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Worldwide Support For Nuclear Power Drops
ProbablyJoe writes "A poll for the BBC shows that worldwide support for nuclear power has dropped significantly in the past 6 years. However, while support has dropped in most countries, the UK has defied the trend, where 37% of the public support building new reactors. Unsurprisingly, support in Japan has dropped significantly, with only 6% supporting new reactors. The U.S. remains the country with the highest public opinion of nuclear power, though support has dropped slightly. Much of the decline in approval has been attributed to the events in Fukushima earlier in the year, although a recent Slashdot poll indicated that many readers' opinions had not been affected by the events, and there was an even split between those who found the technology more or less safe since the events. With reports on the long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted, is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?"
Hurray! The less people who want nuclear power, the better! People are learning on their own about the dangers without listening to the lies from the Power Industry's astroturfers.
What I would love to see is a way to make power from calcium. The world has huge amounts of calcium (limestone, etc.) Early rock samples of the planet have little calcium. As life evolved and creatures died, their skeletons slowly and continuously added to the amount of calcium. Much compressed into calcium carbonate, limestone, etc.
There has to be a way to reverse this trend or one day in the distant future Earth will be a calcified, lifeless sphere. Using calcium as a power source is a win-win solution: we help slow the process of planetary calcification and create power without radiation.
The current strategy of making power from radiation is sheer folly. Aside from the accidents and deaths that get covered up, There have been many reports of Chiropractic offices near nuclear plants as having more patients with more severe subluxations that the general population. The radiation that leaks out in the toxic steam cloud causes severe subluxation in the general population.
Chiropractic Saves Lives!
What do they think of nuclear power in comparison to the other options?
I don't think anyone was ever truly a fan of nuclear power, it's still way more dangerous than hydro electric, geothermal, solar, etc. etc. But it was the best of a bad set of options.
The press will screw up the world just to get headlines. Nuclear power is incredibly safe.
Nuclear accidents can make areas uninhabitable or unfarmable for many generations. It isn't a one-time event that gets cleaned up in a few days. It's something with lasting impacts on the environment and habitability of the area, over generations. In a country the size of Japan, the effects are even worse because they don't have so much land area to be throwing parts of it away like that. The exclusion zone around Fukushima is now unfarmable.
And just like after Chernobyl we were all assured by the nuclear proponents that "there can never be another nuclear disaster", we're being assured that now too. But there will be. It WILL happen again. If we are lucky, it won't be as bad as Fukushima. If we are unlucky, it will be much worse. The only certainty is that it will happen, and it will be because of something unprepared for that is only obvious in hindsight.
Captcha: "Trauma".
Nuclear fission power cannot be made safe. No matter what precautions are taken, nature and the mistakes of man will inevitably cause a disaster.
Maybe it's time to start rolling out Thorium reactors.
There's a problem with a 50 year old nuclear plant built on the coast in an earthquake zone, that means nuclear power is too dangerous for everywhere else! By that logic it's not worth buying a 2011 Mercedes, after all the timing chain broke in my 1961 Dodge that must mean all cars are garbage.
Does the latest BBC survey really show a lack of support for nuclear?
http://world-nuclear.org/wna_buzz/DoesthelatestBBCsurveyreallyshowalackofsupport.html
like all "n% of people said x" headlines there is a lot more info if you look in more detail at the results.
The demands of perfect safety at all times is actually chasing better designs off the table; "no new reactors" means better designs can't be built.
Fukushima is an example of how subtly corrupting the "public/private partnership" can be in privatizing gain while pushing risk onto the shoulders of the public.
Mankind will turn to nuclear power because it is cleaner than the alternatives, because it is energy dense, because it is scalable, and because it is dispatchable (available when we need it). This headline reflects a temporary revulsion from the tsunami, nothing more.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Just wondering, why cant the nuclear reactors, or even the whole facility, simply be placed completely underground? Then if theres some meltdown, nothing would enter the atmosphere.
Yeah, yeah, bash me all you want, its just a question.
I am generally not in favor of nuclear power.
But my support for new reactors is not that bad. I'd say I even support them.
