Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick
theage.com.au
theage.com.au
After Hiroshima and during the cold war nuclear energy was associated with death and destruction. Hiroshima for obvious reasons, and the cold war because the population of the western world was constantly reminded how The Soviet Union had thousands of missiles with nuclear bombs pointing at us, ready to go. Western governments used nuclear weapons to picture the threat and to terrify populations into spending more on defense against the Soviets. There were scary videos of mushroom clouds, scary instructions on how to survive a nuclear blast, and scary stories of how a nuclear winter would pan out.
This, obviously, made people scared of nuclear bombs, and nuclear energy in general. Through decades the population was told by the government that nuclear radiation was the evil silent killer.
The byproduct of all this cold war propoganda was that people are now irrationally scared of nuclear radiation from power plants.
If you look at the numbers you'll see that nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest scalable energy source we've got. It's the energy source that has the fewest deaths per MWH produced, it doesn't produce CO2, etc. etc. Yet we think of it as getting power from the devil.
I blame the cold war propoganda for our irrational fear of nuclear energy.
Here's one of the old propaganda videos from the US, "Duck and cover" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MVJIU0gFk
People are afraid of Airplanes despite their incredible safety record because failure is spectacular and newsworthy. Consequence is concentrated and easily compartmentalized vs the more background event of the relatively near constant death from cars/coal (I wonder if this is leakage due to the brain reusing the smell cancellation modules on abstract frequencies like death rate). Similarly, the impact of meltdowns can be more viscerally felt in terms of relocation and ghost towning - even if they lead to little to no measured cancers or ill health (the worst case of incompetency in the form of Chernobyl is a fraction of the time integral health/death/radiative burden of coal plants to locals and workers). And to top it off, damage can be easily visualized in terms of three eyed fish, Godzilla and those ugly, ugly orange tiles. Shiver. Availability Heuristic at work.
At the same time I believe there is some cause for apprehension. It has to do with what the state current US infrastructure suggests on the real risks of a plant; failure of which might trigger an AI Winter type event at the worst possible time. The risk of Fission Plants is mainly in human competency and complacency. Will there be any corners cut in design and will operators become complacent due to extended runs of non-events? Will vital maintenance be done? I have not seen evidence that much of the world is ready for that kind of thing. The west is yes, mostly, but as the rest of the world comes online it would be preferable to have clean energy that doesn't jump to 50% chance of meltdown during revolts. So looking at alternative replacements at the same time as - instead of just focusing on -Nuclear is worthwhile.
A single large failure and human reaction to that kind of thing will lead to cascading moving away from Nuclear at just the time when it is most needed. It is thus in my opinion, better to do limited roll outs on newer incompetency resistant designs before any universal switching. Education on the nature of different types of radiation and their effects (focus on neutron vs bio, halflives vs waste), drastically reduced dangers to workers of nuclear vs coal plants, unloading the weighting on the bomb aspect of nuclear, probability theory, and shining a clarifying light on the stellar safety record of nuclear plants; will all go a long way towards solving the world's future energy problems.
As for me, while (I think) Civ 5 doesn't have that stupid penalty, the damage is already done. I will always recommend Solar and Hydro in place of Nuclear.
Well, two out of three's not bad: it is silent, and it can kill.
> people are now irrationally scared of nuclear radiation from power plants
You may not fear nuclear energy, but it's not irrational to do so.
Even the current generation of reactors rely on active safety systems, and can't just be shut down. Even with multiple redundant systems of this sort, things will go wrong, since making these systems truly independent — including in the face of floods, earthquakes, human error, etc. — is effectively impossible.
So plants will continue to melt down from time to time, irradiating large areas of land. Bad luck if those areas are near you: in the best case, you'll have to leave your home and neighbourhood for decades.
Sure, it's a low probability event for each of us, but in my opinion those consequences are unacceptable for essentially any probability of occurrence.
This is not rational fear. The non-nuclear energy industry is not perfectly safe. Coal mining results in many deaths both from the dangers of mining and the pollution caused. Oil mining results in some deaths and a fair few major ecological disasters. Solar power and wind power kill people as well (falling from a roof or having a turbine fall on you are both potentially life-ending).
According to this site (http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...), Nuclear is the safest in terms of human death by far. This is just a blog post, so grain of salt, but it illustrates that your "unacceptable for essentially any probability" claim is not rational.
Nuclear plants can be safe, but when they fail the results are often catastrophic. People prefer to live with many small dangers rather than one giant but very unlikely one, and while it may be called out as irrational in the strictest definition of reason, it's perfectly human.
I think this demonstrates the overarching point well because the chances of surviving an air related accident are surprisingly high.
The NTSB figures for people involved in commercial airline accidents between 1983-2000 show that 95.7% of people survived: http://boingboing.net/2012/11/05/surviving-a-plane-crash-is-... .. even narrowed down to only the "worst accidents", the overall rate was 76.6%.
Probably the most avoidable, most pointless way to die... but we think nothing of driving everywhere, of putting our kids in cars (children don't get much in the way of heart disease or alzheimers, so automotive accidents are pretty close to the top for them).
So yeah, I have trouble respecting the public's perception of danger.
I'm old enough to remember chernobyl. at the time, we were assured it was a dodgy old design, and that they future models would be foolproof. Then fukushima, and we started hearing the same soothing stories of fantasy designs that could never cause such havoc. Ever since day one, this industry has over-promised and under-delivered. Remember "power too cheap to meter"?
