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I can't see 3He being worth a damn in comparison to PV or fission in the long run. Mining the moon for 3He would be like buying a Rolls Royce to get at that sweet sweet catalytic converter.

It's not that there isn't a good reason to go to the moon, it's that we aren't ready. No infrastructure exists to deal with moon transit, asteroid mining, etc. Eventually, radioisotopes mined from asteroids might power and heat the space economy of the future, but right now there is no way to do anything economically viable.

The real space race is to get a functioning ecosystem off the planet before funding and/or war nix any possibility.

Until now, we have launched all from Earth. The gravity well of Earth force to use chemical propulsion and very large rockets to launch "small" cargo.

If we industrialize the Moon and asteroids, all will change.
Earth won't be affected. Ion engines and perhaps, fusion rockets will be common, and then huge amounts of materials could be moved across the solar system.

Dense planets are a bad option for big exports (if you don't have a space elevator).

In space, a environment where "contamination" is not critical, we could industrialize exponentially, so incredible things could be possible in little time.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/06/affordable-rapid-bootstrapping-of-space.html

No, a false dilemma is when only a fixed number of options are presented, when in actuality there are many more. Although I can understand how you got confused, I didn't present Denver as the only other place to live. What I did was point out the hypocrisy of those who say that the contamination is bad - if Fukishima is so bad, why aren't we complaining about the natural radiation from Denver, which is 10 times worse?!?!? Why don't we boycott food grown in Denver? Why don't we declare it as unsafe for human habitation?

Just out of interest, you might like to know that more people have been killed by breached hydro-electric than by breached nuclear. In fact, in a single accident, ~171,000 people were killed by hydro. And the thing is, I don't think they really cared whether it was nuclear or hydro that killed them, they are still dead. Solar panels use dangerous chemicals in their manufacture. Wind requires massive constructions projects. Tidal requires massive amounts of dangerous maintenance. Hydro displaces anybody who lived in the catchment area. And in comparison, they produce so little energy compared to nuclear that to get equivalent outputs, they are downright dangerous.

Here, some facts might help you. Seriously, read that before you respond.
Notice what the safest thing is? Sure, nuclear fuel is highly poisonous, but we need *so little* of it that in the big picture it really doesn't matter. In fact, naturally, Uranium decays into Radon, a highly radioactive gas (which is the main source of radiation in Denver). So, by using the Uranium for fuel, we actually reduce the amount of Radon, making the world safer in the future. Neat, huh?

The true cost of Nuclear power is more than any other method.

Talk about easy mode! "Any other method" logically includes coal. And coal sucks. To put it in perspective, about twice as much electricity is produced each year from coal(44.9%) as from nuclear power(20.3%) in the USA.

What, you want healthcare costs included along with the fatalities? Okay, sure thing. How does $500B/year sound, for the USA ALONE?

I'd say I hate to break it to you, but that would be dishonest. I LOVE breaking this to you: The world could suffer a Chernobyl level event EVERY year and it would STILL come out cheaper than coal.

And while we are at it, lets add in all of the cost for nuclear power plant accidents both public and private funds and divide that by the the number of operating plants. Let's see, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, smaller costly but less publicized accidents.

Let's see: Chernobyl: $235B, TMI: $975M, Fukushima: too early to tell. Let's go with roughly between Chernobyl and TMI: $118B. It's probably quite high, but eh. Total: $354B, or about 3/5ths the damage coal does to the USA alone each year.

As I've said before, Chernobyl's design wouldn't have been allowed anywhere, the cost would have been far less if it had been built with a containment dome. 437 reactors, leaving the share per nuclear plant at $810M per your stupid standard.

Let's put it into better context: End of 2012 nuclear power had produced 69,760 billion kwh. Chernobyl, TMI, and Fukushima amount to .5 cents of cost per kwh. Yes, half a cent.

It doesn't matter, because there's not one D thing that we can do about it anyway. Stop burning fossil fuel? Sure, if you want to kill millions of humans, because they / we all need the fossil fuels to get along. Casting people into abject poverty is not a valid solution, either, which is what happens when you deprive them of the cheap fossil fuels. That results in an average 6.5 years shorter lifespan, and if the poverty is experienced as a child, the life shortening is not reversible. Just get over it, whatever is going to happen will happen, and we'll either adapt or we won't. I'm expecting that if push comes to shove, some serious geo-engineering projects will be undertaken, such as dykes along key seaboard areas, and we'll just lose the polar bears - who needs 'em, anyway. When the choice is dead people or dead polar bears, I'll take the dead polar bears.