It is the old reactors still running, those cash cows running at absolute safety limit or bewlow, that I really want to disappear.
The alternatives will be there in the future, but until then we need power and a lot of it. When the oil runs out we will need more power for electric vehicles (if it goes that way). Im an environmentalist and understand the risks. The footprint of a nuke plant compared to the alternatives is huge (with the exception of nuclear fallout).
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.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
And plants with outdated designs.
Bring on the new designs.
Questions of the nature "is nuclear power safe?" seem more political than scientific. Shouldn't the question really be "is this nuclear reactor design (including its associated fueling, storage and waste handling) safe?
Lets try to take some of the emotion and politics out of the issue. If someone asked you "are cars safe?", wouldn't you want to know which car? Different car designs offer a wide range of safety. Not just due to cost compromises, size/weight and design goals, but also due to when it was designed. Materials, technology, scientific understanding, computer modeling, etc have greatly improved our capabilities over recent decades. I wouldn't feels safe in any race car from the 1940s driving at 100 mph wearing a leather helmet, however I would feel safe doing so in many higher end passenger cars today. Maybe a recent reactor design is far more safe than say some 1960s soviet design?
Science and engineering are making great advances in solar, wind, tidal, etc. Aren't they also making great advances in the area of nuclear?
With reports on the long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted, is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?"
Yes. But people are stupid and corrupt. So it'll never go anywhere regardless.
some people want colonies in outer space
some people want life extension through mechanical implants
or through dish-cultured organ implants
some people want tracking of all people at all times
some people want immersive VR
etc etc
without really knowing (or caring) about the real world situations that they entail
Its fair to say that some people basically believe that amazing high-tech is great, no matter what
Nuclear power is fine, until its not
the food chain on earth is finite, and subject to poisoning
see The Natural Step for a framework that might make sense to you
Rarely would buy whatever the BBC is pushing.
It is rather unique in the industry that no insurance company is willing to insure nuclear power plants. The reason is most probably that when the risks are properly estimated the bill increases nuclear electricity to prohibitive, non-competitive levels.
The result of sufficient lobbying is that everybody is believing paying cheap nuclear electricity, while in reality everybody (or the descendants) take a chance paying huge future costs. Just like Japanese now do for the next decades.
The problem is, from what I know of management, funding decisions, and the psychology of long term complacency, I don't trust society with nuclear
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I love candy and can understand the worldwide support - are Nuclear Power Drops anything like Space Dust ?
clear ShZe couldn't
I don't care if they have worldwide support. I will stick to my regular vitamin drops, thank you very much.
is nuclear power still a viable solution to the world's energy problems?
There is only one "solution" to the world's energy problems - demand below renewable supply. Uranium is not a renewable resource. It may seem abundant at current rates of consumption, but the supply is finite.
People will change their minds once harsh winter comes and there is not enough power to keep your little baby son warm. Nuclear plays a ver important role in economy and life, it cant just be discarded and replaced by windmills.....
No "clean" or "renewable" energy source scales the way nuclear can.
No "clean" or "renewable" energy source can provide on-demand base-load power the way nuclear can.
Reliability can be built into nuclear plants in ways that distributed "small" clean power cannot match.
Safety record of nuclear power generation speaks for itself, esp. when context is provided (coal, hydro).
Waste management is an issue that is primarily an engineering challenge, not an obstacle.
Can designs be improved? Certainly, and much work is ongoing in this space (Toshiba, Hyperion, others).
Over the long term, nuclear is the cleanest base-load power source we have, and it is inevitable that more nuclear power plants will be built and brought on-line worldwide.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
Controlled nuclear power was first demonstrated nearly 70 years ago in 1942. The Fukushima plants were based on designs from the 60s and built in 1971 and SURVIVED A QUAKE 10X BIGGER THAN THEY SHOULD HAVE before the tsunami created the real issue. TMI was started in 1974 and was a scare rather than a real disaster. Chernobyl was 1977, but was both human error and Soviet-era design. Today we've got 3x the experience we had when those few incidents, I think we've learned a little about preventing these issues.
