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Maybe you don't understand the word "relative" ?

Including accidents, nuclear power has caused about 0.04 deaths per TWh. This is relatively safe compared to 161 deaths per TWh from coal and 1.4 deaths per TWh from hydropower. (source)

It gets even stranger: more people have died from solar energy accidents (mostly, falling off roofs while installing panels), than have died from nuclear accidents. Of course, ordinary facts can never overcome irrational fears...

For those who don't want to click on the link, the most dangerous (by far) is coal (including deaths due to pollution). Nuclear is the safest. The stats are based on deaths/TWh, and the authors gives lots of references.

There's lots of figures out there, but this article (from some anonymous blog, so buyer beware) was particularly interesting:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

Actually, yes I am. Look up the statistics.
Deaths caused by nuclear power vs. other means of power generation leads to funny results actually. Since you won't believe me if I try to mathematically explain it. Let me link to a reliable source: http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm . Another fun set of statistics can be found here (though a less reliable source): http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html .

Compare deaths per terawatt produced between coal and nuclear.

OK, Deaths per TWh:

Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Nuclear: 0.04

Safeness of nuclear power can be evaluated: 0.04 Deaths per Terrawatt hour Remember, that is with old designs.

The problem is the fear cycle. Plants in operation are old and less safe than newer plants. We can't build newer plants because plants in operation are "unsafe." Plants in operation thereby continue to be "unsafe" rather than being replaced with newer, safer plants.

(Naturally the existing plants are not really "unsafe" because safety is a numbers game. The number of deaths per TWh is still lower for nuclear than it is for any of the alternatives by a wide margin. But when something happens it makes the news, and people are more about what the television says than the reality.)

You should award yourself the Nobel prize for failing to cite any sources. What about this one as an illustration of how "safe" your favoured energy sources are in comparison to nuclear?

Never let the facts get in the way of a good rant.

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

If a coal power plants fails, it is just a big fire, annoying and hard to put out BUT controllable.

There are approximately 2300 coal plants worldwide. Pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 1 million people worldwide each year, or 435 per plant per year. Chernobyl is estimated by the World Health Organization to have caused/will cause 4,000 long-term deaths. So on average, a coal plant operating normally (without any big fires) will kill as many people as Chernobyl every 9 years.

A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream.

The worst power-generation related accident in history was the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. Nearly a quarter million people killed. Equal to about 50 Chernobyls.

Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.

Have you looked at the land requirements for the different technologies? Japan has about 47.3 GW of nuclear power generating capacity. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, meaning it generates an average 42.6 GW for them throughout the year.

Solar has a capacity factor of about 0.15. If you're using 15% efficient panels (125 W/m^2), that means you're getting an average 19 W/m^2 throughout the year. To get an average 42.6 GW throughout the year, you'd need to cover 2.27 billion square meters of solar panels, or 2270 km^2. The evacuation zone around Fukushima is pi*(20km)^2 = 1256 km^2. If Japan replaced their nuclear capacity with solar, it would permanently make more land unusable for agriculture than the Fukushima accident.

Three Gorges Dam in China generates about 80 TWh per year, which works out to an average of 9.1 GW. The reservoir behind it is 1045 km^2. So for every GW of power it generates, that's 115 km^2 of land was flooded and made permanently unusable for agriculture. Dividing Fukushima's evacuation zone by Japan's nuclear power generation comes up with only 29 km^2 of land made unusable per GW of power generated.

So if your concern is km^2 of soil being made unusable for agriculture, you should be even more critical of solar and hydro than nuclear.

It is not as nuclear technology can't be made safe but since about the only argument in the past has been that it is cheap, costs are going to have to be cut in the hope that "it" never happens. That is not a very reliable method to prevent accidents.

The safety of any technology has to be assessed based on the severity of the danger(s), multiplied by the likelihood of accident, normalized by the amount of power generated. This can be simplified to number of people killed per unit of energy generated. The exoticness of the death is not a factor. Whether you're killed by radiation poisoning, a thrown turbine blade, a wall of water, or lung cancer, you're still dead.

