It is cheaper only if you consider wasting rare-earth metals on systems with 20% load cheap. Don't forget to deduce all the tax cuts and helps wind power gets to see how cheap it really is.
I also would like to see your 90% efficiency electricity storage system that can store 1MWh, let alone few dozens 1GWh. You've got yourself a Nobel prise in physics right there!
As for Fukushima, Chernobyl and similar, count the deaths they caused. Then look at Banqiao dam and coal miners deaths during past 25 years (and don't look at respiratory diseases caused by fossil burning). Suddenly it's not so dangerous.
There's one big problem with geothermal: the theoretical amount of power we can draw from it (the thermal flux) is in the same order of magnitude we, as a civilisation are, it's still larger, but it isn't even twice that.
So US will attack North Korea next week, yes? I mean, there are real concentration camps there, just like Nazis did. But there's no oil there so you won't be playing World Police with them.
And if you want to see how it should be done, just look at Libya: we helped them by crippling the Gaddafi forces, but the actual liberation was done by Libyans, not the UN forces.
who have shown ignorance on some key aspects of this issue
So now you're going to put words in my mouth? You can win discussion only by discrediting other people and not addressing their arguments? Where was this ignorance of mine shown? By claiming that the Sievert unit takes type of exposure into account making comparisons between internal and external dose valid? Are you serious?!
Explain to me one thing:
The Banquiao dam failure killed an estimated 171000 people. 11 000 000 people lost their homes. Will you claim that the people that lost their homes haven't had their lives shortened? That living in moulded homes isn't unhealthy? That diseases spread by flood didn't kill anybody? Even if only 1% (highly unlikely) of those people have their lives shortened it's still 100000 people. Why there are no studies about flood victims published, no matter the country? Because they don't exist or maybe because there was no "radiation" involved?
That's how the millions or hundreds of thousands of dead are calculated in those reports on Chernobyl: by using worst case LNT model estimation (known to be highly unreliable at low exposures) and multiplying the population over the dose received or by attributing all changes in population to single cause (which will be laughed at by any statistician). Those are fundamental mistakes you can make in epidemiological studies and they completely invalidate your results.
It requires a lot higher concentrations of Radon contamination to cause harm compared to things like Cessium, Plutonium, or Strontium.
Interesting you mention that: Caesium, Plutonium and Strontium have long biological half-life and are used instead of Calcium in bones. Yet no study showed (even the Greenpeace one) increase in incidence rates of laukeamia in affected areas. Even though laukaemia has short gestation period of few years at best, few weeks at worst, and the catastrophe happened over 20 years ago.
Great, why was all the used fuel at Fukushima sitting in pools next to the reactors?
I already said that and I will say again: nuclear non proliferation. There aren't enough breeder reactors to reprocess all fuel.
so you conclude that no actions to curb carbon emmision should be made
Where did I claim that? I claim that Greenpeace is full of morons for thinking that CO2 is the biggest effect fossil industry has on people and environment, not mercury pollution, not mining, not general air pollution, but CO2. I want to stop fossil fuel usage because of those other effects. AGW has nothing to do with that, If it is really happening, it will be a positive side effect. And how on earth will usage of nuclear increase our CO2 emissions?
You can blame politics all you want, but the industry has had over 50 years to get its act together and show the world they could be profitable, economical, and safer. They have failed.
How have they failed?! It is safer (2 major accidents in ~50 years!!) and it is economical (France). Show me one study that claims that fossil or hydro is safer than nuclear! If it is so obvious why no scientist went and wrote such papers comparing them? Oh wait, there were at least two such papers, both concluded that nuclear is safer. But you just ignore them. Just because over 20 year old designs were shown to be unsafe in extreme conditions.
People overestimate effects from single big events (like plane crashes) and underestimate common small events (like bicycle accidents, let alone car crashes).
They overestimate effects of things they don't understand (like nuclear radiation and cellphones) and underestimate effects of things they think they understand (like coal burning).
Claiming that population "feel" about any issue has anything to do with real numbers and real danger it poses is funny at best and dangerous at worst.
Then why Bulldozers are slower than Phenom II's in file compression (rar, zip, 7z, pick your poison) clock for clock? That's definitely not a shared FPU problem...
So how will you discredit the TORCH report ( http://www.chernobylreport.org/torch.pdf ) commissioned by the German Green party? Are they too paid by or limited by IAEA? Or perhaps they are proponents of nuclear power? They estimate the total death-toll from cancer to between 30000 and 60000. What's more, they warn, that the results highly depend on risk factors used in calculations. So again, the increase in lethality isn't obvious and that means it's not significant.
