NIRS is an anti-nuclear activist group, so I think we can safely conclude that they’re not exactly an objective source.
The IAEA’s mandate is to promote safety and to promote nuclear power. It’s not in their interests to remind people 40% of Europe is contaminated with Chernobyl and that some of the more contaminated areas weren’t even inside the then Soviet Bloc. You can’t promote nuclear power and spotlight widespread contamination, cancer and death because of nuclear power.
After Bhopal, was it corporate HQ that revealed the real events, or was it biased investigative busy-bodies? It’s an obvious fallacy to claim anyone reporting corporate or government or church malfeasance is biased and therefore must be discredited.
One in a billion years? That’s just ridiculous. We’ve had nuclear reactors for 70 years, and there’s been on Chernobyl and one Fukushima. Yes, Chernobyl was the result of a botched safety test possible only under Soviet-style management, and Fukushima was the result of a massive earthquake followed by a devastating tsunami. But horrible industrial management and design isn’t exactly unknown. And natural disasters aren’t unknown either.
And so the real rate isn’t one severe accident in a billion years, it is one severe accident every 35 years. That’s a pretty large difference. And you can’t dismiss the nuclear accidents that actually occured as anomalies that can’t be repeated, since every nuclear accident is going to be an anomoly that is unlikely to be repeated. There have been hundreds of nuclear reactors where nothing went wrong. That’s normal operation. Then there’s Chernobyl and Fukushima, where things went wrong, and you can’t dismiss those as unrepeatable unless you can guarantee that there will be no more severe earthquakes, tsunamis, asteroid strikes, hurricanes, wars, terrorism, or criminally incompentent industrial mismanagement.
We know for a fact that earthquakes will happen in the future. Likewise wars. Likewise incompentent management. Therefore, we know for a fact that we’ll have nuclear accidents in the future. And that won’t be once every billion years.
Of course, when you compare the radiation exposure from Fukushima to radiation we’re exposed to in our daily lives from things airport x-ray scanners and background radiation, the risk is pretty small. We get risk by multiplying severity by probability. Things that have severe consequences and are likely to happen are very risky. Things that have severe consequences but are unlikely to happen are less risky, as are things with mild consequences that are likely to happen. But when you get your estimate of frequency off by a factor of more than 10 million, well, that’s a pretty severe misestimate of risk. We’ve had more than one severe nuclear accident in the less than 100 years of nuclear power, which is 10,000,000 times less than a billion years.
Can we cut out the crappy ad hominem attacks please? “The IAEA is in the pocket of the nuclear industry.” “NIRS is anti-nuke.” If there are attacks to make on the assorted reports, make them and stop throwing around rhetorical junk.
They may not be objective, but their number is still an order of magnitude lower than the 500,000 deaths statistic in the thread title. My guess is that it is somewhere between the 4,000 deaths figure from the IAEA and the 60,000 deaths upper limit in TORCH, but it’s only a guess I have no intention of backing up.
The health risk from nuclear energy is probably comparable to health risk from coal. The big problem perception of risk from nuclear power is that nuclear risk is a small chance of a very bad thing happening; whereas, coal is a very high chance of a minor bad thing happening (pollution - I’ll leave mining out as I believe pollution is by far the greater health risk). Coal plants are killing people every year from particulates, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and other emissions, but it’s essentially a baseline mortality at this point. Nobody gets alarmed.
Nor should they be alarmed. Pollution is killing people, but it’s also making people live longer through abundant food, refrigeration, medical science.
I can’t get excited when a person says that an incident will cause one more incident of cancer in a million. The damn dirt causes that much cancer risk from naturally occurring arsenic concentrations. If you’re in a major metropolitan area, the air you’re breathing is probably ten times worse. That doesn’t mean we give up on reducing pollution. It means we try and reduce it where feasible.
