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Speaking as someone who currently lives in Japan (for work, I'm not Japanese), I think they should. Japan has a ridiculous amount of people in a very small space - Tokyo has is only 75% as large as New York City, but has almost twice as many people. The amount of coal needed to provide enough electricity for them would absolutely pollute the area around them and render it inhabitable - and in a country where habitable land is so scarce, and with such a nice natural climate that attracts a huge amount of tourists, ruining it would not be a good idea. So long as they invest properly in their nuclear power plants and ensure they are well maintained and regulated, they have virtually no environmental impact, and they can provide absolutely insane amounts of power for a very low price. If they act cut the nuclear power like Germany did (which I think was an idiotic move, but I digress), they are going to have a very, very, very hard time supplying enough power for everyone, and if they do it in coal, that will be a disaster. I'll finish with a nice little graph: what do you think?

We only get worked up about nuclear disasters because they're so unusual. Coal is a disaster in its normal operation!

"Jimmy Carter put a presidential order with a permanent moratorium on any and all power reactor construction."

Not so. Carter's order was against the US building a recycling plant for nuclear waste. And yes, there is a huge separation between deaths from nuclear and from the next runner up, but it's in favor of nuclear: http://www.the9billion.com/201...

Compare deaths from nukes vs deaths from coal. There is no comparison. For each person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die from coal. Nuclear is by far the safer option - http://www.the9billion.com/201...

Right, because the number of fatalities due to nuclear power have been horrific! http://www.the9billion.com/201...

It's interesting to watch the different arguments from pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear forces. The pro-nuclear forces point out that building all new power plants as 100% renewable in the near future is not practical but a mixture of renewables and nuclear is. They go on to point out the relatively high rate of deaths from coal power (such as direct deaths in coal mines, and indirect deaths from air pollution) per unit of power generated, compared to the few deaths from nuclear. They may even then point out that petroleum power in general has a poor safety record compared to nuclear worldwide.

The anti-nuclear crowd, meanwhile, either focuses on a tiny number of accidents like Chernobyl and a couple of problematic, but non-lethal, old reactor designs (like the 1970 pebble-bed reactor mentioned by the parent), as if costly problems are unique to the nuclear industry. After all, why pay any attention to accidents, deaths or cost overruns in fossil-fuel power when we can simply make every single new power plant a renewable power plant? Never mind that not every place in the world has plentiful sunlight or wind. They then move on to the only argument about nuclear that is actually fair--that it often costs more than renewables.

Nuclear faces political and popular opposition, often due to outdated opinions based on a few unsafe reactors from the 60s and 70s (did you know that Fukushima reactor 1 was built before Chernobyl? Or that there is another nearby reactor run by a more safety-conscious company that survived the tsunami?). This opposition and regulatory uncertainty increases costs, plus reactors are traditionally built with the "craftsman" approach where every reactor is large, somewhat unique, and built on-site. It seems to me that costs could be reduced greatly if nuclear reactors were mass-produced like trucks (small reactors seem to work great for nuclear subs!) and distributed around the country from factories, and if they used passive failsafes to make uncontrolled meltdowns "impossible" so that outer containment chambers could be less costly.

But the public opposition is no small barrier to overcome. Remember how a Tesla car makes nationwide news whenever a single battery pack is damaged and catches fire, even though there are 150,000 vehicle fires reported every year in the U.S.? You can expect the same thing with small modular reactors--barring some terrible disaster, all sorts of problems with petroleum power plants will be scarcely noticed, while a single minor nuclear incident will make nationwide headlines. Surely this makes potential nuclear investors nervous.

Neither article (OP or this response) seem to support the assertions made in the posts.

Also, is "amount of radiation" a good metric for harm done? Seems like that leaves out a lot of factors that would affect the real world impact.

One thing that seems clear is that (even ignoring climate change) fossil fuels cause a lot more deaths than nuclear.

The 13,000 is CATF's estimate of deaths from *all* power plants in the U.S., not just coal plants.

More directly relevant is that coal plants cause 4000 deaths for every one death caused by nuclear power.

Impressive! That is the first i have heard of that study. My side of the argument. http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/14/power-plant-air-pollution-coal-kills_n_833385.html

Safer than coal, anyway.

