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They can't even lie competently. Where are the organizations competent to run a nuclear power station? Because nuclear power, done right and engineered well,

• podperson 14y ago
  "Because nuclear power, done right and engineered well, is the one of the safest and best sources of energy." Here's the thing: most human endeavors are going to be done wrong and engineered poorly at some point. If I run a slipshod coal-fired plant I can give cancer to a bunch of people and blow up a town, but I'm not going to threaten the food production of an entire country and possibly an ocean. Warren Buffett has famously said (I paraphrase) that he only invests in companies that will do OK even if managed by complete idiots for ten years because most companies will be managed by idiots for extended periods of time. Basically, you want to move to Theory, because that's where nuclear power plants are a great way to generate power.
  • Tuna-Fish 14y ago
    Here's the thing: Even a completely perfectly managed coal plant does more damage over it's operational lifetime than the nightmare scenario at Fukushima. Yes, the damage done by the coal plant is more diffuse. But it is not less than the damage done by Fukushima to the ocean and to eastern japan. Coal plants worldwide kill half a million people per year from direct effects, and a lot more from indirect ones. Also, the nightmare scenario at nuke plants is commonly overstated. Fukushima did not, and cannot, threaten the entire food suppy of Japan. If all it's radioactive isotopes were evenly laid out on all of its fields, the concentrations would be small enough that eating the food would be bad for you, but no worse than breathing the air full of SO4 and NOx found in places where coal plants are run badly (like china).
    • konstruktor 14y ago
      With coal, the danger is roughly where the profit is. You use cheap coal power? Please have your increased risk of respiratory disease that comes with it. One can make policy based on those risks, and given a democracy, people can choose. With nuclear power, you have a low probability of a very catastrophic event with consequences that aren't local. In a very simplified scenario, 50 countries can carelessly operate a nuclear power plant each, and only one of them blows up. However, the wind carries the fallout to another country that never used nuclear power. The people who get cancer, whose soil is irradiated, never saw any benefit from nuclear power, and they never had a chance to stop the plant being built, because it was outside their jurisdiction. So please, could we finally stop comparing Black Swan-type events with non-local consequences to managable, local risks?
      • JoshTriplett 14y ago
        Coal is not a "manageable, local risk"; coal causes problems with probability ~1. Also, the average coal power plant produces more radioactive waste than a nuclear power plant. The real problem: people fail statistics. People can easily observe a nuclear plant when it shows up on the news, and assign a disproportionately high risk to it. The ongoing damage of coal plants doesn't make the news, because it falls under "day-to-day operation" rather than "disaster".
        • wonnage 14y ago
          Nuclear plant failure statistics are meaningless as a measure of safety. You are pointing to the nonoccurrence of a rare event as evidence of its rarity. Even if coal plants cause more damage to the world, failures are local and manageable. When your nuclear plant fails catastrophically, as they have at Chernobyl and now Fukushima, you can't point to "but this is a six-sigma event!" as an excuse. Given this risk, fission plants have been neither economically nor environmentally preferable enough to displace other ways of generating electricity.
        • podperson 14y ago
          So far nuclear power plants cause a big problem with probability ~1 -- we can't reclaim the sites they're built on and we can't safely dispose of the waste. And these problems are going to last longer than any system of government we've ever created has lasted.