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Sigh, its not 'one of the most challenging technologies' its actually rather simple which is why it was developed in the 1940's, a 'challenging' technology would be genetically engineered life forms, only recently managed [1]. Not only are synthetic life forms more technologically challenging, if they escape from the lab the planet is designed to provide them with an environment that allows them to replace all existing lifeforms if they adapt better.

Public concerns, are just that, concerns. While its extremely important to have an open and informed public conversation around complex policy issues, they don't actually inform the policy they inform the public. If the national energy policy is to have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources, we will have 30% of our power provided by nuclear sources.

Human society ... yeah collectively we've been unable to keep a stable form of government for more than about 300 years (I realize that both the Chinese and Egyptians would dispute this given their emperor pasts but I don't accept that a series of emperors represents a 'continuous' government in the same way that a constitutional (or institutional) government exists with people merely filling rolls in the institutions)

Nuclear resources on this planet are limited ... Uh no. You see the two most often discussed forms of nuclear processes for energy generation are fission and fusion. There using simply U235 and D3 we've got plenty. Successful implementation in space craft would extend that basically forever [2]

You know how when you see Doctors in an operating room on TV you might think to yourself "Wow, that is very realistic" and then when you see them using a computer you say "That is so lame! You can't zoom in 2000x on a traffic camera photograph no matter how good your image processing software is." Basically we tend to give credence to things we aren't personally aware of the details of, and we instantly recognize the flaws in the the things we know intimately. However, everything has those same flaws, and if you happen to be sitting next to a surgeon they could tell you all the silly things wrong about the OR in a House episode and you could tell them about all the silly computer things they claim to do in a CSI episode.

ABC news ran a story on coal ash [3] where they talked about cancer and asthma. I'm surprised they didn't run a radiation counter on the coal dust, if they had they would probably have found it to be more radioactive then the area outside the Fukushima plant. What is worse, the mercury and arsenic they were worried about are stable, which means that unlike plutonium they never go away ever. And if you ingest mercury? it kills you way faster than plutonium.

ABC News could have taken a moment to talk about how if instead of the coal fired plants that had been built in Oklahoma they had instead built a single nuclear plant, statistics say that nobody in the town would have cancer due to the power plants. As it is, ABC News makes it look like everybody in the town has cancer. Not rational.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-s...

[2] The sun will eventually go red-giant and that will be the end of the planet so 'forever' in this context is the period of time between now and when the Sun causes the planet to be uninhabitable (more than a billion years)

[3] http://abcnews.go.com/US/oklahoma-town-fears-cancer-asthma-l...

Actually, if you ingest mercury (the metal), it's not that bad for you. Basically goes right through. It's mercury vapor and various compounds that are dangerous. The ABC article doesn't have enough info to identify what's really in the coal ash.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16973445

FWIW I believe I've located the primary source for most of the ABC News coverage [1]. Its embedded in a scare mongering (I mean public awareness there) site which does not appear to be affiliated with ABC News. [2]

Under full disclosure rules I must share that I am not a chemist.

[1] http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/coal-ash.pdf

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/42476.html

On the other hand it's important to weigh the risks of nuclear power fairly, relative to other power sources. These reactor accidents are novel, noteworthy, and dramatic, but how serious are these accidents in proper context?

Jumbo jet crashes are similarly dramatic and noteworthy, yet air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation available, by a significant margin. Is the same bias for flashy and scary events happening with nuclear power?

Fukushima and Chernobyl are notable, but so is the failure of Fujinuma Dam (also due to the Tohoku earthquake), and the failure of Banqiao dam, and the Texas City disaster.

So far the record of the non-Soviet civilian nuclear power industry compares favorably with that of other industries and power sources, even including extrapolating some rather severe further evolutions of the Fukushima reactor disaster factored in.

