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Fukushima used a more than 50 year old reactor design, it has very little bearing on either the risk or feasability of building new nuclear plants. Was Fukushi

Fukushima used a more than 50 year old reactor design, it has very little bearing on either the risk or feasability of building new nuclear plants. Was Fukushima considered a safe design or not? Did the regulatory authorities consider it safe? Did TEPCO consider it safe? The answer is yes, yes of course they did. If they thought the plant was too dangerous to operate, they would have shut it down or revoked its license. Ever since it was built, everyone involved has been insisting over and over that it was a safe design. It turns out that the regulators, manufacturers and operators were all wrong about that. So, why exactly should we trust them when they say that a new plant design is safe? How can nuclear power plant operators, manufacturers and regulators retain credibility when their previous statements have been proven so catastrophically wrong? I personally don't think deaths due to nuclear power a big deal; my greater concern is that the costs for current nuclear reactors don't make any damn sense. Certainly the long term costs of remediating the Fukushima site are going to be enormous.

smsm42 13y ago
How can airline industry maintain any credibility if their claims that air travel is safe were proven wrong so many times by numerous plane crashes? The answer is numbers. Statistically, traveling by air is extremely safe and instances of crashes, while existent, are very rare. Statistically, instances of people hurt by nuclear power failures are also very rare. Of course, since people have irrational fear of radiation (it is invisible, it could kill you and it could be everywhere, right under your bed! OMG OMG OMG!) and the press is happy to fan the flames on each occasion, each case of nuclear reactor failure gets attention incomparable with attention given to each case of lung cancer due to pollution or workers dying while extracting coal, gas or oil, or each case when you need to clean up a failure in any of the technological chain of the traditional power sources - excluding, maybe, oil spills, but even those get less panic press than radiation (OMG OMG OMG!). The main cause of fears about nuclear power is, unfortunately, ignorance and innumeracy. The long term advantages of nuclear power vastly outnumber the costs of the dealing with very rare and exceptional failure events. Unfortunately, people are rarely rational when making political decisions, and this decision is very political.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
TEPCO and Japan's NISA are not the most trustworthy or competent of organizations, they certainly have a lot of room for improvement. However, I think you're misinterpreting the importance of the age of the Fukushima reactor design. Specifically the important point is that the extremely obsolete nature of that design means that its short-comings should have little to no bearing on the relative risk of building new nuclear power plants. Additionally, even with all the problems of Fukushima, many of which are avoidable, it's worth pointing out that those problems did not occur spontaneously. Somehow we've apparently forgotten about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 40 meter high tsunami which killed over 15,000 people while also causing severe damage to the Fukushima reactors. These are not usual operating circumstances. Somehow we give a pass to other technologies that have failed and caused injury to humans after being impacted by extreme natural disasters yet nuclear power must stand on its own. And yet even despite that and despite many many missteps in the response the Fukushima disaster has not pushed nuclear power into being less safe than any other base load power generation technology, even hydroelectric! That's almost astounding, but it cuts to the deep failures that humans tend to make when they attempt to judge relative risk of extremely dissimilar things (like flying vs. driving, rock climbing vs. eating cheeseburgers, or nuclear power vs. coal).

smsm42 13y ago

How can airline industry maintain any credibility if their claims that air travel is safe were proven wrong so many times by numerous plane crashes? The answer is numbers. Statistically, traveling by air is extremely safe and instances of crashes, while existent, are very rare. Statistically, instances of people hurt by nuclear power failures are also very rare. Of course, since people have irrational fear of radiation (it is invisible, it could kill you and it could be everywhere, right under your bed! OMG OMG OMG!) and the press is happy to fan the flames on each occasion, each case of nuclear reactor failure gets attention incomparable with attention given to each case of lung cancer due to pollution or workers dying while extracting coal, gas or oil, or each case when you need to clean up a failure in any of the technological chain of the traditional power sources - excluding, maybe, oil spills, but even those get less panic press than radiation (OMG OMG OMG!). The main cause of fears about nuclear power is, unfortunately, ignorance and innumeracy. The long term advantages of nuclear power vastly outnumber the costs of the dealing with very rare and exceptional failure events. Unfortunately, people are rarely rational when making political decisions, and this decision is very political.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

TEPCO and Japan's NISA are not the most trustworthy or competent of organizations, they certainly have a lot of room for improvement. However, I think you're misinterpreting the importance of the age of the Fukushima reactor design. Specifically the important point is that the extremely obsolete nature of that design means that its short-comings should have little to no bearing on the relative risk of building new nuclear power plants. Additionally, even with all the problems of Fukushima, many of which are avoidable, it's worth pointing out that those problems did not occur spontaneously. Somehow we've apparently forgotten about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 40 meter high tsunami which killed over 15,000 people while also causing severe damage to the Fukushima reactors. These are not usual operating circumstances. Somehow we give a pass to other technologies that have failed and caused injury to humans after being impacted by extreme natural disasters yet nuclear power must stand on its own. And yet even despite that and despite many many missteps in the response the Fukushima disaster has not pushed nuclear power into being less safe than any other base load power generation technology, even hydroelectric! That's almost astounding, but it cuts to the deep failures that humans tend to make when they attempt to judge relative risk of extremely dissimilar things (like flying vs. driving, rock climbing vs. eating cheeseburgers, or nuclear power vs. coal).