It's right and appropriate that we make decisions based on the realities of the industry's present day detriments, not their promises for tomorrow.
This is a stark, stark constrast to Chernobyl (which was a Soviet weapons production design quickly converted for power generation use with very little, if any, regard for passive safety principles) and should if anything reinforce what people were saying about the uniqueness of Chernobyl.
The Fukushima plants were the "dodgy old designs", by the way. Fukushima Dai-Ni's 2 operational reactors were hit by the same tsunami, only a few km down the same shoreline from the afflicted reactors, and both achieved safe shutdown... they were of a slightly less old dodgy design.
The design improvements are not fantasy. They've already happened, have been around for years, but no one builds them but India and China.
We aren't building them because people are too afraid to build new plants. We're keeping plants based on 50 year old designs around because we need the power. These plants require weapons grade uranium. They are inefficient. They are expensive to run. They are physically able to melt down. They produce more waste than needed. Their waste can be used to make weapons.
These are all solved problems. They were solved decades ago. It's about time that they werer implemented.
I don't accept that the significant disqualifications you raise are all 'solved problems'. some are solved. some mitigated. I do accept the scenario I think you're describing: the US[a] is choosing to extend licenses to old plants instead of building safer ones. But beyond the US[a], I'm concerned we're illogically facilitating development of more conventional reactors that offer none of these benefits, in part under the cover of promises that the industry is moving in the right direction. That's the disconnect I see between promises and realities.
Thorium Reactors exist and are being tested in other countries. Unlike Uranium, it is impossible to create a chain reaction and go critical.
Thorium also creates 40x more energy than a Uranium reaction.
There are things that cause more deaths by cancer, slowly and steadily, that don't (or didn't) scare anyone - tobacco was an example. Junk food may be another.
EDIT: this is a sarcastic response to a comment that backs up an assertion with nonsense.
Studies of the Chernobyl disaster have not found evidence of teratogenic effects in humans [1], and neither have studies of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings [2].
The malevolent-sounding yet meaningless phrase "fades your genes" is nothing short of nonsense, especially in reference to inheritable teratogenic effects. The number of special places in hearts can do nothing to alter that judgement.
There's such a wide gulf in possible levels of radiation exposure that radiation health physicists are to this very day still unsure whether constant exposure to low levels of radiation is actually harmful at all. They haven't even been able to rule out that it's not beneficial.
But either way, if you're worried about exposure to radiation you should be more worried about coal plants than nuclear plants; coal plants emit so much radioactivity to the environment that their exhaust would generate more power in a nuke plant, if it could be harvested properly.
beneficial impacts are pretty much fringe science. FWIW, there has been experimental demonstration of minimal ionizing radiation causing mutation in a single cell.
and most regulatory standards around the world continue to reduce 'acceptable limits'. I think the most recent example is the reduction in exposure to radon exposure that has been recognised in a number of national standards. I read that as showing that people who understand the science more than myself are still, decades later, finding more cause for caution.
In addition you're assuming that changes in regulatory setpoints are purely based on proven safety effects, but that's not the case here. Indeed, regulatory changes happen frequently that are not based on safety (e.g. yellow light timings).
What is true is that if you assume, as most health physics societies and regulatory organization do, that radiation exposure should be kept ALARA ("as low as reasonably achievable") then you should reduce regulatory thresholds for no better reason than that it becomes possible to do at all.
In other words even if you find a 'safe' level below which you can't appreciably detect an increase in cancer risk, you'd still set the regulatory threshold far below that if you could (and keep dropping it as technology improves), because regulatory commissions are operating under the assumption that any exposure to radiation represents some additional risk of later cancer.
But it's important to keep in mind that it is an assumption, a convenient and conservative model that is used for ease of regulation, work planning, etc.
That doesn't mean the model is accurate, and the actual biological response to radiation of different types and exposures continues to remain debated at low levels of exposure.
After all, if what you claim is true then frequent flyers, air crew, and pilots should be dying at a ponderously higher rate of cancer incidence, as should residents of high-altitude areas who are exposed to higher cosmic ray flux, as should residents of Ramsar Iran who are exposed to high levels of background radiation from uranics in the soil and water.
But none of these people seem to be as effected by radiation as they should be. The question is why and yes, it's still a question.
It sounds like you're at least interested in the topic so I'd highly recommending researching further. For instance if you do so you would find out why mutation in a single cell is not at all the crisis you think it is, or even that surprising, because you would know how the body handles such cells (which occur all the time from multiple different sources).
But either way, nuclear emits less radiation than coal, so if you're worried about public health effects then we're again in the situation that the power company doesn't really have to care either way; if they want less radiation overall they should build a nuke, if they believe in hormesis then coal would probably be preferred, but even assuming a Fukushima-style triple meltdown would not be a large public health disaster.
and again the coal/nukes false dichotomy. the fact that this is fundamentally flawed thinking is highlighted by your conclusion that more nuclear plants reduce public radiation exposure.
Even in Germany, which is the example everyone points to, 80% of the shift away from nuclear has been towards coal. Even natural gas would be better than shifting to coal! And despite only shifting 20% of that generation to renewables there have been increasing problems with frequency variation and brief power interruptions on the grid due to the much higher variability in power output from renewable.
http://www.king5.com/news/investigators/Hanford-no-ENRAF-nuc...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/world/asia/tepco-says-wate...
