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Most people also forget that even if you don't count Banqiao Dam, hydro still has had more victims per power generated then nuclear.

In fact all major power sources have, including wind and solar. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html (quotes WHO sources peer reviewed study).

Even with our big mistakes and the disasters we've seen, it just can't compete with the "working as intended" performance of coal:

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

To quote the Joker:

Hmmm? You know... You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan.""

It doesn't fit exactly, but good enough. Coal's slow deaths, one by one, are a side effect of the plan. One death isn't really newsworthy. Thousands of deaths, one by one, aren't really newsworthy. A nuclear plant's deaths somehow tap into an irrational fear. Like a person that dies of radiation is more dead than one who dies of a coal related accident. Like a person that dies of radiation from a nuclear plant is "more dead" than one that dies of radiation from fly ash of a coal plant. It isn't part of the plan.

The point is that given the inevitability of human error and insatiable greed, is nuclear the best option? This is the point the anti-nuke crowd has been making. Yes, it CAN be done safely...in theory. But, what happens when corporation A figures that regulation X hurts profits too much so they lobby to get it waivered, and regulation Y is weakly enforced, so they just ignore it altogether?

Personally, I like the idea of nuclear power. I just don't trust it in the hands of any organization with a profit motive.

But coal power is also handled by an organization with a profit motive. If we stop letting corporations run nuclear plants, it means we open new coal plants. Given our current level of inevitable human error, nuclear power has the lowest cost in human lives of any power source. Even with our big mistakes and the disasters we've seen, it just can't compete with the "working as intended" performance of coal:

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

Actually, nuclear is safer than basically everything else.

Also, yes, so far less than 50 have died of radiation exposure from Chernobyl.

Oh, and since the disaster Chernobyl has become a thriving wildlife sanctuary.

Please avoid the usual scaremongering headlines of the mass media regarding health and nuclear energy and remember that when deaths are accounted for energy produced, nuclear energy is the safest source we have around even compared with "renewable" energies.

Those numbers look very familiar. I believe they're based on the false assumption that less than 100 people ever died from nuclear accidents, which means they're only counting the deaths of workers in the plants, and omitting cancer related deaths among the civilian population. Admittedly, those are hard to count exactly, but for Chernobyl, for example, most official estimates range from 4000 to 9000. If you correct your figures for that, nuclear would be worse than solar, wind and hydro.

The problem with nuclear reactors is that when things go wrong, it goes wrong in a way that's very hard to control and can have an enormous impact on the health of entire generations.

Are you aware that the casualties related to the Fukushima plant accident are zero ? OK I'll grant you that maybe some operators at the plant may have decreased their lifespan of a few months due to a statistically significant increased risk of cancer, but that's hardly an "enormous impact" on the health of an "entire" generation. Please avoid the usual scaremongering headlines of the mass media regarding health and nuclear energy and remember that when deaths are accounted for energy produced, nuclear energy is the safest source we have around even compared with "renewable" energies.

My argument isn't that it's not a problem because there are other bad problems, my argument is that it's not magic. it's not infinitly bad.

There are serious issues concerned but the risks are reasonable in comparison to risks we accept every day in ever faccet of our lives.

Imagine if you will you saw me walking around wheeling a large thick metal sheet on wheels keeping it over my head at all times.
You ask me why and I answer "meteors, they could kill me at any time and they would kill me stone dead in a moment"
You then point out that I'm ignoring the fact that I'm billions of times more likely to die in a traffic accident and that I'm smoking a cigarette.

Does this lessen the chance of metor strike?
of course not but it's important when talking about risk to compare it to the status quo and regular risks.

nuclear has a risk like anything in life and any energy source.

If I talk about a risk in abstract with no connection to anything else it's easy to come up with absoutes, if you only talk about the deaths from flying it's easy to conclude that it's too dangerous to fly but if you compare it to the deaths from driving the same distance then it becomes clear that it's the safer option.

nuclear has a pretty good record in terms of deaths per terawatt even including disasters though feel free to apply a multiplier to the number if you don't believe the numbers the WHO settled on for chernoble. it's a safe bet unless you pick the completely-insane-made-up numbers from greenpeace then it'll still beat coal and oil by a wide margin.

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

right now nuclear is a mature technology.
It could step into coals boots right now and stop the tends of thousands of deaths every year due to coal smog, coal mining accidents and the problems of billions of tons of CO2.

Other sources couldn't realistically provide the energy we need in their current state.

if we replaced every coal plant with a nuclear plant worldwide today we'd probably have only a tiny tiny fraction of the deaths even if every 25 years a Chernobyl happened (which itself is insanely unlikely thanks to the fact that sanely built reactors have containment structures) so lets rephrase as "a fukashima every 25 years".

large sections of the exclusion zone are already being reclaimed so the area will be slowly shrinking over the next few decades.

A big mainframe... like this one?

Funny thing is, there have been more solar panel related fatalities than nuclear.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

When it comes to solar vs. nuke, nuke generation (because it's an industry obsessed with safety) claims far fewer lives per Watt-hour than solar, coal, even wind. It's just that when failures do happen, everybody notices. This is even if you include the deaths from the atomic bombs and their development.

Car Analogy - Think of it as the same as traveling by car or airplane. We know driving a car is much more dangerous than flying. But when a passenger jet goes down, it's news for weeks. When a fatal car crash happens, no one hears about it. No one cares when Lenny falls off a roof installing a solar panel that won't even produce enough energy savings over its life to pay for itself. If that same Lenny dies from radiation exposures expect a few weeks of nuclear radiation news.