That's what knocked out the backup generators.
People who read Slashdot actually are the kind of people who already thought about something like this, who have (reasonably informed) opinions, which come down on one side or the other. So, it's no surprise at all that they are not swayed anymore by some newspaper headlines.
as long as it's the Gov't running the plants. I don't trust private business to invest the kinds of money needed to maintain and improve safety; the profit motive is too strong and always looking for 'efficiency', e.g. corners to cut. Take a look at privately run dialysis clinics vs the gov't run ones. The Gov't run clinics have much lower rates of mortality, and the studies show it's because they don't cut corners by reusing supplies.
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there is no way that hydro electric, geothermal, solar or even 'etc' could be scaled to even become 'other options'. Unfortunately, at this point in time, it's either nuclear or fossil fuels. When we compare the absolute numbers, fossil fuels are a much, much un-healthier option, what with climate change, respiratory & heart diseases and the myriad of other ills burning oil brings us.
Thousands of coal mining deaths per year, probably a huge number more attributable to air pollution caused by coal. I couldn't find any appreciable numbers for uranium mining deaths.
And the radiation. How much radiation has coal burning put into the environment? How does that compare to TMI, Fukushima and Chernobyl combined?
Stupidity alert?
When did I say they could?
Oh, right. I didn't, you're just being an asshole.
They can be just as bad as profit motives. Choosing plant designs based on what company operates in whose district, rushing completion so a pet-project plant of a politician can go online before election time, hiding defects in that pet project plant during the next election cycle so that politician doesn't get kicked out of office for supporting it.
And think of the ability to keep bad things secret. With government, that's it. You really have no recourse if it wants to keep bad things secret. With plants operated by business, you have government oversight, someone to go to when things aren't being done right that isn't related to the people not doing things right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have a lot of confidence in modern nuclear technology, but I have very little confidence in the companies building and maintaining it. No matter how theoretically safe you make a reactor you're always going to be up against the cost cutting, profit oriented ethic that forms the basis of capitalism. I just don't think it's practical to regulate the industry enough to ensure it's safe.
That said, I would still take the minute risk of a nuclear disaster over the continuous disaster of fossil fuels. There are better alternatives, but it seems like the prevailing attitude in the industry is "Don't want nuclear? Fine, we'll go back to coal".
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The consequences of Fukushima are a direct result of the power station being unchanged since the 1970ies, even though it became clear already in that decade, that safety precautions were insufficient. Especially concerning the risk of hydrogen explosions (hydrogen was already a known problem during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979), the lack of autocatalytic recombiners (which prevent them) and the lack of filtered containment vents - which were installed in both Germany and France (which you mention here) in the 1980ies and 90ies, in anticipation of otherwise unacceptable releases during a meltdown.
Nuclear power is like plane travel.
It's safer (cancer rate from Fukushima/Chernobyl less than cancer rate from 10 coal plants), but many people are afraid of it, since when accidents happen, they are terrible.
-----------------
Crunch the numbers. It's healthier to live 20-30 km away from Chernobyl or Fukushima than downwind from fossil fuel burning plants or a busy highway or live in a busy city.
Nuclear power can save lives by the thousand by offsetting air pollution from fossil fuels, even if the accident rate was 10 times higher than it is now.
Hence Dawn Stover's proactive piece for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists..
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
*running away as fast as I can*
If the right safety measures are taken then there is VERY VERY little risk. Nuclear power is a great way to power the world as long as we make sure that the engineering around the plants is beyond acceptable.
Is it a greener option than coal ?
Don't have power, then.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Try basing your statements on FACT, rather than basing your FACTS on your belief :)
Remind me, how many people have died because there were Reactors at the Fukushima sites when the tsunami hit? (heres a quick tip, its a nice round number) How many people have actually suffered any serious ill effects from any emissions from Fukuskima? (another nice round number)
Stop trying to help spread the nuclear FUD lies, it's not big, and it's not clever.