When you analyze safety this way, nuclear turns out to be the safest power source. i.e. If you wish to generate X amount of energy generated, the technology which can do so with the fewest casualties is nuclear.

The notion that nuclear power is dangerous and we can't make it safe is a myth. Its incredible power density and the exotic nature of its dangers mean we are much more careful with it than with other technologies. This has resulted in (based on statistics from decades of operation) the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. If you use a different measure of safety, like number of people inj

My understanding of gallium arsenide MOS (and I could easily be wrong) is that its speed advantage for logic started running out at about the 0.35 micron (350 nm) node, which is where Vitesse gave up and very nearly went out of business. The future might not be silicon, but there's little change of it being GaAs.

Intel has recently been talking about using GaAs on future processes. Everything old is new again.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/intel-talks-about-8-nanometer-nodes-for.html

Green also doesn't tend to blow up and render large areas uninhabitable for decades...

Cough. Also, which of these numbers is lowest, again? Hint: it's not hydro, wind, solar, or biomass.

The text may be misleading, but that is how people actually talk about this sometimes.

I think I just have not been clear about the key issue.

People have for decades fought any kind of funding for "cold fusion" on the argument that it violates established laws of physics. The people arguing most heavily for that are people getting lots of funding for "hot fusion", despite the conflict of interest. This has serious ethical complications.

Physicist David Goodstein wrote, in another context: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources."

For example, related to Cold Fusion, see:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/10/dr-george-miley-replicates-patterson.html#comment-341890693
"Third, theory that is institutionally immune to experimental falsification is the sine qua non of pseudoscience so it was the American Physical Society that was engaging in mass pseudoscience. Indeed, theory that is INSTITUTIONALLY immune to experimental falsification is theocracy."

If there is not funding for research, for the most part, it is not done. If things can't be published no matter how carefully and well done the research is, that is a disincentive for professional scientists to work in that field. That is what has been going on for decades with cold fusion. A few people have persisted anyway. But institutionally, cold fusion was never given a fair hearing.

What I'm talking about is the way that people are all essentially religious about some supposed physical law (like the second law of thermodynamics as an example, which basically is at the core of saying energy can not come from anything we do not make an exception about by calling it some kind of battery or reaction). People can cite such laws with the highest moral tone as to why something won't work because it does not fit into known approaches. Then time after time again something does not fit, and then suddenly it is OK because some new exception to the law is invented related to some new theory. But, do people learn much from that?

A true scientist is both intensely skeptical and yet also open to new ideas. Pathological 100% skepticism about anything new generally doesn't help anyone (except maybe those already getting grant funding). Scientists are not supposed to be theologians, but it seems many are (and poor ones at that, too). Also related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism#Religion_and_philosophy

Do you have the professional credentials of this "BW?" Heck, do you even have the real name of this individual? I did not see any affiliations or disclaimers, but I found it quite striking the post date was 3/13 (and, of course excludes any possible impacts from the 311 Fukushima accident). Has this research been peer reviewed by anyone? I don't know about you, but I tend to take "facts" from people that don't even bother to post under their real name with a grain of salt.

I also find it fascinating that you hold "BW's" material more highly than research written by 2 and a half pages worth of authors with impressive and relevant professional credentials. Although, perhaps you just know more about this BW than I do. I do look forward to you letting me know more details regarding this individual . . . However, you even go as far as to say "But it's not the way epidemiology studies are done . . ." Excuse me, but do you mind letting me know what YOUR credentials are, and why I should listen to you instead of, say, a research center for radiation medicine?

One of the ironic things is that BW even has an article stating that cancer is the largest killer in the UK and continues to increase. Yet, in his analysis of deadliness per watt, he is looking at things like people falling off roofs when installing solar panels. It is hard to take such analysis very seriously.

Hold on...

You're saying that two fledgling industries (wind and solar) have had a higher death rate per MWHr than an industry who has been around for years, and have many employees who have never even been near the outer shell of the reactor?

Ya, I found your reference, since you kinda forgot to post it.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html.

Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal - world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal - China 278
Coal - USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

Now you need to look at *how* they came up with those numbers.

First, they're measuring the rate per TWh. So I'd guess that they're estimated that 2.28TWh of solar have been produced world wide by rooftop facilities (you forgot to mention *ROOFTOP*. Like, any schmuck with a ladder who buys a solar panel). So if a single person died in a way related to that solar panel, in that 2.28TWh, that makes it so dangerous.

A more appropriate scale would have been deaths per thousand man hours, directly involved in the power generation facility. A separate number could be correlated deaths.

Come on everyone, you know this song! Sing along!

Correlation does not equal causation.

Your citation is not talking about power generation facility accidents.

For anything but nuclear, they are including environmental, public health, and even global warming. ya. The victims of hurricanes, tsunamis, forest fires, droughts.. You get the idea. They're also considering ozone, coal dust, power plant emissions. If someone dies from a respiratory related illness anywhere near a fossil fuel plant, they died because of it. I'd be willing to bet that they even included people getting hit by freight trains transporting coal, and accidents with oil tanker ships. (ya, ya, both get carried by both, I'm just making a point, not a documentary). That's every person who may have died because of something related to fossil fuel power generation since the first coal plant was built in 1926. I couldn't find a date of the first oil powered plant, but I know they've existed since at least the 1930's.

For nuclear, they are considering nuclear accidents. There have been a handful of accidents since the 1950's. The memorable accidents have caused wide spread destruction and loss of life. And of course, the accident in the Soviet Union was seriously downplayed.

But lets be fair. For hydroelectric, they were only able to pad their numbers by 171,000, when the Banquio Dam broke. A dam that showed evidence of damage just after it was built. That they knew would fail. And finally did fail. Did they include Hiroshima and Nagasaki as nuclear accidents? How about the American troops and civilians who were exposed to radiation during the first hundred or so nuclear tests. Nah, that wouldn't be fair. If you're going to count gross neglect as a cause of death, you'd damned well include intentional manslaughter in it.

So, who wins? I don't know, and I don't have the time to do a comprehensive examination of every incident at every power generation facility world wide since ... well, it doesn't matter when, because I

Here's a pretty good breakdown of numbers. His results for hydro are lower than I've seen from some studies but the gist is the same, nuclear is incredibly safe.

Judging nuclear power's safety by a first generation reactor design that was built nearly 40 years ago, and that despite a M9 earthquake and 15m tsunami has not killed anyone, and is predicted to eventually cause up to 100 deaths from cancer is foolish. It's like judging hydro power by the dams that have burst and flooded and killed thousands, or by natural gas pipeline explosions that have killed hundreds, yet you're not protesting those types of power.

Nuclear power has caused fewer deaths per TWh generated than any major power source, including wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, or fossil fuels. Nuclear power is the safest power source yet tried, and that's even with the older reactor designs and the Russian RBMK design (e.g Chernobyl) that is inherently unstable and should never have been built.

Gen III reactors have passive safety designs that allow full cold shutdown with no external power. And thorium fueled reactors don't produce usable quantities of plutonium so they're not a proliferation concern, and doesn't require uranium enrichment (which is itself expensive and dangerous). And using fuel reprocessing dramatically lowers the nuclear waste (by a factor to 10 to 100).

Did you read the link a bit higher?

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

Solar has .44 deaths/TWh
Nuclear has .04 deaths/TWh

That doesn't even include all the deaths from solar panel construction waste products in China.

Yes, solar power kills more than nuclear ever has.

Here's a compilation of WHO, IEA and few other EU or UN organizations studies with direct links to them:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

Even if they are underestimating the number of deaths, it is highly unlikely they missed the mark by 10 or even 100. It still makes the nuclear energy safer than coal, oil and gas. We're not comparing 2 to 4, we're comparing 0.04 to 161. The margin of error for incomplete data is rather big...

