Worldwide Support For Nuclear Power Drops 324
ProbablyJoe writes "A poll for the BBC shows that worldwide support for nuclear power has dropped significantly in the past 6 years. However, while support has dropped in most countries, the UK has defied the trend, where 37% of the public support building new reactors. Unsurprisingly, support in Japan has dropped significantly, with only 6% supporting new reactors. The U.S. remains the country with the highest public opinion of nuclear power, though support has dropped slightly. Much of the decline in approval has been attributed to the events in Fukushima earlier in the year, although a recent Slashdot poll indicated that many readers' opinions had not been affected by the events, and there was an even split between those who found the technology more or less safe since the events. With reports on the long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted, is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?"
Doesn't really tell the full story... (Score:5, Insightful)
What do they think of nuclear power in comparison to the other options?
I don't think anyone was ever truly a fan of nuclear power, it's still way more dangerous than hydro electric, geothermal, solar, etc. etc. But it was the best of a bad set of options.
Re:Doesn't really tell the full story... (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially since being opposed to new nuclear power stations effectively (given the lack of alternatives) means that you are in favour of old nuclear power stations, many of which are passed the end of their intended operational lifespan already. I bet 'shut down all existing nuclear power plants over the next ten years and replace them all with modern, safer, designs' wasn't one of the poll options...
Personally, I'm opposed to nuclear power and would like to see everything powered by magic (which is non-polluting and 100% sustainable). In the absence of commercial magic power plants, I'll go with nuclear...
I'm against old nuclear plants (Score:4, Insightful)
And plants with outdated designs.
Bring on the new designs.
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The problem with nuclear power is, that even though the risk of a meltdown may be very small, the consequences if it does happen are unbearable.
If a nuclear reactor in France or Germany should experience a meltdown, it would be a catastrophe. France and Germany are relatively small, densly populated countries. A meltdown could expose more than 10% of the countries land area to dangerous radioactive contamination. That could mean evacuating ten million people or more and leaving entire strips of land unusabl
Re:Doesn't really tell the full story... (Score:4, Informative)
And lets not forget how reliable and predictable it is. A nuclear reactor is certain to output a set amount of energy in a certain configuration no matter what. Not a single one of these "renewable" sources are capable of that. None of the current replacement suggestions are worth it.
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Solar panels are a joke without good energy storage systems (good luck on that one with current battery and capacitor technology, and pumping water up a level difference is rather inefficient).
Most solar plants do not use solar panels, and the storage efficiency of molten salt solar plants is over 90%.
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Yes, if they fall down in a storm, there's a dent in the shrubbery, big deal.
Ni!
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Are you seriously trying to claim that nuclear power is safer than wind power? Seriously?
It's not that nuclear power can't be reasonably safe, it's that people can't be trusted to run nuclear power plants safely. They will skimp on maintenance to save a little money, and one day, we will all be very sorry they did so.
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Hydro is the only renewable energy that is economically feasible. Problem is, all the resources have already been tapped.
Unlucky that there's nothing but sea (Score:2)
That's what knocked out the backup generators.
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The risk of meltdown will stay the same until either all nuclear power plants are shut down OR we use the latest generation reactor designs which shut the reaction passively if there is a water pump or generator failure.
Fukushima wouldn't have been such a big deal if they had the latest revision instead of something that should have been retired decades ago.
Tsunami hits the diesel generator. This shuts down the generator. But instead of the reactor melting down since the water pump was unable to function, i
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Personally, I'm opposed to nuclear power and would like to see everything powered by magic (which is non-polluting and 100% sustainable).
We need to get our hands on that blue stuff from the Captain America movie. You just run it through a doohickey and it makes more of itself. Then I'll be anti-nuclear too.
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Magic usually involves tapping directly into the lifeforce of the planet.
Whenever attemps to use it for the industry are made, the planet dies out.
Re:Doesn't really tell the full story... (Score:5, Informative)
You mean it's less dangerous, don't your?
