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The people of the areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl may beg to differ. I'm not anti-nuclear, but the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so h

The people of the areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl may beg to differ. I'm not anti-nuclear, but the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so high, that the engineering must be to similarly high standards. Unfortunately, as we have seen in the cases of 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima, this is not the case. We need to really figure that part out before opting for this route. And then there's the problem of nuclear waste disposal.

Yardlink 12y ago
Don't confuse Fukishima with a nuclear disaster. Yes there was environmental contamination, but 10's of thousands of people were killed by a tsunami. Nuclear accidents aren't nearly that bad. What we need is more sea walls, not less nuclear plants. Also it was of the type that melts down if the cooling water is lost. Other reactor designs (eg 3-mile island) need water to operate so they shut down automatically if there's any major breakdown. Furthermore, coal is far more dangerous. We just don't care when thousands of Chinese coal miners die every year as much as we do when Japanese farmland is rendered unusable once in a lifetime.
- jaekwon 12y ago
  Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? I don't trust anybody with nuclear power. I don't know whether I should be eating fish from the pacific ocean. I have some idea how much cesium is in our ocean water because somebody is tracking it, but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
  - ars 12y ago
    > Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? There isn't enough. Not even close. It's not as abundant as you think - the amount of our planets resources we would have to consume to make use of this "renewable" energy is enormous. > but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA. Well now you do. There are no ramifications whatsoever.
    - jaekwon 12y ago
      You're wrong on both counts. We don't know the full effects of Fukushima yet (it's not over, and cancers caused may take much longer to show).
      - cheeseprocedure 12y ago
        "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" [1] suggests renewables don't stand a chance at displacing conventional power generation without radical efficiency gains across the board and massive investment in infrastructure. They are not ready to drop in at massive scale. As for Fukushima: I can't find a single source suggesting there is any danger short of eating fish caught right in front of the facility, which would indeed be a bad idea. [1] http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml
    - throwaway5752 12y ago
      Please explain why you think solar could not meet global energy needs.
      - ars 12y ago
        It probably could, if we spent enough resources on it. It's just not worth it, Nuclear is better for the environment. Photovoltaics could not do it, no way. But solar thermal probably could. Storing power would require immense amounts of land for pumped water storage, but we could do it. We'd also need huge amount of land for the solar collectors, but we could do it. And huge amounts of copper for power lines and transformers. Again, possible. But none of that is worth it, not when we have something as good as nuclear.
        throwaway5752 12y ago
        That must be news about how photovoltaics could not meet global energy needs. Last I'd read up, global capacity with realistic assumptions was 3 times current energy use. Also, it's already cheaper per kWh than nuclear (fully depreciated). Also, nuclear is non-renewable. It's still flipping the bird to future generations. Perhaps you are conflating capacity with transmission and storage?
  - vmp 12y ago
    As far as I (with only an semi-educated opinion) can tell, renewable energy doesn't come with the steady output a nuclear plant provides. Either its not sunny enough (sudden cloud formations, bad weather) for solar panels or the wind calms so that wind turbines don't work. Another issue is location, in my country (Germany) we have wind parks in the northern regions but the providers are having difficulties directing the power to where it's needed [citation needed].
    - fleitz 12y ago
      Renewable is up there with nuclear for base load generation if one is not dumb about it, and it can be spooled up faster than nuclear because it doesn't depend on heat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam
    - jaekwon 12y ago
      Geothermal is available all the time. I'd like to read about what kind of difficulties they're experiencing directing power. Maybe it's a political problem, not a physical one.
  - fleitz 12y ago
    Those technologies all have unknown unknowns. If we generate power some people are going to get hurt no matter which technology you pick. If we don't generate power some people are going to get hurt because we don't have access to the power necessary extend their lives. Nuclear, hydroelectricity and wind have pretty much the best deaths per MWH, solar happens to be worse than nuclear. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
  - Lazare 12y ago
