at best.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >Solar power will not get a complex if nuclear is chosen instead. I think we'll run out of economically extractable ore deposits of nuclear fuels a little before Sol goes supernova. Perhaps that's it. Also, unless he edited, he said that Nuclear was "safe enough" not that it was the best option. Even if it were the best primary option I wouldn't want to rely on it exclusively; personally I consider that "renewable" sources are better. Fusion would appear to be the best if we can get it to work effectively but I'd still look to diversify to some extent.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Robin_Message 16y ago
I agree that balance is good, and that in truth, nuclear power is very safe, but consider what happens if there is a major release of radioactivity. How is this article going to look then? I think you'd agree it would weaken the credibility of pro-nuclear campaigners. Lying for the sake of truth is a bad idea. As it stands, a meltdown is a definite possibility (not necessarily probable.) Perhaps a better stratergy would be to say "It might meltdown. In which case the reactor will be ruined, but no radioactivity will be released. Or the primary vessel might be damaged, in which case this would be a Chenobyl style disaster, except we have already evacuated the area as a precaution, so the estimated death toll would be 10 (or 100 or whatever.)" I'd say people fear what they don't understand; having lots of people, especially scientists and politicians, say "there's nothing to worry about" only increases peoples' worry – especially when bits of the plant keep exploding.
- dublinclontarf 16y ago
  >Lying for the sake of truth is a bad idea. This isn't lying, it's accurate according to the information that we have acquired over the last 60 years on the use of nuclear technology. Should these predictions turn out to be incorrect then the information we have needs to be updated. I'm hoping it turns out well, there are of course no guarantees but the chances of things going even further south are low.
sunchild 16y ago
Yes, turn on CNN or MSNBC right now, and all you will hear about is an imminent meltdown, and what it means for US nuclear power. This article is a drop of sanity in a sea of stupidity.
- marshray 16y ago
  Correction: It's not an imminent meltdown. It's an ongoing meltdown.

hartror 16y ago

I consider myself a leftie greenie politically, and I am pro nuclear (with some small reservations). It pisses me off no end to see the same people campaigning for action on climate change campaigning against the one proven at scale technology that can help us out of the climate change mess.

billybob 16y ago
I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will be dead and every government in the world will have changed. Our current languages won't be spoken anymore. The location of the waste deposits will likely be forgotten. There is absolutely no way to predict what will happen to the waste, and it seems awfully selfish to foist that kind of problem on people in the future to solve our very short-term energy needs. If there is a form of nuclear power that completely expends its fuel to the point where its demonstrably not dangerous TODAY, or if we can launch the waste into the sun, I'm all for it. But lets not pretend we can control the damage from things that will persist for thousands of years after we're dead.
- knieveltech 16y ago
  The thing is, it doesn't take hordes of engineers nearly a decade to design your web server.
  - whyenot 16y ago
    If his webserver goes down he doesn't need to evacuate everyone in a 30km radius. Apples and oranges.
    - knieveltech 16y ago
      We're in violent agreement here.
  - sutro 16y ago
    Good point. It took hordes of engineers almost two decades to design his web server. http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html
    - hartror 16y ago
      Sure, but those hordes who designed it didn't spend time training him to set it up and run it correctly. Just face that it is a horrible analogy and move on.
- amalcon 16y ago
  That sets the bar too high, though. It doesn't need to be perfectly safe. It need only be safer than the alternatives.
- natnat 16y ago
  Before saying that nuclear power isn't safe enough, consider where we get most of our electricity from today: coal. Coal may have been around a long time, but it is far more dangerous than nuclear power. The fly ash produced by coal burning often contains substantial concentrations of uranium (not too bad) and radium (very bad), as well as all sorts of other toxic but non-radioactive chemicals like lead. Although there is a lot more net radiation coming from all the fly ash we produce that there is from our nuclear reactors, the EPA doesn't bother to treat fly ash as hazardous waste, so most people don't think it's scary. This means we already have a bunch of radioactive waste dumped into our landfills without much oversight at all. While nuclear waste is very dangerous, there isn't a whole lot of it, and it's quite safe when it's stored properly in a radiation-sealed container. It doesn't end up in our landfills, or our air supply. It's a point source of pollution, which makes it much easier to take care of, and it is much nicer to leave future generations some concentrated, shielded radioactive waste in remote areas than to leave them tons of low-level waste in their water supply. I'm an advocate of solar energy, and nuclear power is a hell of a lot less safe than I'd like. But as long as we're burning coal, we should be worried more about the risks of that, even though they may be less scary-seeming, because they truly are more dangerous.
tomjen3 16y ago
The reason they campaign against that is that they don't want us to continue running around in this stage of sin (technological development), but to return to grace (in this case back to working 18 hour days with a single failed harvest killing us). Much of the hardcore environmental movement is using it as a substitute for religion, except in an even more insane way.
- gmac 16y ago
  I'm not advocating a 'return to grace', but you picked a rather selective definition of 'grace'. Looking further back (or elsewhere) than subsistence agriculture, hunter-gathering is potentially a pretty leisurely lifestyle: the 'original affluent society' (http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html).
- michaeldhopkins 16y ago
  More like 4-12 hours per day depending on the age of the farm (startups take work), the quality of the land and the crop season. More hours during planting and harvesting, and almost nothing during the winter. The number didn't really depend on technology past a certain point of desperation (passed well before recorded history.) For example, the gothic cultures farmed before they borrowed the plow from the Romans. Post-plow they became richer instead of cutting back hours. No different than today. There were many provisions for crop failure, including crop variety, raising animals, preserving food, fishing and trading with luckier regions. Like today. Pro-agrarian looking to set the record straight. I'm also in favor of nuclear power!

