What always irritates me about the apologists of nuclear power is the claim that it’s a choice between nuclear, fossil or no power at all. This might be true today, but just forever repeating that claim doesn’t help the development of renewable energies, which could become a viable substitute within decades.
With nuclear power, you will have terrible accidents and produce waste that stays extremely hazardous several millennia into the future.
In other words, too late.
As opposed to all sorts of industrial waste like heavy metals that stays dangerous indefinitely? As opposed to CO2 which endangers civilization?
So we are being given cites from the likes of NIRS which openly admit to being against nuclear power. Gee…wonder what findings they will publish?
Try the following article. It is long, detailed and duly cites where the information was collected from (as in actual scientific reports). I will quote the conclusion here but read it for detailed information on Chernobyl deaths as well as other sources of radioactive contamination.
(bolding mine)
Bottom line is you are at FAR greater risk from other sources of radiation/pollution and coal burning power plants even when you include Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Exclusive: WANTED: U.S. workers for crippled Japan nuke plant
I wonder if healthcare coverage is included?
How is that an argument? No one but the most hard-core opponents wants to shut down all reactors immediately, but we need to look into alternatives now and acknowledge that nuclear power is dangerous, not only for today and our children’s children, but tens of thousands of years down the line.
Again, not seeing the argument - saying that something else is just as bad (which is arguable) doesn’t mean that there aren’t alternatives. We have a chance of a life without being dependent on fossil and nuclear fuels - let’s research the hell out of it so we can leave those bridge technologies behind sooner rather than later.
The world’s largest concrete pump will head to Japan
…“Our understanding is, they are preparing to go to next phase and it will require a lot of concrete,” Ashmore said, noting that the 70-meter pump can move 210 cubic yards of concrete per hour.
Currently we do not have a chance of a life not dependent on coal or nuclear. Hydro/geothermal/wind/solar simply cannot provide the world’s energy needs (currently or in the future). They all have major drawbacks. Any one of those might be a good solution in some very specific cases and they absolutely should be part of the mix.
Barring some not-yet-invented tech changing that analysis we are stuck with fossil fuels or nuclear to provide the lion’s share of power generation. Fossil fuels will only get us another 50 years or so (coal a 100 years or more but do you want India whose population increased over 100 million in the last decade alone and China building dozens more of those things and run them for a hundred years?).
As I noted above even with the nuclear accidents that have happened nuclear is far safer than coal.
Back when we were inventing nuclear bombs, a couple of guys checked out from getting careless with the plutonium cores. I assume some lessons were learned from that, because 50 years on it has not happened again. It doesn’t make sense to pretend there is no learning curve for making processes safer.
The question that should be asked when we make decisions about developing new nuclear power plants is, “How safe can they be?”. It’s not “How safe are existing ones?” or “How safe were the ones the Commies built?”. Chernobyl did not even have a decent containment structure. That’s not a condemnation of “nuclear power.” It’s a condemnation of Communism (as mentioned above).
We’re headed toward 9 billion people within a few decades, all wanting to be Comfortable. The demand for power is not going to diminish. Lead time for building a nuclear power facility is closer to 20 years than 2 years.
Fukushima was commissioned 40 years ago. Making a decision about whether or not nuclear power is “safe” based a freak accident for a 40-year old plant seems a bit short-sighted.
I think I’m going to let the dope it out and commit to a given poison. When the concrete over Fukushima finishes curing and the net result of a freak quake/tsunami combination on a half-century old design is little more than a new concrete graveyard, I think it will be time to look at uranium mining stocks again. Unfortunately, it looks to me like AGW is crapping out (if not in fact, at least from the front pages) so maybe I better look at those coal mining stocks harder instead.
s/b “let the public dope it out”
As others mentioned - IRL it has been a long time between nuke accidents of even similar scale, and Rosen was using the “official” numbers he had at the time, so the last-line question in the OP is kind of meaningless. Of course a full Chernobyl a year - either version thereof - would not be a good thing. * But that is not what is faced by real-world application of modern nuclear powerplant technology.* More worrisome if anything is how it seems there was much complacency about contingency provisions at Fukushima(*) and we do not know if that’s a freak thing or widespread. But THAT can be corrected.
