death rates =/= safety.
100’s of thousands of displaced, fishing and agricultural industries ruined and 100’s of billions of dollars in remediation are all real, factual dangers.
“At least no one died yet!” is pure emotion.
I am not crazy about nuclear power but think it will become widespread. Advances will no doubt be made in solar power, but I don’t feel it’ll ever be enough to meet energy needs. And wind power? Covering half the Earth with those turbines? Not gonna happen. Nuclear’s going to happen whether we like it or not is my feeling.
That’s my gut feeling. Couldn’t point to any cites to tell you why.
Well, OK. But you can say same for hydro-electric (dam failures), oil, gas, and coal which have killed more, displaced more, and ruined more sea life (and I’m guessing with no cite - agriculture) than nuclear.
Which is not surprising as they are more widely used.
All of this is industrial and not nuclear-specific.
How many traffic deaths, traffic fines, warnings, have been handed out in a similar period? How much property damage and liability insurance costs have we all cumulatively bore because of car accidents?
In summation, driving a car is more dangerous than nuclear power.
ETA: There’s a Wikipedia article on Fossil-fuel power stations, but not one on Fossil-fuel power station accidents. Why is that?
Because it’s an evil conspiracy to suppress a miracle power source?
The cite has already been given that fossil fuel generation is on a per unit of power generated basis. Here again:
If the 80s want the argument back they can’t have it because it is valid now. Nuclear is orders of magnitude safer than fossil fuels. Yes orders of magnitude. Same ball park as wind. Both are beat by natural gas on a cost basis at least right now (although natural gas prices may change as demand continues to increase).
Then you should wholeheartedly support nuclear power in China, as it is thousands of times safer than the alternatives.
You keep going on about Fukashima, as though it proves that nuclear power is somehow dangerous. Even with the worst possible scenario, a combination of earthquake, tsunami, and poor maintenance of the plant, it was still not particularly serious. Coal plants cause more death, damage and displacement in normal operation than this disaster did - it just happens to not be to the end users of the power. Which rather makes a mockery of your claim to care about all people.
Basically.
How is this not a valid question? 500,000 people are dying in China every single year due to petroleum; why can I not weigh the 50 odd accidents against this fact? If even half of the predictions for global climate change come out true, 10 Chernobyl disasters would be less damaging to human populations in death count, economic disaster and even dislocation than continuing to pump CO2 into our atmosphere. This, to me, is why nuclear power is a no-brainer.
Oh about 30,000 people die every year from cars, and another 30,000 people die per year from guns. We don’t care. Doing something about those things would be inconvenient. It’s silly to turn around and claim OMFG nukes are safer we must go nuke!!1!
Please. It’s simply the last desperate argument nuke proponents have left and it isn’t fooling anyone. If fossil fuel-related health problems are such a big deal why do we still use them? Do you really expect me to believe nuke proponents think, “we must save lives whatever the cost!” There are far cheaper ways of saving lives than building more nuke plants, encouraging proliferation and storing plutonium in above ground casks all over the planet.
I think we’ll have to come around to that way of thinking in the next 50-100 years.
This is part of what I’m not getting; the deaths from nuclear power are so low, and everyone freaks about about the chance of problems with nuclear power, but we accept 30,000 deaths from driving each year as the cost of doing business - I’m having trouble spanning this massive disconnect.
To a large extent, because of people like you who go around spreading misinformation about the risks of nuclear power. Nuclear power, whilst not 100% safe, is orders of magnitude safer than using fossil fuels. That’s been cited many times in this thread. There’s no denying that it could be made safer still, but that’s not an argument against it, it’s one in favour of it, as it will make it even better than it already is in comparison to fossil fuel power.
Good question.
Mainly because we do not value lives very much it seems, not really, unless they are lost in a dramatic fashion. If it is “news”, an event, we notice and value them; if it is the every day deaths adding up inexorably … we do not seem to give a shit.
Put in the best light, it is because we humans tend to be horrible at risk management, falling for all sorts of cognitive illusions and percieving things that in fact are low risk as scary and things that are high risk as safe.
Viwed less generously because fossil fuel generated power is cheap and we don’t have to see the people die and can fool ourselves into thinking that our cheap power is not the cause.
You seem to think that I’m equating nuclear power with kittens and unicorns. I don’t know how I can restate it: nuclear power is very dangerous. It is, however, less dangerous than fossil fuels.