Stop looking for elaborate answers. As a "lay" person, my impression is that their credibility is completely shot.
Source?
I want to remind that the nuclear material needs to be mined somewhere. I never worked in a Uranium mine but it's probably not the healthiest job in the world. Then the material needs to be transported, transported a long way. During this way it gets enriched, used, cooled down. Maybe even re-enriched, used, some part get stuck in walls, pipes ("contamination") etc. At some point it gets stored, somewhere in the ground. During this long way radiation and material gets emitted. Nuclear dust is cancerogenous for the lungs, radiation in general is suspected of boosting leucemia rates.
But the worst part in my opinion is this: NO insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear power plant.
This is hardly a meaningful claim. Insurance companies in the US won't write flood insurance policies, either. This doesn't mean that your house is very likely to get washed away in a flood. It means that the business is not profitable because no one wants to pay the premiums required to insure for the worst-case, nor do insurance companies want to sit on the piles of cash necessary to insure these sorts of events.
As a counter-point, hydroelectric power plants are also not insured for worst-case scenarios. And when hydroelectric dams fail, the results can be orders of magnitude worse than Nuclear meltdown. e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Insurance companies in the EU do, you need to pay for it though.
>As a counter-point, hydroelectric power plants are also not insured for worst-case scenarios. And when hydroelectric
>dams fail, the results can be orders of magnitude worse than Nuclear meltdown.
Interesting, so do you think Three Gorges Dam is a good idea?
Note that nuclear is significantly safer than even hydro and solar.
I think your fear of uranium mines is overblown, as these numbers are included in the calculations. Many more people die in coalmines.
Did you know that a coal plant emits significantly more radiation than a nuclear plant because coal is radioactive and isn't shielded like nuclear power plants?
here's what we've done: found a remote and isolated spot of land in the middle of a 3000km long highway. we've paid a pittance and reminded the small local indigenous community who actually own the land that they don't have any political, economic or social power. Their economic disempowerment was exacerbated a couple of years after they were targetted, when new apartheid-style laws quarantined welfare to natives. Their political disempowerment was reinforced by unprecedented laws that negate their rights as land owners and remove any possible legal obstacle to the dump plan.
Right, so with the social engineering out of the way, let's get into the nuts and bolts: we're gonna grade a dirt road onto a dry patch of land, and build a barbed wire shed. to hold the most highly radioactive nuclear wastes we produce.
I'm sure before too long the rest of the world will get on side to endorse the engineering, and of course site selection.
As we say down under, she'll be right mate!
http://scott-ludlam.greensmps.org.au/content/speeches/aborig...
Let's put it this way:
In exchange for clean, constant, domestically sourced, almost unlimited energy for an entire year, each person must dispose of or store their waste, which is the size of...
A pill of aspirin.
You could just put it in a little lead jar. That's all the waste. The alternative is fossil fuel waste, which would be...
10 tons of CO2 (volume = 5 American houses) which floats into the atmosphere, plus 2 tons of coal ash.
Of course, everyone can just pool their resources and put all the radioactive waste together. I don't consider it to be a very serious or unsolvable problem.
You make it sounds as if there were no other alternative.
The panicky nay-sayers of nuclear power are too obsessed with the risks of radiation, but there are a lot of other legitimate reasons that it might not have a place in our future. Uranium just isn't that plentiful, for example.
Well, this is exactly what we need. Power demand is fluctuating, but mostly averages out to something constant. It's easier to throw in a little buffering to compensate demand fluctuations than to wake up with half the power in the grid because it suddenly got cloudy. You'd have to store very large amounts of power, which is this "substantial investment in energy storage systems" GP was writing about.
> Uranium just isn't that plentiful, for example.
Here you are wrong.
Nuclear can certainly be designed to ramp power output up or down in response to demand. After all there are many applications of nuclear technology in fields that require rapid and immediate changes in power output.
Nuclear power generation plants are not typically designed to do this, but it's not because nuclear can't, it's because nuclear doesn't have to. The plants are built by the utility companies to act as baseload power generation and can normally afford to take hours to change power output if they wish. But if utility plants wanted a nuke plant that would change power output quicker, that could be arranged as well.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514331/wind-turbines-ba...
Don't forget that uranium is found naturally in the ground, in geologically vastly more unstable regions, with water flowing through it. What we're doing is concentrating the radioactivity, and putting it deeper and safer. If you're afraid of mankind finding these waste sites in the future, are you not afraid of them finding uranium in their drinking water?
Ideally it would be. But in many cases in practice, that isn't the case, because those facilities have either not been built, or not opened. In the U.S., since the long-planned Yucca Mountain facility has never opened, most nuclear waste is stored on-site at the reactor complex, in above-ground facilities. For the first few years it's immersed in cooling pools [1], and then subsequently is parked in metal/concrete cylinders [2]. This is considered interim storage awaiting final burial in geologically stable vaults, but without Yucca Mountain the "interim" storage has become de-facto permanent.
So now the plan is to retrieve all the waste and store it - this time better at an estimated cost of at least 4 - 6 billion Euro.
The general problem I have with nuclear power is that it's all fine and dandy as long as everything goes as planned. If not, then everything goes boom in a big way. And where humans and profits are involved, plans tend not to involve all failure modes: The explosions in fukushima could have been avoided using catalytic recombinators which are for example mandatory in germany [1].
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaktorsicherheit#T.C3.B6pfer-K... (sorry, german)
Now obviously 100% clean means like wind and solar are preferred, but are those really viable at a global level?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor#Nuclear_w...