"yet air travel remains one of the safest forms of transportation available"

Doesn't that depend on how you measure it, like accidents per miles or accidents per hours? Even if it would be safest by miles, I don't think it would follow that the safest way to get to work every morning would be by plane. It only works because airplanes go long distances, and accidents most frequently happen during starting or landing. In short, the comparison is not even very useful.

The question is also do we have to fly so much/do we need so much energy. If there were no airplanes, would people just travel the same distances by car? I doubt it.

Whether you measure by hour or by mile air travel is still comparatively safe (1/4th as many fatalities per hour and 1/60th as many fatalities per mile, compared to automobiles).

this is a testament to safety measures in aviation, not to some inherent safety of air travel.

inherently, 99.9% of people will die if plane was to collide with another plane or ground. That number is inherently much lower for car collisions.

so if we talk about nuclear safety, yes it is very safe compared to some other energy sources. But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else.

"But it also so much more dangerous when nuclear accidents happen than anything else."

This is a facile assumption but it's almost certainly false. The Banqiao dam disaster killed 25,000 people directly, and destroyed 6 million buildings (it caused 145,000 further deaths due to famine). Such a disaster far outstrips even Chernobyl, which was about as maximally bad as any nuclear reactor accident can be (runaway fission reaction generating massive amounts of radionuclides; no worthwhile reactor containment structures; the reactor core melting down, catching on fire, and spewing huge amounts of radiation into the wind).

now please factor in duration and affected area and population into account when talking about severity of nuclear accidents, the same way you factored in hours and miles when you wrote about aviation safety.

> Whether you measure by hour or by mile air travel is still comparatively safe

The problem with that measure is that air accidents don't correlate with either hours or miles, but with takeoffs and landings.

The comparable incident for cars is probably intersections.

Yes, each plane trip involves only one takeoff and landing while each car trip usually involves multiple intersections, but that just means that simple comparisons don't tell us very much.

What's important for humans is whether spending time in an airplane or in a car is more dangerous and whether choosing to use an airplane or a car for a trip is more dangerous. In either case the airplane is safer than the car.

Most car crashes occur near the home, at distances that make air travel impractical. Who drives to the airport to fly 3 miles? Comparing "car miles driven on trips" to air miles would be more enlightening.

As was explained, it is a function of the number of takeoffs and landings. Therefore it only holds because airplane trips tend to be a lot longer than trips with other vehicles.

Oh, I agree. The amount of mercury that coal consumption puts out is horrendous -- and a permanent blight. And coal ash is one of the nastier industrial waste products we've managed to create. (I won't start down the C02 discussion, here, but of course it's another huge factor.)

That's one reason I specifically cited renewable energy (and I'm skeptical that geo-thermal really applies in this regard, long term). If you want nuclear energy, we have the solar system's biggest fusion reactor at our disposal. Just divert some of its output on its way to becoming kinetic (including heat) and chemical energy, to do what we need. Yes, there are problems, but progress -- even in the face of meager funding -- has demonstrated that they are solvable.

Your point about the counter-productive nature of "no new nukes" is spot-on.

However: Nuclear resources on this planet are limited, and unique in their performance profile. There may come a time when we need them...

You're falling prey to the Malthusian fallacy (read up about him and Paul Ehrlich). This logic is constantly being invoked, but history shows that it simply doesn't work this way. The best way to guarantee our future is to ensure that there are plenty of minds around to work on it, and to be sure that the "invisible hand" will guide them so that their greed will be rewarded when they put their effort into solving our problems.

Please, let's keep the fear mongering down. This is the first incident of this kind in 40 years and the number of casualties will probably not exceed a few hundreds.

Coal alone killed over 100,000 people over the past century.

Three Mile Island was 32 years ago.

Three Mile Island was 32 years ago.

Which killed how many people?

Irrelevant, TMI was an incident of precisely this kind.

Agreed. I believe that nuclear energy is safe and nice and dandy when properly managed, but the humankind has demonstrated with 100% certainty that it can't properly manage anything, ever. I don't want anyone to make decisions that can directly affect the health of many, many generations to come.