Now look at this carefully, the amount of years coal has been operating is meaningless in any comparison. If you really wanted a fair comparison, using my made up numbers above over a century coal killed 10,000 people, 9900 of whom would have survived in a nuclear world.
Seriously, it’s kinda scary that you can see that your argument isn’t sound.
By definition you are correct.
So what? You want to keep coal to thank it for being there before we developed other technologies? Coal doesn’t care. It’s a rock.
This is completely laughable statement.
Do you want people to take you seriously?
Where do you live? I’m going to hit it with a 9.0 earthquake and flood it with a 10m wall of water moving faster than you can run. Then tell me how this is the merest suggestion of an emergency. That’s just pathetic dude.
The disaster-fighting energy is trivial compared to what the reactors produced. And how long is the “thousands of square miles” gonna be uninhabitable?
I’m not saying nuclear evacuees are more important, I’m saying all these people have been evacuated and lost their jobs and farming and dairy and beef and other livestock due to an anthropogenic failure of a nuclear power station. I’m not going to let you sweep all that suffering and economic loss under the tsunami carpet and then declare nuclear power plants are safer than tsunamis, which really makes no sense.
Before we move on, first tell me how many lives have been saved thanks to coal electricity vs. nuclear electricity.
My point is that normal people are being treated like lepers and refused housing in shelters and refused even basic medical care, and it’s because of nuclear power, not tsunamis. No one has been denied shelter or medical care because they might have had seawater on them at some point, unless that seawater is from the area around the Fukushima plant. Fishing has been banned, and I imagine swimming in that area is also banned.
It’s not just risk; it’s risk vs benefit. I have no problem declaring that coal isn’t good to breath. That’s a no-brainer. What are the benefits of coal? Modern civilization and millions, and probably billions of lives saved and/or significantly lengthened, and the quality of that lengthened life has improved astronomically.
What has nuke electricity done in comparison?
The average American lifespan in 1880 was 40.5. This is around the time of coal electricity’s introduction.
The current American life expectancy is 78.4. Not only has coal enabled us to essentially double our life spans, but I also want you to think about how many lives are saved by coal electricity, even today. Our modern technically and medically advanced society owes it all to coal-produced electricity.
You can say nuke has provided a little electricity, and so a certain number of lives have perhaps been saved thanks to nuke’s electricity contribution, but the sheer number of lives saved thanks to coal burning absolutely dwarfs the number of lives saved thanks to nuke electricity.
I don’t want to focus solely on them, I just don’t want you to imply they are irrelevant because a tsunami killed more. You can’t compare the two.
We can’t reasonably avoid earthquakes and tsunamis. They are acts of nature. We have complete control over where we put nuke plants, or whether we build them anywhere at all.
You can make buildings safer and develop early warning systems that allow many more people to survive a quake. That’s exactly what has happened in Japan. I already pointed out a much smaller earthquake killed 10% of the affected population in Haiti whereas in Japan, a much larger earthquake plus a major tsunami has killed a miraculously tiny number of the people affected. 0.1% or something?
Japan has done about the best it could be expected to do in terms of earthquake preparedness. It obviously has a long way to go before we can say a nuke plant is anywhere close as safe. The reality is, they can’t be made safe in an economical way. It can’t be done.
There were some coal plants knocked out by the disaster, but some of them are coming back online. Still more to go, but they will come back online. Fukushima is more than likely never coming back online, and it’s going to cost billions in clean up, and the lives of thousands of people right now around the Fukushima area are depending on good old fashioned reliable electricity to keep them alive. Don’t compare one nuke plant vs. an earthquake and tsunami. Compare the Fukushima plant with a coal plant with a similar power output. Compare it to wind. Not a single wind turbine failed as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. Large areas are now depending on wind, and the wind operators have been asked to boost capacity as much as possible. There was a small wind farm described as semi-offshore further south on the pacific coast. It never noticed those stupid tsunami waves passing under its feet. Of course, they didn’t get hit with the worst of the tsunami, but then neither did Fukushima.
We can build more coal plants and make them safer. We’re going to need coal for awhile and the US in particular has vast reserves of it. We are making it safer.
No one is saying let’s depend on coal forever. I’m sure as heck not saying that. In my estimation its far safer than nuke.
