Much better to exhaust every ounce of potential out of safe, clean renewable sources first.
Moreover, even factoring in the risk of extremely outdated or outrageously unsafe by design reactors and the accidents that have occurred at them such as Fukushima and Chernobyl the overall damage caused by nuclear power plants is still far, far lower than that of coal, oil, or even hydropower. The Tohoku earthquake caused the failure of a dam which killed 4 people, more than have died due to the Fukushima disaster. Overall dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands, which is well above even the upper limits of early deaths due to cancer related to the Chernobyl accident. Meanwhile, the world health organization estimates that coal burning causes as much as a million excess deaths per year worldwide.
If CO2 emissions are truly an existential threat to humanity then we should be building nuclear plants like crazy. People who reject the idea of nuclear power but embrace the idea of man made climate change as a catastrophic threat to mankind are either incapable of sane risk assessment or do not truly believe their own claims.
Was Fukushima considered a safe design or not? Did the regulatory authorities consider it safe? Did TEPCO consider it safe?
The answer is yes, yes of course they did. If they thought the plant was too dangerous to operate, they would have shut it down or revoked its license. Ever since it was built, everyone involved has been insisting over and over that it was a safe design. It turns out that the regulators, manufacturers and operators were all wrong about that.
So, why exactly should we trust them when they say that a new plant design is safe?
How can nuclear power plant operators, manufacturers and regulators retain credibility when their previous statements have been proven so catastrophically wrong?
I personally don't think deaths due to nuclear power a big deal; my greater concern is that the costs for current nuclear reactors don't make any damn sense. Certainly the long term costs of remediating the Fukushima site are going to be enormous.
The answer is numbers. Statistically, traveling by air is extremely safe and instances of crashes, while existent, are very rare. Statistically, instances of people hurt by nuclear power failures are also very rare. Of course, since people have irrational fear of radiation (it is invisible, it could kill you and it could be everywhere, right under your bed! OMG OMG OMG!) and the press is happy to fan the flames on each occasion, each case of nuclear reactor failure gets attention incomparable with attention given to each case of lung cancer due to pollution or workers dying while extracting coal, gas or oil, or each case when you need to clean up a failure in any of the technological chain of the traditional power sources - excluding, maybe, oil spills, but even those get less panic press than radiation (OMG OMG OMG!).
The main cause of fears about nuclear power is, unfortunately, ignorance and innumeracy. The long term advantages of nuclear power vastly outnumber the costs of the dealing with very rare and exceptional failure events. Unfortunately, people are rarely rational when making political decisions, and this decision is very political.
However, I think you're misinterpreting the importance of the age of the Fukushima reactor design. Specifically the important point is that the extremely obsolete nature of that design means that its short-comings should have little to no bearing on the relative risk of building new nuclear power plants.
Additionally, even with all the problems of Fukushima, many of which are avoidable, it's worth pointing out that those problems did not occur spontaneously. Somehow we've apparently forgotten about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 40 meter high tsunami which killed over 15,000 people while also causing severe damage to the Fukushima reactors. These are not usual operating circumstances. Somehow we give a pass to other technologies that have failed and caused injury to humans after being impacted by extreme natural disasters yet nuclear power must stand on its own.
And yet even despite that and despite many many missteps in the response the Fukushima disaster has not pushed nuclear power into being less safe than any other base load power generation technology, even hydroelectric!
That's almost astounding, but it cuts to the deep failures that humans tend to make when they attempt to judge relative risk of extremely dissimilar things (like flying vs. driving, rock climbing vs. eating cheeseburgers, or nuclear power vs. coal).
That's fifty million deaths. Why 50 million? Because that's about how many excess deaths have been caused by coal power over the lifetime of nuclear power.
If Fukushima fails to cause 50 million deaths then the entire nuclear industry will be that much behind in the category of ending human lives. Are new buildouts of fission power plant capacity likely to cause enough deaths to even the balance scales between fission and coal? Extremely unlikely. Even if people build irresponsibly outdated designs like the Fukushima daichi plants or even criminally unsafe designs like the Chernobyl plants it's extraordinarily unlikely that the reduction in threat to human lives caused by being able to shut down coal plants will more than make up for the much smaller risk added due to operating nuclear plants.
Edit: a much fairer assessment of relative risk of coal vs. nuclear would delve into deaths and injuries per kw-h, and it would also compare modern first world coal or gas plants vs. modern first world nuclear plants. But that math has already been done and shows that nuclear power is overwhelmingly one of the safest methods of producing power that has ever been created by mankind. And that remains unchanged even if you factor in Chernobyl and Fukushima (which in many ways are equivalent to allowing Chinese unfiltered coal plants into the equation on the other side). And even if you imagine some speculatively high number of deaths, even as many as tens of thousands, as the potential impact of the Fukushima daichi disaster there is just no way that the track record of the fission power industry to date could fall below the level of any other major power source that could potentially serve as base load power for a large industrialized country. It would take multiple Fukushima disasters happening every few years for the fission power industry to finally become as hazardous as gas or coal.
Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420 000–7.04 million deaths and 80–240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces.
If that doesn't bother you, consider that the facts cited come from a "recent" report published in 1978.
And please skip the "but this one version now in the lab ..." speech.
I don't think that's true. Do you have anything to substantiate that claim?
In many countries, the nuclear power industry already gets a free ride on liability and special government loans that other industries don't get. How much more do we have to tilt the playing field to favor nuclear power before it is enough?
I know tech heads love Nuclear and love to go on about how safe it is in this day and age but it still leaves us with significant and dangerous waste which our great great great grand children will inherit.
That's the reality. If it were different it wouldn't require subsidies to encourage people to build solar or wind power, they would do so spontaneously.
Not in every case. BC Hydro powers BC and sells excess to US Markets.
Hydropower is for the most part great when it's available, but it's not available everywhere and it also doesn't come without significant environmental cost. It would not be a net benefit for the world if every country developed a crash program to become as dependent on hydropower as possible.
And many of them are quite expensive and need expensive resources like rare earths which also require significant energy to extract and produce.
And as far as I can see, it is driven by massive government investment and regulation. Which again makes one doubt the viability of the idea - if it were that good, why would it be impossible to find someone willing to invest in it without forcibly taking money from people and prohibiting them from making choices according to their preference?
[1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/power-pri...