Like the chemical processing in IGCC, chemical processing requiring sophistication, can require special knowledge and attention, ie expensive chemical engineers, which can drive up operating costs. Modern pressurized light water reactors require skilled enough operators as is. Reprocessing will make it much worse. Ideally, a municipal power plant would just have a 'on' and 'off' button and never break down.
This reminds me of the Foundation where they reverted from nuclear to coal power because people forgot how to run and design nuclear power plants. All it took was a huge melt down caused by lack of know-how for governments to start making laws banning nuclear power.
Yes, I understand about the danger, albeit a low probability. So here's what can, and should be done to allay fears:
Calculate the total cost of a worst case scenario. Have the company building the nuclear plant put that amount in escaro. When the plant is decommissioned, and all the radioactive waste is cleaned up, return that money, with interest, or put it towards another plant construction.
During court proceedings concerning a radioactive golf course, Tokyo Electric Power Co. stunned lawyers by saying the utility was not responsible for decontamination because it no longer "owned" the radioactive substances.
“Radioactive materials (such as cesium) that scattered and fell from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant belong to individual landowners there, not TEPCO,” the utility said.
So a firm responsible for making atoms into smaller atoms says "not ours" when asked to pay up for contamination. With such examples of leadership - why should fission power be supported?
In recent years the BBC has fallen far from the Gold Standard, they are now corrupted Green/Crony-Capitalist liers such as you have so many in the US LSM.
On Nuclear/Shale/Climate you can't believe a word they say, and in Germany, Austria, Switzerland the useful-idiots are rapidly backing away from their, post japan, nuclear funk as they discover it is a huge vote looser.
The greens lost hugely for this in Germany.
Shale Oil/Gas, deep water drilling and Salt-Thorium Nuclear is the way to go and will hold Peak-Oil, which like Climate Change, is being rapidly discredited, say for 200-500 years, and if we take back control of Scientific Research funding from our governments and Crony-Capitalis-Lobbyists may get us (a) Fusion, (b) a cure for Cancer, and (c) progress to managing viral disease. If we don't we will be subsistance farmers living in caves again.
We need to get rid of the Lefty, Progressive Markzists and their dumb ideas and get back real scientists and engineers who can design and build. We also need to hold the midia accountable for lying, but I guess the Internet is doing that.
MFG, omb
If 1kg of Thorium or Uranium cost as much as a house - $300.000 - the material cost would still only add $0.03 per kWh of electricity.
Nuclear power is not viable. The last U.S. power reactor was built 35 years ago. The expertise for building reactors is now retired or long ago moved on to other work. I used to work for a forge company making pressure vessel nozzles. It was hugely expensive and risky. Hundreds of dollars a year wasted on scrap due to failures in forging, machining or testing. It's half art, half science. The same is true for many aspects of reactor construction. We have lost the technology and it would take 10 years to get it back, and if we can, the new reactors coming onlline would only replace the reactors being retired.
If the various governments would pull their heads out of the ground and embrace a thorium reactor program, ALL of our energy concerns would disappear. It is safe, reliable and plentiful.
There is nothing to debate about thorium. It needs to move forward if we want to to have a fiscally sustainable energy program.
> It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
Exactly. I seriously doubt we are soon going to come up with any way to get billions and billions of Watt/Hours of energy without some nasty side effects. They all involve trade offs between instant costs and longterm risk, environmental losses, direct risks to humans, etc. All of them. even 'Green Energy' unless somebody patents direct conversion of unicorn farts... and locates some unicorns. And they probably have some serious downside we wouldn't discover until going into GW scale production.
>"Green Energy" isn't quite there yet.
And won't ever be. "Green Energy' is energy without consequences. As soon as a proposed 'Green' energy source gets beyond research, beyond government subsidized toys for 'I'm Greener Than Thou' prats and goes into real production the side effects (which were there all along) become visible and the Greens turn on it.
Look to history. Remember when Hydro was THE perfect green energy? Most /. readers are too young, but I remember. Then of course people noticed it disrupted fish lifecycles, submerged whole ecosystems, changed flow patterns of rivers and in at least one instance caused an earthquake. OH NOES, CONSEQUENCES! Can't have none of those, start bustin' those damned dams.
