First, nuclear power started out as a cold war thing; they built nuclear plants because of one very interesting side-product required to build nuclear bombs. These days in those countries that already have nuclear weapons, that's a secondary concern - but this is where it came from. And for countries that don't yet have nuclear weapons, that's the reason they want to build them.
Second, the accident in Chernobyl. Hold your statistics and studies. Just pause for a moment. Think about this accident. All children all over Europe were told to stay inside for a few days. And take Iodine. Any technology that is able to cause that is not fit to generate power. In fact the only man made processes that can cause such an event are nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
Fail safe plants unfortunately don't exist - they're not fail safe, as evident in Fukushima. Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously.
I am not a worrier - but when you're playing with forces that cannot be controlled with the technology we have, you have to do the smart thing and skip them for now. There's plenty of alternatives - I think the nuclear thing is a distraction from them, and kept alive by a very active lobby.
I am happy to change my opinion if you come up with a new process that's actually fail-safe, that's actually guaranteed to not leak radiation, and that doesn't produce nuclear waste.
Solar and wind energy are not reliable enough to provide base-load coverage, hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology, and really the only other option is fossil fuels.
At this point, the options literally are nuclear, or fossil fuels. And burning more and more coal for power (which puts out more radiation and kills more people than a nuclear plant, FYI) because anything less than perfection is not suitable just seems like a really, really shortsighted idea.
An alternative energy source does not need to be perfect to be worth switching to. It just needs to be better than the status quo. And nuclear power, currently, is very much better than coal.
... and isn't any safer than nuclear power. Four people died when the Japan earthquake caused a dam to fail -- that's more deaths than the Fukushima NPP has caused, but oddly enough nobody is calling for a worldwide halt to dam construction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
There have been a lot of other dam failures that killed people, too.
And don't get me started on coal. I've seen estimates that pollution from coal kills 24,000 people every year in the U.S. alone. That's not even from accidents, it's just normal operation.
So I'm not too concerned about the relative risk of nuclear plants. All modern plants are far safer than Chernobyl.
But people are working on ideas that would meet your specs. The liquid thorium reactor, for example, produces orders of magnitude less waste, which is only dangerous for a few centuries. The fuel is liquid, and if it starts to overheat, a plug melts and drains it into a wide basin to cool off. The reactor can also dispose of our existing nuclear wsste.
The Thorium reactor has a lot of problems. Engineering problems that are not solved.
Remember the German Thorium reactor, the HTR 300. It died with a whimper.
What we really don't need is giving nuclear engineers more money to create huge nightmares.
The first thing before ANY nuclear engineer could come back with another idea is to provide us with a safe storage technology and clean up failed attempts like in Asse II.
Believing that the next hundred billions on new nuclear technology will be better spend than the last ones, is just naive. Especially given that the basic question of storing the waste is totally unsolved. The US abandoned now Yucca. Germany has also no storage site. Instead the waste is piling up in totally inadequate places - spent fuel is stored in pools near reactors and in dry storage near reactors.
[citation needed] I live in (western) Europe, and remember neither of these; neither does Wikipedia. Some milk and vegetables were destroyed as precautionary measures, but that is about it.
The Fukushima NPP is very old. Reactor 1 was already scheduled to be decommissioned at the end of March, in fact.
Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously.
At the Fukushima NPP, the chain reactions in reactors 1, 2, and 3 stopped about 5 seconds after the earthquake hit, due to the automatic SCRAM triggered by the detection of abnormal ground acceleration.
In the case the (very old) reactor design used at Fukushima, this was an active insertion; modern power plants use passive SCRAM (usually relying only on gravity) so that even if everything fails the chain reaction will still be shut down.
What we need to do with both nuclear and conventional power facilities is close everything from pre-1985 or so. The pollution coming from the dirty, grandfathered-in (to higher pollution) coal plants in the South, for example, are very likely to kill and sicken a lot more people than nuclear power.
I don't like commenting on things I know only a little about, however, one thing is getting overlooked when people make this argument.
The newer designs are usually PWRs which are stable by design as loss of water or power slows down the reaction. Unfortunately, they are expensive to build (billions of dollars) and have a limited life due to the challenges of containing pressure with metals exposed to radiation. This makes them barely economic over their lifetime at todays energy prices.
The UK has allowed the planning and building of new PWRs. Unfortunately, the companies involved are reluctant to go ahead without some sort of subsidy or carbon tax.
If any of the above is wrong, I'd like to be corrected. However, I feel this is a valid point that is rarely made.
Yes, maybe the UN report showed such a small number of confirmed fatalities, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they based it mostly on data collected by the Soviet Union. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust any data that came from an authoritarian government, especially one run by a bunch of Russians, especially one that collapsed 20 years ago (likely destroying countless incriminating documents in the process), especially concerning a deeply embarrassing incident such as Chernobyl.
