This is typical bullshit human thinking. People are really, really bad at assessing risks.
It is not about “one” accident. It is a measure of overall safety and likelihoods of bad outcomes.
Lots of people die in hospitals due to crap they get in a hospital. You are still better off going most times.
People are scared to fly when in reality they are far safer flying than they were driving to the airport.
You do not look at the Canary Island air crash and think, “Well shit, lots of people died! Air travel should be banned!”
When you look at overall safety and damage caused by various power generation schemes nuclear is rather safe. Yes, Chernobyl and (perhaps) this tilt the scale but even with them they are still far, far below the dangers imposed by other power generation methods (dams can be as lethal or more than a nuclear plant depending on circumstances).
So, show a cite for nuclear power generation killing more people than other methods. Make it per megawatt produced. Saying my solar calculator never killed anyone is not the same as a nuclear power plant.
Like I said, a true believer won’t change their mind, no matter what. No disaster, no matter how large, how deadly, or how expensive, will change their thinking. Once they have determined something is true, nothing will sway them. Certainly not facts, science or reason. That is why they are a true believer.
Comparing nuclear accidents to driving a car is lame. They have nothing in common. Driving is one of the most dangerous things we do.
Cigarettes are an accumulative poison. Before they kill you they diminish your life in lots of ways. You choose to smoke. The Fermi plant was built near me without my input.
I am 33 miles away from a nuke plant with a troubled history. I am well aware that the operators will cut corners to make more money. They have been doing it for many years. I hope they don’t go too far.
Yes, of course. A true believer is a true believer. Myself, I don’t have a problem with the nuclear reactors on subs and carriers, for scientific reasons.
But I do find that they store the spent fuel in pools of water at the Navy bases a serious problem. Again, for scientific reasons.
Well nice to see that you are conceding the point that the resource is more than plentiful enough throughout many areas of the United States and the world and that the issue is how cost-effective it is to exploit it.
The industry sources agree that wind power ends up currently costing $1.2 to 2.6 million per installed MW of capacity - and you do need to oversize it. The nuclear industry generally quotes that nuclear costs about $2 million per installed MW, although that article points out that recent price rises in the cost of the metals needed and construction costs have raised the costs to as much as $8 million/MW according to the utilities who would be building them, and that the actual costs of those already built were 3x as much as the industry had predicted and came in at $3 million/MW - not including the costs of waste fuel storage. And your European plant? So far up to $7.2 billion, a 60% increase over your cite’s quote … and still rising.
But wind does need to be oversized and/or backed up with some natural gas - so let’s increase the cost of wind by 50%. It is still less than nuclear and investors are subject both to a more immediate payback (windfarms start producing from initial investment much faster than do nuclear plants) and much less risky (construction delays, which seem to be the rule in nuclear).
Wind isn’t right everywhere. Solar isn’t either. But we should use it, and other renewables, as much as we can, both in utility scale and distributed applications, build what nuclear we reasonably and cost-effectively can (which might keep up with what ages out), use storage technologies to maximize our use of the cleaner generation sources 24/7, and use natural gas to fill in the rest as we retire the oldest coal plants as fast as we can.
The spent fuel rods are not in the reactor. They are in the same building as a reactor. If you had a weed wacker in your garage, would you say that it was in your car?
There is a LOT of misinformation about wind and turbines and costs.
That is from 2003
A lot has changed since then. The cost of adding another large turbine to an existing wind farm is so low, you won’t believe me if I tell you. You also get back your investment, including maintenance costs, so fast it’s not even funny. After that it is a lot of profit.
If you look on that “Radiation for Dummies” chart the pro-nuke side is posting all over, you’ll also see that emergency responders are allowed higher exposures. Also:
These deaths are directly attributable to nuclear power, not earthquakes or tsunamis or other force force majeures that have nothing whatsoever to do with Bhopal, which resulted in murder charges, among many other things.
Off shore wind farms btw cost a lot more - more like $4-5million/MW installed, but do not need to be oversized as off-shore winds are reliably strong. Still competitive to build with nuclear in today’s cost environment and with less time to ROI, less risk to investment, less operating costs, no spent fuel cost, no proliferation concerns, much less risk of catastrophic failure, and thus less insurance costs.
I request a link. Because without evidence this just looks like more hysteria on your part.
I will also state in advance that if these are workers from the power plant I will be sad but it won’t change my stance one bit. The only thing that will do that is if they’re civilians. So far as we know, no one outside the plant has been exposed to levels of radiation high enough to make one sick.
In your home? Hell, we all carry around some minor radioactivity in our own bodies - trace amounts of radioactive isotopes are a normal part of the environment, have been since the Big Bang, and we ingest a certain amount by eating and breathing.
It’s actually a lovely sort of orange-red color. Very pretty. link No longer recommended for daily use, though
Yes and no - some plants have an unusual affinity for it, too - spinach, for example, which is one reason why spinach is being monitored around Fukushima. It’s going to show up in spinach early, and in greater amounts than some other plants. Why spinach does that I don’t know, but it seems to have a great affinity for heavy metals - it also soaks up things like lead like a sponge.
So … spinach may be more an issue than polar bear milk or salmon.
I don’t know if tobacco shares spinach’s affinity for heavy metals or not, but if it does that could explain why smoking exposes you to more radiation than some other activities.
I would also like a cite for your claim that inhaling cesium-137 is worse than eating it. Among other things, from a chemical standpoint cesium acts much like potassium when ingested, leading to it being distributed throughout the body, being utilized in its structure, and hanging around awhile before being excreted. As we don’t normally absorb potassium from our lungs I’m not sure that cesium enters the body via breathing rather than via ingestion. There’s plenty of other crap in cigarettes that can cause cancer, so I’m not holding the cesium up as a culprit without proof.
Heard of either Al Queda OR Base 10? Do the damn MATH, class!
10 tribes, without 10 Commandments, with a 10 on the Richter Scale means, ‘NO NUKES!’
Class 5 or a tsunami means, ‘NO NUKES.’
Failure to control STUFF THAT HAPPENS, means: ‘NO NUKES.’
Got it? Nukes have no transforming cores, after all that Godzilla and Pokeymon! What is the excuse for failure, to design a core that comes apart, when a disaster strikes?
Got VOLCANOES? Yes, you have! Heard of Yellowstone and Yosemite and Long Valley and La Palma? Any of the above will trash the US mainland. And then there are ALASKA AND HAWAII.
What part of nuclear power need fry us, for having waste, which can kill us in an instant, but it lasts as a TARGET, FOR A MILLION YEARS?!
It’s amazing that with two tremendous explosions, that blew three buildings all to hell, that nobody has died. They aren’t even in critical condition or anything.
They are just irradiating the land into a permanent dead zone. They are spewing radiation into crops and milk in the surrounding area. The workers in the plant are are being irradiated thoroughly. Yep all is well.
It’s unbelievable. No robots, no drones, no infrared cameras, the Japanese were completely unprepared for even a minor problem at a plant.
Really harsh fact, they have a whole bunch of other reactors, just like theses, all along the coasts. On flat land. Next to an ocean that has a history of tsunamis.
