I think that the concerns about feeding the starving people in impoverished countries should be better-directed at their governments. In many cases, food supplied as aid by the U.S. and U.N. is either rejected outright due to political bias, sold on the open market to produce money for corrupt officials, or left to rot in warehouses due to the local government not doing anything to put infrastructure in place to move 'the food' to 'the starving people'.

I'm not an advocate for biofuels, but making the argument that biofuel production is a direct cause of world starvation is more than a little far-fetched; the causes are complex, and more political than technological in origin, much like the failings of the nuclear power industry in the States.

Also don't ignore that, in the U.S., a great deal of arable land goes to waste because of government farm subsidies and other political buggery.

For the sake of playing with some numbers, let's assume that a reasonably efficient car, powered by ethanol, would require ten gallons of fuel per week, or around five hundred gallons per year. That's two acres per car, per year. There are approximately sixty million registered cars in the U.S., requiring a hundred and twenty million acres of farmland be dedicated to producing fuel for these cars, and this is only if the cars ran solely on ethanol.

So, if every car in the US were to run on Ethanol, it would consume one-fifth of the total agricultural production capacity.

Also note that some quick Googling for me shows that yields might be almost double the 250 gallons/acre number for biofuels.

This doesn't mean that biofuels are the ideal solution, but they are certainly a strong contender.

Actually, I may have just become a biofuel advocate. The technology to build flex-fuel cars exists now, and can take advantage of the existing transportation infrastructure until such time as a better means, be it hydrogen, super-capacitors, or dilithium crystals, is available. Doing so would reduce dependence on foreign oil, help boost the national economy, and would likely have the positive side effect of promoting research into increasing long-term, sustainable, high crop yields.

Moving from growing food to growing biofuels is necessarily going to influence the price of food - basically the prices of oil and of food staples are going to move in tandem. And we should be very careful before we commit one fifth of arable land to biofuels.

Ultimately this food crisis is caused by poverty, and there's no easy cure for that.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...

I've often heard this, but is it really the safest? I haven't heard of anything like Inside Chernobyl, a strange new lifeform is blooming (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257454) for any other power source (oil spills aren't in the same league).

Let's also remember a couple of other facts:

Chernobyl was in an office building, with no additional containment built around the reactor core.

Chernobyl was an outdated, graphite-modulated reactor. Several years prior to the disaster, German nuclear engineers had found that this reactor design would go uncontrollably critical if certain conditions were met. The Chernobyl engineers didn't know about this, thanks to the Soviet government.

And let's not forget that a large fraction of casualties after the Chernobyl accident is attributable to the fact that the general public was not informed for an entire day after the accident, in fact not until a powerplant in Sweden reported heightened radioactivity levels. This, with Kiev, Ukraine's multi-million capital, only 100km from Chernobyl.

The thing about nuclear power is that errors such as these have more serious consequences than for other sources of power. Or so it would appear.

But all this is relative: if nuclear power is the safest source of power, is there another source of power that is more dangerous than it?

Several of those disasters, of scales arguably larger than Chernobyl, were caused by attempts to generate power. And although I do not have any evidence to back this, I suspect the total number of casualties resulting from burning fossil fuels over the past century far exceeds that from nuclear power related accidents.

The one aspect of nuclear accidents I'd be willing to concede is the long-term contamination of the area, but while rendering chunks of land unusable, it is not a direct threat to life.

I'm sure you're correct on the fatalities for fossil fuel vs. nuclear, but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude).

Making land unsafe is a less dramatic aspect of safety, but actually destroying usable land is an amazing feat of destruction. I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica) it wouldn't matter so much. But I think (present-day) electrical transmission requires them to be close to the power consumers?

True. Also consider the relative efficiency of the generation methods. Supplying the world's demand for energy with nuclear power would probably require far fewer powerplants than doing so by other means.

> I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica)

Except for the melting of the Antarctic ice and all that, in case of an accident :) Most technology seems to involve a trade-off of evils.

New dangers with nuclear power may be discovered (like those that those German researchers did), but that seems to be true also of new technology in dams and oil transport etc.