Yeah right, if one of my feet is in a pot with boiling water and the other foot is in a pot with ice water, then I’m fine, statistically

We’d have to be sure we can handle the deviations from the statistical normality that will doubtlessly happen, right?

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

This is the weirdest definition of safe I have ever seen. It doesn't matter how rarely accidents occur if you don't also consider the severity of those accidents and the potential situations that could arise. If occasional "accidents" can result in huge loss of life and render large sections of the planet unlivable then no I don't think you'll find a consensus claiming nuclear power is safe.

As for your definition of clean... I guess the fact that nuclear material is basically the worst pollutant imaginable escaped your notice? Add to that the fact that we have literally no way of dealing with used (but still active) material and at best nuclear power is a means of putting off dealing with our power issues and forcing future generations to figure out a solution for that and what to do with the mountains of radioactive material we left for them.

Edit: P.s. I spill close to 100% of my drinks. Does that mean I'm many times more dangerous than a nuclear power plant? If you want to rely on statistics you should include statistics for the results of accidents as well as their probability of occurring.

When the current alternative is spewing megatons of carbon, particulates, and other crap into the atmosphere on a daily basis, which cause countless health problems on their own before you even consider global warming, this becomes a lot less clear cut.

Renewables would be great, but there isn't the infrastructure or capacity to use them for all generation now, and they tend to not be very good at supporting base loads, since things like wind and solar can't guarantee a given output at any given time. A lot of the places that are 100% renewable pay power companies that use renewables, but those renewables aren't actually powering the city or town 100% of the time because of their variability and the fungibility of power in the unified market.

Hydro power is somewhat more managable in this regards, but this too has the problem of making vast swaths of land unlivable, and is to some extent dependent on weather and geography. I think we'd be extremely hard pressed to find enough hydro power to power the world, though it may work regionally (like in Quebec). In addition, it wreaks havoc on river ecosystems as well, as fish are no longer able to migrate up and down the river with ease.

By the way, if you hate radioactive pollutants, don't look up what gets emitted from burning coal. You won't like that.

Nothing is safe. You can get run over while walking down the street. So the definition of safe I'm using is "Causes relatively few deaths and injuries relative to comparable activities". That's the kind of definition we use to say that air travel is one of the safest forms of travel. Yes, sometimes hundreds of people die in a plan crash, whereas your average car crash involves just a few deaths. And the plane crash is given a lot of attention on TV, while car crashes are pretty much just statistics. But if you consider the number of person-miles traveled, air travel is much safer.

In the same way, we can compare nuclear to other power sources, such as coal, hydro, wind and solar, by comparing the number of deaths and injuries per kilowatt-hour generated. By that measure, nuclear is pretty much the safest form of energy out there. Coal, especially, causes huge harm through air pollution. But increased lung disease is a statistics, while an event like Fukushima is a huge media event. But Fukushima has cause no deaths, and is not expected to increase the rate of cancer or birth defects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of deaths are attributable to coal power every year.



Again, you need to compare waste generated per kilowatt-hour. The energy density of Uranium is insane. You literally get a million times more energy from a kilo of uranium than you do from a kilo of coal. So yes, nuclear waste is a problem, but it is far less of a problem than the waste of coal-powered plants.

And lets not forget that we share this planet with a lot of other creatures. So lets look beyond the human death toll and also consider the environmental impact. Uranium, again because of its energy density, has orders of magnitude less impact due to mining than coal. It does not destroy entire ecosystems by building huge dams. The waste problem is a storage problem, unlike coal, where the global warming effect impacts the entire planet.

Now I very much support the widespread use solar and wind, and it would be great if solar/wind energy could power the world. But that is not currently possible. Solar and wind are intermittent power sources that depend on the weather, and our current battery technology and power transport technology do not give us the option to solve that problem.

If you need a constant, reliable source of power that can scale quickly with demand, nuclear is the cleanest, safest option currently at our disposal. Every coal plant replaced by a nuclear plant is a boon for the environment and for humanity.

See this article at forbes.com for some numbers to support Herman's argument. A quick summary: worldwide, coal accounts for 170,000 deaths per trillion kwH produced. Nuclear accounts for about 90. (Solar, wind, and hydro all account for more deaths per energy unit than nuclear power.) These numbers include deaths (and projected deaths) attributed to Chernobyl and Fukishima, and nuclear power generation has still been one of the safest, cleanest forms of power that humanity has ever used.