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

"surely they'd be doing something very similar"

And if they weren't digging coal out of the ground those miners might be doing something equally dangerous, if they weren't drilling for oil those oil workers would probably be doing something else.
If you take that approach then nothing is dangerous since the people dying might be doing something else similar anyway.

If there's less demand for coal then there would be less people working down the mines, if there were less demand for rooftop installations then there would be less people working up on roofs.

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

Rooftop solar leads to more death per terawatt than nuclear though between serious (non status symbol big installations) solar plants out in the desert, wind and nuclear it's close enough that it doesn't really matter.

Hydro is damn good as long as you exclude Banqiao.

and everything else is orders of magnitude safer than coal.

Cheaper, and a great source of power, for sure. Hydro could stand to be further developed all over the northeast, where streams, rivers, and water in general is abundant. Still, it's an order of magnitude less safe than solar or nuclear: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

Ah yes, the "we have to think in terms of the worst case" argument. Are you aware the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure? More people died from that than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. So by your reasoning, clearly with such a horrific worst case, we should immediately start dismantling all our hydroelectric plants because they're simply too dangerous to risk using, right?

Nothing is perfectly safe. But to properly account for risk, you have to multiply the severity of a possible accident with how likely it is to happen When you do that, MWh per MWh, the long-term track record of nuclear power establishes it as the safest power generation technology man has ever invented. Safer than wind, solar, hydro, and a helluva lot safer than oil, gas, or coal. Commercial wind power, despite its minuscule contribution to the power grid, has already killed more people in the U.S. than commercial nuclear power. To raise nuclear's deaths/TWh figure above wind over the last 25 years would require the Fukushima accident to kill something like 10,000 people (more than twice as many as Chernobyl). Wind's fatality figures are only low because it generates so little of the world's power. To make nuclear worse than coal would require it to kill several tens of millions.

Here's a look at deaths per terawatt hour.

Nuclear is the lowest with figure of .04 deaths per terawatt hour.

Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system. And it most certainly failed, after standing up to catastrophic events far beyond their rated capacity.

So the reactors technically went into meltdown ... and were brought out again before anything actually melted. A number of indirectly neutron-activated elements, secondary byproducts of the fission reaction, were released into the air, and are totally harmless by now. In fact, over 99% of the Iodine-131 is Xenon by now.

In reality, in Japan :
-> Solar power killed dozens of people (people installing them during the quake, and a few people who got smashed by falling panels)
-> Wind power likewise killed a few people, who were repairing a mast
-> Oil based power killed hundreds of people, due to explosions in refineries and power plants
-> Nuclear power actually got close at one point, to (indirectly) kill 1 person. That person is recovering, and will make a full recovery in less than a month's time
Deaths per TWh energy (obviously discounting little details like the gulf wars, which only the absurdly naive claim have nothing to do with fossil fuels)

What a bullshit study is that? Counting the deaths from steel production, building and maintenance for Wind and Solar, but only counting the deaths from chernobyl for nuclear. What does he think nuclear plants are build of?

Hydro's good in NZ, but it can't meet demands everywhere - there just aren't enough large rivers running through conveniently damable canyons. Even in NZ, you're apparently falling off the program: "The plan in 1959 to raise the level of Lake Manapouri to increase hydro-electric generation met with resistance, and the Save Manapouri Campaign became a milestone in environmental awareness. Later hydro schemes (such as the Clyde Dam) were also controversial, and in recent decades coal and gas-fired thermal stations have been approved in New Zealand, while renewable energy schemes in general have been turned down because of the unpopular effect they have on the environment." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_New_Zealand

When our power sources "have an accident", perhaps they break down, and other stations pick up slack. Absolute worst case, power goes out in certain regions, big deal.

Big-scale engineering comes with risks. Dam failures:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam - 171,000 dead, 11 million homeless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situ_Gintung - 100+ dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakidor_Dam - 70+ dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gusau_Dam - 40 dead, 500 homes destroyed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_di_Stava_Dam_collapse - 268 dead

Also, aside from the body counts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_dams

So in a disaster in Japan that's killed tens of thousands - including quite a few in burning oil refineries - how many are dead from nuke power?

I'm not saying hydro's universally a bad idea, but even in areas where it does work it has substantial risks that you're ignoring.

Anyway, if you'd care to look at the risks objectively, here's a great chart of deaths per TW/h:

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

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

I'm all for wind, solar and hydro, but they're limited in quantity and geography, so we have to find something else to fill the gap. All the other options but one involve burning stuff at considerable cost to human life and the environment. For all its faults, nuclear just isn't that bad compared to all the other alternatives.

Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system. And it most certainly failed, after standing up to catastrophic events far beyond their rated capacity.

So the reactors technically went into meltdown ... and were brought out again before anything actually melted. A number of indirectly neutron-activated elements, secondary byproducts of the fission reaction, were released into the air, and are totally harmless by now. In fact, over 99% of the Iodine-131 is Xenon by now.

In reality, in Japan :
-> Solar power killed dozens of people (people installing them during the quake, and a few people who got smashed by falling panels)
-> Wind power likewise killed a few people, who were repairing a mast
-> Oil based power killed hundreds of people, due to explosions in refineries and power plants
-> Nuclear power actually got close at one point, to (indirectly) kill 1 person. That person is recovering, and will make a full recovery in less than a month's time
Deaths per TWh energy (obviously discounting little details like the gulf wars, which only the absurdly naive claim have nothing to do with fossil fuels)

So ... which is the safest energy source ? Nuclear power is FAR safer than solar power. More than 3x as many people have died from the consequences of using solar power than have died from nuclear power. This is taking into account that we have solar for 10 years, and nuclear for 60, and solar power is not contributing significant energy right now. In other words : the number for nuclear power is likely to not rise at all, and the number of deaths due to solar power is very likely to rise phenomenally.