Meanwhile, if we could get _this_ to work:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/07/solar-thermal-electrochemical-photo.html

then we could actually take CO2 concentration back to before the industrial revolution. Just get prepared for the sort of winters that George Washington had to deal with at Valley Forge.

Actually, radiative forcing (necessary for the basic assessment of the contribution of the various greenhouse gases to warming) is not 'grade school level physics'. The key problem that any plan to address this warming must deal with is how to address the problem economically. As it turns out, the political compromise to try and build a renewable economy on intermittent low power density sources is entirely misplaced, and it is distracting us from real potential solutions based on nuclear fission/fusion.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/04/terrestrial-energy-will-make-integral.html

An average nuclear reactor core (at least here in Canada) generates about 1000 MW.

Here's a question: how many OTEC plants would be needed to replace current world energy use? Or, how many wind power towers? How much area in solar panels?

Here's another question: without restraining progress, as developing countries become fully industrialized and their energy use per capita becomes 10-fold, how many OTEC plants and windmills and square meters of solar panels are we going to need?

So why bother? Especially when nuclear has the lowest number of deaths per terrawatt-hour generated: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Secondly, this reactor does NOT use a thorium fuel cycle. "It will make use of MOX fuel, a mixture of PuO2 and UO2." (same link above). Rather, what it does is OUTPUT processed thorium that can be used to jump-start a later, hypothetical, thorium-based reactor. In other words: The current project is just "Stage II" in India's 3-stage nuclear program, which has taken since the 1950's to even get to this point. Stage III is now hoped to be a reality maybe around 2050:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%27s_three_stage_nuclear_power_programme#Stage_III_.E2.80.93_thorium_based_reactors

HERE IS THE REAL ANSWER---TIME TO UPDATE WikiPedia Started construction of a 500 MW prototype fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam and this is now under construction by BHAVINI. The unit is expected to be operating in 2010, fuelled with uranium-plutonium oxide (the reactor-grade Pu being from its existing PHWRs). It will have a blanket with thorium and uranium to breed fissile U-233 and plutonium respectively. This will take India's ambitious thorium program to stage 2, and set the scene for eventual full utilization of the country's abundant thorium to fuel reactors. Four more such fast reactors have been announced for construction by 2020. Initial FBRs will be have mixed oxide fuel but these will be followed by metallic-fuelled ones to enable shorter doubling time. http://rawcell.com The 500 MWe FBR being built at Kalpakkam requires two tons of plutonium and seven-eight tons of natural uranium oxide at each fuelling. Thorium Oxide is fed in the periphery of the reactor. rawcell.com

"Started construction of a 500 MW prototype fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam and this is now under construction by BHAVINI. The unit is expected to be operating in 2010, fuelled with uranium-plutonium oxide (the reactor-grade Pu being from its existing PHWRs). It will have a blanket with thorium and uranium to breed fissile U-233 and plutonium respectively. This will take India's ambitious thorium program to stage 2, and set the scene for eventual full utilization of the country's abundant thorium to fuel reactors. Four more such fast reactors have been announced for construction by 2020. Initial FBRs will be have mixed oxide fuel but these will be followed by metallic-fuelled ones to enable shorter doubling time." link http://rawcell.com

Nuclear power does not prevent deaths. Not a single one. In fact, it causes quite a few deaths. It is just plain wrong to attribute lives saved by not burning coal to nuclear power.

However, that does not mean that the 0.04 people assumed to die per terawatthour of nuclearly produced electricity isn't the lowest of all possible sources of power, as this less propagandaish source states:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Or this one:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

And it also doesn't mean that switching to more nuclear power would continue this trend. Furthermore, it does not mean that all fossil plants/mining cause that many deaths.

This is bullshit territory.

Nuclear power has the lowest deaths per TWh of any form of energy -- and that includes things like Chernobyl and Fukushima, the latter of which had a curious focus given that far, far, far more people were injured, displaced, or killed by the actual tsunami as opposed to any radiation events, now or in the future.