We also have to account for the fact that nuclear engineers have made great progress in the last fifty years. Modern nuclear power plants can be built such that it is impossible for them to melt down. The type of disaster that happened at Fukishima is simply not possible with newer plant designs.

In addition, newer designs are able to more effectively use the available energy in uranium, leading to much less potent waste that decays to safe levels in a shorter amount of time. Disposing of waste is still not a trivial problem, and it's certainly one that must be thought through carefully, but we're not talking about "mountains" of waste that lasts for thousands of years. And when the waste is properly disposed, it has far less widespread environmental impact than, say, coal particulates.

I don't think nuclear is the answer to our energy problems. We need to continue to evaluate existing renewable resources (while considering the real environmental impact of each new source we add), research new methods of clean energy production, learn how to more efficiently use the energy we produce, and promote simple lifestyles that lead to less energy demand. But I do think that nuclear is an important part of clean energy production, and the only practical way to maintain energy production comparable to current levels while reducing the atmospheric impact of our current energy production strategies.

I'm going to commit the forum faux pas of double posting to say that, despite my above defense of nuclear energy production, I think that the way matters were handled in Japan during / after the Fukishima disaster was deplorable. (Assuming the linked article was accurate, of course. I haven't done a lot of independent research into the issue.) When there is a disaster of any sort, it's essential that officials communicate transparently with the public rather than try to preserve their own public image. Deceit always compounds the results of disaster.

The problem with nuclear power is nuclear waste, which has to be safely secured for much longer than human civilization has existed. But from the look of things, global warming will destroy human civilization long before nuclear waste becomes a significant danger. The cockroaches can handle it.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Seriously, solar power is getting much cheaper, and thorium reactors sound promising.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Um... thorium, while not uranium, is still nuclear power.

American ingenuity came up with a solution for spent fuel rods: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dod ... 4aug98.htm

See http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/ ... -reactors/

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

No, I do not expect that.
The original posting dates from August 23, 2014. Total number of views till February 20, 2015 (my reply) was slightly over 900, and 12 replies till Feb. 20, 2105, ie. being approx. 6 months.
Compared that to the cat pic topic which yielded almost 60 replies and around 2.600 views over an 11 month period.

Please don't present opinions as facts.
As far as I know, there have been numerous incidents around the world involving nuclear, be it energy, be it military, medical or otherwise. Many casualties also, directly and indirectly/over time. Among various sources, I recall reading the UN report estimating that Chernobyl alone may over time result in several 100,000's of statistically attributable deaths. Not speaking about deformaties and other serious health matters, not speaking about environmental impact etc.

Yes, that's the irony.
We pollute the world, making it inhabitable, and then make it a definition issue.
To clarify: yes, one may argue that air travel is very safe or safer than other means, but it is also more polluting than say train travel.

Also, in reply to jeromie: perhaps the Forbes article does not (just) support HermanHiddema's argument, but may be his primary source of information. A lot can be argued about that article and its contents.

I'd love to travel on a transatlantic or transpacific train, but nobody seems to have built the tracks.

You know, it is always really disheartening to read these kinds of things. Is it really so hard to do your research? Instead of "as far as I know", how about you take the 5 minutes the find the actual UN report?

I mean, there's a wikipedia article on the subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due ... l_disaster) which summarizes the UN report thus:



So yeah, 4,000 is a lot of people. But that's the number of deaths from the worst nuclear disaster ever, and it is way less than the number of deaths due to coal every single year. Or look at hydro power. The biggest disaster ever there claimed 171,000 lives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

So please, do your research. This is the age of the internet, there is no excuse for saying "I recall reading".

If you are only counting incidences than yes, you are correct. But if you factor in the environmental impact of each accident then you get a very different picture. And, I would claim, that is the only reasonable picture to look at.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Yeah, it’s a sad fact that some people care little about the generations that come after us. These 171.000 lives were lost. That’s terrible. But they aren’t going to pass on their genetic defects, contrary to what happens in nuclear accidents and bombings, etc.

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Ah, but isn't that how the meek (bonobos) will inherit the earth?