In any sane society or media, Fukushima would be a very strong argument about how extremely safe nuclear power really is, and how it can stand up to disasters far bigger than what it was built for. In a sane media articles like this would be published, because any panic about nuclear effects will easily kill 10x as many people as the nuclear incidents themselves, just due to traffic accidents.

Additionally, without nuclear fission reactors, we would not be able to do half the medical scans that yearly save tens thousands of lives in the US and all over the world ... Tracers in blood are dependant on nuclear power reactors, for example. In reality nuclear power saves FAR more people than it kills.

Any sane society would build more nuclear power reactors, and pour money into further research into things like nuclear fission, fusion, and whatever. Cheap, safety is far beyond any other power source, portable, absurdly small amounts of fuel needed, and, ironically, less toxic than solar panels, and far less mechanically dangerous than wind power, and let's just shut up about fossil fuels and their wars, or coal ... what possible other thing could you ask for in a power source ?

And why the fuck are we focusing on this ? Some 10000 people died due to many different reasons, all of which basically boil down to direct effects of the force of nature. To all of the media their deaths are merely a tool to implement their preferred policy, which is, for reasons I cannot fathom, anti-nuclear.

Reading Cosmos for science is like reading the National Enquirer for news. TFA presents a false dichotomy: it takes lots of energy to move stuff between space and the surface of the earth. Therefore space travel is impractical. Whats wrong with this?

• First, one you establish a real, mostly self-sufficient presence in space, there is no moving stuff back-and-forth to earth. Raw materials are abundant, and getting in and out of weaker gravity wells (like the moon) is no problem.
• Second, getting back into the earth's gravity well takes essentially no energy at all - only control.
• Lastly, who says that "chemistry" is the only energy source. Nuclear power offers immensely higher energy densities. Like nuclear power for electricity, nuclear propulsion may well be safer than the chemical alternatives.

Space travel takes a huge initial investment to establish a real infrastructure, including mining and manufacturing. After that, it's all gravy.

No, the ARPA grant was awarded in 2009.

What have we had since then? Not even an updated video...? How come the existing video doesn't even show something spinning? All I see is a guy with a piece of metal in his hand making extraordinary claims and no evidence whatsoever.

I sincerely disagree with our supposed tree-hugging friend. There was definitely an anti-carbon free energy theme to the show, try starting right after they slam the Tesla for having a long charge time at 5m30s:

"Before people green people say that's a price worth paying, lets not forget where that electric comes form"
- cue ominous music -
-- cut to a picture of a nuclear power plant--
- switch to car parked in-front of an extremely low powered PERSPONAL wind powered electric generator -
"... [condescending remarks]... to charge a Tezla (sic) from something like that would take 600 hours. That's twenty-five days, and that's assuming it's windy, which... it isn't"

Why the ominous music around Nuclear power? Despite Fukushima, it's still safer / cleaner than coal / petrol.
Who in there right mind would hook the Tesla up to a personal wind based generator?! The wind is suppose to augment regular electricity use. The personal generator is just a way to off set one's emissions by trickling power to the grid while the wind is blowing. Given the music and the number crunching, the show clearly is trying to claim that the Tesla isn.'t a green alternative. Whether or not they spent the time to do this for the Honda is irrelevant. The whole excerpt was entirely irrelevant and unnecessary, yet some how this anti-EV pro-oil propaganda message managed to find it's way into a TV program that's funded by British Taxpayers. Simply outrageous!

It's not that it's a bad technology, it just doesn't have a great track record.When it works, it works well, when it doesn't the results are horrifyingly bad.

Funny, it seems that nuclear has had the BEST track record:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

But you are right, that when nuclear fails, the results CAN BE horrifyingly bad. Note that it CAN BE bad, but it's not a certainty. Three Mile Island is the 3rd worst nuclear power incident in history, and its negative effects were almost non-existent. No deaths, no serious radiation exposure to anybody, and no land contaminated and made uninhabitable. It's almost as if the incident had never happened.

But back to the point, yeah Chernobyl was horrifying. Not sure that Fukushima is yet what I would call horrifying (just bad). But you know what...most other sources of power are pretty horrifying when they go bad, too. Banqiao Dam was pretty horrifying. The gulf oil spill was certainly horrifying. And then there's coal power, where even when things go GOOD and there are no accidents, the results are STILL horrifying.

The problem is you're viewing those nuclear accidents out of context. Consider how many people die from the normal operation of coal-fired power plants. 24,000 lives a year shortened, 22,000 of those preventable. Looking at your list, the last time there was an incident that qualified as an "accident" on the scale was in 1999, at Tokaimura (Level 4). Two people died. In the time between that and the next "accident" (i.e. Fukushima), pollution due to coal has caused 288,000 premature deaths, just in the United States.

The real number is probably more, since this was before Bush's changes to environmental law. The report in question estimated 4,000 more deaths per year if the law went forward. Another way of looking at it is in deaths per terawatt-hour. By that metric, Nuclear is 0.04, Coal is 128, and Oil is 36.