As for greenpeace report: if you attribute each and every case of cancer to Chernobyl on this area (as they did with their own 6000000 estimate) you will get to similar numbers. But it's not the way epidemiology studies are done. Besides, if you start counting the number of people which quality of live has been reduced (because they had their thyroid cancer removed or have other health problems) you have to count also the number of people that have asthma attacks, heart problems or other diseases because of air pollution (mercury pollution alone is huge problem) caused by fossil fuel burning. Otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges (future early deaths to deaths that are already happening).

India has 150,000 tonnes of Uranium.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/india-plans-to-start-exporting-nuclear.html
Abdul Kalam is an Aerospace Engineer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_kalam

You may want to check out, well, the facts.. Nuclear is safer, by far, than any other power source. Yes, nuclear power, for all it's "shoddy" construction (never mind the concrete chimneys are designed to survive jumbo jets flying into them), the fact that power plants have been run for decades longer than intended instead of being replaced by newer, safer, and more efficient models (in part due to regulative costs. I won't get into the irony of that, since most of them have apparently been fixed recently), and counting in the horror that was Chernobyl (which still only managed to kill ~4000 people total), is safer than solar power.

Also, the best sources I can find agree that renewables aren't cheaper than other sources (and won't be for another good 5-15 years. Hence why there are government subsidies for them, at least in the US.) If that were true, we would be seeing a lot more of them. Companies don't buy gas and oil because they like ruining the environment, they do it because it is the cheapest option. Once you make solar, et al. cheaper than the alternatives, then people will start using them.

If the choice was really between solar and nuclear, I would agree with you. The problem is, that isn't the choice. The choice is between coal/ oil and nuclear. Solar (or geothermal and definitely not wind) isn't even a viable option yet. And presented with the dichotomy between nuclear and coal, I will vote for nuclear every single time. So would anyone else who understands how bad coal is (it's worse in normal operation than a nuclear plant is when it breaks down.)

On nuclear being a safer energy source:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Summary - nuclear causes .04 deaths per TW/h produced - dramatically lower than even hydroelectric, which is the next closest.

On Tokyo radiation being a non-issue:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Some excerpts - the extra dose of radiation to Tokyo following the Fukushima incident was only 40 microSieverts, which is about a tenth of the amount of radiation you absorb every year from the potassium naturally occurring in your own body. It is such a small dose that an increase in cancer risk isn't even detectable. Even if you were in Fukushima for 2 entire weeks surrounding the tsunami, you only would've absorbed 1 milliSievert, which is 1% of the dose that shows a perceptible increase in cancer risk.

Conclusion - worst case scenario, the submitter would have nothing to worry about. The doses he could possibly encounter are far below the kind of radiation that could produce any kind of perceptible effect on his or his family's health. Colorado experiences higher radiation than most places because of naturally occurring uranium in the soil and higher cosmic ray incidence (from altitude), yet it is the healthiest state in the US. Eating McDonald's on a semi-regular basis is a bigger health threat than living near a nuclear power plant.

You make it sound like switching over to nuclear power now would be like swallowing bitter medicine.

It's less bitter than you think.

So the really big question is how long the primary evacuation zone is going to be left open. At this point it looks like it won't be that terribly long, maybe 50 years or so. However, Japan's history of negative attitudes about nuclear power (for quite understandable reasons) makes it likely that the zone will stay for longer than necessary. Even when we people are let in, it is likely that few people will actively want to return for a while. Since Japan is so small and has such population density issues this could have a much more disproportionate than Chernobyl did on the USSR even though that was by many metrics a much worse accident.

However, none of this is a good reason to be that fearful of nuclear power. It still seems clear that nuclear power is far safer and more reliable than most other forms of power including coal, gas and oil. By number of deaths per a terrawatt hour nuclear power is one of the safest. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. Nuclear power simply seems worse because radioactivity is so scary and because when disasters occur they are rare and spectacular rather than routine. To see how irrational the various anti-nuke fears are one needs to only look at how groups like Greenpeace protest anything remotely nuclear such as fusion power even though it shares none of the risks of fission power. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/ITERprojectFrance/.