Take all the people who died from Chernobyl [wikipedia.org]. Add the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima [wikipedia.org]. Still killed fewer people than hydro power [wikipedia.org].
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Chernobyl estimates account for actual deaths, deaths that MAY have been reasonably caused by radiation exposure, and expected long-term deaths in the future. If you add in illnesses, it's still less than this one dam accident.
That is if you exclude ideological-based estimates, such as from Greenpeace, which give ridiculous numbers.
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Um.. um .. that was an old commie-block design! Modern first-world hydro-electric doesn't have that problem!
Heh, I can't wait for the first solar-power screwup that results in mass casualties. Not that I want people to die, but we do need to get past the whole anecdotes-set-the-perception-of-safety that seems to plague energy planning. The best part is trying to imagine a solar power disaster. You've gotta get pretty sick in the head to come up with anything even marginally believable. The holy grail,
Re:Doesn't really tell the full story... (Score:4, Insightful)
That isn't a fair comparison. Hydro power had absolutely nothing to do with the failure of that dam, which was built to prevent flooding. Power generation was just a bi-product.
You could say that high speed rail or aircraft are unsafe because there have been accidents in China. Actually both are very safe when done properly. Nuclear seems to be beyond the ability of developed nations to get entirely right, and as Chernobyl demonstrated we really don't want less developed nations using it.
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People keep bringing up tidal. There are 3 operating tidal generation stations in the WORLD (Canada, France, Russia). The largest one uses the largest tides in the world, located only in Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy (recently rejected as a wold heritage site I believe), and it generates something like 80MW of power. It was also very expensive to build, as nothing like it had been constructed before.
So no, tidal really isn't a key one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power [wikipedia.org]
If you are talking about the type th
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I wasn't arguing safety, by rather your assertion that it was "key". It sounded like you were saying it was a key energy generation technology, which as I hoped to point out, it is not.
I suppose it is certainly key safe one, as it is hard to get hurt by a technology that no one really uses (in production anyway)! :)
Re:Doesn't really tell the full story... (Score:5, Informative)
When the Banqiao Dam in China collapsed, 26,000 people died immediately. This is the worst accident in the history of hydroelectric. Chernobyl had 31-56 direct deaths and this is the worst nuclear power accident. In both cases they were from direct negligence. Banqiao continued to kill more, just like Chernobyl. Banqiao killed 145,000 additional people within a few years and Chernobyl killed/will kill ~6,000 eventually (various estimates change). Banqiao directly effected 11 million people and Chernobyl displaced the entire town, 49,400 people, and it's a mere fraction of Banqiao. The fact is the deaths from nuclear power is significantly less than hydroelectric and always will be. A nuclear power plant does not blow up like in video games such as Red Alert 2, Chernobyl was the absolute worst case scenario (for one reactor, Chernobyl would be worst if all reactors that were there blew).
The Three Mile Island incident shows the lack of education for the public. People continue to "monitor" Three Mile Island but what they don't know or are too dense to know is that their basements have more radiation than Three Mile Island outputs.
Oh, lets note that Chernobyl continued to operate the other reactors until 2000.
Banqiao Dam source [archive.org]
How many die from coal? (Score:2)
Thousands of coal mining deaths per year, probably a huge number more attributable to air pollution caused by coal. I couldn't find any appreciable numbers for uranium mining deaths.
And the radiation. How much radiation has coal burning put into the environment? How does that compare to TMI, Fukushima and Chernobyl combined?
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It's surely not your expensive and low energy output tidal generators?
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That's the problem. There are no "ideal" options. Anybody telling you different is selling you a line of bullshit.
Nuclear, done right, is safe, efficient, and the waste can be recycled numerous times. What's left at the end, while quite dangerous, it very compact and can be stored, long-term, safely. It's a damn sight better than breathing it in from coal plants and having thousands of miners dying every year.
