If a whole farm of wind turbines falls over, its a huge fuck up, and its quite possible people will die.
It's pretty unlikely people will get sick and/or die if they visit the site the next day in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt.
Solar and wind will be a key component of the grid power source but they aren't afeasible replacement for baseload coal plants yet.
One Fukashkma every 20-30 years is worth avoiding global warming.
Well I'm glad we got all sciencey and shit. Fuck it, sounds legit.
> One Fukushima every 20-30 years is worth possibly avoiding global warming.
Fixed that for you.
If solar and wind power could meet energy needs around the world better than nuclear then great. The fact is that they're not even close and no good alternatives will be ready in the foreseeable future.
You talk like this is going to happen overnight. It won't and this is not how it works. Even in the recent articles, sea level rises in MILLIMETERS, not FEET:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
"Seas rose about 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) from 1900 to 2000, the new study suggests, for a rate of 1.4 millimeters per year. The current rate, according to NASA, is 3.4 millimeters per year, suggesting that sea level rise is still accelerating."
If you do the math, there's approximately 300mm in a foot. If you think its going to raise even conservatively another 2 feet, it would take close to 175 years for sea level to rise 2 feet. Not sure how old you are, but you, your kids, and your kids kids will never see the sea levels rise 2 feet. And in the event it does happen, I would hope that humanity had either solved climate change or found a suitable alternative on another planet by then.
"if emissions were to continue at a high rate over the next few decades, the ocean could rise as much as three or four feet by 2100"
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/science/sea-level-rise-glo...
http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2014/04/06/first-offic...
"Though some would blame the islands’ sinking on shifting tectonic plates, Australia’s National Tide Facility has measured an annual rise of 8.2 mm in sea level on the islands in every year they’ve monitored—which, coupled with climate change’s propensity towards making weather patterns more sever, places climate change as at least a major contributor to the island’s submersion. "
I think that's pretty much the reason people seem "opposed" to them. It's not that people hate wind or solar power per se, but that waiting for them to swoop in and save us means sticking with fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, which people don't like.
But barrels of radioactive waste that need to be stored for 1000s of years are basically just marshmallows and titty sprinkles, right?
And we already have tons and tons of the stuff. All the existing reactors in operation produce it every day. The only way to actually get rid of it is to build new reactors that use it as fuel.
No barrels involved. (At least in the US).
In other countries they recycle the fuel in fast breeder reactors to make more fuel.
The real issue is what do to do with the steel from decommissioning reactors, as it is radioactive and can't be recycled into new fuel or non radioactive steel.
Tldr; nuclear plant operations are not like they are in cartoons.