It isn't so much whether the plants themselves can be designed to be safe, sited in safe areas, built safely or operated safely; it's whether we can trust the people who are involved not to take kickbacks or falsify records because they're too lazy to x-ray all the pipe welds or be bullied by politicians or miss what turn out to be obvious problems.

That's an advantage for nuclear, not a disadvantage. What you say about safety is true for all power plants. Coal plants, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams can be built and operated dangerously. They're distributed so the number of people killed/injured from a single incident is smaller. But if you assume the same level of corruption in all industries, the number of people killed by those technologies will be about the same or higher per unit of energy generated.

So how is this an advantage for nuclear? Because nuclear's power generation is so concentrated, it's much easier to enforce stricter building codes, maintenance schedules, and inspections for the same amount of energy generated. Instead of amassing a small army to monitor 10,000 wind turbines being built, inspected, and maintained over 1000 km^2 of land, you can have a dozen inspectors do the same at a single nuclear plant. The statistics bear this out. Historically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Safer than coal, safer than solar, safer than hydro, safer than wind.

This isn't a reason to be worried about nuclear power. This shows that bad things can happen when political decisions override science engineering or when bad engineers don't do a good job.. At the end of the day, what you want can't override nature. Nature doesn't care about politics. This is true with many different technologies

At this point, more people die from coal related problems every year than nuclear power. One interesting metric to compare power types is to look at deaths per a terawatt hour. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. By this metric, nuclear power is one of the safest forms of power out there. The primary reasons that nuclear power stands out to people is because a) it associated with nuclear weapons which makes it scary b) it is a more advanced technology which makes it seem more risky and unnatural c) when something does go wrong is goes wrong in a spectacular fashion. This last is probably the most important- humans react to how much they hear about disasters not how likely they are to impact them. This is why people are afraid of airplane crashes and shark attacks more than car crashes and heart attacks.

Unfortunately, few people are likely to pay attention to this. We are already seeing the fallout as Germany and other European countries turn away from nuclear power. France right now is being surprisingly calm in continuing to use it. Unfortunately, there's some indications that this issue is also making people more worried about fusion power. There's been a long-running problem with scientifically ignorant environmentalists who don't understand the difference between fission and fusion. A lot of them have tried to protest fusion research in the past and Greenpeace has an anti-fusion stance. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/22/fusion_greenpeace_no/. The whole situation sucks.

Oops, wrong link - 2010 reference to railguns. > AC posting delay...

The risk depends on where the energy is produced too, so the metric is not absolute.

The procedures and technology can be improved. The solar/wind/hydro deaths for example are calculated from resource mining, construction and maintenance related fatalities (/resource or /profession in general population) : http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html That article precedes the one that OP referenced and provides the methodology.

The nuclear comes out as the safest probably because of the strict safety guidelines and the fact that not anyone can maintain a nuclear power station. Should the same kind of methods be enforced to all energy related activities in society the renewables (and coal too) would appear a lot more safer.

In other news, 30 coal miners die each year in the U.S. alone and no one gives a rats ass.

Deaths per terawatt hour (from nextbigfuture.com):

Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Oil: 36
Natural Gas: 4
Biofuel/Biomass: 12
Peat: 12
Solar: 0.44
Wind: 0.15
Hydro: 0.10
Nuclear: 0.04

Yeah, most environmentalists won't care about operating a nuclear reactor on Mars (some will of course. Loonies are loonies), but many (very, very many) will bitch and moan to no end about launching nuclear material on rockets in case they explode. Right now it isn't so much of an issue (because, well, most people don't know we do it and we don't do it often) but if it enters public consciousness you can expect a massive backlash against it, and no set of statistics about how safe the rockets are will stop it, just like no set of statistics convinces them nuclear reactors are one of the safest power sources in existence and cause far fewer health issues than coal (hell, even solar has more deaths than nuclear, simply because of rooftop installations. source)

I'm not saying launching massive amounts of nuclear material on rockets is necessarily a good idea, but no matter how safe it'll never get off the ground once people hear about it. So unless we start mining Uranium or Thorium off planet, don't expect this to become a widespread source of power on Mars anytime soon.