Wave generation is in its infancy. And we aren't actually sure about what environmental impact
I hate the press. (Score:2, Informative)
The press will screw up the world just to get headlines. Nuclear power is incredibly safe.
its because of the time scales (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear accidents can make areas uninhabitable or unfarmable for many generations. It isn't a one-time event that gets cleaned up in a few days. It's something with lasting impacts on the environment and habitability of the area, over generations. In a country the size of Japan, the effects are even worse because they don't have so much land area to be throwing parts of it away like that. The exclusion zone around Fukushima is now unfarmable.
And just like after Chernobyl we were all assured by the nuclear proponents that "there can never be another nuclear disaster", we're being assured that now too. But there will be. It WILL happen again. If we are lucky, it won't be as bad as Fukushima. If we are unlucky, it will be much worse. The only certainty is that it will happen, and it will be because of something unprepared for that is only obvious in hindsight.
Captcha: "Trauma".
Re:its because of the time scales (Score:4, Insightful)
The only certainty is that it will happen, and it will be because of something unprepared for that is only obvious in hindsight.
The monstrous earthquake/tsunami combo the Fukushima reactor was hit by was "obvious in hindsight?"
If it took a direct hit from a meteor you'd be saying the same thing I guess. There's no certainty that there will be another nuclear disaster. In fact, if no new reactors are built in Natural Disaster Central I'd bet that none of them will suffer disasters, pretty much in line with the rest of the history of nuclear power. If EPIC_STUPIDITY = 0 && BUILT_ON_NATURES_SHOOTING_RANGE=0 then NUCLEAR_DISASTER=0.
Re:its because of the time scales (Score:5, Insightful)
Thorium (Score:5, Informative)
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My question is: Why haven't they already? Why isn't everyone building tons of these? What is wrong with it?
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I think they're not really needed, not yet. There is still plenty of uranium, it's cheap, and uranium-fission reactors are a known quantity that we know how to build and that are really pretty safe.
Re:Thorium (Score:5, Informative)
arguments I've heard
- never built one to scale
rebuttal - it doesn't matter - build 1000 tiny ones instead if big ones don't work.
- continuous reprocessing has never been tested and may be impossible
rebuttal - you don't know unless you try, and it seems feasible.
- they still spit out the same long half-life, long decay elements as conventional reactors :
rebuttal - most of these can be reused or salvaged for medical devices, and it burns 97% of its fuel instead of 3% or less. Also you will find almost as much naturally occurring "waste" where the Thorium came in the first place. Here is a breakdown from http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html [energyfromthorium.com]
read that again - can be used to "burn down" waste from an LWR - so in addition, we can get rid of a lot of the waste from the inefficient reactors we have.
- they are really Uranium reactors and they require a seed reaction
rebuttal - true reactors like this are Uranium - they convert Thorium to Uranium and then split, however the base fuel is still Thorium and the seed can be reused. It is also possible to continuously feed them if the equipment can filter out impurities. No physical research has been done here.
- Thorium is uneconomic, and costs far more than Uranium
rebuttal - Thorium is much more plentiful than Uranium, easier to mine and therefore if a market emerged, would likely drop from current ~$5000/kg to potentially $10/kg or less. That is compared to enriched Uranium, which is over $1600/kg after an expensive processing and/or reprocessing. Total cost of operations is also much less - estimated at 30-50% of a LWR.
- Thorium is bad for selling weapons grade elements to the government and charging massive reprocessing fees and kickbacks that line the back pockets of reactor owners.
um, exactly.
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Did you actually read that article? Thorium reactors are still at the research stage. A decade or so down the line when the first commercial ones are being built demand for nuclear will have dried up, with developed nations doing over to renewables and developing nations not allowed to run their own nuclear programmes anyway.
On top of that there is little commercial demand for more safety because it costs money. That is what screwed Fukushima up and is why there is little investment in safer fuels. Historic
Another example of people thinking reactively (Score:4, Insightful)
Does the latest BBC survey really show... (Score:2, Interesting)
Does the latest BBC survey really show a lack of support for nuclear?
http://world-nuclear.org/wna_buzz/DoesthelatestBBCsurveyreallyshowalackofsupport.html
like all "n% of people said x" headlines there is a lot more info if you look in more detail at the results.