Direct deaths from fossil fuel sources -- including even naturally occurring radiation from conventional fossil fuel energy sources -- far outstrip any deaths that have ever occurred, or even will occur with even the most extreme statistical projections, from any nuclear power source, including accidents. That's right: there are more deaths from "radiation" from the byproducts of fossil fuel sources than there are from nuclear power, including accidents and waste.

This is what we should be worried about:

"Outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China in 2010, nearly 40 percent of the global total, according to a new summary of data from a scientific study on leading causes of death worldwide. Figured another way, the researchers said, China's toll from pollution was the loss of 25 million healthy years of life from the population."

There is a reason China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.

The bank bailout of 2008.

What about the bank bailouts is supposed to prove your point? It wasn't the banks who could on the spur of the moment channel many trillions of other peoples' money. That point resided with the governments of the world.

Fracking.

If fracking is dominated by business interests then why isn't it being applied as quickly as possible everywhere? California supposedly has much larger shale oil reserves than North Dakota has, but it doesn't have the same activity. Why can't businesses get what they want in California, if they dominate politics?

Monsanto and GM crops. First they said the the manipulated genes would not get into non-GM crops. Then when it happened the courts ruled that the non-GM planing farmers could be sued for stealing their IP. So if GM crops are used in an area, either you plant a different crop, or are forced to use the GM seeds to avoid being sued. The Mafia is envious.

And Monsanto's legal efforts would be completely toothless, if it weren't for the power of government to make inadvertent pollenization of crops illegal for the victim.

In addition: Big Pharma and Oxycontin. HDMI cables. EULA. "Clean Coal". Mandatory ethanol from corn. Increasing the number of 1-HB visas.

All enabled by government force. Without which, none of these would be happening.

The constant feature is that big business can buy damn near any legislation they want.

But they can only do so from one national level legislature in the US (and similar monopolies on law creation elsewhere). And in the US, the power to make law is held by only two groups, the Democratic and Republican parties. I have to ask why people think that businesses have the power, when it's concentrated in two parties with trillions of dollars at their disposal?

In the real world the law goes to the highest bidder

Of course, big business can buy law. How else are you going to monetize the concentration of political power in the federal government except to sell it? And you claim, it goes to the highest bidder. That indicates that the big businesses are competing with each other to purchase political power. That's another indication that the power resides with the government not with the highest bidder.

Can it deflect the solar wind?
If it can, then it has the necessary density to build statites.

That technology scaled to insane sizes can create a Dyson sphere and harness the total output of the sun.

"Unless, of course, there's a breakthrough in fusion."

In fact, I think fusion is the reason. Even oil companies are selling off oil fields and renting the mineral rights.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/02/new-google-solve-for-x-lockheed.html

No alternative is 100% safe either. Wind turbines kill several people every year (mostly maintenance workers falling to their deaths). Falls from roofers are a leading cause of death among home contractors, and installing rooftop solar panels on every home would increase this number. The occasional hydroelectric dam failure kills people via flooding (in fact the worst power plant-related accident in history is the failure of a series of hydroelectric and flood control dams - nearly 200,000 killed). Oil and gas plants occasionally have fires. And everyone knows the staggering number of deaths caused by smoke from coal plants. If your threshold for safety is that an electric power source must be 100% safe before it can be used, then that's equivalent to saying we cannot generate electricity.

If you accept that there will always be some risk, and sort the different power sources by deaths per unit of energy generated, it turns out nuclear is the safest power source man has ever invented. Yes the potential calamity when a nuclear plant goes out of control is big. But the amount of electricity that single plant can generate compared to other power sources is even bigger. Frankly, if there's going to be an accident, I'd rather have it all happen in one place, so we can just cordon it off and concentrate all our efforts into cleaning it up. I think that's preferable to having thousands of mini-accidents which as an aggregate kill more people, do more damage, and cost more to clean up. The only advantage of the mini-accidents is that they don't capture the attention of the press and thus never enter the public consciousness, meaning their perceived safety is just an illusion.

