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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

1) The story is not complete yet.

2) Things other than a simple count of short-term fatalies matter.

How about we do a deal: stop deciding whether Fukishima is a good or bad thing at least until it's completely under control. We've already had the darkly amusing round where the pro-nuclear have said "See, perfectly safe, no nuclear explosion" and then there was one.

Wait for the chapter to be finished before claiming win or loss.

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The story isn't complete, but already it's being used by critics of nuclear to prove that nuclear is unsafe.

Fatalities is an objective, verifiable measure of safety.

If you want to compare apples to apples, you might look at fatalities attributable (including statistical estimates) per TWh since the introduction of nuclear power. Watt for watt and year for year nuclear has been safer to date than coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind and biomass.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...

Nuclear power is clearly unsafe, it's just a question of whether or not it is more unsafe than the other alternatives. This accident doesn't need to prove that, the fact was apparent the first time someone lit a match.

However, Nuclear Power does have a special need to prove its case in the aftermath of this incident. Just look at the economic damage from the Fukushima issue. Other than the flight of foreigners out of Tokyo (fear + uncertainty is inevitable with the notoriously closed Japanese nuclear industry), there are issues with farming in Japan's third or fourth largest farming area, medium-term damage to energy output ("All eggs in one basket"), damage to businesses in Tokyo & environs (Rotating power outages, etc..). Summer in Tokyo will be HELL without air conditioners.

I think It's pretty obvious Japan needs nuclear power. A future without 20% of Japan's energy sources is a non-starter. I'm sure the power-downs & practical alternatives (fossil fuels) will show that decisively.

However, putting so much generating capacity in one location in an earthquake & tsunami prone country is a mistake. Maybe mini-nuclear plants are what we need going forward. Maybe we need less nuclear and more renewable power. Maybe something else.

However, what we don't need is people outside of Japan using this life-and-death situation to promote energy politics, be it green, nuclear or otherwise. The geographical & historical context is completely different. (Ontario will never be hit with giant 8 meter Tsunamis after a 9.0 earthquake.)

(Ontario will never be hit with giant 8 meter Tsunamis after a 9.0 earthquake.)

I am knocking on a lot of wood for you, friend.

Ontario will never be hit with a tsunami. They're ocean waves. [[edit ok, maybe on hudson bay. my geography isn't that good sometimes]]

Seches though ... they're the lake version. That could happen.

It saves a lot of headaches for people googling or wikiing for a word if you spell it correctly for them. The word is "seiche".

Funny, I googled for it and got a few hits where it was spelled both ways in the same page.

Funny, I googled for it and only got hits for "Seche - The World's Finest Top Coat", "SECHE - Sioux Empire Christian Home Educators", translations of the French word sèche, seche.net blogfolio...only after googling "seche lakes" did I get any hits---two. The first of which used the spelling "seiche" 54 times and "seche" once. I do believe that qualifies as a typo.

Anyways, wikiing "seche" won't even get you a helpful pointer in the right direction. So for those, like me, who wanted to know what one of those things was, Wikipedia's got a good page on it under "seiche".

I've heard that a big earthquake hits the Ottawa Valley every century-and-a-half or so that the people there are totally unprepared for, but tsunamis? C'mon now, if a tsunami was big enough to hit Ontario, I think the tsunami would probably be the least of our worries---I think we'd be looking at The End Of The World.

In a few thousand or a few million years, Ontario might well have a coastline! Not that he'll have to worry about tsunamis then.

I live in Tokyo dude.

Not that it improves my chances to escape an earthquake though.

No, but they'll be hit by giant nuclear plant bids that are 3 times bigger than the expected cost (and this is from the people who would build the plant). Post from 2009: http://www.thestar.com/business/article/665644

The price per kilowatt of capacity ended up being three times more than other alternatives (natural gas in this case, not my favourite, but interesting to compare).

That's a news story from Canada. Nuclear building costs vary widely from country to country, depending on the type of plant, the local infrastructure, and how psychotic the political and regulatory system is. In contrast, South Korea is steadily building nuclear plants for a fraction of the number quoted in that news story, and China is building them even cheaper. Without any sudden cost surprises, I might add.

Contrasting the two, I have to wonder: what's Canada's problem?

pretty easy, if you try to build safe - the costs are actually higher than most alternatives - comparing with china might not be very clever

China's cheapest nuclear plants are the CPR-1000, which are a refinement of an earlier French design imported from Areva. They're switching more of their efforts over to producing Westinghouse AP1000 plants. These are both designed with safety in mind.

Maybe Canada's the only one with a bidding process stringent enough to produce accurate bids? True nuclear costs tend to be buried in a variety of ways: not paying insurance (ignoring potential cleanup costs), hidden amongst the total energy budget, ignoring cost overruns, etc. I don't know that that's the case, but I put more stock in a process that shows an inkling of skepticism than one that seems to be pushed through enthousiastically by the government of the nation/region concerned. And especially not estimates from China, which has a notoriously terrible attitude towards safety in general.

I think his point is that up until now the Fukashima situation has proven to be an illustration of the stability and safety of the technology rather than the dangers of it. Since the situation seems to be stabilizing, I think its a pretty good argument.

Also, there has been no nuclear explosion. (IMHO, that's not a trivial error you made there)

They were hydrogen explosions, not nuclear explosions.

And indeed there couldn't be such an explosion, the fuel is not rich enough in U235.

Sorry, bad terminology: release of large quantities of radioactive materials. The pro-nuclear side were talking about how safe the plant was and how there had been no release of radioactive materials - and then there was such material released.

For the knee-jerk downmodders, I'd like to repeat that I'm on the fence here: Wait for the chapter to be finished before claiming win or loss.

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