"Safe" (Score:5, Interesting)
The demands of perfect safety at all times is actually chasing better designs off the table; "no new reactors" means better designs can't be built.
Fukushima is an example of how subtly corrupting the "public/private partnership" can be in privatizing gain while pushing risk onto the shoulders of the public.
Mankind will turn to nuclear power because it is cleaner than the alternatives, because it is energy dense, because it is scalable, and because it is dispatchable (available when we need it). This headline reflects a temporary revulsion from the tsunami, nothing more.
Support for new reactors (Score:3)
I am generally not in favor of nuclear power.
But my support for new reactors is not that bad. I'd say I even support them.
It is the old reactors still running, those cash cows running at absolute safety limit or bewlow, that I really want to disappear.
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Don't worry; if they're running beyond safety limits they'll disappear sooner or later.
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Okay, but given that we don't have Thorium reactors and it still costs tens of billions to build new nuclear power stations, run then and finally decommission them are they really the best option? Why not spend the money on renewable technology that can also be sold around the world into both existing and developing markets, and for which demand is increasing?
As an added bonus most of the safety headaches go away, and you don't have to worry that 20 or 30 years into the plant's lifetime the operator will sk
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Nuclear power is safe. (Score:5, Informative)
Safer than coal [scientificamerican.com], anyway.
There is plenty of evidence of coal mine disasters, OK there are a few uranium mining disasters as well [energy-net.org], but I don't want to minimise the mortality from either if I can help it: the simple fact of the matter is, you're 4,000 times more likely to die from a coal-related power generation cause and 1,000 times more likely from oil-related power generation than you are from nuclear-related power generation [the9billion.com]. It all carries risk, but the protocols and procedures surrounding uranium handling mitigates the risk to the point where people who actually work it tend to worry less. Fukushima was, in my opinion, unfortunate but avoidable; OK the tidal barrier was inadequate. It could have been higher and it might have diverted the tsunami but that wouldn't have helped with the ground subsidence. The location probably wasn't that well thought out, being that close to one of the deepest ocean trenches on the planet. It was probably the wrong type of reactor to have built there even if it was proved that the location was suitable for a power plant that could potentially (and as it happens, did) crack and go critical after just one good shake and a deluge of salt water. Lessons learned, we all hope, but I wouldn't like to try and assure the surviving families around the plant of that.
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That article compares the radiation exposure from coal stack emissions versus radiation emissions from properly contained nuclear waste and a properly functioning nuclear power plant. It makes no comparisons with Chernovyl or Fukushima disasters. Also the data presented in that article is based on a Science article written in 1978, this is before emissions were being actively scrubbed to meet EPA clean air guidelines that were passed in the '80s.
Can you mak
Question should be about reactor design ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets try to take some of the emotion and politics out of the issue. If someone asked you "are cars safe?", wouldn't you want to know which car? Different car designs offer a wide range of safety. Not just due to cost compromises, size/weight and design goals, but also due to when it was designed. Materials, technology, scientific understanding, computer modeling, etc have greatly improved our capabilities over recent decades. I wouldn't feels safe in any race car from the 1940s driving at 100 mph wearing a leather helmet, however I would feel safe doing so in many higher end passenger cars today. Maybe a recent reactor design is far more safe than say some 1960s soviet design?
Science and engineering are making great advances in solar, wind, tidal, etc. Aren't they also making great advances in the area of nuclear?
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No, that's only a part of the question. At least as important is the question: "Do we trust the power companies to responsibly run a nuclear plant without compromising safety for cutting costs?"
Of course not. That's why the industry is heavily regulated and monitored. And in the case of the US gov't nuclear power generation may actually be one of those instances where the gov't knows what it is doing. The US Navy may have more experience than anyone else out there.
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Seems like we ought to just plug the Navy nuke ships into the grid while they're in port. Might actually get some public good out of the things.
NE will get more credible when properly insured (Score:3)
It is rather unique in the industry that no insurance company is willing to insure nuclear power plants. The reason is most probably that when the risks are properly estimated the bill increases nuclear electricity to prohibitive, non-competitive levels.