I'm reading this line of comments and feel the need to point out that the radioactivity of coal power plant waste is merely a 'jee wiz' talking point. The various OTHER contaminants in coal that end up in the fly ash or up the smoke stack are of far greater concern.

If you're going to make a serious argument as to the hazard of nuclear vs coal, you SHOULD include more factors, such as the pollution, accidents, and such.
Deaths per TWh by energy source.

Nuclear: .04
Coal, USA: 15
Coal, Electricity, World: 60
Coal, Electricity, China: 90
Hydro: .1 (1.4 world, including Banqiao)
Solar, rooftop: .44
Wind: .15

I want to see their Big F***ing Rocket launch (a.k.a. Merlin 2). Supposedly, it's similar to the F-1s used on the Apollo program. A Falcon XX is on the drawing board for up to 140 tons to orbit. By mass, a new space station like the ISS could be launched with 4 of those. The ISS is supposed to take 40 flights to construct.

Source

"Air currents from whatever source were eliminated in the first Proof of Concept project by testing the experimental thruster mounted in a hermetically sealed box. The experiment was reviewed and accepted by professional government scientists." [The research was being supported by the British government at the time.]

He also points out that real ion drives need much higher voltage and that "Anyone who thinks they can create grammes of thrust from ion wind at the voltages we work at clearly doesn’t understand physics." He does not believe a vacuum chamber test would show anything, as ion drives function in a vaccum and there would still be the question of wehther some ionised material was somehow being ejected. However, the hermetically sealed box test should have negated that possibility.

None of which addresses the problem which is not about ionization but about simple convection - the waveguide gets hot (from having 2.4kW of microwave energy pumped into it) and heats nearby gas asymmetrically, creating a net thrust (which, due to the taper would cause it to move in the direction of the wide end provided the overall surface area / taper angle creates more surface area then the large end has).

The hermetically sealed box is a red-herring too: if you were in a sealed box full of water you'd have no trouble swimming around inside it. The only thing it controls for is external air currents blowing the machine around.

Source

"Air currents from whatever source were eliminated in the first Proof of Concept project by testing the experimental thruster mounted in a hermetically sealed box. The experiment was reviewed and accepted by professional government scientists." [The research was being supported by the British government at the time.]

He also points out that real ion drives need much higher voltage and that "Anyone who thinks they can create grammes of thrust from ion wind at the voltages we work at clearly doesn’t understand physics." He does not believe a vacuum chamber test would show anything, as ion drives function in a vaccum and there would still be the question of wehther some ionised material was somehow being ejected. However, the hermetically sealed box test should have negated that possibility.

You're right, but why nuclear? Why not something that doesn't have the chance, however remote, of causing armageddon?

Because modern nuclear doesn't have even a remote chance of causing armageddon. The worst crisis in the history of nuclear power gave a few thousand people cancer. The second worst crisis has killed or injured almost nobody, although caused a lot of inconvenience in the area no doubt. No other nuclear failure has caused any health problems worth mentioning, and the ones whose failures were costly to clean up were old, and would not be produced in this day and age.

Nuclear power is the safest energy source per TWh, bar none. Wind power is more deadly.

Modern nuclear can also process existing nuclear waste, which seems like a bit of a win.

Shut up. All bringing up nuclear power does is remind everyone that most people are superstitious morons.

You're right, but why nuclear? Why not something that doesn't have the chance, however remote, of causing armageddon?

Because modern nuclear doesn't have even a remote chance of causing armageddon. The worst crisis in the history of nuclear power gave a few thousand people cancer. The second worst crisis has killed or injured almost nobody, although caused a lot of inconvenience in the area no doubt. No other nuclear failure has caused any health problems worth mentioning, and the ones whose failures were costly to clean up were old, and would not be produced in this day and age.

Nuclear power is the safest energy source per TWh, bar none. Wind power is more deadly.

Modern nuclear can also process existing nuclear waste, which seems like a bit of a win.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Cavitation
http://www.articlesextra.com/cavitation-fusion-nuclear.htm
http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/brillouin-funded-for-2-million-and.html

Nuclear power has an very low deaths per kWh, even when you include chernobyl, 3mile island and fukushima ( http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html ). chernobyl is a terrible design (as the coolant boils, the reaction goes faster. fail), nothing like that could happen in any modern (by which i mean anything made in last few decades).