If you’re going to say coal plant workers die more than nuke plant operators fine, but that’s a disingenuous comparison. For one thing, there are far, far more coal plants in various states of safety.
It would be fair to compare one 40-year-old coal plant to a 40-year-old nuke plant but then let’s compare the immediate consequences when they both “blow up.” When they both blow up, it’s fair to compare evacuation zones and contamination zones and lengths of time that otherwise usable land is rendered uninhabitable. It’s fair to compare economic losses. It’s fair to compare the mental and emotional costs on nuclear disaster and coal plant disaster survivors.
I wish we were making coal safer. They have a staff of lobbyists and politicians fighting to keep from cleaning them up.
Even fracking is exempt from EPA regulations due to Cheney’s push.
They will never clean up in the interest of the environment. They never have, They fight every attempt to clean them up. That goes for all the big energy producers.
They do make some first rate commercials describing how much they love the environment though.
They might kick and fight a bit, but I think industry-wide, they realize they’re very likely to get carbon-taxed, and they are trying to get cleaner. They know solar, wind and renewables are a serious threat to them. You notice they never worried one bit nuclear would ever seriously compete with them, and they were right about that.
Now though, they can see with their own eyes, wind farms kicking their asses, affordably. We’ll probably see coal companies buying out wind farms, if we haven’t already.
Big oil and coal are both *very *interested in renewables, and they’ve pretty much already written off their nuclear losses.
Texas is the big oil state, and now it’s also the biggest wind power state. What does that tell you, in terms of which way the wind is blowing.
I’m not playing your “thought experiment.” I want real numbers of lives saved by coal power vs nuke power. If you can’t do that, you have no business spreading the fallacy about how nuke is safer than coal because more people die because of coal, but only when you control all the parameters of the comparison.
As I said that’s a completely insane standard. Because *more *lives would have been saved if we had nuclear for the amount of time we had coal.
Seriously, this is very, very basic logic and reasoning here. You need to compare how they work per unit of electricity produced. Extending the value to society of the electricity generated backwards in time for the* total existence of the technology* and its market-share isn’t something that will give an honest number to go by.
What possible advantage can be garnered (aside from artificially inflating coals numbers by comparing over a century to a few decades) from your method? Are your opinions really so unsupportable that you have to engage in this sort of inept number conflation to support them? This is *fighting *ignorance?
Never mind that the societal value of electricity isn’t even what you should measure, since they both generate electricity. You should measure how many deaths per unit of electricity.
Dude, you aren’t seeing this right. I know you aren’t a fool, are you seriously so emotionally off-kilter about this issue that you can’t understand this?
If you can compare death by coal to death by nuke, then I sure as hell can compare life by coal, vs. life by nuke. Cost benefit.
It’s that simple. Not logical, but simple. If you’re afraid of what my comparison will show, then you should probably back off your coal vs. nuke death toll standard.
It’s just one of the fallacies the pro-nuke side perpetuates over and over again.
Moving forward, coal will continue to get safer and cleaner. Wind, solar and other renewables will continue to chip away at coal’s share of the electricity pie.
Nuclear won’t do a thing but waste 100’s of billions of taxpayers money and we won’t see one single new nuke plant in 13 years.
It’s coal, natural gas and renewables for me. Nuke can go now. Buh-bye! Come back in 100 years when you’ve worked out the kinks. Sheesh, we’ve already given you 65 years. What the hell? Go away with your nuke scam.
No. Stop there. If you actually wanted to compare life by coal to life by nuke you’d need to compare the deaths per unit of electricity. And guess what? It’s way, way fucking better for nuclear.
So the only way you can get the numbers to play out the way you want them is to dishonestly include how much time and market penetration coal has. This is dishonest. It doesn’t generate a real number that can be compared.
Don’t you care if your argument is wrong? Doesn’t that bother you? Are you so afraid of reality that you’d rather have a delusional fantasy of what is true?
No. Stop. You need to understand this, given the same level of use coal causes more deaths and misery. This is a fact and you are running away from it hysterically.
Pretending that gibberish is logical doesn’t make it so. Your argument is incoherent. You are saying that a 747 is superior to a 787 because its flown more passengers. That’s not a rational sane argument.