The public may be overreacting to the nuclear threat posed by the Fukushima reactors, but this seems like a subtle attempt at rewriting history.
(I wouldn't be surprised if there is a UN report 20 years from now proving that Saddam Hussein did indeed win re-election with 99% of the vote.)
In the nineties, families in the country around where I grew up, here in Ireland, hosted children from Chernobyl every summer, so that they could breath clean air and eat clean food. I've also seen documentaries about birth defects in the years after the accident. Perhaps there weren't too many fatalities, but a lot of lives were very badly affected by the radiation and a lot more people died due to slow, radiation induced diseases. For example, in the reports, how many people who died of cancer or other diseases since were counted?
So, I agree with you - downplaying the dangers of radiation is careless and playing with peoples lives.
Take one of the ones that measures an hour's exposure and multiply it by 24. Or a day and multiply it by 365. Suddenly the visual comparisons look much, much different.
Stop spreading such nonsense articles, please! Just because the immediate impact is comparatively low, that doesn't mean it's harmless.
Radiation is a carcinogen, yes. But it turns out that radiation is a really puny carcinogen. A radiation dosage which will probably kill you if delivered rapidly -- 4 Sieverts -- has only a small chance of causing cancer -- about 10% (and an even lower chance of causing lethal cancer).
Half of all wild boars shot in central Europe can not be sold because their radiation levels are still too high for general consumption because of Chernobyl.
This is a pernicious meme that frequently recurs on this board. Reject it.
(The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, has occurred in the open within the context of a reasonably free society, so it may provide us with data that proves useful for future nuclear accidents.)
Okay, I'm just going to set your claim against the introduction to the report (http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/Advance_copy_Annex_...) referenced in the BBC article.
There has been an unprecedented effort by the international
community to assess the magnitude and characteristics
of the health effects due to the radiation exposure
resulting from the accident. As early as August 1986, a
widely attended international gathering, the “Post-Accident
Review Meeting”, was convened in Vienna. The resulting
report of the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group
(INSAG) contained a limited but essentially correct early
account of the accident and its expected radiological consequences
[I31]. In May 1988, the International Scientific
Conference on the Medical Aspects of the Accident at the
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant [I32] held in Kiev summarized
the available information at the time and confirmed
that some children had received high doses to the thyroid. In
May 1989, scientists obtained a more comprehensive insight
into the scale of the consequences of the accident at an ad
hoc meeting convened at the time of the 38th session of
UNSCEAR [G15, K25]. In October 1989, the former Soviet
Union formally requested “an international experts’ assessment”
and, as a result, the International Chernobyl Project
(ICP) [I5] was launched in early 1990; its conclusions and
recommendations were presented at an International Conference
held in Vienna, 21–24 May 1991 [I5]. Many national
and international initiatives7 followed aimed at developing a
better understanding of the accident consequences and in
assisting in their mitigation. The results of these initiatives
were presented at the 1996 International Conference on One
Decade After Chernobyl8 [I29]. There was a broad agreement
on the extent and character of the consequences.
...
The objective of the present annex is to provide an
authoritative and definitive review of the health effects
observed to date that are attributable to radiation exposure
due to the accident and to clarify the potential risk projections,
taking into account the levels, trends and patterns of
radiation dose to the exposed populations. The Committee
has evaluated the relevant new information that has become
available since the 2000 Report, in order to determine
whether the assumptions used previously to assess the radiological
consequences are still valid. In addition, it recognized
that some issues merited further scrutiny and that its
work to provide the scientific basis for a better understanding
of the radiation‑related health and environmental effects
of the Chernobyl accident needed to continue. The information
considered included the behaviour and trends of the
long‑lived radionuclides in foodstuff and the environment in
order to improve the estimates of exposure of relevant population
groups, and the results of the latest follow‑up studies
of the health of the exposed groups. The effects of radiation
on plants and animals following the Chernobyl accident are
discussed separately in annex E, “Effects of ionizing radiation
on non‑human biota”. Other effects of the accident, in
particular, distress and anxiety, and socio‑economic effects,
were considered by the Chernobyl Forum [W5] but are
outside the Committee’s remit.
The Committee, in general, bases its assessments on
reports appearing in peer‑reviewed scientific literature and
on information submitted officially by Governments in
response to its requests. However, the results of many of
the studies related to the Chernobyl accident have been
presented at scientific meetings without formal scientific
peer review. The Committee decided that it would only
make use of such information when it could judge that the
results and the underlying work were scientifically and
technically sound.That was probably right decision, and I find it entirely plausible that they did great work given the enormous limitations that they faced, but there is only so much you can do when the authoritarian regime standing in your way happens to finally disintegrate, years later.