Switching to any other form of power generation will cost lives.

From a environmental point of view, suppose japan can build enough wind and solar to replace nuclear (big job on the scale of a war effort), if they did that along side nuclear they would be reducing carbon emissions. if you do it instead of nuclear then you are standing still. Now take a look at this http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ and have a read of IPCC, and explain how we are going to not hit 400 ppm.

A Russian moon base that "accidentally" happens to have offensive moon based warheads, lasers, magnetic rail guns or any other type of threatening technology facing the Earth.

http://defenceforumindia.com/forum/strategic-forces/156-electro-magnetic-rail-gun-2.html

Referncing this article:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/02/railguns-for-space-launch.html

"The source of this post is this 10 page IEEE paper, Launch to Space With an Electromagnetic Railgun by Ian R. McNab, Senior Member, IEEE The cost of electricity for a launch will be negligible, as shown below. Barrel life is central to the successful economics for this system. A system might cost $1.3 billion and launch for $500/kg. Recent tests fired 7 pound projectiles at 5637 mph. Lunar escape velocity is 5,324 mph. So the truck sized system is already good enough to launch from the surface of the moon. Classic science fiction "the Moon is Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein could become reality."

Yeah, I'll stand by my statement. Fracking tends to occur in areas with low populations. Even if has some hidden cancer risk that isn't apparent for many years, the number of people affected is pretty small.

Coal gets blamed for 1 million deaths per year just from the air pollution. There is also the increased cancer risk from the radioactive material released and of course the mercury that gets into our fish. This guy even made a table where you can see the relative deadliness of coal vs natural gas. Even if frack water is as big a hidden danger as, say, asbestos, it would be a long shot for gas to match coal in deaths.

Laser physicist. Not a lot of use in making nuclear weapons.

You should read up on the Laser uranium enrichment program announced by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Well, the coal-plants don't result in such an accident... They spew out radioactive material continuously... Also they produce quite allot of hazardous waste..

as a prevous commenter wrote..

Solar is expensive to clean up, too. Either we need to find a way of processing and recycling old solar cells, or they need to be stored in a dry place indefinitely. The arsenic (from doping or from GaAs substrate panels) can contaminate groundwater.

And if we get large amount of arsenic in our ground-water we are probably more screwed than the Fukushima incident..

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Even if very little electricity is produced directly from oil it does have a direct influence on the oil usage..
If electricity was cheap as hell more electric cars would be made thereby reducing oil-usage..It would become more const-beneficial to use electric trains instead of diesel engines and so on...

(Numbers are from 2008)
About 36% of the world energy comes from oil... fuel for vehicles, burning for electricity or to heat homes etc..
About 26% of the world energy comes from coal...
About 21% from natural gas..

Oil and coal are also have the highest death's per kWh..

reference http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Off-shore wind will help with that. More reliable that nuclear and coal, ideal for base-load. The wind never, ever stops blowing in the Pacific, as any sailor will attest.

Well, the wind might not stop blowing, but the towers might stop working since it's a quite rough environment... Hurricane winds is not too popular to have at a wind-farm....

Offshore wave generators might do the trick, and will probably be cheaper in the long run too.. Can be placed very close to the coast since they are quiet and it will also reduce the install-costs and reduce the transfer-loss since shorter power-lines will be used.. Also a benefit... If placed around a harbor it will reduce the waves while still providing power..

Last time i checked a ~25m floater was able to generate somewhere between 700kW to 1MW..

And to remember... the energy potential in a wave that's just a few centimeters high and a few hundred meters long is *huge*.. And most waves out at sea, or just maybe 500 meters out from the shore, are those types of waves, in any weather and regardless if it's windy..

But to get back to the point... Nuclear energy is safe and efficient.. What's not safe and efficient today is old nuclear plants that was mainly built between 1950-1980..
Building thorium reactors would make it safe, efficient and cheap.. They would be safe since they are unable to go critical.... They are also much simpler in design making them less prone to failures since there are fewer parts that can fail...

