People are incredibly bad at risk assessment.
Even counting the major fuckup in Russia, comparatively speaking how many people have been harmed by nuclear radiation from the power industry compared to effected negatively by arsenic poisoning?
Well, I’m fully with you here! I want that space elevator and the pony too!
Again, how great were the risks realistically speaking? What has the track record been? Compared to, say, the chemical industry? And how dangerous, again realistically, is it TODAY…when we have so many advances in the industry (well, WE don’t of course…but say looking at nuke power in France or South Africa)?
When you could realistically assess the actual dangers and weigh them against the benifits. NO power source is some kind of magic miricle silver bullet…they all have their dangers and drawbacks. Coal and oil are great…they are cheap and reasonably easy to extract from the ground. They only have those small draw backs that they tear up the land extracting it (at least coal does), and they are highly polluting. And of course they may eventually lead to massive global climate change. Nuclear certainly has its drawback too…it IS dangerous, which is why its so highly regulated. The problem has been that the anti-nuke crowd has kind of gone beyond ‘legimate concerns’ over nuclear power (which could be addressed through regulation and better engineering) to ‘paranoia’ in their knee jerk reaction to anything nuclear.
As I said, people really suck at risk assessment.
Well, part of the problem was the anti-nuclear fervor…which drove up the costs of nuclear power until it was nearly impossible to BUILD a nuke plant in the US. I was there too and I saw the OTHER side. The protests. The frenzy over a new (proposed) nuclear plant. The myriad law suits.
And well…how many people have died due to nuclear power in the US? How many people have been adversely effected by nuclear power? Its certainly a non-zero number…but I’d have to say that more people are probably effected by swallowing toothpicks in the US ever year than have been adversely effected by, or killed from nuclear power per year in the US. (This is just a WAG on my part by the way…I have no idea. Hell, for all I know more folks suffer detremental effects from tooth picks a year than have EVER had fatal accidents from nuclear power in the US for its entire history…including those who died or were harmed in the military).
The new age environmentals crowd certainly seems to think so. A lot of them are quite vocal against the old dino-environfacist crowd about this in fact.
Put your question this way if you like…what OTHER energy source will allow us to switch over realitively impact free (i.e. you can just insert it into the power grid and to the end user its transparent) and will scale up to not only our current needs but our future needs? I can’t think of a one to be honest. All the other power sources, geothermal, wind, solar, etc…they are ALL small scale and can’t meet even a large percentage of our needs. Alternatives are either somewhere out in the future or will have a large impact on society and even the planet.
The thing that the new generation of environmentalists have FINALLY realized is that we aren’t going to cut our energy consumption. Its not realistic, its not going to happen. If anything our needs are going to keep rising. So, we need to find ways to scale our energy consumption to those growing needs. And the ONLY thing (that I know of) that will scale is nuclear.
If you think there is a reasonable alternative that doesn’t include us dropping back to an 18th century (or prior) agrarian lifestyle (with a hell of a lot less people on the planet) then I’m all ears.
-XT