The result of sufficient lobbying is that everybody is believing paying cheap nuclear electricity, while in reality everybody (or the descendants) take a chance paying huge future costs. Just like Japanese now do for the next decades.
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It is rather unique in the industry that no insurance company is willing to insure nuclear power plants. The reason is most probably that when the risks are properly estimated the bill increases nuclear electricity to prohibitive, non-competitive levels.
More likely, that the risks are impossible to quantify. Insurers could have made plenty of money insuring reactors for the last few decades, but it would only take one Homer Simpson to really ruin their day.
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Precisely, if the risks of an activity cannot be rigorously evaluated, then it should not be declared safe. Any professional certification of an activity requires evaluations. If serious evaluations are impossible then the activity cannot be certified, therefore responsible deciders should discard it.
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No it can't. All it would take would be one really nasty unforseen accident to drive that figure up by several orders of magnitude, and there's no way to rule it out statistically.
i trust the engineers with nuclear (Score:3)
The problem is, from what I know of management, funding decisions, and the psychology of long term complacency, I don't trust society with nuclear
Nuclear power drops? (Score:2)
I don't care if they have worldwide support. I will stick to my regular vitamin drops, thank you very much.
solution to the world's energy problems? (Score:2)
is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?
There is only one "solution" to the world's energy problems - demand below renewable supply. Uranium is not a renewable resource. It may seem abundant at current rates of consumption, but the supply is finite.
Nuclear not *a* solution, it's *the* solution (Score:3)
No "clean" or "renewable" energy source scales the way nuclear can.
No "clean" or "renewable" energy source can provide on-demand base-load power the way nuclear can.
Reliability can be built into nuclear plants in ways that distributed "small" clean power cannot match.
Safety record of nuclear power generation speaks for itself, esp. when context is provided (coal, hydro).
Waste management is an issue that is primarily an engineering challenge, not an obstacle.
Can designs be improved? Certainly, and much work is ongoing in this space (Toshiba, Hyperion, others).
Over the long term, nuclear is the cleanest base-load power source we have, and it is inevitable that more nuclear power plants will be built and brought on-line worldwide.
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How many nuclear-related fatalities have France had?
Just wondering since 80% of their power generation is now nuclear.
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Ooh, one fatality, in forty years. That's worth closing the book on the technology for, isn't it?
Can I be flippant? Is that allowed? OK. How many die on France's roads every year? How many from tobacco or alcohol. Yet these are freely advertised nay, encouraged, to the general public who are only too well aware of the risks associated with driving, drinking, smoking, and/or a combination of the three. Yet, they choose to accept those risks even though it is proved beyond doubt that these are infinitely more
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Safer than what? What's your proof? Is it cost effective? What long term commitments must be made for each plant?
You can type proved and benefit all you want in all caps
I support Nuclear power (Score:3)
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Now, if we could throw the ones responsible in jail for the rest of their lives, that'd be fine. But that's not how it works in the Real World.
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now people are dying from cancer and other illness due to coal power plants, it is adding tones of carbon to the atmosphere. Nuclear solves these immediate problems. Are their potential future problems? Yes they are. But after we fix our current problem we have time to fix the next set of problems.
It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
"Green Energy" isn't quite there yet. The longer we wait putting off those "Greener Energies" in hoping you will get Good "Green Energy".
OK Natural Gas Fraking has an environmental impact. But it is better then strip mining.
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
Can we get coal to burn even cleaner? How many cars can befit from hybrid technology? We as a world culture is spinning our wheels on trying to get a perfect solution. There isn't one... Sorry... But why don't you get off you butts and stop opposing everything and start supporting better solutions that are available now.
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
The "thousands of years" thing is FUD too. It comes from the half life of certain Plutonium isotopes (~24,000 years), but ignores that said Plutonium is not substantially more radioactive than the Uranium they mined out of the ground to make it in the first place. It also ignores that newer reactors can use it as fuel, which gets rid of it permanently.
