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I feel like this line of reasoning misses the point a bit. Nuclear waste is dangerous for a very very long time, while deaths from these other sources are front

• DanI-S 16y ago
  How long would the atmosphere take to recover from CO2 emissions if we stopped burning fossil fuels today? How many people will have died as a result of climate change and lung problems before then?
  • afterburner 16y ago
    People keep dismissing renewables. Well, they won't get anywhere if we don't invest in them, and that investment has to come from a decrease in spending on other sources. Like nuclear.
    • lukeschlather 16y ago
      It should come out of coal. If we were willing to nationalize all of our energy, start phasing out coal plants, and go fully nuclear to replace coal, over the next 50 years we could get substantial savings over coal and put those savings into renewables. And in any case, as this graph shows, renewables are not a panacea. Hydro dams cause significant environmental damage, and even wind turbines have their issues.
      • afterburner 16y ago
        Sure, from anywhere it can. But a lot of people are talking about ramping up nuclear spending (and the costs are always understated).
        • lukeschlather 16y ago
          Yes. Ramp up nuclear, ramp down coal. Potentially it is a very green technology, and at worst it's an improvement over the fossil fuel status quo.
          • afterburner 16y ago
            I'd rather ramp up renewables, ramp down coal, and let nuclear dwindle on its own. Renewables aren't just "potentially" green, they are green, and without the extremely obvious risks that can contaminate a region for decades and increase the entire planet's risk of cancer. Renewables (and the advanced power grid that would support it) have huge room for improvement in generation, nuclear does not have huge room for improvement.
            • deleted 16y ago
              [deleted]
            • webXL 16y ago
              We do not have a nonfossil alternative that can make up the substantial power needs of the world other than nuclear power. --Glenn Sjoden In other words, unless we litter the plains with windmills (a form of contamination IMO), we cannot get off of coal and NG.
            • afterburner 16y ago
              Oh, look at me being downvoted because what I'm saying can't possibly be true...
    • maigret 16y ago
      Right... Renewables + energy savings. It is not that hard to save 15% energy. And it is such a magic field for startups currently. I don't understand why the startup crowd here isn't already working on making nuclear energy unneeded.
  • Alex3917 16y ago
    Exactly. This whole chart is irrelevant because what we care about is the expected impact on our health in the future, not the impact on our health in the past. This is why all those people who say we shouldn't decide what to do about building more nuclear power plants until the events in Japan have stabilized are dumb, because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes.
    • thalur 16y ago
      The outcome in Japan may have no impact on the statistics, but it will have a massive impact on the opinons and beliefs of the human decision makers. Waiting for it to resolve will allow calmer heads to prevail.
    • jshen 16y ago
      "because the outcome in Japan has zero impact on expected future outcomes." Huh? Expected future outcomes are based on assumptions. Japan gives real data that we should use to recheck those assumptions, and we may learn that some of them were wrong.
      • sorbus 16y ago
        It gives data about reactors that are, as I recall, 40 years old. That's entirely irrelevant to the designs of newer reactors.
        • jshen 16y ago
          not if the new reactors made the same assumptions. Are you suggesting that it isn't possible, or highly unlikely, that we'll learn anything worthwhile to improve reactor design in the future from this disaster?
          • sorbus 16y ago
            Yeah, more or less. We're learning more about what happens when it fails, but it's an old reactor, and we've seen them fail before. We also seem quite unlikely to learn anything especially revolutionary about how radioactive materials behave.
• moxiemk1 16y ago
  On that thread, it's important to look at new breeder reactors and Thorium reactors before denouncing waste from nuclear reactors as a permanent problem. We have technology that is much better, much safer, and less damaging than even what we have now.
  • afterburner 16y ago
    Are those technologies what is being lobbied for in today's governments?
    • Lost_BiomedE 16y ago
      I am not sure how active it is but at least to some extent: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html About this talk: At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor TWRs differ from other kinds of fast-neutron and breeder reactors in their ability to, once started, reach a state whereafter they can achieve very high fuel utilization while using no enriched uranium and no reprocessing, instead burning fuel made from depleted uranium, natural uranium, thorium, spent fuel removed from light water reactors, or some combination of these materials. The name refers to the design characteristic that fission does not happen in the entire TWR core, but takes place in a fairly localized zone that advances through the core over time.
• yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Unless you have a negative discount rate, a few (hypothetical) deaths in the distant future is less bad than a few deaths now. People currently live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, 24 years later: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,412954,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,412954,00.html There was significant radiation exposure in Japan a while back. This is what it looks like today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HiroshimaNight.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HiroshimaNight.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasaki_C1414.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nagasaki_C1414.jpg
  • Tycho 16y ago
    Is fallout from an atom bomb worse than fallout from a reactor meltdown?
    • beefman 16y ago
      Fallout from the WWII bombings was much greater than the fallout expected from the Daiichi plant. We'll have to wait until data come in to say how much.
  • jshen 16y ago
    couldn't it be a lot of hypothetical deaths? I also fail to see how dumping our waste on generations to come for our own selfish desires is less bad. I think it's less responsible to expect someone else to bear the risks in the future for a reward I want now. Maybe I'm not looking at this like a banker ;) My default position isn't anti-nuclear, but I find a lot of the arguments and reasoning on the pro-nuclear side to be less than convincing, and in some cases disingenuous. Nuclear seems safer than coal, but the knee jerk reaction on this site from pro-nuclear people isn't helping that cause. Go read the comments on the posts the day after the earthquake, most of them said "everything is fine, nothing bad can possibly happen". Turns out that wasn't true.
    • dstorrs 16y ago
      > I also fail to see how dumping our waste on generations to come for our own selfish desires is less bad. You're assuming that just because we consider it waste, they will too. Personally, I'm expecting that at some point some use will be found for the 'waste' -- maybe highly efficient reprocessing or materials for low-radiation (think 'easily traced') medical nanobots -- at which point future generations will thank us profusely for generating such convenient stockpiles of the stuff.
• maigret 16y ago
  Right, + the US crowd majority here probably have a hard time that Japanese cannot move to the other side of the country in case of a major disaster. It's just too small, too full.