How many birds die because of eolic parks?
How many animals die or lose their habitat when a hydroelectric power plant is built?
"in just 65 years or so since nuclear power is available"
every single time a technology has been introduced this has caused an impact. People still die in plane crashes, car crashes, complications due to surgeries, etc
And of course nobody died in the petrol extraction->refining->distribution->thermal power plants process.
EDIT: ah I missed that there was a deleted comment above.
List of Oil spills: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
Deaths related to Oil and Gas: http://gdacc.org/accidents-injuries-natural-gas-injuries/
Where should we get our energy?
Preferably using some process that won't leave the planet uninhabitable when something, inevitably, goes wrong.
I think it's clear we should be spending more time, money, and effort on truly renewable and environmentally friendly power sources. People have been turning that discussion into a "nuclear or not" debate for a long time, which has certainly hampered whatever progress we have made in that direction.
Even on years with major nuclear disasters, coal energy production kills more people than nuclear plants. Proper nuclear plants are the second safest option after hydro, and we can't get all our energy from hydro unless we start using much, much less energy.
Just to be clear, I am of the opinion that modern Nuclear is a great option for our present energy needs.
And Fukushima? It had containment, but it was using a design that predated Chernobyl, and sacrificed safety for the ability to produce material that you could use to build bombs.
Nuclear is far from perfect, but compared to the damage we're doing with fossil fuels, I'd welcome a change to the relatively safe and clean nuclear power, especially with modern, safe designs.
The problem is nuclear waste. No matter what nuclear technology you use, it leaves behind tons of waste that will be hazardous in tens of thousands of years.
It's a very difficult problem to deal with -- politically. Technically, it's not a non-issue, but it is easier to deal with than, say, the horribly toxic tailings ponds that you get from most mining processes, or the residues from the tar sands. And those, unlike nuclear waste, are produced in massive quantities, and do not decay naturally.
It's a minor detail which doesn't really distract from your major point.
One of the key advantages that recommends fourth generation nuclear reactor technology is that the design eliminates much of the existing "waste" (it's really just ~$50T worth of unspent fuel we have laying around that could power the entire world for ~1000 years) that's been produced by past and current light water reactors. A better estimate would be in the 200 to 400 year range now. That's right; we're actually capable of getting rid of nuclear waste with nuclear reactors.
Yes that's still a good number of years, but estimates for global deaths per year caused just by particulate pollution from coal power plants range from a conservative 100,000 up to 3,000,000. How many people per year is nuclear currently killing? I was pretty incredulous to find this out, but the answer is zero. And given that they produce negligible CO2 as compared with fossil fuels, they are recommended by the climatologist who is largely responsible for drawing attention to climate change since the 1980s, James Hansen. The conclusion (begins on page 116 of this .rtf file) in his 2009 book is worth reading:
Ironically, traditional environmentalist movements that indiscriminately protested and continue to protest against any nuclear power technologies have effectively greenwashed the "clean coal" (wtf) mantra into existence because fossil fuel plants are the only other alternative for baseload. To me, this seems eerily similar to the protestation of tobacco companies that their products were causing cancer. We're still building coal power plants, but the CO2 sequestration they're currently talking about would require burning ~25% more coal to power the process, making it so uneconomical that it won't ever happen.
And since sodium-cooled fast reactors can also run on decommissioned nuclear weapons, decreasing the risk of nuclear proliferation, we have every reason to be using these technologies for baseload power and zero reasons not to. Given the choice, I'd rather live near a nuclear power plant than any other type. Perhaps I'd finally be able to get an electric car that would then be functionally carbon neutral, though maybe not avoiding the ecological damage externalized in the building such massive batteries. (That's something I still need to look into for myself. Anyone have any academic sources other than the Union of Concerned Scientists/Lobbyists?)
The answer to that is no. When people believe something to be safe, they cut corners. This continues until it is demonstrated to not be safe by disaster.
A disaster then causes people to be safety conscious until they forget.
Look at planes. Considering the number of planes in the air the fact that we have so few accidents is pretty astounding. We were able to build an entire manufacturing process that very strictly avoids cutting corners.
Then again, maybe we don't really think about planes as being safe.
There is no technology that I am aware of which comes with risk of disaster, and does not suffer a major disaster at least once every generation or two.
The best I came up with was determining longitude based on the lunar distance. It could be disaster for a single ship that got it wrong, but I don't think there were major disasters during the 80 years (2-3 generations) it was in service.
I can think that a fleet might have ended up in the wrong place (like the Scilly naval disaster of 1707), so there could be a major disaster, but a fleet also has enough independent people doing their own reckonings that it would be self-correcting. I looked through the UK and French lists of ship disasters, but found no multi-ship disasters based on location errors during 1767 to ~1850.
(If you want a physical technology, rather than mathematical technique, then Hadley's octant, integrated with Vernier's scale, which made the octant precise enough that sailors could use to judge longitude usefully. In turn, it was effectively replaced in the 1800s by the sextant.)
But I don't know enough about nautical history to know if there were major disasters caused by octant/sextant use which were comparable to pre-lunar distance methods.
* Citing mildtrepidation's comment on this thread, it's a good one.
Because you need enormous quantities of the machinery used to harvest the power. Hundreds if not thousands of times as much as you would need in a nuclear reactor.
The real solution is gradual powerdown and, eventually, population reduction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EROI_-_Ratio_of_Energy_Ret...
I guess it is highly unfriendly to the local environment though (on the other hand, we already did most of the damage in the good spots).
There is also the "high enough" factor. If things got awkward, we could run a civilization on solar PV, and even devote some of the energy production to increasing the total energy production.
(I sort of expect the cost curve on solar to start to bend quite a lot faster in the next few years; it's reached the point where it almost beats the grid without subsidies)
(The 'hydro wins' was just the sort of fun/obnoxious way to link to the chart showing that lots of systems have a net EROI, which is almost all you need)