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.
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".
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.
I think we should power our society by burning chiropractors.
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.
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.
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?
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!!!
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.