Namely, that taking Chernobyl in its proper context (one nuclear plant out of many) and even taking Fukishima to be an event of similar magnitude, nuclear power plants still present significant advantages over coal from a pain-and-hardship caused per watt-hour generated.
No one's arguing that nuclear power is safe. However, I'd rather have the last unprocessable nuclear waste from a generation of reactors buried in a well-shielded container under my house than live downwind from a coal power plant. Ideally of course I would like neither, but the fact is millions of people live downwind from coal power plants, and that is a much bigger problem than Fukishima. That problem could be mitigated if as those coal plants die they are replaced with modern nuclear reactors. Yes, it will cause other problems, but these will be smaller when taken in aggregate. (Even if they are more dramatic when they happen.)
Also, your argument could be turned on its head. If there hadn't been the kind of secrecy and attempts to cover up what had happened, way fewer people would have been affected.
That said, I'm not a big fan of nuclear because I don't like making commitments for thousands of years. A lot can happen in that timeframe. Wars, corrupt regimes, a collapse of our entire industrial society, etc.
>Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients every day - and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment.
From http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/coping/radiation-therapy-... :
"Late side effects may first occur 6 or more months after radiation therapy is over. They vary by the part of your body that was treated and the dose of radiation you received. Late side effects may include infertility, joint problems, lymphedema, mouth problems, and secondary cancer."
From the HN comment guidelines:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say;
1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I also agree shadowsun7, you could cut down on the name calling and be a bit more civilized in your comments. It doesn't contribute anything to the conversation but weakens your message.
this article is a clear propaganda piece designed to evoke such primitive logical conclusions. But even primitive logical analysis by a rudimentary educated person shouldn't have missed the significant difference between localized deep-tissue dose delivery ("meat cooking") in the radiotherapy where 2-3S is delivered per session normally without any lethal risk and 25-50% lethality of 2-3S delivered whole-body (100% lethal if repeated several times during period of several weeks).
>be a bit more civilized in your comments
yep, taking an intentionally misleading propaganda by a professional for a blabbing of a moron isn't that civilized.
Japanese can resolve this hysteria after seeing economic costs. However, the governments in lawsuit prone countries will go out of their way to make it very safe in almost everything. eg low speed limits, many speed bumps, background checks, etc. Otherwise the government would get sued for not doing enough, affecting the budget.
Educational Video of Japanese Nuclear Boy for kids http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN2hSVxA
But even with that said, why doesn't it make sense to compare the number of casualties and damages between different accidents? It's a way to put things into perspective. People have in general a rather faulty sense of proportion and understanding of statistics.
The Tsunami deaths have nothing to do with radiation. hence they don't belong into an article about radiation.
Maybe those who think nuclear energy is very green might join the author? I am sure we can find a few 10,000, and then we have room for all that nuclear waste.
The media overhyping things is nothing new and doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean nuclear power is safe, for example. Unfortunately, real journalism has all but disappeared from the world, to be replaced by what we'd refer to as trolling or link-whoring online.
There seem to be a small group of people who want to play the contrarian game and claim that people are overreacting to the potentially huge damage the contamination (as opposed to radiation) that Fukushima is going to result in.
It's easy to be holed up safe in Oxford and claim radiation is not an issue. Why doesn't this gentleman volunteer to assist at the plants if he thinks radiation is no danger at all.
The people running away or worrying about the situation don't care so much about the levels now. They care about the levels if/when shit happens, and only use the radiation seen now to check how good things are handled. And for now it's not as if tepco's engineers, as goog as they are, are yet mastering the situation.
I think it is only reasonable to ask that avoidable civilian technology be insured against harm done by it. So: how much would this insurance cost? Cleanup, health care costs, disability payments, loss of property?
Given just a slight increase in illness rate for the sheer number of people involved can give a hard to detect but significant cost. An insurer will have to set aside enough money for the expected amount of payout. What would Warren Buffett's premiums be? Some claims will be excluded by the insurer, and the rest of the population will probably be called to for economic assistance: how much will that be? What is the opportunity cost of having half a million people cleaning up the place instead of being productive?
Feel free to peruse the [IAEA report about Chernobyl](http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernoby...). What is the total economic cost? Maybe "hundreds of billions of dollars"? See the report for estimates.
So yes, we shouldn't run away from radiation. We should clean it up safely, then come to our senses and stop dispersing any more of it. This technology is a dead-end for normal energy production.
This particular article doesn't say so explicitly, but has links in the margin to: "Nuclear power: Energy solution or evil curse?" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12730473
Key aspects of the discussion really is whether nuclear power is safe (for people and environment) and economical. A good discussion about the economic aspects can be found at: "Cost, not Japan crisis, should scrub nuclear power" http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-17-cost-not-japan-crisi...