The simple fact is coal kills more people than nuclear. Even if there are nuclear "accidents" (on the INES) every decade or so, there will still be a net decrease in loss of life if those nuclear plants replaced coal plants. Nuclear is not a perfect option, but it's our best alternative to coal for the kind of large scale power generation our system currently needs.

Except the worlds largest sources of uranium aren't in third world countries, and the coal numbers above for coal can be separated to include US only. Oh Look, it's 15 deaths/TWh just in the US alone 3 orders of magnitude higher than world wide nuclear.

There's a lot of negative things to be said about nuclear power, but in terms of human death coal is orders of magnitude worse regardless of how you neysayers try to skew the statistics.

no, I'm asking for a citation for your crazy claim that nothing but CO2 escapes from a coal power plant.
no amount of googling tells me anything except that vast quantities of poisonous metals and compounds come out along with the CO2.

You seem to have this idea that in 1st world countries coal has been clean for 25 years.

yet all I find is a report from this month about the government bringing in regulations to try to make coal power plants stop emitting heavy metals into the air:

http://www.lungusa.org/associations/states/california/for-the-media/alacinthenews/epa-proposes-limits-on-coal.html

"Jackson said mercury and other emissions covered by the rule damage the nervous systems of fetuses and children, exacerbate asthma and cause lifelong health damage for hundreds of thousands of Americans."

try reading this:
Comparing deaths/TWh for all energy sources:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html

You are comparing Bill Gates' accomplishments to the science behind splitting the atom, really? Nuclear energy was one of the crowning achievements of the last century, and that it failed to live up to its promise is a tragedy caused by politics, nothing more. In perspective, it is still the safest and cleanest source of energy we have, and that doesn't even consider all of the deaths due to wars motivated by oil.

It might surprise you to know that the inventor of those "exploding nuclear reactors" was actually opposed to their being used for commercial power production. Dr. Alvin Weinberg was pursuing a far better alternative, which could not explode, could not melt down, burned the nuclear fuel completely, and produced very little (and short-lived) waste. It also didn't produce Plutonium for the weapons program, which was likely the deciding factor. Unfortunately, questioning the safety and direction of the nuclear program lost him his job as director of ORNL, and here we are today, left to wonder, "what if?"

It isn't too late though; the idea is sound, and indeed they did operate a liquid floride reactor for five years without incident. All we need is public awareness of this tragically wasted opportunity, so we can pick up where they left off, and fulfill the promise of nuclear. Unlimited safe, cheap, and clean power--along with an end of the use of fossil fuels and associated pollution and conflict.

only greenpeace claims 1 million and that appears to come from nothing but their imagination.

the world health organisation which actually did research on the matter rather than pulling random big numbers our of their arse claims about 4000 .

"I'm sure it was about 100,000 at least."

based on?
what?
did you just kinda decide that's what it had to be or just kinda average out a few of the claims you heard?

"People care about the "RISK". The risk if a plant goes rogue, melts or explodes"

that's exactly what I was talking about. the RISK.

If a chemical plant producing solvents for solar pannels leaks we could have another Bhopal only worse.

If a dam collapses above a big city hundreds of thousands could die. that that's not just a posibility: that ones has actually happened.

In practice the RISK from nuclear is less than from it's competitors, in part because most of them guarantee a steady death toll.

"It is irrelevant that *so far* it has not happend. It is irrelevant that over the last 100 years died X people to coal and Y People should be far more afraid of hydro dams given that individual dam collapses ... "

sorry but that's insane. "lets just ignore reality and history and instead go with my gut feeling."

And what had happend if there would have been a nuclear power plant and not a simple dam?

what?
That doesn't make any sense at all but the realistic answer is: probably nothing, the towns wouldn't have been washed away.

If you would care to read up the stuff other people link here regarding uranium pollution from coal you would realize: no one ever has died to any pollution coming from coal.

do you own shares in a coal plant or something? work in the marketing department?

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm

Coal kills a lot of people every year.

"If you would apply the same logic you apply to coal mining also to uranium mining you would realize: oh my god, thousands of people died to uranium mining."

most uranium mining in the first world is done with in-sitiu leaching, no mining shafts, they just pump baking soda into the ground and the uranium dissolves into it and they can pump it back up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-situ_leach

And the volumes of ore are tiny in comparison to coal so even in the developing world there's far less deaths because there's far fewer working in uranium mining and vastly fewer deaths.

Please, this is a trivial request: when you feel the urge to make things up just google it first, find a source, cite it.

"Do you really think falling down from a framework during painting has anything to do with the technology involved how the power is generated?"

yes.
yes I do.
it would be dishonest to do otherwise.
it would be deluding myself to do otherwise.
Because those people are exactly as dead as if they got a lethal dose of radiation or suffocated on the fumes in a facility producing solar panels.

As long as I also count similar deaths in other forms of power generation it only makes the comparison more fair and accurate.

most western civilization coal plants are "clean" the don't have any toxic exhaust at all.

repeat after me:
"There is no such thing as clean coal"
"'Clean coal' is a myth"
"'Clean coal' is a marketing and PR scam"
"Coal is the dirtiest, worst source of energy, even in the western world"
"Coal plants emit a horiffic quantity of poisonous metals into the air"

It's pretty easy to sit back and do an armchair analysis of...
I live in an area that's prone to flooding and it's harder than you think...

Yessit, it is. It is. But no sir, its still their job if not doing so means millions could die an agonising death of cancer.