    Why? Because it doesn't work. Nuclear is—even counting all the accidents—the safest and one of the greenest forms of energy we know of. Geothermal is hugely limited; wind is flaky, limited, and bad for the environment; solar is promising and getting economical, but it's still faced major practical and safety challenges. > I have [...] no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA. None. Zero. Absolutely no impact or ramifications whatsoever. And that you'd even feel like that was in question is a crushing indictment of our sensationalist media.
    - jaekwon 12y ago
      > Geothermal is hugly limited How? If you dig down you'll get heat. Wind power is bad for the environment? Solar has safety challenges? What? > None. Zero. Absolutely no impact or ramifications whatsoever. Clearly it has some impact, the question is how to measure it. Whatever the answer, zero isn't it.
      - abelsson 12y ago
        No, the correct answer is zero. The impact of Fukushima on someone living on the west cost of the US is negligible; as near to zero as makes no difference. There are many, many, many other things you don't worry about which has a much larger impact on your life: most dangerous of which is probably your diet and your commute to work.
        shangxiao 12y ago
        The correct answer is not zero, it's negligible.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
bmelton 12y ago
To be fair, the most doom and gloom predictions (which are also disputed) basically amount to approximately a 7% increase in cancer risks as a result. While that's obviously tragic, the WHO has far less pessimistic estimates, it's worth noting that some 15,000 people died just from the earthquake itself, and another couple thousand or so from exposure as a result of evacuating to nowhere. More importantly though, if they hadn't been utterly and woefully incompetent on safety, would almost certainly have survived the earthquake without incident.
tomphoolery 12y ago
The cost of a nuclear power plant is pretty high, but not because of the dangers. Rather, the expensive part is inherent with all reactors, and has to do with how it is constructed. IIRC, Nuclear reactors need a few years to "warm up" before they begin producing power, so you basically have to pay people to work on (and in) the reactor all the while knowing that they won't be producing anything that can make you money. In short, a big reactor is a very expensive investment, but eventually it pays off. I'd say 3 incidents in the almost 50 years of solid nuclear power usage is a pretty good track record. These incidents were also relatively "contained", that is, their meltdowns didn't trigger worldwide environmental catastrophe, or even a catastrophe inside their own countries.
- jaekwon 12y ago
  It appears that Fukushima isn't exactly over. And, it's clear that in the case of a disaster, nobody needs to take responsibility. Who is holding Tepco accountable?
ivanca 12y ago
Yeah, actually one of the reasons of their failure was that both were made with old tech, Fukushima one was made in 1967 and Chernobyl in 1977. Even if they did upgrade software they certainly didn't upgrade hardware.
ars 12y ago
> The people of the areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl may beg to differ. Have you been to Kingston, or Martin County, or Buffalo Creek or .... I should stop or I'll be here all day. Coal has killed hundreds of times as many people, and contaminated thousands of times as much land as nuclear, even including the worst accidents.
- fleitz 12y ago
  Yup, the funny thing about coal is even from radioactivity perspective it's worse than nuclear.
  - jaekwon 12y ago
    I think everybody here is in agreement.
- ljf 12y ago
  Yes, I would also love us to stop using coal, and believe we should asap. But this doesn't mean that we should be subsidising nuclear, we should be able to see and pay for the true costs of all our power sources. But instead we have crazy incentives where for residential and commercial energy contracts, the more you use the lower your unit cost. So a highly energy efficient house pays more per unit than an inefficient one.
tsomctl 12y ago
3 Mile Island was not a catastrophe, although it could have been. The reason for this is arguably the high standard of engineering. The safety systems worked to contain almost everything. Chernobyl was an outdated design when it was built, today it is a really outdated design. In addition, Soviet bureaucracy prevented people from being properly informed what was happening and evacuating. Fukishima was a disappointment, I normally have a huge amount of respect for Japanese engineering. One way to solve it is to not locate nuclear reactors near seismic activity. (In the case of Japan, they have to. They aren't going to build them in another country, and all of Japan is vulnerable to seismic activity and tsunamis.) Very high voltage power transmission is feasible, and will only get better as silicon fabs increase. It also likely that we will have some energy dense liquid like gasoline/ethanol that is produced easily from electricity, and can be shipped anywhere. Hydrogen is not realistic. I'd say we have figured out the engineering more than you claim.
pdonis 12y ago