The most difficult components of nuclear waste are the medium half life isotopes that last for a few years, because they're radioactive enough to be problematic but long lived enough that you need to wait a few decades before they're "safe." But characterizing having to store them for e.g. 50 years as an insurmountable problem just doesn't pass the laugh test.
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained
And this is the crux of the problem. Most people if you sit them down and talk to them, even those with pretty anti-nuke attitudes, will admit that it is theoretically possible to do fission in an environmentally responsible way with risks appropriate to the level of benefit. That is not the problem. The problem is the complete lack of trust in our corporate or even government culture to actually accomplish that goal. And there is no foot to stand on arguing that these institutions deserve that trust. In fact they've shown time and time again that they are the last people you should trust with this level of responsibility.
So since we obviously can't hand the keys to the car to the town drunk, and finding a new designated driver is going to take a decade or so of trust building, the OP raises an important question: "can nuclear power actual save us if public opinion cannot be swayed?" This is a political and social question, and frankly the technology doesn't matter much. On the renewable energy side, since the risks are lower and the responsibility is more distributed, the question being grappled with is "can renewable energy actually save us if the investor class never buys in sincerely?" This is also a political and social question.
At the end of the day we only have our own cultures to blame for failing to both produce and promote people with the education, common sense, and strength of character to be deserving of our trust.
Green Energy does not and will never exist (Score:3)
> It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
Exactly. I seriously doubt we are soon going to come up with any way to get billions and billions of Watt/Hours of energy without some nasty side effects. They all involve trade offs between instant costs and longterm risk, environmental losses, direct risks to humans, etc. All of them. even 'Green Energy' unless somebody patents direct conversion of unicorn farts... and locates some unicorns. And they probably have some serious d
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Informative)
Even worse, there are all the issues that happen from coal *mining*. Never mind what happens on the burning end, coal mining kills people and ruins huge areas of land.
If you're comparing basically anything to coal, coal is worse.
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Informative)
people seem to forget that >25k people died in the Tsunami - the effects of Fukushima are trivial compared to that.
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"If you're comparing basically anything to coal, coal is worse."
Price ? Otherwise it wouldn't even be used.
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[citation needed], much? All the comparisons I've seen, doing exactly what you suggest, have come to the exact opposite conclusion.
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You can't compare. Because no real research being done to link all the health problems people encounter back to the coal plant itself.
"Bob developed thyroid cancer and skin cancer."
"Well Bob smoked a lot."
Never mind that Bob lived a mile downwind of a coal-fired plant for 50-odd years.
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Informative)
Compare deaths per terawatt produced between coal and nuclear.
OK, Deaths per TWh [nextbigfuture.com]:
Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Nuclear: 0.04
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Or the lakes of toxic coal sludge stored near coal plants, often in above-ground containers that can rupture and cause toxic coal sludge tsunamis.
+1.5 for nuke over coal (I get another 0.5 for Lived Near Nuke Plant bonus)
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Until a catastrophic failure of the nuclear plant, then it quickly passes the coal plant in toxic emissions.
Of course. It's also not nearly as likely as coal miners being trapped underground, or you dying because of your silly fear of RADIATIONZ! and insistence on burning coal next to your house. So, do you prefer to live next to a nuclear plant, or a coal-fired one?
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah. Let's talk about coal mining deaths.
http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_coal_mining_.html [typepad.com]
Nearly a thousand in the US since 1980.
Now let's look at China's track record over the last decade.
Nearly 53 THOUSAND people dead mining coal.
How many people have nuke plants killed again?
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One nuclear plant surpasses that coal plant once every few decades.
Meanwhile, thousands of coal plants spew out their radiation every day as part of normal operation.
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Less radiation, more calcium. (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, no -- that's a serious pollution hazard -- chiropractors are uniformly toxic.
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That's FUNNY, not Overrated. Stupid mod dropdown! Posting to undo.
