Splatted wrote:HermanHiddema wrote:I am talking about the Real World, with Real People. Real world experience shows that accidents are rare. Statistically, based on real world experience, nuclear power is safe. Nothing theoretical about it.
If you want to stay away from the politics, and look at the science only, then the statement "Nuclear power is safe and clean" is as close as you're going to get to the scientific consensus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