3-Mile Island is a very bad example, since no member of the general public was harmed by it (some plant workers got more radiation exposure than they should have, but nobody who wasn't a plant worker did). Chernobyl is a bad example too, not because it didn't do harm, but because nobody since the Soviet Union is going to be insane enough to build a plant without secondary containment, or to run uncontrolled experiments with a reactor, or to build a reactor with a positive void coefficient of reactivity. Fukushima is a somewhat better example, but the engineering that needed to be done better in that case was not nuclear engineering: the problem was siting the backup power generators and switchgear behind a seawall that got overwhelmed by the tsunami. (To be fair, newer reactor designs don't need backup power to cool the reactor after a shutdown; but those designs didn't exist when Fukushima was built.) Nuclear waste disposal is only a problem if you refuse to reprocess the waste, which only the United States has done among all nuclear-using countries (because of misplaced concerns about proliferation; other countries have been reprocessing for decades and there have been no incidents). Finally, if you're going to be fair in assessing nuclear power, you have to compare the overall cost of nuclear power with the overall cost of other forms of base load power generation. You have to look at the damage done by coal mining, coal ash and soot (not to mention radioactivity in coal ash, which is actually worse than many forms of nuclear waste), oil spills, fracking for natural gas, etc.
- Lazare 12y ago
  Good point about Fukushima. People often forget that there was a reactor closer to the earthquake that got hit by an even bigger tsunami which survived just fine... ...because they'd built a sensibly sized sea wall. I'm all for learning lessons from Fukushima, but the lesson basically seems to be "don't put reactors on the coast without big sea walls".
  - throwaway5752 12y ago
    Perhaps the lesson is that reactors are just about the most complicated construction projects that humans build, they continuously operate on the edge of disaster, and they require a huge number of highly educated operators. There are too many factors to assure they will be safe, and their failure mode can reach catastrophic levels. As you obviously know, the Fukushima disaster was not because of quake or tsunami damage to the reactors. It was because of water damage to the diesel generators that circulated the coolant to remove decay heat. Then failures in 3 (4?) redundant backup measure to provide that power occured, too. What would happen, hypothetically in the event of an human generated EMP (or general infrastructure because of war) or a multi-stdev CME from the sun? What if a sufficiently dedicated group was able to infiltrate a reactor and intentionally damage it? There's always a way to imagine a failure scenario that is possible, even if unlikely. Thankfully Fukushima wasn't nearly as bad as Chernobyl. Had the fuel breached the containment unit and triggered a steam explosion with groundwater. it would have been worse.
jlebar 12y ago
What people don't think about, because it's not an acute disaster like a nuclear accident, is that coal power plants kill a /lot/ of people. According to this article, coal power in China killed 300,000 people last year, which itself is way more than were displaced (not killed) by Fukushima. Even US coal power, which is much safer than Chinese coal power, is 160x more deadly per joule than nuclear, and it appears that's not counting climate change effects. I don't mean to suggest that nuclear power is without risk -- of course it's risky business. But we need to compare the risk to the alternatives. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
- nwh 12y ago
  Somewhat vitally, there's a certain amount of unease for a danger we can't sense and can't see. Nuclear power is scary for that reason, it doesn't matter if it's irrational or unfounded, the thought of being killed by an invisible foe is pretty universally terrifying. I'd much rather see wind, tidal or geothermal anyway. In the scheme of things they have lower regulatory hurdles and can even be tinkered with in your back yard for the former. One of the houses I walk past on my way home has a wind turbine made out of a washing machine motor and PVC pipe, it's extremely cool to watch.
  - afafsd 12y ago
    That's fine, but the amount of reasonably accessible wind, tidal and geothermal power is far below global requirements.
    - power_rated 12y ago
      No it is not. Reasonable accessible wind, solar, tidal an geothermal power is many times the global requirements.
- Lazare 12y ago
  Germany responded to Fukushima by shutting down their nuclear power plants, and using more coal. In fact, they've embarked on a program of building new coal plants across Germany, which is madness by basically any metric you care to use. Which has an interesting outcome: The irrational response to Fukushima (in particular, the shift from nuclear to coal generation) will undoubtedly kill several orders of magnitude more people than the actual Fukushima disaster did. Sometimes it's hard not to get cynical and bitter.
oldmanjay 12y ago
This reminds me of a recent tweet I saw, to the effect of "people in the US will text you while they drive to say they're scared of ebola" Which is to say, people are terrible at risk assessment.
lucb1e 12y ago
> the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so high, that the engineering must be to similarly high standards Sounds much like an aircraft. Let's revert to cars. Oh wait those aren't any safer, either.
pmorici 12y ago
Coal power plants supposedly put more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear plant per unit of energy produced. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...