What’s my proof? The history of nuclear power. We’ve already discussed the comparitive deaths between fossil fuels and nuclear power and NP wins easily. I am not as familiar with NP outside of the US but in the US the most serious accident was Three Mile Island. Nobody died and almost nobody was evacuated permanently. It hardly compares with the single BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf a few years ago.
We haven’t really discussed the role of fossil fuels in AGW. The study comparing deaths doesn’t (to my knowledge) consider forcasts regarding AGW. For example, the entire island nation of Kiribati–a population of over 100k–might have to be relocated because of the rising ocean due in large part to AGW.
Why bother? He has one single “gotcha.”
Actually, as I have stated prior in the thread, I don’t participate much in GD simply because of this. People are more interested in proving a single point and repeat it ad nauseum. Eventually the other people get tired of responding, and the person thinks they win.
The only reason I got into this was that the OP was asking how to help convince people to accept nuclear power, and I wanted to have a discussion and not a shouting match where people repeat the same thing. It looks like that’s not possible.
I’ll respond to a few more points, but really, since I’m not into this to “win” the debate, and I seriously doubt that anything I say would convince people, then I’ll do as I stated in my first post:
Factually incorrect. As posted above, it was a coin flip away from requiring the evacuation of 50 million people, and everything going to hell.
In fact, it still isn’t out of danger. The number four plant was in shut down for maintenance and the entire nuclear fuel was in the spent fuel pool, along with the standard waste. The spent fuel pools are built up high in the reactor and the supporting structure was damaged in the quake. A strong aftershock, which Japan has had many of, could send it crashing down, and experts say that the subsequent nuclear accident could result in the evacuation of 10 million people. As the spent fuel pools are not in the same type of superstructure which the reactors are contained, the danger is that they go right through the roof.
The larger the quake, the larger the aftershocks. This is the danger which bothers the experts the most.
Anyway, you opinion has been noted.
Opinion noted.
“A coin flip away from requiring the evacuation of 50 million people, and everything going to hell …”?
I know that such has been popularized but, no, not really.
There was no “coin flip away” … there was in fact no plausible scenario in which such would have happened … popularized reports playing to fear in order to drive eyeballs notwithstanding.
No question that Fukushima was a wake up call to inadequate oversight by the Japanese government. But even with what basically amounted to a perfect storm of governmental incompetence, a host of design flaws, an earthquake and tsunami, and far from ideal preparedness, its harm was, and would have been under plausible scenarios, still far less than what we accept as the every day death toll from fossil fuel power generation, and what is, indirectly, now being caused by Japan’s switch to more fossil fuel power.
I am no fan of nuclear. My take remains that it is past its time at the teat of subsidies and that without suckling there it cannot compete on cost even with a fair price on carbon and other greenhouse gases (I’ll include methane releases in natural gas production/distribution.) Its future role, to my read, will be and should be limited on that basis. I believe that a wider roll out of a diverse portfolio of renewables, including but not limited to wind, integrated with natural gas and power storage capabilities, integrated into geographically disperse networks that diminish the impact of localized intermittencies, and utilizing some distributed power generation as well (such as factory roof top solar) is a better value.
But if all we cared about was safety then nuclear, while far from risk free, is far far safer than the fossil fuels that will be used in its stead in Japan and elsewhere. You want to portray that one fact as a “gotcha” then so be it.
The link above states it well:
A random gas line explosion in NYC kills more people (eight) than Fukushima disaster: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/15/us/aging-gas-infrastructure/
“Experts” say that large cities are riddled with aging gas lines and one calls the number of explosions “an epidemic”.
It’s going to continue to happen,unfortunately.
Most of the infrastructure in American cities,especially in the Northeast and Industrial Midwest dates from The Great Depression, which was almost 100 years ago. The people who installed those items certainly didn’t foresee that major cities would be unwilling to maintain them due to cost or that they might be in use in some cases 100 years later.
For those who think that nuclear power supporters (among them me) are overstating the dangers of fossil fuels: I have worked at three refineries where there were more than 100k people within a five-mile radius of the facility. If there had been a major explosion or a serious leakage of vapor, the death toll would be in the hundreds or the thousands within MINUTES. I personally know of two gigantic propane storage tanks where if they exploded everything within five miles would be completely destroyed.
Few nuclear accidents are going to occur with enough rapidity to create those levels of devastation in such a short order. People who live near refineries are literally (not figuratively) rolling the dice that they aren’t killed by an accident at the facility.
No, I don’t think anyone is literally rolling any dice in that scenario.