I'm not accusing the authors of doing this because I don't know much about this field, but it's worth being aware that even raw data can be biased.

Good point. And those were interesting omissions, I agree.

For the record, I am biased against centralized power grids. I'd rather see decentralized power grids and as a strategy for those I think RTG piles are a safe and well-understood technology for backstopping other forms of small scale renewable power.

Fission is just... it's too expensive for what it is. It centralized too much power with states. It's very dangerous when its safety is inevitably bypassed by industry that could never be held accountable for the tens of thousands of years of human no-go zones that it can produce.

At least it's feasible to provide high security for centralized nuclear facilities. (In the UK there's even a special police force for this.)

Edit: or on desktop. Can you post the link to the article you're seeing please?

But this idea that nuclear power plant disasters cause measurable harm anywhere but Chernobyl is just ignoring every bit of epidemiology I’ve ever seen.

And, even at worst-case-Chernobyl, where they took a terrible design and turned off all the safety features, the idea that negative effects last more than decades is ludicrous. The atoms with short half lives are the dangerous-to-human-health atoms; after decades they’re gone.

I’m with you on centralizing power production having socio-political ramifications, but... we’re going to have a grid any which way. Unless we get Shipstone-level inexpensive batteries, we’re still going to have to maintain an electrical grid.

My anti-nuclear friends hate me for it, but I tend to think if we have any hope of limiting carbon forcing in mid-century, we’re going to need nuclear.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclus...

Good point. Thanks.

"There have been a lot of radiobiological studies over the decades to find out what it takes to really damage animal populations, to do some serious reproductive damage. And across most of the exclusion zone, the doses aren't really high enough to have that effect."

> ... research with [Anders Pape Møller & Timothy Mousseau] has shown that voles have higher rates of cataracts, useful populations of bacteria on the wings of birds in the zone are lower, partial albinism among barn swallows, and that cuckoos have become less common, among other findings. Serious mutations, though, happened only right after the accident.

The idea that a 10x spike in population is at all surprising in the wake of removal of humans from the region is silly. Of course short lived animals with large litters would have population spike. Futher, as the Exclusion zone is a 30km diameter circle around the blast. A very large amount of it only sees low sums of radiation, and with the removal of human influence many species will skyrocket.

All this is moot though. You wouldn't go and live there, because you as a human would die within a few years unless you stayed on the very edges and outlying areas of the blast zone. This attempt to minimize the impact of Chernobyl by suggesting that some species managed to find a way to live in the environment is bizarre. You're not defending that generation of reactor design. It's not even clear to me why you want fission when RTG piles are much more practical for anything but the most heavy of industrial use.

Chernobyl being a place "where if most mammals go they die in agony" is patent nonsense. I quoted from the article linked above your post to suggest as much.

What on earth does RTG have to do with this discussion?

As for RTGs, I'm sorry did you lose the plot about power production at the top of this thread?

Honestly, I am an anarchist. I detest hierarchy. I don't like centralization. But let us not make a religion out of it. Let us stay rational.

I think nuclear is the safest viable option we have at this moment. It is not perfect, far from it. It also doesn't mean we should stop funding the research of renewable energy and of energy storage. Quite contrary. But let us not fall for wishful thinking --- look at Germany.

Okay, imagined it. If we need that much power in one place then great. We'll work on it then. But for the majority of individuals, they'll never need close to that level of electricity.

> I think nuclear is the safest viable option we have at this moment.

Based off nothing other than handwavey arguments about how, "Look how this system which has been deployed at a tiny fraction of the scale of the other systems has fewer deaths when we specifically cut out fuel procurement but count atmospheric pollution even if that's difficult to avoid confounding?"

This is not a compelling line of argument. No more so than the "what if we suddenly have a fusion breakthrough won't you want thousands of lines of cabling then?"

> It also doesn't mean we should stop funding the research of renewable energy and of energy storage. Quite contrary. But let us not fall for wishful thinking --- look at Germany.

I don't recall us saying science was bad. Rather, it was, "Concentrating capital on ever larger energy ziggurats is not something that makes sense in 2019."

Sure. Let's look at Germany, where they literally have such an abundance of power they can't migrate their grids to use it fast enough so they pay people to use it? Or how they're now investing in inexpensive and locally sourced storage options because they can power over 90% of their peak demand on a good day?

These are "good problems to have." Certainly better than "How do we shield this drone enough that we can make contact with the melted fuel rods at Fukushima."