Yardlink 12y ago

Don't confuse Fukishima with a nuclear disaster. Yes there was environmental contamination, but 10's of thousands of people were killed by a tsunami. Nuclear accidents aren't nearly that bad. What we need is more sea walls, not less nuclear plants. Also it was of the type that melts down if the cooling water is lost. Other reactor designs (eg 3-mile island) need water to operate so they shut down automatically if there's any major breakdown. Furthermore, coal is far more dangerous. We just don't care when thousands of Chinese coal miners die every year as much as we do when Japanese farmland is rendered unusable once in a lifetime.

jaekwon 12y ago
Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? I don't trust anybody with nuclear power. I don't know whether I should be eating fish from the pacific ocean. I have some idea how much cesium is in our ocean water because somebody is tracking it, but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA.
- ars 12y ago
  > Why don't we just build renewable energy that is abundant and doesn't require the unknown unknowns of nuclear energy? Geothermal, wind, solar? There isn't enough. Not even close. It's not as abundant as you think - the amount of our planets resources we would have to consume to make use of this "renewable" energy is enormous. > but no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA. Well now you do. There are no ramifications whatsoever.
  - jaekwon 12y ago
    You're wrong on both counts. We don't know the full effects of Fukushima yet (it's not over, and cancers caused may take much longer to show).
    - cheeseprocedure 12y ago
      "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" [1] suggests renewables don't stand a chance at displacing conventional power generation without radical efficiency gains across the board and massive investment in infrastructure. They are not ready to drop in at massive scale. As for Fukushima: I can't find a single source suggesting there is any danger short of eating fish caught right in front of the facility, which would indeed be a bad idea. [1] http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml http://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml
  - throwaway5752 12y ago
    Please explain why you think solar could not meet global energy needs.
    - ars 12y ago
      It probably could, if we spent enough resources on it. It's just not worth it, Nuclear is better for the environment. Photovoltaics could not do it, no way. But solar thermal probably could. Storing power would require immense amounts of land for pumped water storage, but we could do it. We'd also need huge amount of land for the solar collectors, but we could do it. And huge amounts of copper for power lines and transformers. Again, possible. But none of that is worth it, not when we have something as good as nuclear.
      - throwaway5752 12y ago
        That must be news about how photovoltaics could not meet global energy needs. Last I'd read up, global capacity with realistic assumptions was 3 times current energy use. Also, it's already cheaper per kWh than nuclear (fully depreciated). Also, nuclear is non-renewable. It's still flipping the bird to future generations. Perhaps you are conflating capacity with transmission and storage?
- vmp 12y ago
  As far as I (with only an semi-educated opinion) can tell, renewable energy doesn't come with the steady output a nuclear plant provides. Either its not sunny enough (sudden cloud formations, bad weather) for solar panels or the wind calms so that wind turbines don't work. Another issue is location, in my country (Germany) we have wind parks in the northern regions but the providers are having difficulties directing the power to where it's needed [citation needed].
  - fleitz 12y ago
    Renewable is up there with nuclear for base load generation if one is not dumb about it, and it can be spooled up faster than nuclear because it doesn't depend on heat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam
  - jaekwon 12y ago
    Geothermal is available all the time. I'd like to read about what kind of difficulties they're experiencing directing power. Maybe it's a political problem, not a physical one.
- fleitz 12y ago
  Those technologies all have unknown unknowns. If we generate power some people are going to get hurt no matter which technology you pick. If we don't generate power some people are going to get hurt because we don't have access to the power necessary extend their lives. Nuclear, hydroelectricity and wind have pretty much the best deaths per MWH, solar happens to be worse than nuclear. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
- Lazare 12y ago
  Why? Because it doesn't work. Nuclear is—even counting all the accidents—the safest and one of the greenest forms of energy we know of. Geothermal is hugely limited; wind is flaky, limited, and bad for the environment; solar is promising and getting economical, but it's still faced major practical and safety challenges. > I have [...] no idea what the ramifications of the Fukushima disaster is on me now and in the future, as somebody living in the west coast of the USA. None. Zero. Absolutely no impact or ramifications whatsoever. And that you'd even feel like that was in question is a crushing indictment of our sensationalist media.
  - jaekwon 12y ago
    > Geothermal is hugly limited How? If you dig down you'll get heat. Wind power is bad for the environment? Solar has safety challenges? What? > None. Zero. Absolutely no impact or ramifications whatsoever. Clearly it has some impact, the question is how to measure it. Whatever the answer, zero isn't it.
    - abelsson 12y ago
      No, the correct answer is zero. The impact of Fukushima on someone living on the west cost of the US is negligible; as near to zero as makes no difference. There are many, many, many other things you don't worry about which has a much larger impact on your life: most dangerous of which is probably your diet and your commute to work.
      - shangxiao 12y ago
        The correct answer is not zero, it's negligible.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bmelton 12y ago

