This is a good site. And our prayers are with the quake survivors in Japan and the responders who are working to contain the problem during this horrible disast

This is a good site. And our prayers are with the quake survivors in Japan and the responders who are working to contain the problem during this horrible disaster. Any model of nuclear power reliability would have a high degree of uncertainty (due to intractability) and would need to account for arbitrary faults in design, siting, construction, operation, and monitoring. In CS there's a concept of "byzantine fault tolerance" where every processor in a network can fail in arbitrary ways. The minimum reliability rate predicted by the safety model would need to be on the order of 1-10^-8 to have assurance that major catastrophic events would not be likely to occur within some reasonable time span. How much confidence can you have that a model is consistent with reality to within 8 or 9 decimal places in order to overcome the minimum acceptable reliability level? We cannot come close to this in a complex, realistic system analysis. This is not like other problems we normally encounter, where the minimum acceptable reliability to prevent an immediate global catastrophe is orders of magnitude lower. Due to high model uncertainty and low acceptable failure rate, it is difficult in principle to come up with a convincing pro-nuclear argument whose lower interval didn't have a high expected death rate. In this case, the heroism of the emergency responders was the difference between an immediate catastrophe and the current situation. Logistical problems and equipment failures impeded the response. Had the delays been exacerbated or had there been other complications (such as aftershocks that weakened the system), it's easy to see the delays could've been extended to the point where intervention wouldn't have been as effective. Solar thermal power generation and wind are safe alternatives that can provide all 474 exajoules of earth's global energy demand. It's cheaper than the alternatives when externalities are properly accounted for and the initial investment would be a reasonable fraction of global GDP (certainly much less than the global financial crisis cost and it would actually stimulate the economy). Technology is ready. However, there are primarily sociological hurdles now (how do we get powerful polluters to change course?) Why should anyone have to die for electricity? Renewable energy is safe. Emergency responders and residents are all at serious risk. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/january/jacobson-world-energy-012611.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/january/jacobson-world-en...