Your house flooding won't nuke your area.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/fukushima-tsunami-data-over-10-meters.html
They designed for a tsunami of height of between 5-6 meters and put the generators 10-13 meters above sea level. Historically Japan has tsunamis twice that height (10m). The wave that hit them was 14m. If they had catered for the historical tsunami heights, all would probably be well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_tsunamis
1605: Keich Nankaido, Japan
On Feb 3 of the Keich era, a 8.1 Quake and tsunami hit 700 houses (41%) at Hiro, Wakayama Prefecture washed away. 3,600 drowned in Shishikui area. Awa, wave height 6-7m. 350 at Kannoura 60 at Sakihama drowned, wave height 5–6 m and 8–10 m, respectively

Actually right now, renewables have significantly higher risks - http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html for the detailed statistics. Once you get into the much larger-scale construction projects that wind and solar farms have, there are surprisingly high injury rates compared to most nuclear energy.

Still almost nothing for either approach compared to coal, of course.

Plutonium in perspective.

As far as widespread release of Plutonium into our environment is concerned, consider this:

The most important effects of plutonium toxicity by far are those due to nuclear bombs exploded in the atmosphere. Only about 20% of the plutonium in a bomb is consumed, while the rest is vaporized and floats around in the Earth's atmosphere as a fine dust. Over 10,000 pounds of plutonium has been released in that fashion by bomb tests to date, enough to cause about 4,000 deaths worldwide. Note that the quantity already dispersed by bomb tests is more than 10 million times larger than the annual releases allowed by EPA regulations from an all breeder reactor electric power industry.

Plutonium is not good for you, but the sky has yet to fall, and seems unlikely to in the future.

FWIW, the word "stats" at the top of "This Seth Guy's" comment was a link to this page: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html which has all of the supporting documentation used, &c.

The main issue is that you can't look at numbers in a vacuum. Any talk of "safety" that's not comparing any power generation method to other methods is misleading at best.

Statistically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology Watt-hour for Watt-hour. Hydroelectric power accidents kill about 40x more people, wind power accidents about 4x more people, than nuclear accidents (projected, since most of the deaths from Chernobyl are cancer deaths that haven't happened yet). If you remove Banqiao and Chernobyl from the statistics (both were outdated and dangerous designs), both hydro and wind kill about 100x more than nuclear . Solar is a bit trickier to nail down because most of the deaths associated with it are classified as construction deaths (falling off rooftops), and not attributed to solar directly. But the linked-to site makes a decent attempt and solar comes out worse than wind.

The statistical comparison to fossil fuels is completely off the scale. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill 1 million people each year (primarily by inducing lung cancer - basically the same mode of death as the majority of the deaths attributed to Chernobyl). That's like 250 Chernobyls every year. Yet people want to hold off on nuclear plants because "they're too dangerous" when the only viable alternative is more coal plants. It's madness.

And for the folks who say that average statistics aren't important, you have to look at what the worst-case potential devastation is, the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. Chernobyl was pretty much a worst-case nuclear accident (active core completely exposed to the environment accompanied by a fire and a government which disregarded the safety of nearby residents), and Banqiao was much, much worse. So by those folks' reasoning, we should be getting rid of hydro in favor of nuclear.

Basically people interact with water, hunger, and disease every day, they're not freaked out by the prospect of death by dam failure. Radiation on the other hand is something they don't deal with every day (or at least they don't think they do, as they eat a banana split on their granite counter-top after getting home on a transatlantic flight from Europe). The mere mention of the R-word even with no deaths attached completely freaks them out.

This Deaths per TWH by energy source (the chart, not the article) gave me some perspective. It's hard to find data on the number of deaths caused by the nuclear disaster in Japan, but it's apparently something 1 (+/-1). If that chart is anything like accurate (and I'm not aware of the World Health Organization having a pro-nuclear power bias), nuclear isn't just safer than coal, it's safer than all the other alternatives.

[...] will have effects spanning billions of years.

Explain. I was of the impression that isotopes with half-lives in the range of billions of years (K-40, U-238, Th-232) can only be considered "technically radioactive" since they're just too damn stable to give off much of any radiation. Keep in mind 99.3% of all naturally occurring Uranium is U-238 and Potassium-40 is contained not just in nuclear reactors, but bananas and brazil nuts.

The increase in background radiation [...]

During the Chernobyl disaster, an estimated 50-80 million (Russian authorities), 1 billion (Time magazine; optimistic estimate) to 9 billion (whole core; pessimistic estimate) curies were blown into the atmosphere (source). Reasonable estimates vary around 3 to 4.5 billion, or a third to half of the core. A 2006 UN report figures an average lifetime dose throughout Europe of around 1 mSv or some three to four months of (global) background radiation.

[...]people who voluntarily and knowingly engage in such employment

And people living near coal mines or plants, breathing the exhaust air from coal plants, living near hydroelectic dams, living near windmills...

Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are much safer.

Nuclear: You're the expert, please provide numbers.
Hydroelectric: Quick Googlage reveals tens of thousands evacuated and >100 casualties 2009-2011.
Wind: Old data mentions rates between 0.1 and 0.4 casualties per TWh, about twenty deaths in NAM from mid-nineties through 2011. Some more googling finds interesting data.
Geothermal: Seems safe but may cause earthquakes. Some pollution issues are to be worked out, but after that we might have ourselves a real contender.
Solar: Apparently more dangerous than wind and hydroelectricity. Who knew.

[...] will have effects spanning billions of years.