It still makes nuclear safer than mining coal, let alone burning it. And safer than hydro. Even if we assume that Fukushima will cause another 60000 deaths in next 40-80 years.
Again, external exposure is immaterial to this discussion ..
Because you can eliminate internal exposure when you're living in very high background radiation area and the radioactive materials are in water you're drinking, bathing in or air you're breathing... Those are areas that have higher radiation levels than the permanently evacuated areas in Ukraine. As we know, studies for internal exposure haven't been conducted, at all: http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/24/4A/008 . Oops, there have been, multiple ones. But those results don't agree with your world view so you just ignore them.
Building nuclear reactors requires a large amount of capital, an extensive period of construction time, and government insurance.
First and foremost it requires convincing general population that the build is necessary, unlike fossil fuel plants which you can "just build" and poison neighbouring areas for next 40 or 60 years. Could you explain to me, why on earth French have the cheapest electricity in Europe if its so economically infeasible?
How many generations will have to deal with nuclear waste
Because breeder reactors are impossible to build and you can't enrich "used" fuel once more... If you want the answer why France is sending its nuclear waste to Germany and Russia: it's because Greenpeace protests made their only breeder reactor uneconomical! USA shot themselves in the foot with law that makes it illegal. You may want to read something more about radioactivity: the longer something is radioactive (its half-life is longer) the less its radioactive (it's more stable). The "waste" is buried because of political (nuclear non proliferation) and public relations reasons not because its actually needed or because its re-use is economically infeasible. You can separate highly-radioactive isotopes from not highly radioactive ones, you recycle non-highly radioactive to regular fuel. The highly radioactive stuff will decay to stable isotopes in few decades, not centuries. Not to mention that we have reactors that can burn anything radioactive, not necessarily Uranium or Plutionum. Even if this would make the fuel 100 times more expensive, the electricity produced with it would be only few percent more expensive. In the end my children's children won't have more problem to worry about than I do.
All because of Soviet propaganda and now Greenpeace scaremongering. "It's invisible so it's lethal", just like cellphones. Or will you tell me that there aren't people that are scared of radio waves or that claim that they are sensitive to them? Or that there's another conspiracy of cellphone makers to hide those results and they are in fact causing millions of deaths around the world?
Priceless . . . so you are a pro-nuke and global warming denier . . . That fits well with your low knowledge to conviction ratio. Are you sure you are not also a creationist?
And you believe in power from unicorns and rainbows. Just like I don't deny that nuclear power kills people, I don't deny that global warming is happening. I say we don't have enough data (where did I saw tha
If another report on Chernobyl claims significantly more deaths but is also written by radiation experts and physicians, I do not have the same level of skepticism that bias has compromised the analysis.
Right, because WHO is comprised of nuclear physicists, oh wait, it's World Health Organization, not Radiation, it's an agency of UN, not IAEA! The ExtenE report also had a professor of Occupational Medicine on the panel.
But they come to conclusions you don't like, with methods you don't approve ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_proof ) instead of extrapolation and wild speculation (like the Greenpeace report did). So you ignore the results they come to and assume there is some grand conspiracy to make us all highly radioactive. We can't just sit on our asses muttering "there's not enough data" when people are dying in thousands in coal mines alone, and this is definitely attributable to energy production, unlike future possible life shortening. Just like there is statistically proven lung cancer increase near coal fired power plants (which isn't easily curable, again, unlike thyroid cancer). There have been hundreds of trials related to X-Ray, CT, radiation exposure to mouse, people living in very high background radiation areas, etc. and they agree that the LNT approximation is wrong, so any study using it as approximation will be wrong, we don't know by how much, but the WHO report (just like most of data from those trials) would suggest very.
How is questioning a source that we only get a mere 13% from today "wanting to live without energy.
Because fossil and hydro don't kill people? There are only 3 sources of energy that we know that work: fossil, nuclear and hydro. All three kill people. But you somehow can't wrap your head around that idea! We've got better data to support that nuclear is killing less people than the other two than to support AGW. Yet the politicians wave the "Anthropogenic Global Warming" flag, because there's no "radiation" in it, so the general population doesn't throw rationality out of the window and don't yell "conspiracy!".