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You are wrong on two counts:
Calcium is not created somehow by biological processes, at best it would be extracted from the atmosphere. Also carbon is more common, are you sure you don't confuse the two?
The chemical element with the least energy is iron.
Therefore, if everything reached the least energy state due to nuclear fusion and fission, everything would be iron, not calcium, and it would be really really difficult to generate energy from it by fusion or fission.
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You are wrong on two counts: Calcium is not created somehow by biological processes, at best it would be extracted from the atmosphere. Also carbon is more common, are you sure you don't confuse the two?
The chemical element with the least energy is iron. Therefore, if everything reached the least energy state due to nuclear fusion and fission, everything would be iron, not calcium, and it would be really really difficult to generate energy from it by fusion or fission.
Isn't iron where the fusion reactions of stars stop and they "explode"?
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Yeah but they explode as a result of being unable to fuse iron into anything heavier. Iron is extremely hard to fuse. When the star converts everything into iron and stops burning there's no radiation pressure to support it anymore, and when you consider just how sodding massive a star is, that's pretty serious. It starts to implode, and the temperature rises. In previous times when it exhausted a fuel (when it stopped burning hydrogen, for example) the increase in temperature reached a level at which the s
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You had me up until "subluxations".
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I missed Bob getting outed. Got a link?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2437110&cid=37457272 [slashdot.org]
Re:Fukushima proved nuclear cannot be made safe (Score:5, Insightful)
Life cannot be made safe. No matter what precautions are taken, nature and the mistakes of man will inevitably cause a disaster.
FTFY
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Life cannot be made safe. What do you suggest we do?
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All Fukashima proved was that building a nuclear power station next to the sea in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, then building a defence wall that might be a little bit low and placing the backup generators at a level that would be "below sea level" if the wall failed is a bad idea.
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All Fukashima proved was that building a nuclear power station next to the sea in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, then building a defence wall that might be a little bit low and placing the backup generators at a level that would be "below sea level" if the wall failed is a bad idea.
And that, even then, the tsunami caused far more harm than the damage to the reactor.
The anti-nuclear nutters could save more lives by demanding that no-one is allowed to live in a tsunami zone anymore.
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This is the thing that everyone misses -- just how damned big that earthquake was. Twenty thousand people got washed out to sea -- whole trains, whole villages. While there are lessons to be learned from Fukushima, people seem to miss that it was in the context of a 9.0 quake.
Re:Fukushima proved nuclear cannot be made safe (Score:5, Insightful)
No, Fukushima proved that, given a disaster that killed at least 15,000 people, with many thousands still unaccoutned for, that the entire world will forget it and focus on a dangerous yet manageable situation which has thus far caused no deaths directly, and might, given a worst-case-scenario playout, cause 1,000 cases of cancer, not deaths.
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Yup.
And unfortunately the number of idiots living in the world far exceeds those that use their brains to think about the world around them.
I fear for the future of nuclear power. We'll soon be in some backward world where the crazies have forced us to use "renewable" resources that damage the environment far worse than nuclear power would ever be likely to. And how will people ever support fusion if they've rid the world of fission power through their ignorance?
I think the best solution was provided by one
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How many people died from big stuff smashing them?
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Neither can hydroelectric power. No matter what precautions are taken, gravity and the mistakes of man will inevitably cause some poor bastard to fall off of a dam.
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Want to build one in my backyard? Be my guest. A nuke plant in my backyard pollutes my life far less than a coal plant across town.
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If it enters the ground water, that is bad too.
It might be even worse.
You could build the plant somewhere far away from ground water, like in a salt mine, or one of those underground locations they are planning to store the nuclear waste. But then how do you cool it?
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Because if there was a meltdown you'd trigger a supervolcano or a megaquake on the San Andreas fault, or annihilate Tokyo or some such rubbish, I'm sure.
(Also, you'd irradiate the soil and the groundwater something rotten.)
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I recall that after 9/11, people asked "Oh no! What happens if someone flies a plane into a nuclear reactor?"
Some folks went off and thought about it, and came back with the answer: "It'll bounce off of the containment vessel."