Using words that sound debatey isn’t debating. You need to be able to understand why your argument is rubbish.
Sure. And nuclear will continue to increase market-share and combat global climate change.
Well it will also provide clean, economical energy and I assume continue driving you up the walls.
Depending on where you live, you could easily have some nuclear energy.
You have a lot of nerve calling nuclear a scam when you are advocating a completely misleading and delusional way of evaluating its safety.
Several studies found elevated cancer rates near Three Mile Island | Three Mile Island Alert There are lots of ways to distort claims of deaths at TMI. But rest assured big money energy gets a boost from so called studies that come up with the answers they want. There have been lots of conflicting studies.
To make it clear, big corporations can get experts to say whatever they want if they ply them with enough money. They have been doing that for years in every field.
There you go, controlling all the parameters of your comparison.
Saying “27,000 people die from coal every year” is the same thing as saying, “the result of coal burning air pollution shortens every American’s life by approximately 1 day.”
People don’t care. People care when a very human-built and human-operated nuke plant fails disastrously - and a percentage of them always will - resulting in thousands of square miles of previously occupied land being rendered uninhabitable and 100s of thousands of people being permanently evacuated from their homes, jobs, farms, and environmental cleanups that span over decades and 100s of billions of dollars, that nuke plant builders never acknowledge in their funding proposals, proposals that require the taxpayers to front them 80% of the cost of the plant with assurances they are immune from any future liability, while keeping all the profits. Guaranteed profits, btw. Utilities won’t buy a nuke plant if they can’t charge at least a set, high rate for the plant’s 50-year lifespan, regardless of what the energy market is doing. That’s like a cellphone company locking you into a $100/month plan for 50 years, and you have to keep paying it even though all your friends now have $30/month plans with regularly updated technology and no contracts.
Lets review who is listed on the report as funding the report.
I did typo Rebbecca Harms but I also posted a link to info about her.
This is the result I get when I Google Altner-Combecher-Foundation. Link. There ain’t shit there.
This is the result when Googling Hatzfeldt Foundation. Link. Unless I am missing something the HKH foundation you linked to and the Hatzfedlt foundation do not appear to be the same thing. (Sourcewatch is blocked at work)
And guess what, I really don’t give a shit about a theologian thinks when it comes to nuclear safety.
This report doesn’t pass the smell test.
It seems, after reading the rest of the posts in this thread that you refuse to understand comparative risk. These quotes:
The “lives saved” argument is bogus and intentionally misleading.
Electricity is electricity (it is fungible…a kilowatt is a kilowatt is a kilowatt no matter how it was generated). Electricity from coal will save a life as readily as electricity from nuclear or any other source.
So, you can look at this chart and see that, per terawatt/hour, nuclear is by far the safest on the list. Remember, electricity from one is as lifesaving as electricity from any other source. So, the source that kills the fewest people in its generation is better (at least on that measure).
So what if coal had a hundred year head start and thus saved more lives? That is like saying cars used to be less safe in the past but since they saved lives too ignore new technologies that make safer cars because they have saved less lives overall (by virtue of having less time on the road). Silly on the face of it.
After TMI, a group of nuclear engineers at Univ. of California suggested a robust venting and filtration system be installed in containment domes. Sweden installed them. France installed them. We did not. The NRC did not put pressure on our plants to retrofit.
In 2002 , the NRC despite evidence that one plants containment vessel was corroding through , refused to order them to shut down and repair it.
The NRC inspector general said “the NRC has informally established an unreasonable high burden of requiring absolute proof versus a reasonable assurance of maintaining public safety”.
When it comes to big energy, there is no advocacy for the people. The NRC works for the nuclear companies, while the tax payer pays their salaries.
Even if we buy your uncited (or cited with patently biased organizations) assertions and ignore that there are no deaths in the US attributable to nuclear power generation it remains that nuclear is safer than any other means of power generation and far, far safer than coal. That is including the likes of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
And we have repeatedly noted it is possible to build passively safe reactors today. Our current reactors are old and do not utilize what we have learned. We can engineer them even more safely today.
The National regulatory Commission , the organization in charge of regulating nuclear plants is half baked? The inspector general of the same organization is a biased source. WOW.