As for sustainability of nuclear: There's a difference between "I will have to deal with the problem" and "My children's children certainly won't need to deal with the problem" (where the problem is energy shortage): it's very likely we may not harness fusion to the end of century (especially wide adoption is highly unlikely), it's very unlikely we won't harness fusion and won't use it commercially in 4 or 5 centuries (solving the problem for foreseeable future). We need technology that will bridge the gap.
Oh, and Greenpeace doesn't like fossil because it's "causing Global Warming", not because it's killing people working in mines or living near power plants.
You question validity of minimal estimates for deaths from fossil fuels, isn't that a proof for your involvement in fossil industry or effectiveness of their lobbying? I don't hate Greenpeace, I just considers them terrorists and luddites at best (also, they hate coal for completely different reasons). You still haven't provided any data what so ever supporting your world view: that we can somehow live without energy or that fossil fuels don't cause vastly more deaths and pollution than nuclear. I'm still waiting for that reports/papers/data... or will you tell me that the nuclear industry is much more powerful than fossil fuel industry and so can silence any such report? Nuclear isn't renewable, but at least estimates for known and proven uranium and plutonium ores will last at least few centuries, unlike fossil, which won't last to the end of current century (if our estimates for undiscovered resources aren't overstated and we don't kill ourselves over what's left).
who are considered by many to have far too much vested interest in the success of nuclear to be considered objective
Because fossil fuel industry has absolutely no lobbying incentive and no vested interest to sustain the public perception of nuclear power, yeah, sure. All those scientists are on nuclear power payrolls. We have nothing to talk about about then, just watch out for your tinfoil hat it seems to be blocking blood flow.
You may also want read more about Sievert unit, or not, you may actually learn something...
Finally, 13% is hardly something to start screaming the end of the world over
Because coal, oil and natural gas (those that make up over 80% of energy sources) will last forever, solving the problem once and for all, ONCE AND FOR ALL.
You've completely missed my point, the IEA report says why we're not building more nuclear power plants. And if you want politicians that think, that, somehow, nuclear is safe and is sustainable just look at Russia, they did build 4 new reactors after 2001 and the newest one came on-line this week.
Also, as you go forward in time, the estimates for total death-toll from Chernobyl are being reduced, not increased!
As I said, Fukushima released only half the radioactivity Chernobyl did and only 4% of the released material landed on dry land, 96% landed in ocean. At no time, the amount of caesium and iodine in sea exceeded regulatory limits. No member of public received or will receive doses of radiation higher than a single CT scan (in the range of 5-20mSv). Scientific reasoning assumes there must be a cause to cause an effect. If there is no cause, there will be no effect. If the cause is small then the effect will be small (like with the worst possible case model: LNT).
Assuming that the risk is proportional to dose (the linear no-threshold hypothesis), a 10-rem whole-body dose would bring with it a risk of cancer death later in life of about half of one percent.
The very high thyroid doses from the Chernobyl disaster were due in large part to the failure of authorities to block the consumption of milk produced by cows grazing on contaminated grass.
By contrast, in Japan, shipments of raw milk and vegetables from Fukushima and three neighboring prefectures were blocked on March 21, six days after the large release that caused the high contamination. Screening of produce for radioactivity began the next day
Very little potassium iodide was distributed in the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl accident. In Poland, however, more than 10 million children, 16 years of age and under, and approximately seven million adults received at least one dose of potassium iodide, reducing their thyroid doses to “negligible levels”.
Finally, it is important to note that, if not dealt with properly, the psychological consequences associated with accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima could damage many more lives than the cancer consequences.
My "belief system" include bringing data together from different sources. For example: comparing doses received by residents with typical CT or X-ray.
He thinks the reaction to low doses could be quite complex. “There's not going to be a uniform response of all biological functions to low levels of radiation,”
Some researchers doubt that any study in Fukushima, no matter how well devised, will reveal much. The radiation exposure of the general population “is too small to give a statistically significant increase in stochastic effects such as cancer,” argues Ohtsura Niwa, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Kyoto University.
We need power or people will die from malnutrition, hypothermia and diseases (just like in developing countries right now) in much higher numbers than even those caused by coal burning, as no other technology has proved itself in high-scale power production, we can make it only from fossil or from nuclear. You have not provided any source stating that nuclear is less safe than fossil. If you want to live in developing country, then please, do so. You may take your Greenpeace pals with you. In the meantime, by using coal electricity, you're responsible for more deaths than it is necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks those geeks were sleeping during their statistics 101 lecture...
In other news, this year alone, in China coal mines over 1000 people lost their lives.
Do you also think that flying is more dangerous than cycling? I mean, just look at all those plane crashes, every time hundreds dead.