To be fair, the most doom and gloom predictions (which are also disputed) basically amount to approximately a 7% increase in cancer risks as a result. While that's obviously tragic, the WHO has far less pessimistic estimates, it's worth noting that some 15,000 people died just from the earthquake itself, and another couple thousand or so from exposure as a result of evacuating to nowhere. More importantly though, if they hadn't been utterly and woefully incompetent on safety, would almost certainly have survived the earthquake without incident.

tomphoolery 12y ago

The cost of a nuclear power plant is pretty high, but not because of the dangers. Rather, the expensive part is inherent with all reactors, and has to do with how it is constructed. IIRC, Nuclear reactors need a few years to "warm up" before they begin producing power, so you basically have to pay people to work on (and in) the reactor all the while knowing that they won't be producing anything that can make you money. In short, a big reactor is a very expensive investment, but eventually it pays off. I'd say 3 incidents in the almost 50 years of solid nuclear power usage is a pretty good track record. These incidents were also relatively "contained", that is, their meltdowns didn't trigger worldwide environmental catastrophe, or even a catastrophe inside their own countries.

jaekwon 12y ago
It appears that Fukushima isn't exactly over. And, it's clear that in the case of a disaster, nobody needs to take responsibility. Who is holding Tepco accountable?

ivanca 12y ago

Yeah, actually one of the reasons of their failure was that both were made with old tech, Fukushima one was made in 1967 and Chernobyl in 1977. Even if they did upgrade software they certainly didn't upgrade hardware.

ars 12y ago

> The people of the areas surrounding Fukushima and Chernobyl may beg to differ. Have you been to Kingston, or Martin County, or Buffalo Creek or .... I should stop or I'll be here all day. Coal has killed hundreds of times as many people, and contaminated thousands of times as much land as nuclear, even including the worst accidents.

fleitz 12y ago
Yup, the funny thing about coal is even from radioactivity perspective it's worse than nuclear.
- jaekwon 12y ago
  I think everybody here is in agreement.
ljf 12y ago
Yes, I would also love us to stop using coal, and believe we should asap. But this doesn't mean that we should be subsidising nuclear, we should be able to see and pay for the true costs of all our power sources. But instead we have crazy incentives where for residential and commercial energy contracts, the more you use the lower your unit cost. So a highly energy efficient house pays more per unit than an inefficient one.

tsomctl 12y ago

3 Mile Island was not a catastrophe, although it could have been. The reason for this is arguably the high standard of engineering. The safety systems worked to contain almost everything. Chernobyl was an outdated design when it was built, today it is a really outdated design. In addition, Soviet bureaucracy prevented people from being properly informed what was happening and evacuating. Fukishima was a disappointment, I normally have a huge amount of respect for Japanese engineering. One way to solve it is to not locate nuclear reactors near seismic activity. (In the case of Japan, they have to. They aren't going to build them in another country, and all of Japan is vulnerable to seismic activity and tsunamis.) Very high voltage power transmission is feasible, and will only get better as silicon fabs increase. It also likely that we will have some energy dense liquid like gasoline/ethanol that is produced easily from electricity, and can be shipped anywhere. Hydrogen is not realistic. I'd say we have figured out the engineering more than you claim.