Explain. I was of the impression that isotopes with half-lives in the range of billions of years (K-40, U-238, Th-232) can only be considered "technically radioactive" since they're just too damn stable to give off much of any radiation. Keep in mind 99.3% of all naturally occurring Uranium is U-238 and Potassium-40 is contained not just in nuclear reactors, but bananas and brazil nuts.

The increase in background radiation [...]

During the Chernobyl disaster, an estimated 50-80 million (Russian authorities), 1 billion (Time magazine; optimistic estimate) to 9 billion (whole core; pessimistic estimate) curies were blown into the atmosphere (source). Reasonable estimates vary around 3 to 4.5 billion, or a third to half of the core. A 2006 UN report figures an average lifetime dose throughout Europe of around 1 mSv or some three to four months of (global) background radiation.

[...]people who voluntarily and knowingly engage in such employment

And people living near coal mines or plants, breathing the exhaust air from coal plants, living near hydroelectic dams, living near windmills...

Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are much safer.

Nuclear: You're the expert, please provide numbers.
Hydroelectric: Quick Googlage reveals tens of thousands evacuated and >100 casualties 2009-2011.
Wind: Old data mentions rates between 0.1 and 0.4 casualties per TWh, about twenty deaths in NAM from mid-nineties through 2011. Some more googling finds interesting data.
Geothermal: Seems safe but may cause earthquakes. Some pollution issues are to be worked out, but after that we might have ourselves a real contender.
Solar: Apparently more dangerous than wind and hydroelectricity. Who knew.

No form of power generation is completely safe, and if you look at the statistics, even now nuclear is by far the safest.

I agree that nuclear is one of the safest, but I figured wind or solar would be better, with only the few occasional deaths from construction/manufacturing accidents. So I went and looked it up, and you are right...nuclear actually is THE safest:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/07/summarizing-deaths-per-twh.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)

Eight more people died when the Fujinuma dam failed in the earthquake than were killed in the nuclear power plant "catastrophe". When is Germany going to start dismantling all dams?

Not to mention the urgency of laws banning anyone from living withing 10km of the Pacific ocean...

It is a silly system because the copyright laws are made for the 19th century.

"Made for the 19th century" is different from "made in the 19th century". Copyright was created in the 19 century, in order to combat the foreseen side-effects of duplication technologies becoming cheaper and more accessible. Now, we have the internet, and those side-effects are worse than ever. Copyright is more relevant today now than it ever has been, and probably as it ever will be until we get matter duplicators.

The industry is using their monopoly to raise their margins instead of lowering the prices.

Yeah, are we exactly sure that the industry is doing better? From the first result of a Google search, it seems that the US music industry has had a bit of a decline, adjusted to inflation and population. Again, it's only the first result pulled from a Google search, but then again, it demonstrates the sheer flexibility of truth when faced with the possibility that what brings you so much joy can actually be wrong.

My employer (disclosure) has a proposal out for a NASA discovery-class mission to put a boat (yes, a boat) on the surface methane seas of Titan;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8409052.stm
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010LPI....41.1236S
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/carnival-of-space-135-proposed-titan.html

It's called the Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) and let me just say, it's the coolest thing that I've ever come anywhere near close to working on. Not much of a Catholic anymore but I say a littler prayer each night that NASA selects this proposal to go forward. (They are due to announce next month. Write your congressperson!)

So it's not impossible, it's actually do-able, and it's not very logical to carp about whether it's convenient or fun for astronauts to go, as we've got a tremendous amount left to learn from automated missions before we contemplate sending people there. Besides, when TiME sends back the first live footage of the ravenous methane kraken, I'm sure everyone will be glad that astronauts were not part of the first payload.

Lowering Deaths per Terawatt Hour for Civilization

This doesn't even come close to a worst-case scenario for for solar (broken PV panels?, leaked salt?), or even a coal plant.

The problem is, the worst-case scenario doesn't define the statistical average. By definition it's an outlier. The long-term statistical averages for the other technologies are much, much worse than nuclear. Solar is about 10x deadlier than nuclear in comparison. Roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S, with over 100 roofers per year killed from simply falling off. If rooftop solar panels become commonplace, you're probably looking at 100 additional roofer deaths per year from installation and maintenance deaths.

Coal is an absolute carnage in comparison to nucleear. Pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 30,000 Americans each year. The WHO estimated Chernobyl will cause 4000 long-term cancer deaths, so we have 7.5 Chernobyls happening every year in our country due to our coal plants. But this bothers no one, and instead everyone is all worried about commercial nuclear power (which has never killed anyone in the U.S.).

This is just like planes are safer than cars, yet people fear plane crashes. Or white collar crime causes more economic damage than bank robbery, but sentences for bank robbers are harsher. The concentrated damage gets extra scrutiny, while the distributed damage gets overlooked. It's people's poor risk assessment and management which is killing nuclear.

Interesting reading. Do you have a similar link for coal accidents? Do you know the respective casualty rates per watt-hour for the coal, fission, solar, wind, hydro, etc logistics chains?

I spent a half-hour or so googling, and the best I could come up with in that short time was http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html - if that's accurate, global deaths per watt-hour for coal was four thousand times higher than for nuclear. Makes me think fission and coal are like planes and cars - lots more people die in cars each year, but a plane crash is bigger news.

So if you had to pick either coal or fission to supply humanity's power needs, which would you pick? (personally I'd try for solar-thermal, but if you *had* to pick fission or coal...?)