It is cheaper only if you consider wasting rare-earth metals on systems with 20% load cheap. Don't forget to deduce all the tax cuts and helps wind power gets to see how cheap it really is.
I also would like to see your 90% efficiency electricity storage system that can store 1MWh, let alone few dozens 1GWh. You've got yourself a Nobel prise in physics right there!
As for Fukushima, Chernobyl and similar, count the deaths they caused. Then look at Banqiao dam and coal miners deaths during past 25 years (and don't look at respiratory diseases caused by fossil burning). Suddenly it's not so dangerous.
There's one big problem with geothermal: the theoretical amount of power we can draw from it (the thermal flux) is in the same order of magnitude we, as a civilisation are, it's still larger, but it isn't even twice that.
So US will attack North Korea next week, yes? I mean, there are real concentration camps there, just like Nazis did. But there's no oil there so you won't be playing World Police with them.
And if you want to see how it should be done, just look at Libya: we helped them by crippling the Gaddafi forces, but the actual liberation was done by Libyans, not the UN forces.
Yeah, vote him down for stating uncomfortable truths!
Russians used nuclear explosions in civilian applications many times with quite good results...
"It's not terrorism if we're doing it." - the real US motto
Hardly a good business considering the cost of cartridges... Even if you're printing Intel i7's
Don't hold your breath on Rossi, he's a conman.
How I want you to be wrong...
I'm quite sure this breaks EU data protection directive...
who have shown ignorance on some key aspects of this issue
So now you're going to put words in my mouth? You can win discussion only by discrediting other people and not addressing their arguments? Where was this ignorance of mine shown? By claiming that the Sievert unit takes type of exposure into account making comparisons between internal and external dose valid? Are you serious?!
Explain to me one thing:
The Banquiao dam failure killed an estimated 171000 people. 11 000 000 people lost their homes. Will you claim that the people that lost their homes haven't had their lives shortened? That living in moulded homes isn't unhealthy? That diseases spread by flood didn't kill anybody? Even if only 1% (highly unlikely) of those people have their lives shortened it's still 100000 people. Why there are no studies about flood victims published, no matter the country? Because they don't exist or maybe because there was no "radiation" involved?
That's how the millions or hundreds of thousands of dead are calculated in those reports on Chernobyl: by using worst case LNT model estimation (known to be highly unreliable at low exposures) and multiplying the population over the dose received or by attributing all changes in population to single cause (which will be laughed at by any statistician). Those are fundamental mistakes you can make in epidemiological studies and they completely invalidate your results.
It requires a lot higher concentrations of Radon contamination to cause harm compared to things like Cessium, Plutonium, or Strontium.
Interesting you mention that: Caesium, Plutonium and Strontium have long biological half-life and are used instead of Calcium in bones. Yet no study showed (even the Greenpeace one) increase in incidence rates of laukeamia in affected areas. Even though laukaemia has short gestation period of few years at best, few weeks at worst, and the catastrophe happened over 20 years ago.
Great, why was all the used fuel at Fukushima sitting in pools next to the reactors?
I already said that and I will say again: nuclear non proliferation. There aren't enough breeder reactors to reprocess all fuel.
so you conclude that no actions to curb carbon emmision should be made
Where did I claim that? I claim that Greenpeace is full of morons for thinking that CO2 is the biggest effect fossil industry has on people and environment, not mercury pollution, not mining, not general air pollution, but CO2. I want to stop fossil fuel usage because of those other effects. AGW has nothing to do with that, If it is really happening, it will be a positive side effect. And how on earth will usage of nuclear increase our CO2 emissions?
You can blame politics all you want, but the industry has had over 50 years to get its act together and show the world they could be profitable, economical, and safer. They have failed.
How have they failed?! It is safer (2 major accidents in ~50 years!!) and it is economical (France). Show me one study that claims that fossil or hydro is safer than nuclear! If it is so obvious why no scientist went and wrote such papers comparing them? Oh wait, there were at least two such papers, both concluded that nuclear is safer. But you just ignore them. Just because over 20 year old designs were shown to be unsafe in extreme conditions.
People overestimate effects from single big events (like plane crashes) and underestimate common small events (like bicycle accidents, let alone car crashes). They overestimate effects of things they don't understand (like nuclear radiation and cellphones) and underestimate effects of things they think they understand (like coal burning). Claiming that population "feel" about any issue has anything to do with real numbers and real danger it poses is funny at best and dangerous at worst.