As far as dreaded heavy metals from wind or solar power are concerned, the risks are manageable and probably less than coal. Sure, they’ll be around literally forever (barring a nuclear reaction), but they’ve been around forever too. We’re not going to eliminate the risk by never using them. As I mentioned, the arsenic in the soil is high enough many places to cause increased cancer risk. In a printed circuit board or other component of a turbine, metals are well contained. We need to pay attention to the end-of-life treatment, but that can be managed too. We haven’t always done a good job of the end-of-life management in the past (which is why I have a job evaluating what needs to be cleaned up), but it’s doable.
Fukushima is expensive, but simply not that big a deal in terms of safety except that many people go nuts when the word “nuclear” is used. And it is physically impossible for most plants to do what Chernobyl did.
Don’t be silly; the reliability and bias of an organization is important. And the anti-nuclear movement has a history of distortions and outright lies. Why should we trust the word of such people?
No, coal is much worse, and threatens civilization in general. Nuclear energy has no world-threatening side effects to equal global warming.
Let’s do a comparison with another disaster in the energy field: In 1975 a typhoon caused 62 dams to fail in China, killing as many as 200,000 people and destroying the homes of 18 million people.
Is this an indictment of dams? Should they all be dismantled?
Others have all ready mentioned the implicit deaths from coal and other fossil fuels.
What else do we have? Wind? Solar? Leaving aside the fact that those energy sources can never make up our entire power needs, both of them have per-megawatt death tolls that are quite high. Wind turbines are up on tall towers, which means maintenance is dangerous. High winds have caused turbine towers to collapse, endangering anyone around them. Turbine blade failure can cause a blade weighing hundreds of pounds to fly as far as a quarter of a mile.
Solar power is also dangerous, as it is often mounted on rooftops. Falls are the second-leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. Putting solar panels on millions of roofs would cause thousands of deaths per year as people cleaned snow and leaves off the panels by climbing up on the roofs of their houses.
This is not an indictment of either wind or solar - it’s a recognition that energy production is never completely safe. Anti-nuclear types constantly hold nuclear to a safety and environmental standards they do not demand from other power sources. They hype any nuclear incident way beyond reality, and completely ignore the dangers of the alternatives.
Could you cite, well… the whole thing? Assuming you weren’t kidding. If you were being ironic or something - not bad!
As for deaths from the other sources, here’s a reasonable analysis: Per TWh deaths from various energy sources.
Japan’s evacuees wait for all-clear.
That’s a nice BBC video report talking about the nuclear evacuees. Most of their homes weren’t damaged by the earthquake or tsunami, yet they’re still sitting in shelters. They don’t know if it will be weeks or months before they’ll be allowed to return. They are concerned they will never be allowed to return. That’s not an unprecedented fear, as the Chernobyl evacuees were never allowed to return to their homes either. They feel Tepco and the government should be more honest with them, and don’t feel being bowed to as an apology is in any way sufficient.
So…you’ve changed things from talking about Chernobyl and the supposed 500,000 deaths to talking about approx. 30k evacuees who might not be able to go home for weeks, months or worst case ever. Within the 20 km evacuation zone.
While that’s certainly a bad thing, there are over 250,000 Japanese living in such temporary refugee camps right now…and they will probably be there for weeks, months or, in some cases, they may never go back to their homes, since their homes don’t exist anymore…they are just driftwood or wreckage that has to be cleaned up and moved out. There are people who never were able to go back to New Orleans after Katrina.
Personally, I’ll be surprised based on what I’ve read if those people aren’t allowed to ever go back to their homes. Most of the readings the IAEA is reporting are higher than the legal limits for various types of contamination, but the scary 4000 TIMES!!! or 10000 TIMES!! or MILLIONS OF TIMES!! readings were coming from under the plant, and last update I saw they had cleared out some or all of the water from the tunnels and were continuing to pump out the basements of the plants. The only factor there was finding storage for the contaminated water, and there was talk of moving in tankers to do just that. Once the majority of the contaminated water is cleaned up I expect the radiation levels to fade (note, I didn’t say go away completely or disappear). When that happens I’m guessing people will be allowed to go back to their houses for longer and longer periods (I understand that some have already been allowed back for limited and supervised visits to get stuff, though I don’t know if that includes the ones within the 12 mile radius).