You mean you haven't heard of Canadian Bacon?

On a more serious note, this tech is the precursor to laser ablation being used for rocketry. Funding has to come from somewhere.

we are allowing the pseudo-environmental movement to control the discussion to the point where we will be shutting down nuclear plants in the US

No, their actions have been worse than this.
They're not getting old, dilapidated reactors shut down... quite the opposite. They're extending the life on these reactors by preventing safer, more efficient reactors from being built.

Solar and wind power have killed more people than nuclear power. But nuclear might catch up if we're forced to keep using ~50 year old designs and ~40 year old reactors, while also being given no way to reprocess the waste.

http://nextbigfuture.com/

Brian's copyediting is atrocious, but he stays on top of a wide range of technological developments.

The problem seem to be that you are under the impression that Mythbusters is something other than an entertainment TV show.

Apparently that's enough credentials for the US military... And I'm not trying to prove you wrong here. I'm baffled by it.

you are right, you will go down in flames from the 'nuclear fanboys'. You deserve it.

We have much more pressing concerns to deal with than this inane bullshit:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/un-study-says-76-trillion-needs-to-be.html

and keep this in mind when you consider your excruciatingly stupid decision:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/20/us-germany-energy-idUSTRE75J42J20110620

And in case you are a 'climate change skeptic' I'd suggest you check the statisics on coal and oil deaths, in relation to nuclear:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html

What an unmitigated, colossal, inconceivably short-minded, pooch screw of a fuckup this flip-flopping is. It's guaranteed to cost lots of lives and billions of dollars.

And the chance of a 9.0 earthquake plus tsunami is - in case you are wondering - is pretty much next to NONEXISTANT in Germany.

If you don't like the current brand of nuclear reactors, use that reputed german engineering skill and build LFTRs and IFRs to take their place, don't cower under the utter spinelessness of this decision.

Ed

"It's not obvious to me that a brain simulating algorithm would be parallelizable enough to run effectively in chunks distributed over the internet. "
It wouldn't. The timing of the spikes arrival at neurons is critical to within less than the usual jitter across large networks. General purpose CPUs just are not an efficient way to simulate neurons, and never will be.

This comment on TFA links to information on a much more technically advanced and likely to succeed method:

The DARPA SyNAPSE project looks much more promising. Rather than attempting to use general-purpose CPUs, they are creating special purpose neuromorphic hardware that will be much faster and more power-efficient than any conventional hardware. Funding for FY2010-2012 is over $75 million, phase I is complete, goals for 2012 include having a verified design and fab process for chips simulating ~10 billion synapses and ~1 million neurons in 1cm^2 with less than 1kW power consumption. These chips are planned to be prototyped by 2015. Given that between 20-100 billion neuron equivalents are needed for a human-scale simulation, that gives them plenty of time to hit their goal of 2019 for human emulation. See the article at NextBigFuture.

If you're referring to the cost in human lives, at deaths/TWH, nuclear power is *still* the safest power source, even when you include Fukushima.

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

It IS the safest... How many have died in Fukushima? How many of those were from radiation?

Apparently, solar power is pretty lethal:

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

What scarce resource? Uranium? Thorium? These supposed scarce resources will long outlast coal and hydrocarbons even if we replace all the worlds current power production with nuclear.

Dangerous technology? Nuclear is the safest form of technology in the world completely irregardless of what kind of measurement you want to apply to it. You're just scared because on the rare occasion that something does go wrong it stays in the news for a month of scaremongering. Fukushima had what ... 1 death? Or how about closer to home:

The death rate for the entire lifecycle of the nuclear power industry in the USA has been .... 0 per year. As far as I know it's 0 per EVER. That includes mining, haulage, etc as well as radiation related cancer cases.
The death rate for the lifecycle of the coal power industry in the USA is 34 deaths per year.

If you say one industry is bigger than the other then just look at in terms of Deaths per TWh of generation Coal in the USA alone is 15 deaths / TWh, Nuclear world wide is 0.04 deaths / TWh.

Clearly due to safety concerns we must ban all forms of power except for Nuclear.