Windmills kill birds, environmentalists just won't abide them anywhere THEY have to see the eyesores. A couple of windmills are great, LOOK, I care about saving the earth! A thousand windmills cranking out MWs for the power corp? EVIL!
Solar? So long as the government tosses enough subsidy cash and the toxic manufacturing stays out of sight in China oh yea, plenty of Holier than Thou egoboo for the preening green. Cover the desert in collectors to generate industrial scale power? What! Lizards and shit live in the desert dude!
Geothermal? Causes earthquakes. Oops. Sorry bout that.
Tidal? Will kill fish. Just wait, you know it does.
Biofuels? Just toying with it spiked corn prices and is on the brink of causing worldwide hunger. Any attempt to derive a noticable chunk of our current energy needs from there is folly and our energy needs are about to skyrocket as the bulk of the world makes it to the 19th century.
Democrat delenda est
There is new technology out there that is much safer. Until the greener alternatives evolve into economically viable forms, we need the nuclear plant, as the pollution from coal fired plants is doing a lot of damage to our environment and killing many thousands of people each and every year, far beyond any damage attributable to nuclear plants!!
The environmental movement is likely one of the major reasons why Nuclear power has fallen out of public favour.
Consider the possibility that after weighing all the factors (carbon emissions, other air pollution, mining, radiation, etc) that Nuclear power is a major net benefit to the environment.
It's entirely possible that the planet would be better off if the environmental movement never existed.
I don't know if that's actually the case, but I think it's pretty damning of the environmental movement that it could come down so strongly on either side of an issue where there's a legitimate debate. Maybe as a rule of thumb when a movement starts rallying around causes that could very be hurting their objectives than that movement has gone off the rails.
I stole this Sig
Adam West: Oh My.
Doctor: Probably from rolling around in that toxic waste. What in God's name were you trying to prove?
Adam West: I was trying to gain super powers.
Doctor: Well that's just silly.
Adam West: Silly, yes...idiotic...yes
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
First of all it was a record flood that killed those people. The dam couldn't handle such a massive, prolonged downpour, but what do you think would have happened if the dam wasn't there?
Secondly the dam was built to control flooding, more than 20 years previously. It probably would have been built with or without the hydropower station. How many lives do yout think could have been saved over 20 years of flood control?
Nuclear power causes dangers that wouldn't have been there if not for the nuclear power station.
Hydropower taps a resources that is produced because of flood control.
Flood control can be done badly, sure, as can anything, but if done well it saves lives, houses, crops, etc.
Turning all that harnessed power into electricity, especially when the efficiency of doing so is so high, the resource is so renewable and the pollution is virtually nill, is just good sense.
Nuclear power is perfectly safe. Just look a Fukushima - it's proof that Nuclear power is safe.
SAFE!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Most existing dams don't have hydropower stations on them.
For example:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/retrofitting-non-electctric-dams-for-power/
That's a lot of free energy, which can be efficiently tapped.
And that's before considering places that could or should be dammed for flood control and could in the process get hydropower stations, or places that don't need flood control but could provide a lot of power if dammed.
Despite public opinion, government policy, or personal preference, this universe is only equipped with a single source of energy and it happens to be Nuclear. We can either obtain our energy needs directly from the natural sources of fusion (stars) by using photo cells, indirectly by using wind, wave, hydro or stored biomass carbon fuel, or we can produce it directly ourselves in fission or fusion reactors. Our current solar technologies,fully exploited, are not capable of supplying the energy needs of 7 billion plus humans. We will, of necessity, require nuclear fission to generate the balance of the power to maintain a minimum standard of living for the worlds population for the foreseeable future. We do not, however, have to locate that generating capacity inside the Earth's gravity well/environmental cocoon. We have the technology to place that generating capacity either in an unstable high earth orbit ( so that it flies away from the Earth if the orbit decays ) or on the Moon. The energy can be transmitted back to earth by laser, microwave, or as chemical reagents ready to be recombined into harmless byproducts ( like water ). We can, and should, be moving in this direction as a matter of policy. We aren't because no one has figured out a way to turn a profit by doing it.