-XT
Holy shit that is a lot of concrete @_@
Well, we need to get the damned entitlement whores here in the US to understand they don’t need the 5000 square foot Mcmansions for 2 or 3 people, the huge swimming pools, the 1 TV in every room and every light in the house on all the time. We need to get industry to turn the fucking lights off when nobody is in the office, we need to get biofuels instead of petro based fuels. Rechargable batteries for the small stuff [ipods and ereaders] that can be easily recharged with a small solar panel. Perhaps more people into the high efficiency off grid microhomes - simplify, simplify! Heck, I have spent a fair amount of the last 2 years scanning in my paperback book collection so I don’t need to lug them around any further. My goal is to scan in all except for about 250 books, generally ones of sentimental value [like my grandmother’s original Raggedy Anne and Uncle Wiggly books …] Maybe the developing countries that are having a population and financial boom should also be concerned about not emulating the ultimate american luxury lifestyle.
And? We have had the EPA riding herd on us Americans about our industrial waste disposal, and OSHA for safety. We are using the superfund to clean sites up as money becomes available. We are taking steps to stop industrial pollution. Talk to China and other developing nations about pollution.
And can we finally figure out that people are not dying young from the old diseases any longer, and are surviving long enough to die of cancer and heart attacks? Stuff that can be genetically influenced.
Heck, I managed to survive measels, chicken pox, whooping cough and I did have cancer … maybe I am one of the cancer statistics that 100 years ago would have died from whooping cough. Should I be horrified at the cancer or grateful for modern medicine?
Teaching people to live a more energy efficient lifestyle is great.
It won’t make a big difference though in global energy needs. Particularly when oil runs out in 50 years or so and we need an electric/hydrogen economy.
The point I was making was industry pollutes. It is a fact of modern life. People are trying to hold out the nuclear industry as somehow unique.
It isn’t.
I don’t understand your reasoning. Nuclear evacuees are less important than tsunami evacuees? That’s a weird position to take.
Tsunami survivors, even if their homes were destroyed, can go back and rebuild. People are already returning to tsunami areas and doing that.
evacuees turned away from shelters
Now Fukushima evacuees are being ostracized like lepers? That’s messed up.
Are tsunami evacuees treated that way?
BTW, where do you get your 30K number from?
In damaged nuclear plant’s shadow, mayor pleads for food, fuel
I’m not trying to be a doom & gloom-monger, my point is all this suffering should be included when considering the cost benefit of nuclear power. We’re trying to make coal cleaner, but the dangers of coal are spread out among 7 billion people. Nuclear power concentrates too much dangerous material in one place, and when it fails, it can fail spectacularly.
I read today it was three years before Three Mile Island even got to the core. How long is Fukushima going to take to clean up? the risks of nuclear power just aren’t worth it considering there are proven alternatives. If building fewer nukes actually did result in rolling blackouts, and it won’t, I’d prefer humanity get used to that, rather than get used to Chernobyls and Fukushimas. It just isn’t worth it.
Back to the thread topic. No nuclear is not as safe as proponents claim. They have claimed it was a clean and safe fuel. we were all taught that. But evidence has shown it is a dangerous method of boiling water.
The Japanese are proving once again that when things go wrong with nuclear plants ,it is a major disaster. But things go wrong with them on a continuing business. They are endlessly leaking and getting shut down while the management covers up.
Nuke is just too dangerous to allow private companies to make profit off of it. If they can make money ,they will cut corners, fight regulation, chop employees and generally sacrifice safety, in order to increase profits. The conflict between safety and cutting costs ,guarantees there will be trouble.
Do me a favor.
I want YOU to explicitly point out the dangers of boiling water for industrial power generation.
You and others have been provided with cite upon cite that the least deadly way to do it is via nuclear power. Even with your worst case scenarios taken as given it is safer. Consider CO2 and global warming. Consider India and China which are ramping up power generation needs spewing yet more CO2 into the air (CO2 from power plants it THE primary source of CO2 emissions today).