If you want to learn a bit more about this watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8

Saying that nuclear power is dangerous is like saying that atoms are dangerous.. There are many ways to extract energy from nuclear reactions... Like direct conversion from radiation to electricity from the already produced waste from the current breed of reactors.. http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/direct-conversion-of-radiation-into.html

Supposedly one that does not kill us. "Better" is not just a matter of engineering; it's about having the basic sense not to do anything that will render our habitat useless.

A better nuclear-plant like a thorium reactor does not go critical. It does not risk the same problems as the old reactors that where built during the 50-80'ies.. The problem with nuclear power is not safety, it's the inability for people to accept development of them since they think all nuclear devices are harmful without actually having an idea of what is safe or not and this is causing the politicians to stop accepting new, safer, reactors to be built and we are stuck with the old ones since we still need the power from them...

Even if a dam breaks and thousands die, the land itself can be used again somehow. Contrary to that, Chernobyl (and most surely Fukushima) are off limits to mankind now.

And what happens with farm-land when a dam breaks... top-soil gets washed away, houses demolished, peopled killed.
- Power to rebuild the houses.
- Power to transport new top-soil back to the farm-land..

With Chernobyl it was gross human error that caused the tragedy.. Turning off the safety systems and pushing the stuff well pasts it's limits is not safe...
People have already started to move back to the surrounding areas that has dropped to safe levels... The actual Chernobyl plant will probably be unsafe for some time (300-600 years).. But this accident was due to grossly incompetent people and a plant that was not maintained as it should..

Even if you burn something, it is possible to devise a close cycle where you plant, absorb CO2 and then release it again by burning wood, which is far better than just burning oil or dealing with the uncontrollable: radioactive reactors.

The problem is that we could never grow enough trees to facilitate the energy-demands... But the biggest parts to make something like that sustainable..
- Fuel for the machines and trucks for chop the trees down, transport to the plant and then transport the ashes away from the plant..
- Risks for the workers.. People in this line of work today have quite high injury/death rates.

Death-rates by energy-source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Some information about thorium reactors: http://theweek.com/article/index/213611/could-thorium-make-nuclear-power-safe

The pro about a thorium reactor is that as soon as you stop the proton beam it will stop power-generation.. Ie, it cannot go into a melt-down state... http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html

And where did you get Hiroshima from?? That's not related to nuclear power... That's related to a nuclear weapon designed to kill people...

Check this page... people killed per TWh for different energy-sources..
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

More people have died from cancer that they got from the coal-industry... Death's per kWh for coal is very high... Even kWh for wind-power is quite high.

from http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Energy Source / Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal – world average 161
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36
Natural Gas 4
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44
Wind 0.15
Hydro 0.10
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04

The REAL problem with nuclear power today is not that it's unsafe... It's the unrest from the population because they have not idea about risks.. This in turn results in no new, safer, reactors being built and the old ones kept since we still need them.

Building Thorium reactors would solve basically all safety issues we have with reactors today since they cannot go critical... The only problem related to this is to make the population understand that they are safe, but i don't think that will ever happen since the majority of the population are idiots and scared of anything 'atomic'... Just hope no one tells them they have about 7 billion billion billion atoms inside them... And a few are probably uranium.

Entirely true. Problem is, you can make the same argument for all the other sources too and they'll show even more deaths. I'm sure if you applied measures to bring the safety of coal into line with nuclear you'd blow its price sky high. You'd have to make mining far safer, and capture almost all of the pollutants emitted from the power plants. Good luck with that.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

In the grand scheme of things, are the disasters all that bad? Look at fukashima. Death toll from the earthquake and tsunami was in the order of 20k people. How many confirmed deaths cause by nuclear power? At least five. Total deaths after all's said and done? It's going to look paltry next to the natural disaster. If you can make these accidents considerably less common than natural disasters (and face it, we have), and kill far fewer people, that's possibly an acceptable risk.

Renewables are great. In theory.

But as soon as you extrapolate their production capacity to equal that of current coal and nuclear plants, you find that their empirical accident and fatality rate is no longer insignificant.

The problem here isn't that nuclear is risky. Everything we do has risks. The problem is that we're judging the risks of the alternatives based on their current (minuscule) capacity. Their aggregate risk falls underneath our alarm threshold, so gets ignored. Then proposing those alternatives be scaled up 20-100x to replace nuclear, under the assumption that their aggregate risk will remain the same instead of also scaling up 20-100x.

