This is the problem with the pro-nuclear approach to nuclear safety. Fukoshima was a massive safety failure. Something that was supposed to never happen did, the cooling failed, the reactors melted down, the containment breached and radioactive isotopes leaked and kept on leaking. At that point, it's not engineering that's protecting people, it's sheer luck and we don't even know the odds of the bet or the stake. We don't know how likely it was for an even bigger containment breach to occur, for things to have gone far worse, because the whole event was outside of the plan. Not only that, it was due to an issue that had already been pointed out by TEPCO's internal planning documents and ignored. (Then there's the huge economic costs of the radiation leaks.) Just ignoring this as a minor incident is inviting further failures which may not be so kind.
If you want to badmouth nuclear by spouting off its worst-case scenarios rather than its average or expected scenarios, I invite you to do the same for the alternatives. Coal's worst case causes the Great Smog and Beijing and New Delhi. Oil's worst case causes the Exxon Valdez and Piper Alpha and the Texas City Refinery explosion and oh yeah global climate change. Hydro's worst case is the Banqiao Dam burst, which directly killed 200,000 people and forced 11 million out of their homes. Badmouthing nuclear over fukushima and chernobyl is like badmouthing cars because a Fluorine tanker crashed in downtown Seattle around 1935.
We're essentially strangling the innovation that would fix the things we're terrified of, which are why the regulations exist in the first place!
As a result, we still have Gen II reactors (Watts Bar) coming online. In 2016.
Engineer: "The one about the primary turboencabulator?"
Bureaucracy: "Yes. Your reactor needs it to be certified to the standards laid out in Index 437."
Engineer: "There aren't any turboencabulators in the design. Our design uses retroencabulators. That's how it's so safe; the primary turboencabulator was the primary failure point. There is no primary turboencabulator to certify."
Bureaucracy: "I'm sorry, but we can't accept this design without a certification for a primary turboencabulator. It can't be safe without one. Maybe you should start over?"
If he has documented tests etc, how about going the route of getting the paperwork amended? And if not, should the bureaucrats just take his word that this time it is safe? That was what they were saying with the turboencabulator as well...
I would hope that this is less of an issue in nuclear regulation, due to them hopefully having engineering resources on staff. But I do know it's a common problem with less technically focused branches of government.
Asking for "perfectly safe" is idiotic. There's no such thing. There is always a chance that you will get wrapped up in your sheets and strangle in the middle of the night, or that you'll accidentally stab yourself in the wrist with a pencil and bleed out at your desk. Safety is relative. What we have today is better than what we had twenty years ago. What we had twenty years ago was better than what we had forty years ago.
I'd take Fukushima over coal or oil or hydro every day. It took every variation on malice and incompetence that humankind could devise to make it do anything bad, and its "anything" was honestly kind of pathetic compared to the "anythings" for anything else. I'd take a modern reactor over it, but it's take it over the alternatives. And, yes, I'd probably take whatever people have come up with in 30 years over today's technology. Science marches on.
Safety systems, backup safety systems, backup-backup safety systems can go down, and yet, the plant kills nobody. Even though the radiator had a meltdown, it was passively contained and the radiation didn't leak out in dangerous quantities.
You mention that we don't know how likely a bigger containment was to occur, but I think there's barely a nugget of truth in that. The way the radioactive material was contained is very well understood. The safety systems worked, despite anything TEPCO did.
On the other hand, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air gives coal mortality at 350 to 60[2] after converting to the same units which is well below Fukushima's death toll.
[1]http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd... [2]http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fukushima_Daiichi...
>As of March 2012, no cases of radiation-related ailments had been reported. Experts cautioned that data was insufficient to allow conclusions on health impacts. Michiaki Kai, professor of radiation protection at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences, stated, "If the current radiation dose estimates are correct, (cancer-related deaths) likely won't increase."
Still, it seems pretty ridiculous to worry about nuclear safety when the actual tsunami killed over 15,000 people and nobody seems to be up in arms why there weren't better safeguards against tsunamis.
No one has died of outright first-order radiation poisoning, but it's a specious claim with respect to long term cancer rates since we lack the tools to pinpoint the cause of a cancer death.