(*Where the cause of the failure is not intrinsic to nuclear power itself, but from a vulnerability of support systems. Had there been spare backup generators 10 feet above the tsunami line and a secure compatible power connection, none of us would even have heard of the Fukushima powerplant)
I see you implicitly corrected it later, but that was confusing as heck. In English written style “The UK” stands for a country other than Ukraine (who BTW do not wish the nation’s name styled with “the”).
This guy’s like his own self-contained version of that scene in “Spies Like Us”. 
Anyway, here’s the thing- if not for the superior Western style of reactor design vs. that of Chernobyl, the Fukushima situation would be considerably worse than Chernobyl.
Chernobyl was one reactor having a meltdown and fire. Fukushima is at least three reactors partially meltedown, and another that’s struggling.
Considering the extraordinary nature of the disaster, and the rather mild consequences so far, I’d tentatively call this a win for nuclear energy.
Also, another thing to consider is that like everything else, the tsunami/earthquake and the aftermath is a learning experience for the industry. I’d bet you money that there are things being proven that were simply theoretical in February. And beyond that, the industry knows where improvements may need to be made, and has a better understanding of how these sorts of accidents progress. Even if we don’t build more nuclear plants, the ability to better handle problems at the existing ones has got to be the silver lining in this cloud.
Actually I think their counting is even worse than that. The quote is
He then goes on to say that the cancer rate was 3 times higher than normal. There is no way that the deaths counted here are just from cancer deaths. From this I take it to mean that the 500,000 includes all deaths from all causes. A person getting hit by a bus counts as a death for a Chernobyl exposed person. From that point of view, FDR’s new deal cost the lives of around 100 million because since almost all who were exposed to it are now dead.
From a statistical point of view, this is not actually a bad way to count deaths, but you should then compare it to a similar unexposed population to find the deaths that are likely accountable just to the Chernobyl effect. my understanding is that Russian and Ukraine have among the lowest life expectancies in all of Europe, so I doubt that that 25% mortality in 25 years is all particularly high.
Everything is dangerous. Nuclear is simply the least dangerous method we have that can do the job. And our “children’s children” won’t thank you for condemning them to live in the ruins of a collapsed civilization just so you can indulge your fantasies about alternative energy. It isn’t up to the job.
No; the fact that there aren’t viable alternatives at present is what means there aren’t alternatives; not now, at least and we live in the present, not some hypothetical future. And it is entirely possible that we will never not be dependent on nuclear at least - you presume that the research will actually be fruitful.
ZOMG, I never thought about that. All that wood and brick and steel that goes into homes - Those molecules will be there for millennia! Run!
Wonder what the OP thinks of that article. 
Probably that Cecil has also sold out to the nuclear industry…
-XT
There are 1,280 Superfund sites (areas that require intensive hazardous material cleanup) in the United States alone (places like old Soviet era countries have much worse although not sure what, if anything, they do about them).
These are places that are contaminated and dangerous to humans. Most of it stems from industry.
Read up on Love Canal which prompted the Superfund program.
Talk to the people of Bhopal, India and ask them about the wonders of living next to an industrial site.
See, when business pollutes, we get testy with them, let them declare bankruptcy, and then make the taxpayers clean it up, and then tell everybody not to do that again.
Business being business, they find new ways to pollute so we gotta keep on 'em. Fact of life.
Ignoring pollution because the other kids pollute is a very childish way of looking at pollution.
You mean like the way you are pretending that the theoretical danger from an impossible wave of nuclear disasters that aren’t going to happen is more of a problem than actual pollution?
And then trying to twist things around so that it sounds like you are a big supporter of polluting industries. I mean, everyone knows what a staunch supporter of polluting big businesses you are, Der.
levdrakon, as with others in the anti-nuclear corner in these various debates, simply wants to focus on the more sensational numbers out of any sort of context. In his case, however, he also wants to use deceptive or outright fabricated cites (such as the one linked in the OP) to make things seem even scarier. Looked at in the context of the old Soviet Union, however, even the ridiculous 500,000 deaths (in total) from Chernobyl over the past 2 decades would be spit in the wind compared to the deaths due to the OTHER environmental horrors that happened in the old Soviet Union…things that continue to affect the citizens of Russia today.
-XT