My comment about the Greenpeace propaganda still stands. The best place to learn about Nuclear power is neither www.greenpeace.com nor www.iaea.org. Find something without bias. It may open your eyes a bit.

What scarce resource? Uranium? Thorium? These supposed scarce resources will long outlast coal and hydrocarbons even if we replace all the worlds current power production with nuclear.

Dangerous technology? Nuclear is the safest form of technology in the world completely irregardless of what kind of measurement you want to apply to it. You're just scared because on the rare occasion that something does go wrong it stays in the news for a month of scaremongering. Fukushima had what ... 1 death? Or how about closer to home:

The death rate for the entire lifecycle of the nuclear power industry in the USA has been .... 0 per year. As far as I know it's 0 per EVER. That includes mining, haulage, etc as well as radiation related cancer cases.
The death rate for the lifecycle of the coal power industry in the USA is 34 deaths per year.

If you say one industry is bigger than the other then just look at in terms of Deaths per TWh of generation Coal in the USA alone is 15 deaths / TWh, Nuclear world wide is 0.04 deaths / TWh.

Clearly due to safety concerns we must ban all forms of power except for Nuclear.

My comment about the Greenpeace propaganda still stands. The best place to learn about Nuclear power is neither www.greenpeace.com nor www.iaea.org. Find something without bias. It may open your eyes a bit.

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

Rgds

Damon

Why don't you ask your favourite search engine? This was the top hit for me. The important data (deaths per TWh):

• Coal – world average: 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
• Coal – China: 278
• Coal – USA: 15
• Oil: 36 (36% of world energy)
• Natural Gas: 4 (21% of world energy)
• Biofuel/Biomass: 12
• Peat: 12
• Solar (rooftop): 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
• Wind: 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
• Hydro: 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
• Hydro - world including Banqiao): 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
• Nuclear: 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

So, Nuclear power is 3-4 times safer than wind, and twice as safe as hydro-electric.

Assuming 4000 deaths from Chernobyl over a 45 year period that WHO did, you get 0.037 deaths per TWh of nuclear power.
Coal in the US scores 15 deaths per TWh.

Even if you come up with an absolute ridiculous number like 400 000 killed by Chernobyl, you only get 3.7 deaths per TWh of nuclear power.

[Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html%5D

Yes, Chernobyl led to around 4000 cases of thyroid cancer in children, however since that cancer type is easy to treat all but 9 of them recovered. Ironically, the treatment is based on radioisotopes only produced in nuclear reactors.

The numbers are probably from here:
    http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
The blog author does a pretty good job of citing all the sources. The thing that makes it interesting is that many of the data points are *so* far apart that even large inaccuracies in the source studies would not shift many of the conclusions you'd draw.

Here's my take, if a nuclear reactor explodes, a rare but possible occurrence, it will contaminate a hundred square kilometers or so so it cannot be inhabited for a century or there abouts. If you want a hydro system with the same power output, you generally flood a valley and not only prevent it from being inhabited while the dam stands, but also ruin it for plants and animals too, unlike Chernobyl which is returning to natural forest flora and fauna. Nuclear probably won't explode and if it does, it still isn't all that bad compared to hydro.

Also, hydro has a death caused per joule generated rate much higher than nuclear, which is safer than any other source:

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

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

This is deaths, but what about contamination?

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

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

"The World Health Organization and other sources attribute about 1 million deaths/year to coal air pollution."
"For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced."

While that fact is interesting and unexpected, it only applies until something goes wrong.

While everything is going right, nuclear power is quite safe.

While everything is going right, coal power still kills 24,000 people in the USA alone every year. And that's not even mentioning things like the 48 tons of mercury released into the air and water every year by perfectly functioning coal plants in which nothing has gone wrong.

Even Greenpeace only puts the death toll from Chernobyl at 200,000 from 1990 to 2004, less than two thirds of what American Coal accomplished over the same time, and they didn't even have an accident to blame. That's just business as usual.

So, yeah, go Coal. Let's put an end to those dangerous nuclear plants and return to safe, clean power.