Looks to me like most of that long quote can be summarized as “The French drive cars that burn oil, and import their uranium from Canada and Australia.” I’m not quite sure how that’s an argument against nuclear power plants.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear power are two entirely different things.
Not only was that nuclear weapons focused, but it was also before the risks and how to mitigate were understood in any real way.
If this is supposed to be a current argument, it’s sad.
Yes, which is why, as a world leader in nuclear power, the US is encouraging Iran to enrich uranium because it’s entirely different from weapons uranium enrichment.
This is rather a total failure in sarcasm, as of course of course weapons enrichment is in fact rather different than commercial enrichment, and there are all the signs the Iranians have a military focused, and not a genuinely civilian focused programme.
Of course there are always cross-overs.
http://www.truthout.org/040209O Because you have not heard that people died from 3 mile island incident, does not make it so. I have read several sources like this one. You will not find these stories on mainstream “news”.
Who said I was arguing? I’m in favor of nuclear power, I was just being pedantic.
You know, there are too many humans anyway. Killing off a few with some nuclear accidents might not be the worst thing ever.
Really? That article is mostly unreadable and his point evades me.
Whatever one’s position on nuclear power, neither the heavily invested source nor the conspiratorial tone of that article fill me with great confidence.
As is obvious, merely trawling for examples of illnesses that could be caused by radiation doesn’t prove much because things like birth defects and cancer happen all the time without the need to resort to radiation from TMI as a cause. Nor does citing civil settlements in a legal and cultural environment which would make it practically impossible for the power plant to win, no matter what the merits of their case. The proof requires subtle and complex statistical analysis which the article linked did not come close to providing.
At a guess, the answer is ‘no’, at least if you are talking about the US. Look at gonzo. Yeah, he’s a crazy idiot, but he represents thousands (hell, probably millions) of deluded assholes who have been deluged with anti-nuclear propaganda for decades. You are simply not going to change that kind of inertia in a couple of years (if ever). Hell, many environmentalist groups out there that are the most vocal about Global Warming are ALSO anti-nuclear, so the propaganda continues. And these guys (presumably) realize the deeper issues here, understand that the magic pony wind and solar tech isn’t ready to seriously scale up to meet the current demand and replace coal or oil, and in spite of that they are STILL anti-nuclear.
Well, that’s the crux, innate? People are horrible about risk assessment. They have been told for decades that nuclear power plants in their areas would be the apocalypse, or a waste holding plant in their state would create a wasteland. They aren’t concerned about things like facts, don’t want to hear about probabilities or risk assessment…they only understand fear. And since they have been taught to fear nuclear, while not being taught to fear other forms of power generation (which are much more risky), they tend to be against what they fear. It’s like people who are afraid of flying but who blithely drive about with no seat belts on, or who are afraid of dying from some exotic virus while downing that 3rd cheeseburger, diet coke and trough sized fries and then having a smoke before going back to the office. They fear the sooper sekrit deaths from TMI (that the ‘mainstream’ has suppressed, while the bloggers really know) while ignoring the REAL deaths due to coal mining and processing (let alone respiratory deaths and other deaths directly and indirectly related to coal usage) per year.
Simply put, you are just not going to shift people rapidly on this issue. It’s going to take a lot of time, a lot of patience, and the dawning realization that the other alternatives, cool as they are, simply aren’t up to the challenge of providing the same levels of energy we NEED that coal and oil are…and that nuclear could be. Until you can somehow counter act decades of propaganda and until you can get the larger and more influential eco groups to come out forcefully and publicly for clean CO2-free energy it’s simply not going to happen in the US.
-XT
I’ll pretend for a moment that that crap piece of fiction is real news*. As far as I can tell it doesn’t mention how many people died because that would require, you know, facts, so we’ll have to guess. How many people does that article insinuate died? 20? 30? The WV coal mine explosion killed 29, the current disaster off Texas killed 11 (I think). That just this year alone and you’re going to compare it to the WORST nuclear disaster in the US and say nukes are worse?