Once you scale up their risk along with capacity (basically assume all power sources generate the same amount of power), you find that they're actually more dangerous than nuclear.

Note, especially, the human death rate per Terrawatt-hour of energy produced here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-sources and look at the bottom of the graph on the right (consistent with http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html which has discussion attached to the numbers).

Now redo the chart for deaths in the 5 mile radius around the power plant, and you will have your answer. Nuclear deaths are usually in the vicinity of the plant, and happen in bunches. Its like 9/11 and people are willing to accept an increase in the chances of cancer to avoid another 9/11.

> Would these locations prefer a windmill farm or coal fired plant.

Oh, wow. This is the most blatant example of a false dichotomy I have seen for days. There are many other options, all of them more practical. Note, especially, the human death rate per Terrawatt-hour of energy produced here: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-sources and look at the bottom of the graph on the right (consistent with http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html which has discussion attached to the numbers). This is a rate lower than even that of wind, but there's a more important reason that this method is much better than wind: it's the only alternative to coal that can meet all of the world's energy needs as developing world per-capita usage energy use explodes to match that of the developed nations. You can't cover every square mile of the planet with wind towers.

Here is some research into the actual safety figures in deaths per TWh generated:
      http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
As you surmise, Coal is the worst. Nuclear is the safest, bar none, beating Solar/Wind/Hydro.

The optimal solution (right now) is to build some more Gen IV reactors (such as the "Integral Fast Reactor"): this
uses far less uranium, and burns up the lanthanides in situ, yielding very small amounts of waste that are safe
[same level as the uranium ore] within 200 years.

Nuclear (fission) power would have to become a *lot* more dangerous to be "as safe as coal".

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Stop being afraid of nuclear.

Deaths per terawatt-hour for all energy sources

I live in the Netherlands. We have two nuclear powerplants here, plus a bunch of them close enough in Belgium and Germany. If one of these plants has a serious accident, it could harm millions of people. And even if it isn't a medical problem, as we might be able to move all those people to safer places, the socio-economic problems will be enormous, and the problems we're facing with Greece now will be small compared to this. Look at Japan, where they considered evacuating Tokyo last year. They didn't make this public until recently, but think about that. What if they had to leave Tokyo and stay out for the next 50 years?

There is no other energy source that can create problems on such scale in such a short time.

Stop being afraid of nuclear.

Deaths per terawatt-hour for all energy sources

The mystery of the human genome was sort of like a protective lock that prevented people from engineering terrible plagues. Now that mystery is going away, with lots of well-meant good intentions to cure genetic diseases and so on. With that protective "code" widely understood, we had better be sure to learn how to be nicer to each other, and use that knowledge to build a better society rather than tear everything down.

Or, in other words:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042546/quotes
"Elwood P. Dowd: Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she'd say "In this world, Elwood, you can be oh so so smart, or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart... I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."

In general, our society needs to move to "A Newer Way Of Thinking" like Albert Einstein (and now Donald Pet) talk about, given we can either use abundance to build a better world for all, or we can use it to destroy that possibility for all:
http://www.anwot.org/
http://anwot.org/blog/2011/07/10/stren-70-why-do-we-have-destructive-aggression-and-war/

And a basic income for all is part of that transition to a newer way of thinking, even though it seems all these social trends are very slow processes. I've heard that is until the trends reach some tipping point like about 10% of the population understands them and values them, and then the trend races forward. It's amazing that it was considered as much as it was in Germany recently:
http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_2_snd-basic-income.html

There really is no alternative to a newer way of thinking and related socioeconomic policy, given the power of WMDs at this point in the hands of disgruntled people at the edges of the society who may think the whole thing is grossly unfair. The miracle is that people are so peaceful anyway, and that things like blowback actually so rarely happen.