To bring in the car analogy, you don't need to be a racing expert to know it's a bad idea to ride around with stunting teen driver whose confidence exceeds reality, anymore than you need a degree in nuclear physics to know that those who claim everything is absolutely safe and nothing bad can ever happen are probably being similarly reckless.

This is actually a really good analogy, except you have it backwards. If you look at the historical safety record, nuclear is the safest power generating technology we've developed. So the correct analogy would be: Declining to ride with the young driver who says he's safe and has an almost spotless driving record, but being concerned because he's a teen and seems to be bragging about his safety. And choosing instead to ride with the older driver because "we've always ridden with him", who has been in countless accidents and regularly mows down pedestrians, but never brags about his safety.

The support for nuclear isn't based on some blind faith in the technology as you're assuming. It's based on numerical comparative analysis of how nuclear and the other options have performed in real-world use. No technology is perfectly safe, but nuclear is safer than the alternatives, and a helluva lot safer than coal and oil which comprise the bulk of worldwide power generation at present.

I don't know if there are some safe nuclear plants. I don't know if we can reliably make safe nuclear plants. What I do know is that the same people keep repeatedly telling us that "nuclear power is safe" and then we keep having major failures which prove it isn't.

Nuclear is the safest power generation technology man has invented. Safer than coal, safer than oil, safer than hydro, safer than solar, and safer than wind. In the U.S. in particular, wind power has killed more people (13+) than nuclear despite supplying only a tiny fraction of the power that nuclear does.

These major failures you keep hearing about are "major" only due to much higher level of caution with which we treat nuclear power, and the high level of press coverage it receives. It's the same reason people are hyper-sensitive to plane crashes, even though cars are nearly 10x more dangerous.

If you think nuclear power is too dangerous to use, then you should immediately stop doing the following activities:

- Using hot water (2x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Climbing ladders (4x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Sleeping on a bed (5x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Taking a bath (15x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Riding the train (20x as dangerous as nuclear power)
- Riding a car (1250x as dangerous as nuclear power)

I don't need to understand the engineering issues to understand that there is no way to trust the pro-nuclear lobby to actually deal with those issues. Fission based power (and yes; you are right fusion is a different case) needs to be severely limited until we are sure that the people proposing it are much much more trustworthy.

I weep for the future of humanity. People like you are going to damn us to continue using coal, whose emissions kill an estimated 100,000 people worldwide every year. All because you're irrationally afraid of a technology which has killed just a few thousand people in ~60 years.

One thing about wind power. In the event of an earthquake, a terrorist attack, a greedy company cutting corners like BP, incompetence or human error nobody needs to worry about the breeze getting out.

This is the "flying is dangerous because I saw a plane crash on TV" fallacy. When you're comparing how dangerous something is, you cannot look at just a subset of its operation (e.g "in the event of an earthquake, terrorist attack" or "the incident I saw on the news"). You have to look at the totality of its operational risks.

The stats are, commercial nuclear power generation in the U.S. has had zero fatalities in ~60 years of operation, and is currently generating nearly 20% of our electricity. Commercial wind power in the U.S. has had at least 13 deaths since 1970, and has never produced more than 1% of our electricity. All of those are maintenance deaths, but these people are still dead. It doesn't matter that it happened because of an earthquake, or a terrorist attack, or they slipped off a ladder. They're still dead. The only difference is those wind-related deaths never made national news because they didn't have the sensationalism of an earthquake, a terrorist attack, or a catchy phrase like "nuclear meltdown" associated with them.

In terms of deaths per unit of energy generated, statistically worldwide, nuclear is the safest form of power generation man has invented. And yes, that includes the high-end estimate of cancer deaths due to Chernobyl.

I posted part of this already, but it's buried near the bottom due to the GP being downrated. Every time there's a nuclear accident, the anti-nuclear people come out in droves yelling about the "dangers" of nuclear power. If you want to talk about perspective, danger, and opportunity costs, here's the low-down:

There have been zero deaths in the U.S. associated with commercial nuclear power generation despite it producing nearly 20% of our electricity. Wind has already killed at least 13 people in the U.S. despite producing less than 1% of our electricity. All of these have been maintenance workers (the only non-maintenance death was a skydiver in Germany who flew into a turbine). So the quip about a wind turbine at sea collapsing is beside the point since that wouldn't have stopped any of these deaths. In fact I suspect it would have caused more deaths since transferring from a boat rocking in ocean swells to a stationary platform isn't exactly the safest thing to do.

Solar has a huge problem in that roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S.. If you're imagining every house in the U.S. with solar panels mounted on the roof, you should expect probably about 100 more roofer deaths per year from installing and maintaining them. In terms of direct deaths (i.e. excluding mining and pollution), hydro actually turns out to be the most dangerous power source worldwide due to deaths from dam failures.

Over it's 50+ year history worldwide, in terms of deaths per unit of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. Yes that includes Chernobyl (a reactor design not used outside of the former USSR). If you accept the high estimate of number of expected cancer deaths from Chernobyl, it's about 4x safer than wind (the safest green technology). If you accept the low estimate, it's 125x safer than wind.

How about pollution? What most people don't realize about nuclear is that it's an incredibly concentrated power source. How much spent fuel (high-level nuclear waste, like we're trying to bury in Nevada) do you think would be produced to power a typical U.S. home for 30 years? A bit less than 10 kg, about a half liter's worth. To power the same home with solar, you'd need about 30-50 square meters of panels, and the panels have an expected lifespan of about 25-30 years. One small water bottle's worth of waste, vs 30-50 square meters of solar panels. Nuclear in the U.S. generates about 20% of our electricity, and produces ~2000 tons of spent fuel a year. That's about enough to fill one tractor trailer. One tractor trailer-full of high-level waste to provide 1/5th of the entire country's electricity for an entire year. And it's not spewed into the atmosphere like coal, it's not spread all over towns and the countryside like solar or wind. It's neatly contained in concentrated form within the nuclear plant. And all this is not even factoring in the waste reduction that can be achieved with reprocessing.