How about nuclear waste though? Where do we put that? I'm with you, it seems like humanity at large is hysterical beyond reasonable levels about radiation. However, it's not like it's completely harmless or unproblematic either.
Maybe - just maybe - we should just use less energy, so that the renewables suffice. Just a crazy idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Comparing_radioac...
Nuclear power really is a darn good solution to our energy problems, and is more feasible and entirely more humane than using less energy. Our growing energy demands are not just a result of us being spoiled, they are a direct result of our need to sustain more and more people. Cut down on the energy, and you quickly fund yourself cutting down on progress and on the welfare of the poor.
Progress has created a lot of problems, but we can't really slow down in any significant way. Our only hope is to use our momentum to find solutions.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Comparing_radioac....
That surprised me, but I didn't mean to say that fossil fuel power plants are a great alternative.
> Progress has created a lot of problems, but we can't really slow down in any significant way. Our only hope is to use our momentum to find solutions.
I'm not saying we should go back to not having energy at all. But it seems like there's quite a bit of potential for saving energy without seriously lowering anyone's quality of life.
For instance, does 50% of the population have to commute in a big car every day? That doesn't sound like progress to me.
The US's per capita energy consumption is more than twice that of the UK [1], is there really no way to save some of that?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_con...
If the cost of housing near cities is greater than the cost of transportation, then yes.
It's a "fun" watch, probably the most frightening piece of film I've ever seen.
EDIT: and a link to the fun part, for the lazy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKLSGLjcJJc
"Many technologies and materials associated with the creation of a nuclear power program have a dual-use capability, in that they can be used to make nuclear weapons if a country chooses to do so. "
That's interesting, certainly very complicated, but consider an occams razor explanation like "Dumb people almost always viciously hate whatever they don't understand, and (intentionally?) not too many people understand nukes, so ... "
Cleanup costs and storage/disposal costs for the nuclear waste are usually also ignored when looking at the costs of nuclear power - as well as the environmental impact of mining uranium. Let's just not talk about the additional dangers associated with nuclear proliferation. Nuclear power generates elements that are extremely dangerous and extremely difficult to handle - unlike solar, wind or even coal power.
Coal pollution doesn't "kill outright" - but does so slowly, over many years, and many, many more people than nuclear power.
Coal waste continues to leak into the air, and into water systems.
I'm not arguing that Nuclear power is "safe" (nothing, is - even solar power kills many people a year, mostly installers) - but I am suggesting we stay rational, and realize that there are consequences to any of our energy choices.
If it turns out that C02 will have an outsized impact on global warming, that alone, will likely suggest that Coal powered energy systems are fairly bad for the environment - in a much greater way than the discretely managed radioactive waste put off by nuclear power plants - which can be buried underground without changing the earths environment.
Coal isn't the alternative, solar and wind are
Furthermore:
Nuclear energy has a fairly high CO2 output, if you count it all together. So this argument against coal is itself an argument against nuclear energy.
Most importantly: We can't manage nuclear waste. There is just no feasible scenario which makes sure for future generations that the nuclear waste we produce now won't be the mulch of the society after us. This point is what seems to seperate the people pro and against the sharpest, some seriously believing we could manage that.
For one thing, it's an incomplete alternative; it needs to be paired with some form of country scale battery for when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.
This is covered in the excellent book Without Hot Air[1] which breaks down power usage and generation potential (using UK figures), primarily to discuss weaning the country off of fossil fuels.
Reading through estimates of what will be required ignoring cost, the sheer scale of what it would really take to power a country off of renewable energy quickly becomes apparent.
And it's written by a physicist who strongly argues for the need to move off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. He just doesn't have his head in the sand about how difficult that will be.
I tend to agree with that viewpoint but I'm skeptical we'll get there without pairing it with a significant boost in energy efficiency, ala Reinventing Fire[2].
1: http://withouthotair.com/ 2: http://www.rmi.org/rmi/ReinventingFire
This isn't true, as distributed power networks are actually preferable. I'd much rather have uninterrupted power supply at the home than try and rely on an entire network to provide it for me.
There is no way we could switch to solar/wind without moving to the 1800's. There are many technological and economic issues with large scale solar/wind. We need to build better grids, we need storage for when sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow...
Realistically we are at least 20 years from the point where renewables could overcome fossil. And that is assuming optimistic scenario.
If we plowed all this funding into nuclear power research we would get far more out of our investment.
e.g.: You can use (advanced) nuclear power anywhere, while solar and wind are less than suitable for outer space applications, etc.
This is why I feel that people that support "green" agenda are hurting environment and our species.
That is false in that the system currently cannot do it because we've promised 100% uptime and all the users have designed around perhaps 99% uptime. Lower uptime on the coasts, much higher in civilized areas (Dang near 100% by the great lakes, for example, where interestingly AC power has been much more reliable than UPS/generator transfer switches)
That is, obviously, a stable and profitable system design.
Multi-generationally, we could move to a system that can insta-shed perhaps 99% of load. Suddenly its not so hard.
I've done stuff with CAD/CAM machines. They don't like power interruptions because ignoring the problem is simpler than dealing with them. There's no technological reason why a next gen system can't have a functionality like "Hey, your power is shutting off in 5 seconds, so go into controlled shutdown mode and prepare to instantly come out of power saving mode momentarily". This isn't someone from the outside speculating but someone from the inside describing.