Likewise, if LENR (what was formerly called cold fusion) pans out, while it will open up many possibilities for good, it will lead to more destructive possibilities as well, and probably, after a brief spurt of new jobs, we will see massive formal-sector unemployment as energy can often substitute for labor. Related links (even if things are still up in the air, and solar panels are a proven technology also rapidly dropping in cost):
http://www.google.com/search?q=lenr
http://pesn.com/2012/01/12/9602009_NASA_Admits_LENR_Cold_Fusion_Game_Changer/
http://energycatalyzer3.com/news/cold-fusion-being-studied-at-mit
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/12/newenergytimes-gets-three-nasa.html
http://energycatalyzer3.com/news/billionaire-donates-money-for-cold-fusion-research-at-us-university
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

That that's a depressingly low bar? I don't think most anti-nuclear people are pro-coal. How many people have died producing solar?

Solar power has about 0.44 deaths per TWh

Granted thats better than the 4.0 for Natural Gas, but Solar is not viable for other reasons.

-=Geoskd

In practice, even factoring in Fukushima, nuclear power plants turn out to be the safest thing. (It helps if you don't build it in a tsunami zone and ignore a safety report for 5+ years, of course.)

New designs being developed now are even safer and more efficient: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4

http://nuclearpoweryesplease.org/

According to this, it is 10 times the rate of deaths due to nuclear power.

These numbers are what the GP is referring to. On a per-Joule basis, nuclear power does have the lowest number of deaths by far. There are a number of factors, starting with the comparatively small volume of fuel required. Coal requires much larger mining operations because the energy density is lower than uranium. More mining equals more opportunity for regulatory capture/failure producing unsafe conditions and mining accidents. The second factor is air pollution: The number of deaths caused by excess smog from coal-fired power plants is large and measurable.

I always think it's funny that solar power is cited as more than 10 times as deadly than nuclear on a per Joule basis. I understand most of those deaths are due to installers falling off house roofs, and since the total volume of production is low the average is not favorable. The bottom line is that once a nuclear plant is operational, the personnel protection regulations do a damn good job of keeping folks out of harm's way, and since they constantly pump out power and fail so infrequently, the average is pretty damn good.

The Mars mission* became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved.

* The Mars mission mentioned here was a NASA mission planned in the mid 1960s.

The only reason we don't have nuclear powered rockets right now is that politicians were worried about budget.

I don't really know for sure, but I suspect that Kenya and other developing nations might want newer, cheaper, safer, more efficient technologies, such as the small modular reactors which should start coming on the market in 10 or 20 years.

There's a quote from Al Gore to the effect that the problem with nuclear power is that it only comes in one size - extra large. That is how our current nuclear plants are built: $3Bn - $10Bn (the range reflects that construction costs are different in different countries - China is building reactors for about $3Bn, and I bet the chinese might end up building reactors in Africa) reactors that produce 1GW or more.

That reactor from Japan might be 800MW or 1GW, and might be "too big" for Kenya's current and near-future needs. They might prefer a 150MW small modular reactor which costs a fraction of the price, and is based on safer technology (like High Temp Gas-Cooled Pebble Bed reactors, which China has been doing R&D work on: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/china-210-mwe-pebble-bed-reactor-starts.html ).

from press release it is clear, that the plant is not for plug in hybrids market ( and the possible answer - is low quality,which in below the current plugin batteries ). For buses and for grid storage - molten salt batteries are preferred ( because materials are much more abundant and cheaper and for these applications the biggest problems of molten salt batteries ( high temperature ) could be of less significance than in cars ). There are examples of such uses http://asmoronurhadi.blogspot.com/2011/03/tindo-worlds-first-solar-electric-bus.html and http://engineering.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2011/03/11/so-what-battery-technology-powers-our-electric-bus/ etc, there are new developments http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/low-temperature-molten-salt-battery-ten.html http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/11/sumitomo-2011111.html in this field, which could make molten salt batteries even more attractive. and if to consider, that lithium reserves are quite limited - mass production of low quality batteries seems a strange idea. I can't say for any good reasons for RUSNANO except they need to spend huge money on something ( they have a big budget and just few mostly idiotic projects )- it is moronic organization which is run by the man who put Russia into poverty in 90s due to badly designed reforms and any degree of idiotism could be expected, but what drives Chinese in this venture is an intresting question. It might turn out, that both sides are driven by bureaucratic logic and thus the project has no real value.

Sure: Deaths per TWh
0.04 deaths per TWh for nuclear. Hydro is a bit more than twice that, wind is at 4 times as much, and Coal is at 42 times that again.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html