Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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".
Maybe it's time to start rolling out Thorium reactors.
First of all, people who live near coal-fired plants get more radiation exposure than those living near nuclear power plants. You're burning coal, which has been known to have bits of uranium (and other radioactive components) in it and sending all that coal smoke right into the air.
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.
Life cannot be made safe. No matter what precautions are taken, nature and the mistakes of man will inevitably cause a disaster.
FTFY
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I think we should power our society by burning chiropractors.
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 vast majority of nuclear power plants which have not failed prove that nuclear can be made safe.
All Fukashima proved was that building a nuclear power station next to the sea in an area prone to earthquakes and tsunamis, then building a defence wall that might be a little bit low and placing the backup generators at a level that would be "below sea level" if the wall failed is a bad idea.
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.
Oh, no -- that's a serious pollution hazard -- chiropractors are uniformly toxic.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
No, Fukushima proved that, given a disaster that killed at least 15,000 people, with many thousands still unaccoutned for, that the entire world will forget it and focus on a dangerous yet manageable situation which has thus far caused no deaths directly, and might, given a worst-case-scenario playout, cause 1,000 cases of cancer, not deaths.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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?
You had me up until "subluxations".
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.
You're proving that we should power our society by burning stupid people. It's an infinite resource.
Join the window installer's union, where prosperity is a brick throw away!
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
Yeah but they explode as a result of being unable to fuse iron into anything heavier. Iron is extremely hard to fuse. When the star converts everything into iron and stops burning there's no radiation pressure to support it anymore, and when you consider just how sodding massive a star is, that's pretty serious. It starts to implode, and the temperature rises. In previous times when it exhausted a fuel (when it stopped burning hydrogen, for example) the increase in temperature reached a level at which the star could fuse a heavier element such as helium. This cycle stops when it's onto iron, and the collapse continues, and continues, and the enormous envelope (still mainly hydrogen and some helium) falls faster and faster until it slams into the iron core, and bounces. This bounce is enormously energetic and provides enough energy to restart the entire sequence, and the envelope rapidly fuses its way through hydrogen all the way up to iron - and beyond. (Incidentally, the only natural way to produce even a trace of heavier elements that I'm aware of is in a supernova.)
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;
The problem is people do not understand the concept of trade-offs and the fact it they effect every decision. And while people have short attention spans they tend to focus more on the long term problems then the short ones on hand.
Right now people are dying from cancer and other illness due to coal power plants, it is adding tones of carbon to the atmosphere. Nuclear solves these immediate problems. Are their potential future problems? Yes they are. But after we fix our current problem we have time to fix the next set of problems.
It isn't a perfect world, But doing nothing will only make it worse.
"Green Energy" isn't quite there yet. The longer we wait putting off those "Greener Energies" in hoping you will get Good "Green Energy".
OK Natural Gas Fraking has an environmental impact. But it is better then strip mining.
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
Can we get coal to burn even cleaner? How many cars can befit from hybrid technology? We as a world culture is spinning our wheels on trying to get a perfect solution. There isn't one... Sorry... But why don't you get off you butts and stop opposing everything and start supporting better solutions that are available now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yup.
And unfortunately the number of idiots living in the world far exceeds those that use their brains to think about the world around them.
I fear for the future of nuclear power. We'll soon be in some backward world where the crazies have forced us to use "renewable" resources that damage the environment far worse than nuclear power would ever be likely to. And how will people ever support fusion if they've rid the world of fission power through their ignorance?
I think the best solution was provided by one of the above posts-- burn the stupid people to power the world! It will provide power *and* reduce power consumption at the same time!
Even worse, there are all the issues that happen from coal *mining*. Never mind what happens on the burning end, coal mining kills people and ruins huge areas of land.
If you're comparing basically anything to coal, coal is worse.
Until a catastrophic failure of the nuclear plant, then it quickly passes the coal plant in toxic emissions.
Of course. It's also not nearly as likely as coal miners being trapped underground, or you dying because of your silly fear of RADIATIONZ! and insistence on burning coal next to your house. So, do you prefer to live next to a nuclear plant, or a coal-fired one?
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Or the lakes of toxic coal sludge stored near coal plants, often in above-ground containers that can rupture and cause toxic coal sludge tsunamis.
+1.5 for nuke over coal (I get another 0.5 for Lived Near Nuke Plant bonus)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"long lasting effects in Fukushima still conflicted" huh compared to Chernobyl there are very few efects - Chernobyl had wards full of firemen and conscripts dieing horrific slow deaths from radiation poisoning - Fukushima nothing.
people seem to forget that >25k people died in the Tsunami - the effects of Fukushima are trivial compared to that.
Yeah. Let's talk about coal mining deaths.
http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2006/01/us_coal_mining_.html
Nearly a thousand in the US since 1980.
Now let's look at China's track record over the last decade.
Nearly 53 THOUSAND people dead mining coal.
How many people have nuke plants killed again?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
One nuclear plant surpasses that coal plant once every few decades.
Meanwhile, thousands of coal plants spew out their radiation every day as part of normal operation.
Compare deaths per terawatt produced between coal and nuclear.
OK, Deaths per TWh:
Coal – world average: 161
Coal – China: 278
Coal – USA: 15
Nuclear: 0.04
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained and its by products are toxic for thousands of years, but that is better then toxic gasses floating in the air you breath.
The "thousands of years" thing is FUD too. It comes from the half life of certain Plutonium isotopes (~24,000 years), but ignores that said Plutonium is not substantially more radioactive than the Uranium they mined out of the ground to make it in the first place. It also ignores that newer reactors can use it as fuel, which gets rid of it permanently.
The most difficult components of nuclear waste are the medium half life isotopes that last for a few years, because they're radioactive enough to be problematic but long lived enough that you need to wait a few decades before they're "safe." But characterizing having to store them for e.g. 50 years as an insurmountable problem just doesn't pass the laugh test.
Nuclear Energy needs to be highly regulated and maintained
And this is the crux of the problem. Most people if you sit them down and talk to them, even those with pretty anti-nuke attitudes, will admit that it is theoretically possible to do fission in an environmentally responsible way with risks appropriate to the level of benefit. That is not the problem. The problem is the complete lack of trust in our corporate or even government culture to actually accomplish that goal. And there is no foot to stand on arguing that these institutions deserve that trust. In fact they've shown time and time again that they are the last people you should trust with this level of responsibility.
So since we obviously can't hand the keys to the car to the town drunk, and finding a new designated driver is going to take a decade or so of trust building, the OP raises an important question: "can nuclear power actual save us if public opinion cannot be swayed?" This is a political and social question, and frankly the technology doesn't matter much. On the renewable energy side, since the risks are lower and the responsibility is more distributed, the question being grappled with is "can renewable energy actually save us if the investor class never buys in sincerely?" This is also a political and social question.
At the end of the day we only have our own cultures to blame for failing to both produce and promote people with the education, common sense, and strength of character to be deserving of our trust.
Someone had to do it.
I missed Bob getting outed. Got a link?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2437110&cid=37457272
> 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
"If you're comparing basically anything to coal, coal is worse."
Price ? Otherwise it wouldn't even be used.
New things are always on the horizon
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.