I would imagine a reasonably intelligent HVAC system talking to a smart enough grid could coordinate such that during worst case intervals they're off.
My phone has 8 or so hours at night to do its 30 minute or so top off charge, so why does it draw full power when the grid is stressed? Yeah that's just a couple watts, but 400 million 10 watt phones and tablets adds up to quite a draw. Laptop draw is even more impressive.
Why isn't every installed UPS legally or contractually required to be a smart grid controllable grid tie inverter on demand?
I sympathize that its harder to design an aluminum refinery to insta drop. Too bad, do it anyway. That limited hydro power is going to be needed by the hospital patients, traffic lights, SOME telecom gear, etc. Interestingly the improved insulation and control and dumping gear has the opportunity to lower overall energy use and possibly increase safety if done right.
(edited to add that only EEs are going to understand what this means, but a law that any plug in device with an effective negative resistance must implement full remotely controllable high speed low latency smart grid tech would go a heck of a long way toward grid stability in a renewables situation)
Probably because that would be really freaking expensive. Why go to all the expensive failure-prone trouble of making it easier to interrupt people's work and lives, instead of taking the cheaper, easier route of building reliable base load power generation? That's just another case of making the public bear the costs of a centralized benefit, just like fossil fuels' externalized costs.
Your proposal is as impractical as proposals for urban hydroponics.
Coal provides something like 25% of the world's energy production. Solar and wind more like 2%.
The more nuclear plants we build the more coal ones we can shut down.
The more wind and solar we build, the more coal we can shut down too, but it will take a lot longer and a lot more money to replace coal with wind and solar than with nuclear.
On a worldwide scale, it is even a different thing. You can't simply replace coal with nuclear energy worldwide, even if you were absolutely convinced that nuclear energy is safe when properly used and you have a concept for the nuclear waste produced like shooting it into space. Because many countries are just too instable, poor and iniffecient to consider building a nuclear plant. It wouldn't be safe at all. Also, don't overestimate the availability of uranium, which is estimated to only reach till 2080 (depends on who you ask probably).
In Germany, where they are shutting down their nuclear power plants, more than 80% of the shut down nuclear power has been replaced with coal power plants,[26] which release 100 times as much radiation as a nuclear power plant of the same wattage
In 2012, member firms of the Verband der Industriellen Energie- und Kraftwirtschaft (VIK) reported power failures of several seconds duration, combined with a rise in frequency fluctuations. These were reportedly caused by network overloads due to the shutdown of nuclear power plants, and an increase in wind power generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Role_...
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/greenwashing-af...
If other countries would be as aggressive with renewables as German are we would see a lot of Europe wide blackouts.
Renewable energies require updates to the network infrastructure - granted - but should that be a reason not to push technology and try to improve?
Do you even understand what you are saying here?
Living in Southern California, I've been watching the botched upgrade of the San Onofre plant power generation system. There was a well understood, existing design being upgraded with modern engineering under a regulatory watch of the NRC. Nobody in any quarter of that case wanted the upgrade to fail, but despite best efforts and intentions, there was a critical failure in the equipment.
The cost of storing nuclear waste falls under similar uncertainty, efforts to build long term storage facilities in the US and UK have huge cost growth, pointing at the immaturity of the ability to plan, cost-estimate, and technically achieve the goal.
Still really aren't and definitely weren't when Fukushima was built.
> Nuclear energy has a fairly high CO2 output, if you count it all together.
Care to elaborate?
Add the CO2 used for disaster prevention and management and from decomissioning the power plants.
You need quote some good sources to convince me that a nuclear plant wouldn't be able to power uranium mines, transportation trains and all its supporting infrastructure by itself and still have over 99% of its capacity left for other purposes.
And BTW, wikipedia claims [1] that California has plans to use up to 180 square miles to generate 7.3GW of energy. This is slightly less power than capacity planned for Fukushima after building two new reactors in 2016 and slightly more area than has been permanently closed after Fukushima plant failure.
So you can take area intended for a solar plant, build a nuclear plant instead, cover the rest with forest and have:
1. Higher power output.
2. Probably negative CO₂ balance, thanks to big forest.
3. No evacuation even in case of Fukushima-size disaster.
4. You can even allow tourists to use this forest for recreation as long as the plant hasn't failed, and most plants have never faled in their history. Try letting tourist into a solar plant.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojav...
edit: The parent edited his comment
> We can't manage nuclear waste.
But it is tightly regulated and under close scrutiny, unlike coal ash contamination.
I've just spent the last two weeks in the UK working on various Low Carbon smart grid projects, and the challenges of Distributed Generation (mostly wind right now in the UK) are significant - the large one being building the Transmission/Distribution network to handle this somewhat erratic source of power.
So - the future is clear, but the journey is still in question. I vote nuclear power - The impact to future generations of carefully buried waste will be much, much less than the impact of global warming.
If we want a Star Trek future--spaceships, advanced materials, anti-gravity, incredible new technologies, etc.--we are going to need to iteratively develop denser and more powerful energy sources. These will also have denser and more powerful failure modes. So our engineering also needs to get iteratively better.
If you want to save on CO2 and energy, there's far better ways than building new coal or nuclear plants: reduce energy consumption and - most importantly - reduce it where it can be cheaply done. Go to developing countries and replace inefficient stoves, air conditioning and fridges. It's dead cheap compared to what we can squeeze out here - but it's a political nightmare. It's simple to support buying an efficient freezer in germany or better insulation for buildings or solar collectors on the roof, it's very hard to do so in africa.