How about compared to wind? The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant which is the cause of the problem today has an overall generating capacity of 3596 MW. How big a wind farm would you need to replace it? The largest wind farm in the U.S. is Roscoe Wind Farm. 781.5 MW peak capacity, 627 turbines, covering 400 km^2. Note however that that's peak capacity - how much electricity the farm generates under ideal conditions if each turbine is running at maximum power and efficiency. In practice, the average power generation from wind farms has been about 20%-25% of peak. Be generous and go with the high 25%. So 627 turbines and 400 km^2 gives you 195.4 MW of power on average. To replace Fuku

Now let's see... how many anti-nuclear hippies died from doing too much LSD or ketamine or whatever it is they do? Probably thousands.

No need to resort to ad hominem. Even an objective comparison of safety supports nuclear over green technologies.

There have been zero deaths in the U.S. associated with commercial nuclear power generation. Wind has already killed at least 13 people in the U.S. Solar has a huge problem in that roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S. If you're imagining every house in the U.S. with solar panels mounted on the roof, you should expect probably about 100 more roofer deaths per year from installing and maintaining them. In terms of direct deaths (i.e. excluding mining and pollution), hydro actually turns out to be the most dangerous power source worldwide due to deaths from dam failures.

Over it's 50+ year history worldwide, in terms of deaths per amount of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. Yes that includes Chernobyl (a reactor design not used outside of the former USSR). If you accept the high estimate of number of expected cancer deaths from Chernobyl, it's about 4x safer than wind (the safest green technology). If you accept the low estimate, it's 125x safer than wind.

Sort of tangential, but Sandia has made tremendous progress on thermal-electric conversion efficiency. Using supercritical carbon dioxide in the Brayton cycle, efficiency is 40-50% better than with the conventional steam cycle. As an added bonus, the system is thirty(!) times smaller, and will be correspondingly cheaper. The technology is applicable to existing coal, natural gas, nuclear, and even solar thermal plants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
"The fully-loaded cost (not price) of solar electricity is $0.25/kWh or less in most of the OECD countries. By late 2011, the fully-loaded cost is likely to fall below $0.15/kWh for most of the OECD and reach $0.10/kWh in sunnier regions. These cost levels are driving some emerging trends:[8] ... Oerlikon Solar announced in 2010 that its 'ThinFab' production line is capable of manufacturing 143Wp panels at a cost of 0.5 euro per watt (0.64 dollars per watt) and has a capacity of 120MW per year. The company also claims that its production plants have very low energy consumption rates, so that the energy payback time of its 10% efficient, silicon thin-film modules is less than one year.[12] ..."

http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/nuclear-battery-can-be-used-to-help.html
"The Hyperion [nuclear battery] site claims to be 30% of the cost of natural gas approaches to insitu recovery of oil shale"

And maybe someday LENR "Cold Fusion":
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270

Not to disagree that oil production has (or will soon have) peaked, but whale oil peaked, too, and we survived that, and the whales are better off for us moving on to other things, too. Wind and PV are here now, and growing exponentially. In twenty to thirty years at current rates of growth, they will supply all our power. And nuclear continues to improve, too, as with Hyperion, for somewhat the same reasons as renewables are getting better, more research, better materials, and a design focus on safety.

Look at it this way. We live in a community with lots of apple trees making golden delicious apples that are healthy for you and let you live a good long happy life. Those trees are outside everyone's homes. The problem is, you have to walk a little ways, get out a ladder, climb into the tree, and pick the apples. There are also rotten oily coal fruits that drop from the sky all the time. To eat those, you just have to walk out your door and pick them off the ground, although a group of people said they have first rights to them and you have to pay an annual "defense" tax just because you might pick them. Rotten oily coal fruits taste awful, give you gas, and shorten your life, but they sure are easy to get, and they are cheap at baseball games, plus you are already paying a tax for them anyway. So, everyone says golden apples are too expensive, eats rotten coal fruits insteads, suffers bloating from gas, and dies early. Whenever a few crazy people try to get together organized groups to pick the golden apples, or to make special equipment to make those apples easier to get without climbing trees, the large numbers of people who make money off of selling rotten oily coal fruits at baseball games beat the crap out of these innovators with baseball bats, and then they go around and cut down some of the golden fruit trees, too, just to make their point. Some scientists now say rotten coal fruits are not falling as often from the sky these days, and may stop falling altogether in a few years due to changing weather conditions. Is this a good or bad thing?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Rockets are no nearly perfect - given new fuel http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/swedish-researchers-have-discover.html shuttles could have 4-8 times more payload. And this is actually huge step. Next - launch could be performed from towers few kilometers hight or even mountains - it will take money - but still will make quite a change. There are other possibilities such as quad airship launch (walrus was designed for 500 -1000 tonnes - so the rocket could be 4000 tonnes of weight and could be launched, say from 15000 meters hight ), there are other, non rocket ways to launch things into space - but even rockets could be times more effective, than now.

Apparently, not as much as you (or I) would assume - http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/sea-based-launch-option-for-nuclear.html