I am not defending coal or solar or whatever. I am referring to the closed attitude of the nuclear industry. There is a huge problem with nuclear defenders in Japan who don't eat their own dogfood. You'd think they would be happy to do so since the reward is huge (improved confidence) and the risk is only 20 or more years down the line (if ever)
But the problem is, when people freak out about Fukushima, they don't say "Hey! Mark I BWR's aren't safe! We should shut down those designs!" They go after Nuclear with a wide brush, and instead we're stuck with more gas and coal dependance.
But the problem is that using Fukushima as an argument against nuclear, is like using a car crash as an argument against transportation.
Please note that I'm not saying the reactor designs themselves weren't old and out of date. They were. But that wasn't the root cause of the problems. The stresses that these reactors have withstood due to the lack of backup power are far beyond any safety specification they were built to.
There are much cleaner modern coal plants with filters. Still coal is dirty and dangerous.
In the nuclear industry you have new designs. But this does not solve the basic problems:
* mining of Uranium is dirty
* you need to transport dangerous material
* nuclear weapons can be produced
* reprocessing is extremely dirty
* storage is unsolved
* it promotes large corporations with all problems (corruption, ...)
* a society needs to be sufficiently advanced to handle the risk (i.e. better than Japan, the Soviet Union, or the US)
* the capital costs are large, needs to financed by the government
Plus with the new reactors you get interesting new dangers. Ever heard of 'stuxnet'? There are now viruses and attacks against nuclear facilities based on computer viruses.
I'm not saying it's something that should be dismissed, but I do think that we just have to take into account that anything that handles humongous amounts of energy in a concentrated space is dangerous, but nuclear energy is less so than most alternatives.
And here in Uruguay, the current way to supplement the already exhausted hydroelectric power is burning oil - I'm advocating a nuclear power plant to get us out of our current energy crisis (and I would have it in my backyard if needed)
By your reasoning, you should be raising your kids on a coal ash dump. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/us/07sludge.html
The fact that one such glider still exists and is apparently in use has no bearing to the current state of the art of aeroplane design. Similarly that one old, outdated and utterly inferior reactor can fail when provoked says nothing of the current state of the art of reactor design.
The problem isn't that we don't have designs that can deal with these sorts of problems. The problem is that we don't have the political strength of will to decommission the older, unsafe plants and replace them with newer, safer plants. Similarly we don't have the political strength of will to do what is required to ensure uncompromised safety, ie. moving spent fuel into secured areas away from power plants, breeding fuel to dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive waste created and burning that waste out to make it less radioactive before it ever needs to be stored, etc.
We just need to build stronger and safer reactors.
Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought.
I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physicist and he explained to me why I was wrong.