I agree that that solar and wind are currently no perfect solution and alone probably will never be, but that's no reason not to invest money and do research. The progress that has been made so far is impressive. We're nerds, we all love a good challenge.
As AndrewDucker linked to further down the thread, this report http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener... shows that nuclear power has the fewest deaths per terrawatt-hour out of any energy source, and coal has the highest.
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull411/... (pdf, Wilson &al. IAEA Bulletin 41/1 1999)
Additionally, I recall that there are some problems with the estimate. For example it assumes that there are no more major accidents after Chernobyl. And he uses the WHO study, which may underestimate cancer fatalities by an order of magnitude. For a nice discussion of the problems of studies of Chernobyl see:
http://allthingsnuclear.org/how-many-cancers-did-chernobyl-r...
I'm not certain how relevant this is to the fukushima disaster. Certainly, many people are today living in radiation levels well above those which defined the Chernobyl exclusion zone. I guess the abandonment of LNT has fed into the WHO calculations, that actually don't say there will be no deaths, just that the deaths due to the fukushima reactor disasters will not be discernable from cancers expected to occur in the population over the next lifetime due to other causes.
Contrary to what the article tries to evoke, the Fukushima meltdowns were a huge catastrophe that severely impacted a whole region. Ask the people who live(d) there if they think the impact of this thing was overstated in the media - they're likely to tell you if anything consequences were buried not exposed. Even if these very first statistics are true, there is likely to be more impact further down the road. There will be shortened lifespans as a result of exposure. There is massive economic damage as well. People's lives were severely affected. And let's not forget the destroyed reactors still aren't safe. There are very likely huge unpleasant surprises yet to be revealed.
I don't get why everything related to nuclear power gets discussed with this much emotion and propaganda. Let's not overreact, but let's also not underreact. Somewhere here there is a middle ground supported by facts and scientific judgement.
> the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has drawn on 80 scientists from 18 countries to produce a draft report that concludes: "Radiation exposure following the nuclear accident at Fukushima-Daiichi did not cause any immediate health effects. It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers.
What you've done is read (or not) an article discussing the findings of a bunch of independent commissions, decided that there must be something missing, and bemoaned the fact that people are applauding nuclear energy.
How about we assume that I've read the article before commenting on it, and while we're at it, how about doing away with the vitriol even when you don't like someone or their opinion?
> decided that there must be something missing, and bemoaned the fact that people are applauding nuclear energy.
I have indeed, for myself, decided there is something missing and I put my doubts out there for people to judge, and I believe I explained where I see the problems. I did express some reservations about the completeness of the picture as it is being rendered in the article and I do believe some measure of caution is advisable, yes.
Fair enough. Sorry for the way I wrote what I wrote.
What I was trying to convey is that calling the article out for being misleading, because we can't yet know, goes against what the stated research determined. Admonishing commenters for cheering on nuclear power just because you don't think the research is complete seems suspect.
I don't think anyone is saying "but there was no damage done, yay for a perfect energy source". What they're saying is "it's the best we've got and scare campaigns against nuclear power are ridiculous - thankfully someone has exposed them".
What happened was terrible. But tearing down the nuclear power plants across the globe is not the correct reaction.
Vice Japan did a fascinating story about a man who's been living inside the exclusion zone[1] and has yet to feel any ill effects of being exposed to radiation (though in the article, he was described as being a freak of nature in that regard).
[1] http://www.vice.com/jp/read/alone-in-the-zone-jp (Japanese)
[2] http://macaronics.com/article/2f7763d5d38a49c5aea761ce2fb2f9... (partially translated into English)
There's really no such thing as a 'correct' argument on these issues.
Maybe coal has fewer expected deaths per MW generated on average, but a nuclear plant's worst-case scenario is clearly substantially worse. Facts and scientific judgment can't really tell us in that case which is better: that's really only something that informed democratic deliberation can do (informed by science, economics, ethics, etc.).
No, coal has dramatically more expected deaths. But, yes, nuclear disasters are potentially much worse if things go wrong. [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-...]
> Facts and scientific judgment can't really tell us in that case which is better: that's really only something that informed democratic deliberation can do (informed by science, economics, ethics, etc.).
Again, I'm really not sure what the point is besides being contrarian ;) I'm certain that you are not telling me facts and scientific judgement don't matter? Or that popular opinion, informed by a host of factors, is somehow preferable to doing the right thing? Keep in mind I'm not even "taking sides" pro or con nuclear here, just advocating an informed discussion.
That leaves us with safer, more productive reactors. The future holds even safer reactors. This seems like a good trajectory for everybody.
Ooops, yes, that's what I meant to say.
> I'm really not sure what the point is besides being contrarian
All I'm saying is that you can't settle this question (or many others) with facts and science alone. Sure, you've got to weigh the facts, but often, including in this case, those have got to feed in to an ethical judgment which is everybody's (not just scientists') to make.
Exclaiming, as the article does, "see, not a single person got hurt, everything is just awesome!" while people in Japan are burying contaminated top-soil from school yards under their front lawn, while everyone carries a dosimeter to gauge how long they can stay outside today, and while thousands of people have lost their homes strikes me as very bad judgement - even if the health statistics have not been manipulated.