bluedanieru 16y ago

Just a quick point of order: study after study on Chernobyl found major exposure by just about everyone. It was serious business. This is where, without any containment vessel at all, the fuel caught fire and the radioactive ash spread all over the place. But you are right about Three-Mile Island.

dublinclontarf 16y ago
Yes there was exposure, certainly those 4000 children recieved high enough levels. However this is a far cry of hundreds of thousands of dangerous exposures, massive increases of cancer rates and birth defects that are still happening that most people think of. I myself thought just that until recently after investigating it.
- sterling 16y ago
  I was studying in Russia when Chernobyl occurred, and I dated a woman from northern Ukraine who was a teenager at the time of the accident. I saw the results of the accident firsthand - basically everyone under the age of 10 was affected - hair loss, skin rashes and nausea in the immediate years after, cancer and early death later. But even so it isn't fair to judge the safety of nuclear power by Chernobyl. Chernobyl happened because the Soviet system had become incredibly incompetent, and technical decisions were being made by thugs.
  - brazzy 16y ago
    The capitalist system quite often also becomes incredibly incompetent and has its technical decisions made by thugs. Tepco, the company that runs the Fukushima plant, has a long history of corruption, faked security reports and blatant incompetence. What makes nuclear power unsafe is human error more than technical failure. That's the aspect the naive technocrats (like the guy who wrote this article) always ignore.
- jshen 16y ago
  Are you saying that only 4000 people were affected?

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

kmfrk 16y ago

>Sadly within a few weeks, armies of anti-nuclear campainers, writers, and politicians will have jumped on this and pumped it so through the roof that, even if everything in this article is correct most people won't listen. NYT, Guardian, Spiegel, Mother Jones, The Atlantic (every online publication there is), every news TV channel (except Al Jazeera). Greenpeace are all over the place with their campaigning. The hysteria isn't imminent - it's happening right now. If people don't fight the campaign to stop nuclear energy, the factoids are going to dominate the discourse in many years to come.

nakkiel 16y ago
I deeply agree with that. At the same time, I believe it's time to forcefully put other energy sources to use, make them work and more generally give them their chance. I'd go as far as saying this would draw a lot of economical activity world-wide and get us out of the economical crisis for good. In a way, I see this event as an opportunity. It's just been demonstrated that Nuclear Energy is safe enough (at least, that's how I see things) but I still believe we deserve greener energies.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  Hang on, I'm confused. If you think nuclear energy is good, why should the others get a chance? Surely we should go with the best option (which obviously includes diversity, but ought to have the overall best as its main component.) I don't mean to be rude, but this isn't a playground. Solar power will not get a complex if nuclear is chosen instead. Our way of life depends on energy, and just hoping other sources will work out seems naive at best.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >Solar power will not get a complex if nuclear is chosen instead. I think we'll run out of economically extractable ore deposits of nuclear fuels a little before Sol goes supernova. Perhaps that's it. Also, unless he edited, he said that Nuclear was "safe enough" not that it was the best option. Even if it were the best primary option I wouldn't want to rely on it exclusively; personally I consider that "renewable" sources are better. Fusion would appear to be the best if we can get it to work effectively but I'd still look to diversify to some extent.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Robin_Message 16y ago

I agree that balance is good, and that in truth, nuclear power is very safe, but consider what happens if there is a major release of radioactivity. How is this article going to look then? I think you'd agree it would weaken the credibility of pro-nuclear campaigners. Lying for the sake of truth is a bad idea. As it stands, a meltdown is a definite possibility (not necessarily probable.) Perhaps a better stratergy would be to say "It might meltdown. In which case the reactor will be ruined, but no radioactivity will be released. Or the primary vessel might be damaged, in which case this would be a Chenobyl style disaster, except we have already evacuated the area as a precaution, so the estimated death toll would be 10 (or 100 or whatever.)" I'd say people fear what they don't understand; having lots of people, especially scientists and politicians, say "there's nothing to worry about" only increases peoples' worry – especially when bits of the plant keep exploding.

dublinclontarf 16y ago
>Lying for the sake of truth is a bad idea. This isn't lying, it's accurate according to the information that we have acquired over the last 60 years on the use of nuclear technology. Should these predictions turn out to be incorrect then the information we have needs to be updated. I'm hoping it turns out well, there are of course no guarantees but the chances of things going even further south are low.

sunchild 16y ago

Yes, turn on CNN or MSNBC right now, and all you will hear about is an imminent meltdown, and what it means for US nuclear power. This article is a drop of sanity in a sea of stupidity.

marshray 16y ago
Correction: It's not an imminent meltdown. It's an ongoing meltdown.