There is plenty of evidence of coal mine disasters, OK there are a few uranium mining disasters as well, but I don't want to minimise the mortality from either if I can help it: the simple fact of the matter is, you're 4,000 times more likely to die from a coal-related power generation cause and 1,000 times more likely from oil-related power generation than you are from nuclear-related power generation. It all carries risk, but the protocols and procedures surrounding uranium handling mitigates the risk to the point where people who actually work it tend to worry less. Fukushima was, in my opinion, unfortunate but avoidable; OK the tidal barrier was inadequate. It could have been higher and it might have diverted the tsunami but that wouldn't have helped with the ground subsidence. The location probably wasn't that well thought out, being that close to one of the deepest ocean trenches on the planet. It was probably the wrong type of reactor to have built there even if it was proved that the location was suitable for a power plant that could potentially (and as it happens, did) crack and go critical after just one good shake and a deluge of salt water. Lessons learned, we all hope, but I wouldn't like to try and assure the surviving families around the plant of that.

New plants have zero exhaust except for CO2 ... and even that will be stored away in a few years.

Emphasis added, because we have to cut CO2 emissions as fast as we can. Carbon sequestration isn't guaranteed to be available in a few years, or guaranteed to be as cheap or as safe as nuclear (we'd basically be creating new potential "killer lakes"). Meanwhile nuclear plants, while not perfect, are much safer than coal plants, and only emit a few percent of the CO2 from equivalent coal plants.

Try actually reading his whole post. He said MODERN plants not Chernobyl or the rest - there were some really dumb design decisions around nuclear plants from way back when. Unfortunately all you idiot environmentalists always group the two together without really understanding the difference.

As for peddle bed reactors? When were they determined not be safe? They never even entered the main stream let alone had any problems.

What credibility problem? In the last 30 years how many people have died from a nuclear disaster or resulting fallout compared to fossil fuels? Take a look at http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/ Hell throw in all the wars fought over fossil fuels and nuclear looks even better.

While it might make that tinfoil hat fit more comfortably to suggest there's a 'vast right-wing conspiracy', it's far more likely people (shock!) simply disagree with you.

I'm neither employed nor in any way connected with the nuclear industry, nor do I even know anyone who is. Of course, I could be lying. Further, not being an 'astroturfer' doesn't ipso facto prove there's none going on, but I'd be happy to answer your points:

1) danger - Humans are notoriously bad at estimating real risk, recognizing and highlighting "big" sporadic events but disregarding ongoing small ones. The danger of nuclear power is much like flying on an airplane vs driving a car: a perceived spike of risk if something goes wrong, vs a long term incremental risk that we've long since gotten used to. According to a number of seemingly-objective sources, coal power kills about 4000x the people per unit of power produced. That's a HUGE number. http://www.the9billion.com/2011/03/24/death-rate-from-nuclear-power-vs-coal/

2) I'm always glad when people recognize things are more complicated than they seem. More understanding - even if it's just realizing what we DON'T know - is always better. But your position is naive. Nuclear power is very much about large corporations trying to elbow their way around regulations for commercial benefit, but so is ANY industry. Further, the 'green' energy techs are even MORE about lobbyists and bureaucracy, as most of them can't live without subsidies and the smiling face of government keeping them in business. Finally, while it's easy for us to slip into the 'corporations are evil' (default comment mode on /., unfortunately), let's not forget that corporations are made up of people, some of which are no doubt motivated by unrestrained greed, but the people that work in nuke plants generally live around them and have a pretty strong vested interest in making sure they run safely.

3) blaming the anti-nuclear luddites - full disclosure, I agree that much of it is their fault, at least in the US. I remember as an elementary-school student in the late 70s watching the screaming, crying protesters being dragged out of the way of trains and trucks involved in nuclear plant construction. These people killed nuclear power in the US - no new plants have been started in the US since 1974, and the "newest" one broke ground in 1973, expected to finally finish construction in 2012. This means that the cutting-edge work on developing better, safer reactors has come from other places, like Germany and the PBR.
It's ironic (and of course politically motivated) that the same /. crowd that cried bloody murder about the stunting of stem cell research during the Bush years seems to have missed noticing that the eco-abandonment of nuclear power in the US had the same effect on the R&D of safer commercial nuclear power by the US for the last 40 years.
The fact is that most of the nuclear plants in the world are reaching the point where the end of their productive lifetimes is within sight - and having a 30-year hiatus on development, thanks to the anti-nuke activists - and we're decades behind where we should be in terms of developing better, safer replacements.

Let me be clear - I don't even disagree with some of the anti-nuke protesters, in terms that government oversight in the 1970s was woefully inadequate. I heard a story - probably apocryphal - that during the construction of a nuke plant in AZ or NM it was discovered that the containment vessel had been installed completely upside-down and reversed. Staggering, if true. But even in my junior-high-school mind at the time it seemed stupid to simply turn our backs in fear of nuclear power as a result.