Workers have received high does of radiation, and some models predict hundreds of future cancer deaths (but some models predict zero). Even if someone in the exposed population were to die, we would be very unlikely be able to say for sure if that death were due to 'natural' cancer or cancer induced by exposure to some substance leaked. That doesn't make the exposure or the technology safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
But the larger point still stands about nuclear being the safest form of energy we have. Even the worst case scenario of 600 eventual deaths won't sway the numbers for nuclear very much.
My argument isn't that nuclear is 100% safe, I'm just asking for it to be honestly compared to the alternatives.
I've read this online in one form or another for the better part of 10 years. I've never seen a single actual study to back it up.
And if anyone did require power companies to have this insurance, it's likely that nobody would invest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...
If other power sources had to factor in the full costs of such contamination they would be uneconomical as well. We need to have power if we want to have nice things, it's purely a question of figuring out how to do it in the most responsible way possible.
For that matter we should probably also factor in upstream contamination - landscape destruction due to large-scale strip mining for coal [1], or pollution from lithium/neodymium refining and silicon fabrication. These are measures where uranium mining has essentially zero pollution but both coal, solar, and wind all have fairly significant pollution footprints.
[1] 1 year's supply of fuel for a 100MW (?) power plant visualized, coal vs nuclear: http://i.imgur.com/Qst8z.gif
Sure, but again you need to compare like with like. How many people relocated per megawatt? The numbers for the alternatives are worse.
In some places, hydro isn't very pretty by this measure.
The politicians are not "drafting rules to require more safety" just for fun. Not regulating nuclear energy makes it cheaper but seems rather unsafe. (because humans, you know)
Can you back this up?
Coal is not the only contributor, but still a major one:
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1632163/670000-deaths...
670,000 reported deaths because of coal annually in China
I wonder if that's because of things like Fukushima...
You can't have it both ways.
1) Nuclear is safe because there are regulations - Fukushima just had bad safety policies implemented. That's all
and
2) We can't have too many nuclear regulations - that would make nuclear too expensive!
Solar/batteries are the future. They are both going to drop in price by multiples over the next decade, and then some more after that.
I also think there are very few companies that wouldn't rather build solar/battery power plants now, even if more expensive to build at first, but much cheaper to maintain later, than deal with the complexities and regulations and uncertainties of nuclear power plants.
Nuclear should've "won" 30-40 years ago with the whole "too cheap to meter" thing. It's too late now. There are much better alternatives that are close to being competitively priced, or will be soon enough.
Let's apply the same level of rational risk tolerance to nuclear power as we do to all other power sources. Nuclear isn't 100.00% safe, but it's already a lot safer than any other source. People die from falling off roofs when installing solar and nobody bats an eye because shit happens and life goes on. Let's accept that nuclear is extremely (if not absolutely) safe, and make sure we learn from mistakes, accidents and near-misses when they do happen -- like we did (and do) with aviation.
It's way more terrifying because you have basically no control over the risk once a reactor is built. Worse, if you lived in the area before the reactor existed you've just gained a new risk factor. If you're a homeowner you can pack up and move, but that's a major undertaking to avoid a risk that someone else created for you.
In contrast, the solar installer has direct control over their exposure to the risk. They were aware of it before entering the situation, and they can eliminate the hazard at any time by quitting.
Mainly due to politicians drafting rules to require more safety out of nuclear than any form of other energy solution. Of course it's more expensive if it's 100x more regulated.
> Nuclear waste: Many supposedly safe storage solutions such as in former salt mines have turned out to be unsafe. Gen IV reactors produce less, but not nothing at all
And what damage has these "unsafe" storages caused, especially compared to other forms of energy creation? Coal is basically pumping out the radioactive waste into the air we breathe. It's better to have few concentrated places for the waste rather than spread it all around the air little by little.
You can't just say "nuclear waste" and be done. You have to compare the data between different solutions.
> Security and safety: They're centralized infrastructure, attacking them has catastrophic consequences, unknown unknows like in Fukushima and human errors like in Chernobyl do happen and lead to catastrophes.
Funny you mention Fukushima, where zero people have died or gotten sick due to radiation, and experts say that the toll will probably stay at zero. Overall nuclear has the lowest mortality rate per MWh of any form of energy: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-de...