By saying that facts and scientific understanding are essential to decision-making, I'm not insinuating these decisions can only be made by scientists. Instead I'm advocating a better scientific/factual understanding by and for everybody. Clearly that is not how things are working right now, but I think it's an important goal to have.
If 14-meter tsunami hitting a 70's build nuclear power plant isn't a worst case scenario, what is?
Also coal's worst case scenario is global climate change.
Can anyone here remember going to war because we though the other crazy guy -might- have a coal bomb?
there's more nuclear actors than ever before, and it only takes one of them to have a bad day for all of us to have a bad day.
I don't think anyone is trying to argue that there wasn't a huge catastrophe that affected the region least of all this article. It was very clear on the thousand deaths that the evacuation caused beyond those caused by the Tsunami. What it argues is that the radiation from the disaster wasn't a huge catastrophe that people worried it was.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/06/05/national/fukushi...
I'm fully in favour of nuclear power but using partial evidence and misleading comparisons to back up arguments does not help the cause.
You can't compare the death toll of mining coal to the death toll of a nuclear accident and prove one is more dangerous than the other. They are completely different things having no common factors. How many people died mining Uranium? How many people die per MW produced for both fuels? How many people die in disasters at Coal Power plants?
No common factors? Really? They are both used to make energy.
Coal is 1,888 times more deadly than nuclear power when measured in deaths per MW. According to http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...
And that includes Chernobyl, and uses the worst case scenario for the effects of radiation!
If you removed Chernobyl and used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis instead (which is more likely to be accurate) the deaths attributed to nuclear power would go even lower.
Nuclear power is by far the safest form of energy on earth - it even beats solar power. It is so very very very stupid we don't get 80% of our energy from it.
Agreed, they are all part of the mix when comparing the overall life-cycle dangers of different fuels, but the Author of the article is not comparing like-with-like. If you're comparing Coal vs Nuclear, you can only compare the death toll of mining coal with the death toll of mining uranium. Or the health effects from coal burning vs uranium fission.
An article claiming BMW's are safer than Volvos because nobody ever dies during their manufacture whereas Volvo's are dangerous because 1000 people crash and die in them per year would hold no wieght.
That article would indeed be a problem, but only if it ignored either Volvo manufacturing deaths or BMW driving deaths. An article comparing total Vovlo and BMW related deaths as a measure of the make's cost to society would present a valid argument. Granted, generally when someone calls and automobile make "safe," they mean safe to drive, and that's what matters to car buyers, but part of the point of this article is that's not what matters when discussing power plants, which are payed for by 'society' rather than individual buyers.
Total deaths from Coal power generation vs Nuclear Power generation is indeed a meaningful comparison.
Which is exactly what that article does. I see no reference to the deaths from uranium mining, or the deaths from industrial accidents at coal power plants.
I'm not saying these figures don't exist and certainly not suggesting they suggest nuclear isn't quite so squeaky clean. Other HN commenters have supplied links suggesting uranium mining is much safer. My original point was that misleading comparisons, like the one mentioned, don't help pro nuclear arguments because they are frankly desperate, sensational and don't hold up to scrutiny.
I know he writes that, but the numbers used aren't mentioned and not easily to research, as far as i saw. I heavily doubt that statement.
An article talking about "two failures" of nuclear plants isn't believable, there were quite a few more.
Can you see what I did there?
After I make a tongue in cheek comment to your comment. You flail more rethoric at me, demanding sources from me (?).
You also accuse me of trying to invert the burden of proof, while like I said you haven't really offered a source.
Here is a source for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-ener...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coa...
So that is 3 vs. 60,000 deaths for mining
It should also be noted that coal mining is done the worst conditions you can think of. I'm very glad that by 2018, Germany will stop its coal production completely and not only because it is very expensive to get the coal in Germany.
This is btw something you have with all fossil and nuclear sources. With time it will get more expensive to get to the fuel needed. And according to the German government, nuclear fuel comes only partially from mining. So mining is currently not delivering the fuel for all nuclear power plants running. The rest comes from old nuclear weapons and other sources, according to the German government.
Also it should be noted that nuclear power was never really profitable. It might be with old plants now but with newer plants I think it is unlikely to earn a dime with nuclear power unless you get some kind of subsidy. The new EPR currently being build in Finland already costs 100% more than expected. With that money you could have installed enough windmills to cover those 1600 MW the EPR might provide.
Nuclear power was used for about 50 years, it will leave us with waste for the next 100,000 to 1,000,000 years.
Visit within 10, 5 miles of Fukoshima power plant ?
Take your kid(s) there?
Eat any food produce there in next 5, 10, 20 year?
Won't move or leave the area if the government give order to evacuate?
Won't file any lawsuit against the power company when something happen?
Or will knowing buy a house, start a family within evacuation zone (20, 30 miles) to Japan coastal nuclear power plant if it 30, 40, 50% cheaper for similar house AND if you can afford not to?
Won't object at all after you purchase a house and some company decide to build a nuclear power plant within 20 miles of your house?
I am an engineer and also think it is safe, but it can't be in my backyard or within 100 miles of silicon valley. It is perfect safe, good for the environment and produce a lot less CO2 - in Japan.I support nuclear as An energy source but it really seems like we are doing it wrong at the moment - it costs too much, seems like we are, or have been using reactor designs that we probably shouldn't (ie they have meltdown risk in disasters vs other newer designs).
However it speaks volumes about the changed political environment, and our environmental sensitivity these days, that a response to Japan's tsunami and nuclear shutdown was also the shutdown of German reactors and fast-tracked plans to transition away from nuclear from them and other countries.