We have shown, repeatedly, that hydro/geothermal/solar/wind can come nowhere close to meeting global or national energy needs.
We have shown, repeatedly (in this or other recent threads you have participated in) that nuclear power is far, far below the lethalness of other power generating technologies.
This has been pointed out to you repeatedly.
I can only guess you have a phobic reaction to nuclear power that overwhelms your intellect.
Nothing else makes sense as to why you keep repeating the same bogus crap over and over.
It is not supported by any (scientific) evidence.
I would like you to cite how many human lives have been saved with the assistance of electricity since its commercial widespread introduction, starting around the 1880s. Since coal produces the vast majority of the world’s electricity, it’s safe to say essentially all those lives saved are thanks to coal.
Now tell me how many lives world-wide have been saved thanks to the electricity provided by nuke.
Keep in mind nuke only contributes around 6 or 7% of the world’s energy.
What you’re saying doesn’t make sense.
If electricity saves lives, then the safest form of electricity is the best to use. Saying coal has saved tons of lives because it has been in use longer and thus is safer isn’t coherent.
Am I understanding what you are saying?
You’re obfuscating. The anti-renewable crowd hinges its entire argument on the fact that coal supposedly kills more people than nuke.
I demand a fair comparison, so I want to know how many lives have been saved by coal electricity vs how many have been saved via nuke electricity.
Fair is fair.
Nuke technology wouldn’t even exist without coal electricity. Neither would modern transportation and gas stations, nevermind modern science, technology (computers, internet) and medicine.
Coal electricity saves lives during emergencies. Nuke, as demonstrated by Fukushima, shuts down at the merest suggestion of an emergency, and results in hospitals and patients being abandoned, while consuming huge amounts of fossil fuel energy just to keep it from not melting down any more than it already has, and rendering many thousands of square miles uninhabitable.
It would be, if that were the one I was taking. My position was to point out that YOUR position that nuclear evacuees are MORE important is bullshit. And your constant efforts to focus on JUST the nuclear evacuees instead of looking at the big picture…the one where there are hundreds of thousands of OTHER evacuees living in tent cities and wondering when they will get to go home…is distasteful and self serving. I’m sorry if the facts inconvenience you.
Really? How many? How many are returning to those areas permanently, and how many are just being allowed back in to look for their stuff? Are you saying that many are? A majority? All? Do you have a cite?
It is in those cases, but what has that got to do with what we were discussing? Try and focus. Do you have a cite for your assertion so that we can get some sort of context as to who is going back, in what numbers and for what reasons?
Might have been an earlier report. I also read that the number evacuated for the rest of the disaster was 600k, not 250k, but I figured I’d go with the low end numbers in both cases, in either case it’s a lot of folks.
Yes, you ARE trying to be a doom & gloom-monger. You refuse to even discuss comparative risk because you know that comparatively speaking nuclear as a whole is less dangerous and costs less lives than other, comparable forms of electrical power generation. You want to focus solely on what the folks around that power plant (with 20 or 30 km) are going through (no deaths due to radiation, no reports of radiation sickness amongst the people living there) but don’t want to look at the bigger picture, and that this is merely ONE aspect of the greater disaster that struck Japan. Yeah, the people there might not be able to go back to there houses for weeks, months or maybe not ever (again, I think that’s unlikely, personally, but we’ll see)…and that’s bad. VERY bad. But the conditions that had to happen to make all this possible were not exactly normal or happen daily. Or yearly. A earthquake/tsunami combination of that scale last hit Japan, what? a thousand years ago? 1200? And even then, the plant survived half of that one-two punch without major issue…and the part it didn’t survive well it still didn’t fail catastrophically, and though it’s been and will continue to be a nasty cleanup, no lives have yet lost due to all this.
And build more coal plants, since that’s the reality, where the deaths can be spread out over more of the population…so we all take our chances at the death lottery game. It’s cool that there will be more deaths because then the tiny chances of there being a few will be averted, and it will all be worth it.
-XT