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- lets all have a laugh at what the article is proposing: the if-it-bleeds-it-leads media, which can pay to hover a helicopter over Tiger Woods’ house in the hopes of getting footage of his wife wielding a club, can’t bother to report on the shocking deaths caused by TMI.
Forget it Deeg. I’ve seen these threads a lot in the past, and when it comes to Nuke Power, gonzomax is a troll, who will drive by post nonsense and anti-nuke agitprop, but will not actually stay and make an actual effort to discuss the issue.
First off, I’m ashamed of those who 1) haven’t seen the 500 times on this message board prior where I’ve posted about the small amount of electrical power provided by oil in the United States (at one point, I threatened to climb a clock tower over it…) and 2) couldn’t search to find it.
Second, to give the same response I gave this weekend to my 90 year old grandmother who is still sharp as a tack (go grandma!) and whose father was wildcatting oil wells in the 1800’s (incredible…), what’s really newsworthy about coal mining and oil development is that it doesn’t kill more people in the United States than it currently does. Especially with respect to coal - speaking as the only person on this message board with professional experience working at both underground and surface coal mines in the US and other countries, we should be thankful that deaths in the scores don’t happen monthly, like, oh, in China.
That’s not an excuse of coal or oil; on the contrary, I’m saying that dead miners and drillers are part of the unfortunate cost of doing business in the industry, and I have a difficult time seeing how the numbers will drop appreciably unless 1) there is a major change in the ratio of surface/underground mines (surface mines are safer, but make environmentalists cry more than underground mines), or 2) we reduce dramatically consumption of primary energy.
I’m not sure why people are comparing coal mining and oil drilling to nuke plant operation. Seems like apples and lemons. Uranium mining is just as dangerous as any other form of mining, maybe more so if you follow the further reading links.
It’s also silly to brag about how safe it is to work at a nuke plant and then cry about how expensive all those pesky safety regulations make it. Duh. Remove the safety regulations until the price comes down, and let’s compare safety and accident records 40 years and 100 nuke plants from now.
That’s just in the US. Let’s not forget George Bush invaded and occupied Iraq over yellowcake. Never mind everyone who should have known, did know Iraq already legitimately possessed 550 metric tons of well-documented yellowcake and also knew the Nigerian yellowcake sale was a forgery. What’s the current death toll and financial cost of Iraq?
If nuke power is some global warming panacea, what’s going to happen when everybody is buying and/or mining and enriching their own yellowcake? And yeah, I know yellowcake is actually pretty benign stuff, but Bush did use yellowcake hysteria to go to war. Eco-fascist hippies had nothing to do with that.
Personally, I think nuke power is one part of the short-term global warming solution, and we should build some plants and keep the nuke power option, but this “all in at any cost” bullshit pisses me off.
I thought we went to war over oil? I can never keep the rotation of reasons straight.
Who said anything about “all in at any cost”? If there’s something safer and cleaner than nuclear power then I’m all for it. I’m railing against those who are afraid of the “dangers” of nuclear power when it’s demonstrably better than what we’re currently doing. The cost is less.
This is not really an apt comparison, considering that the energy density of mined uranium is approximately 18,500 times greater by mass than that of bituminous coal. In other words, you have to mine 18,500 times more bituminous coal than uranium to get an equivalent amount of energy.
And with the use of breeder reactors, you can actually create more fuel than you use.
Not to mention that there’s enough fuel in decommissioned nuclear weapons to fulfill a full year’s worth of the worldwide demand for mined uranium, in a true “swords to plowshares” arrangement. Cite.
It’s not the safety regulations that make nuclear power plants expensive. It’s the obstructionism, litigation, and drawn-out permitting requirements that make them expensive.
The U.S. Navy has just as strict or stricter safety requirements than does the civilian power industry. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take decades to get a new reactor plant built. Indeed, a new nuclear-powered ship or submarine is built just about every year.
Great, now I’m hungry for cake. 
P.S. To actually quantify this, from the same cite listed above, the energy density of natural, mined uranium in a fast breeder reactor is about 3.6 million times greater by mass than that of bituminous coal.
And how many people died in the early days of researching steam engines when boilers or cylinders exploded? For that matter, how many people are killed each year now in steam plant injuries?