One is the safety of radiation. This is a medical question. It can be tested in the laboratory, but we have enough "field experience" with it by now to know that it is indeed Very Bad News(tm) in high doses.
The second is the safety of nuclear power. This has many factors including the first issue and also including things such as evacuation response. Our ability to recognize threats (such as plainly unsafe radiation) and react effectively and rapidly is itself a reason that nuclear power is safe.
Properly regulated nuclear power is safer than nuclear power that is not. Sort of like how cardiac arrest in Seattle is safer than it is in Detroit, since the EMS response time is about 1/3rd the time.
The reason the world continues to pollute more than necessary for the energy we desire has much more to do with the irrationality of people than the physics of energy production.
Having said that, in the mid-term I'm also pro-nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is one of the greenest, least polluting energy sources right now. It's the only technology that emits zero CO2 and can be used as baseload. All other technologies, be it CCGT/natural gas, fuel cells using natural or bio gas, coal powered plants, etc. produce CO2 and other GHG. As much as I wish the world run entirely on wind, water and sunlight, we are very far from this happening. Nonetheless I think it will be possible.
The main issue with renewable energy right now is its production volatility: the wind blowing, the sun shinning, dams to 100% capacity, etc. The need for a stable, non-CO2 emitting, energy production is nuclear. No doubt doubt about it.
When you negatively say > billions spent decommissioning nuclear reactors around the planet
implying that the cost of decommissioning is a big downside, let me clarify a few things:
1. decommissioning (from cleaning to storage) costs are priced in the energy cost, still making it far cheaper than oil and gas sources even without CCS technologies.
2. the cost of decommissioning is provisioned by the company running the plant, meaning that decommissioning is no extraordinary cost to the operator/consumer/citizen.
3. today's nuclear technology is nowhere as archaic as it was in the 70's/80's, when many errors were made trying out different technologies. Many people make the mistake of brining up the case of Chernobyl, but people are unaware that this plant was an R&D plant, built for the production of nuclear weapons, and not built for energy production.
4. the environmental impact of running nuclear plants today is extremely small (if not insignificant) compared to running the same energy capacity and production on fossil fuels, where CO2 and other harmful gasses are causing increase in temperatures, melting of icecaps, decimating thousands of species, and the list goes on.
I do agree that with you on
>The reason the world continues to pollute more than necessary for the energy we desire has much more to do with the irrationality of people than the physics of energy production.
There is plenty of educating still to be done on energy, its consumption and user behaviour, and I hope the anti-nuclear sentiment focuses more on the bigger picture, rather than blaming nuclear for the sake of sounding environmentally friendly.
It's a unique feature, so don't feel bad if it takes a while to get used to.
The post to which I replied has been edited. Where it now says "I do agree" it used to say "However, I disagree with you on..." or something similar, and also in other places.
Probably people and companies who decided to invest billions in nuclear plants did some cost-benefit analysis.
Go to one and watch the endless trains of coal arriving constantly to power the thing, then come back and rethink what you just posted.
My interpretation was that he was bemoaning the political backlash that lead to shutting down nuclear power in various countries, with the related financial cost and environmental cost due to the increase in coal and gas power generation that was required to make up the gap. All because of an incident that hasn't killed anybody.
What a pro-nuclear disinformation article! That's a shame but so classic of general disinformation on this subject. Costs, dangers, reality of contamination, waste dangers, ... just listen to real independent scientists and concerned actors. The writer and its commissioners don't live in contaminated areas, and they probably don't care about future of these populations. Listen to real people there, for example search for "Women of Fukushima" videos : www.women-of-fukushima.com
A few simple facts : 27 years after Tchernobyl, 3 children out of 4 are ill in Bielarus. 2 years after Fukushima, twelve children of Fukushima have confirmed thyroid cancer et 15 are suspected.
Shame!
I would offer the journalist, all-expenses paid including food (and fed by fish caught in the general area), internet, housing, to live within 10km of the plant, for 1 year with his wife and children.
Would he take me up on the offer?
BTW, articles like this seem to show that long-term effects can be expected: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130429/srep01742/full/srep01...
Wait, "if author says so", since he doesn't provide any source other than "aristoteles dixit".
It reminds me tchernobyl fallout, here in France, when government said there were no impact on our territory, before being proven wrong (and lying) almost 20 years later : http://www.expatica.com/fr/news/local_news/france-hid-info-o...
6 (?) workers died. Maybe not from poisoning or ionization but from something else caused by the accident. What exactly happened with the "Fukushima 50" is also unclear.
Obviously people are smart enough to carry Dosimeters and to protect themselves from radiation as appropriate and possible.
But please, saying that "nobody died/got killed (yet) from radiation => nobody died/got killed => nobody died because of Nuclear accident" is just naive. The people died because even after the power plant became unusuable, they needed to manage radiation and spreading of nuclear material. You don't exactly have that problem when dealing with non-nuclear plants. Most of the times can just run and wait. In case of a nuclear plant you need to stay on site or else...
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-04-03/study-almost...
None sick, because the increase in cancer that even the article mentions means nothing.
The thyroid cancer rate of Fukushima children is 79 times higher than usual. But "none sick". Yeah, whatever.
>Researchers at Fukushima Medical University, which has been taking the leading role in the study, have so far said they do not believe that the most recent cases are related to the nuclear crisis.