Italy Votes To Abandon Nuclear Power

ElementOfDestruction writes "Italy has joined Germany in halting the production of energy from atomic power generation. This differs from Germany in that the Italian decision was made by a public vote, rather than a government mandated shutdown. 57% of Italian Households voted in this public measure. While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"

Comments

Re:Alas, Rev. Bayes

[Anonymous Coward]

"US coal power fleet kills 10,000 a year

[citation needed]

Those sorts of claims come from anti-coal activists, not unbiased researchers. Besides that, they're mostly claims of relatively small life-shortening effects on people with serious health problems to begin with. The reason they can come up with such large numbers is because they're doing very fishy correlation analysis (coal-mining regions and regions with older and less-upgraded coal power plants tend to be poor regions, and thus suffer statistically from a variety of deprivations).

Also: how often does a coal accident require the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people for months or longer, at the same time as another major disaster? Fukushima demonstrated the potential for large-scale nuclear disaster to occur immediately after a large-scale natural disaster. The death toll is only being kept low through tremendous expenditures and accepted losses of time and money.

Even if coal power IS responsible for as many deaths as the worst estimates and more, these diffuse deaths mostly among sickly children and the elderly don't have the power to disrupt our society or render large areas uninhabitable the way nuclear accidents can. The economic impact of nuclear disaster can be crushing, and economic trouble has its own ways of killing people.

This is without even getting into the issue of nuclear waste, which is for all intents and purposes a PERMANENT problem of never-ending costs and dangers which grows with every watt of nuclear energy we extract, to be passed on to our children and grandchildren.

Re:Solution?

[cpu6502]

>>>Let them sit out a winter shivering in the dark. We *need* nuclear power.

People in the 1800s didn't have nuclear power (or electricity), and they seemed to make out okay. Not that I want to revert to pre-turn-of-the-century living but we may not have any choice one the Oil Drought happens.

There's simply not enough energy to give ~3 billion Chinese, Europeans, and Americans the lifestyle they enjoyed living off the billion-year store of accumulated Dead Tree/Plant matter (coal/oil). We'll have to learn to live with less --- like only heating ONE room, rather than the whole house.

Yes the future sucks. :-|