pdonis 12y ago

3-Mile Island is a very bad example, since no member of the general public was harmed by it (some plant workers got more radiation exposure than they should have, but nobody who wasn't a plant worker did). Chernobyl is a bad example too, not because it didn't do harm, but because nobody since the Soviet Union is going to be insane enough to build a plant without secondary containment, or to run uncontrolled experiments with a reactor, or to build a reactor with a positive void coefficient of reactivity. Fukushima is a somewhat better example, but the engineering that needed to be done better in that case was not nuclear engineering: the problem was siting the backup power generators and switchgear behind a seawall that got overwhelmed by the tsunami. (To be fair, newer reactor designs don't need backup power to cool the reactor after a shutdown; but those designs didn't exist when Fukushima was built.) Nuclear waste disposal is only a problem if you refuse to reprocess the waste, which only the United States has done among all nuclear-using countries (because of misplaced concerns about proliferation; other countries have been reprocessing for decades and there have been no incidents). Finally, if you're going to be fair in assessing nuclear power, you have to compare the overall cost of nuclear power with the overall cost of other forms of base load power generation. You have to look at the damage done by coal mining, coal ash and soot (not to mention radioactivity in coal ash, which is actually worse than many forms of nuclear waste), oil spills, fracking for natural gas, etc.

Lazare 12y ago
Good point about Fukushima. People often forget that there was a reactor closer to the earthquake that got hit by an even bigger tsunami which survived just fine... ...because they'd built a sensibly sized sea wall. I'm all for learning lessons from Fukushima, but the lesson basically seems to be "don't put reactors on the coast without big sea walls".
- throwaway5752 12y ago
  Perhaps the lesson is that reactors are just about the most complicated construction projects that humans build, they continuously operate on the edge of disaster, and they require a huge number of highly educated operators. There are too many factors to assure they will be safe, and their failure mode can reach catastrophic levels. As you obviously know, the Fukushima disaster was not because of quake or tsunami damage to the reactors. It was because of water damage to the diesel generators that circulated the coolant to remove decay heat. Then failures in 3 (4?) redundant backup measure to provide that power occured, too. What would happen, hypothetically in the event of an human generated EMP (or general infrastructure because of war) or a multi-stdev CME from the sun? What if a sufficiently dedicated group was able to infiltrate a reactor and intentionally damage it? There's always a way to imagine a failure scenario that is possible, even if unlikely. Thankfully Fukushima wasn't nearly as bad as Chernobyl. Had the fuel breached the containment unit and triggered a steam explosion with groundwater. it would have been worse.

jlebar 12y ago

What people don't think about, because it's not an acute disaster like a nuclear accident, is that coal power plants kill a /lot/ of people. According to this article, coal power in China killed 300,000 people last year, which itself is way more than were displaced (not killed) by Fukushima. Even US coal power, which is much safer than Chinese coal power, is 160x more deadly per joule than nuclear, and it appears that's not counting climate change effects. I don't mean to suggest that nuclear power is without risk -- of course it's risky business. But we need to compare the risk to the alternatives. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...

nwh 12y ago
Somewhat vitally, there's a certain amount of unease for a danger we can't sense and can't see. Nuclear power is scary for that reason, it doesn't matter if it's irrational or unfounded, the thought of being killed by an invisible foe is pretty universally terrifying. I'd much rather see wind, tidal or geothermal anyway. In the scheme of things they have lower regulatory hurdles and can even be tinkered with in your back yard for the former. One of the houses I walk past on my way home has a wind turbine made out of a washing machine motor and PVC pipe, it's extremely cool to watch.
- afafsd 12y ago
  That's fine, but the amount of reasonably accessible wind, tidal and geothermal power is far below global requirements.
  - power_rated 12y ago
    No it is not. Reasonable accessible wind, solar, tidal an geothermal power is many times the global requirements.
Lazare 12y ago
Germany responded to Fukushima by shutting down their nuclear power plants, and using more coal. In fact, they've embarked on a program of building new coal plants across Germany, which is madness by basically any metric you care to use. Which has an interesting outcome: The irrational response to Fukushima (in particular, the shift from nuclear to coal generation) will undoubtedly kill several orders of magnitude more people than the actual Fukushima disaster did. Sometimes it's hard not to get cynical and bitter.

oldmanjay 12y ago

This reminds me of a recent tweet I saw, to the effect of "people in the US will text you while they drive to say they're scared of ebola" Which is to say, people are terrible at risk assessment.

lucb1e 12y ago

> the cost of a failure at a nuclear power plant is so high, that the engineering must be to similarly high standards Sounds much like an aircraft. Let's revert to cars. Oh wait those aren't any safer, either.

pmorici 12y ago

Coal power plants supposedly put more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear plant per unit of energy produced. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r...