Japan Doubles Fukushima Radiation Leak Estimate

DrBoumBoum writes "The severity of the Fukishima disaster continues to go up, from incident level 4 to level 5 to level 7, and now to 20% of total Chernobyl radioactive spill. The story is not over yet as the plant keeps on leaking radioactive material and may still do so for a long time."

Comments

Cliche but nuclear is far safer than anything else

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Oil/coal have operational pollution issues, but they don't have catastrophic failure issues. Yes the Gulf Oil spill was a sort of catastrophic event, but even oil is eaten by microbes. The downsides are limited to a decade or so...and life continues there even during this time. Not great but not nearly on the scale of a nuclear accident.

Radioactivity :
1) IS "eaten" by microbes (well it's converted into energy and used), small plants and (I've read one paper claiming ...) even by small animals
2) has reduced far faster than predicted in all known sites (none of the nuclear test sites are unlivable, and even radiation levels in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have decreased faster than anticipated). So after decades, nearly all of the affected areas are perfectly liveable for humans, and less dangerous than natural high-radiation areas (Chernobyl is long since back to a perfectly safe place to live, only the actual plant itself is still dangerous, and only in long-term exposure)
3) radioactivity has failed to produce casualties and even mild increases in disease have been near-completely absent except in the case of atomic bombs

I mean can we please get some perspective. How many people died in Japan :

from water movement itself ? 12000 (and counting)
from fossil fuels ? 240 (and counting) (mostly refinery explosions or pressure problems)
from wind power ? about a dozen (let's avoid high towers when an earthquake hits)
from solar power ? 4 (again, don't be on rooftops maintaining or installing solar panels during earthquakes)
from nuclear power ? 0 (*one* got mild burns and *may* get sick in 20-30 years)

And let's just not compare number of people displaced due to nuclear power versus number of people displaced due to fossil fuels. We both know perfectly well the answer won't favor fossil fuels.

Care about CO2 ? Nuclear power does better than any other power source (including solar and wind, due to solar panels and wind towers being mostly made of oil)

Care about general environmental effects ? Nuclear does better than any other power source. In fact, all the places on earth with increased radioactivity have more and richer plant life, *and* animal life

In general nuclear power has tiny mining operations (as compared to fossil fuels, and compared to coal mining, uranium mining barely exists at all). The production facilities are equally tiny. A little place 400 meters on each side producing 5 gigawatts with *zero* other effects on the environment ? And the worst of it : the only argument, the waste disposal, is bogus : the waste from nuclear reactors is far *less* dangerous than the uranium that produced it, so nuclear waste actually makes the world safer. Just try producing a single gigawatt without destroying part of the environment with anything else, including wind, solar, or anything at all. (solar panels take away the main energy source for life on this planet for anything below them, and you need a *lot* of them for a gigawatt (and even a desert is teeming with life), and wind power obviously changes athmospheric flows, which doesn't matter in tiny quantities, but will have major implications if deployed at scale)

You want to make the world a safer place ? Great ! I'm all in favor of that. You should *support* nuclear power. In fact, you should support massively expanding our nuclear capacity, so it can replace other forms of energy. Given numbers like above, how can anyone claim to be an environmentalist and be against nuclear power ?

I mean, I try to maintain a distance from these kinds of things and it seems to me that all this anti-nuclear is just people with ipads, 50 inch tv's, jogging around the park in nike shoes with builting mp3 players shouting that modern technology is bad because the girl on the idiot box said so. I mean, you have to admit, it sure looks that way.