You may know a lot about radioactiv
Then why Bulldozers are slower than Phenom II's in file compression (rar, zip, 7z, pick your poison) clock for clock? That's definitely not a shared FPU problem...
How is that for bias?
So how will you discredit the TORCH report ( http://www.chernobylreport.org/torch.pdf ) commissioned by the German Green party? Are they too paid by or limited by IAEA? Or perhaps they are proponents of nuclear power? They estimate the total death-toll from cancer to between 30000 and 60000. What's more, they warn, that the results highly depend on risk factors used in calculations. So again, the increase in lethality isn't obvious and that means it's not significant.
It still makes nuclear safer than mining coal, let alone burning it. And safer than hydro. Even if we assume that Fukushima will cause another 60000 deaths in next 40-80 years.
Again, external exposure is immaterial to this discussion . .
Because you can eliminate internal exposure when you're living in very high background radiation area and the radioactive materials are in water you're drinking, bathing in or air you're breathing... Those are areas that have higher radiation levels than the permanently evacuated areas in Ukraine. As we know, studies for internal exposure haven't been conducted, at all: http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/24/4A/008 . Oops, there have been, multiple ones. But those results don't agree with your world view so you just ignore them.
Building nuclear reactors requires a large amount of capital, an extensive period of construction time, and government insurance.
First and foremost it requires convincing general population that the build is necessary, unlike fossil fuel plants which you can "just build" and poison neighbouring areas for next 40 or 60 years. Could you explain to me, why on earth French have the cheapest electricity in Europe if its so economically infeasible?
How many generations will have to deal with nuclear waste
Because breeder reactors are impossible to build and you can't enrich "used" fuel once more... If you want the answer why France is sending its nuclear waste to Germany and Russia: it's because Greenpeace protests made their only breeder reactor uneconomical! USA shot themselves in the foot with law that makes it illegal.
You may want to read something more about radioactivity: the longer something is radioactive (its half-life is longer) the less its radioactive (it's more stable). The "waste" is buried because of political (nuclear non proliferation) and public relations reasons not because its actually needed or because its re-use is economically infeasible. You can separate highly-radioactive isotopes from not highly radioactive ones, you recycle non-highly radioactive to regular fuel. The highly radioactive stuff will decay to stable isotopes in few decades, not centuries. Not to mention that we have reactors that can burn anything radioactive, not necessarily Uranium or Plutionum. Even if this would make the fuel 100 times more expensive, the electricity produced with it would be only few percent more expensive. In the end my children's children won't have more problem to worry about than I do.
All because of Soviet propaganda and now Greenpeace scaremongering. "It's invisible so it's lethal", just like cellphones. Or will you tell me that there aren't people that are scared of radio waves or that claim that they are sensitive to them? Or that there's another conspiracy of cellphone makers to hide those results and they are in fact causing millions of deaths around the world?
Priceless . . . so you are a pro-nuke and global warming denier . . . That fits well with your low knowledge to conviction ratio. Are you sure you are not also a creationist?
And you believe in power from unicorns and rainbows. Just like I don't deny that nuclear power kills people, I don't deny that global warming is happening. I say we don't have enough data (where did I saw tha
If another report on Chernobyl claims significantly more deaths but is also written by radiation experts and physicians, I do not have the same level of skepticism that bias has compromised the analysis.
Right, because WHO is comprised of nuclear physicists, oh wait, it's World Health Organization, not Radiation, it's an agency of UN, not IAEA! The ExtenE report also had a professor of Occupational Medicine on the panel.
But they come to conclusions you don't like, with methods you don't approve ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_proof ) instead of extrapolation and wild speculation (like the Greenpeace report did). So you ignore the results they come to and assume there is some grand conspiracy to make us all highly radioactive. We can't just sit on our asses muttering "there's not enough data" when people are dying in thousands in coal mines alone, and this is definitely attributable to energy production, unlike future possible life shortening. Just like there is statistically proven lung cancer increase near coal fired power plants (which isn't easily curable, again, unlike thyroid cancer). There have been hundreds of trials related to X-Ray, CT, radiation exposure to mouse, people living in very high background radiation areas, etc. and they agree that the LNT approximation is wrong, so any study using it as approximation will be wrong, we don't know by how much, but the WHO report (just like most of data from those trials) would suggest very.
How is questioning a source that we only get a mere 13% from today "wanting to live without energy.
Because fossil and hydro don't kill people? There are only 3 sources of energy that we know that work: fossil, nuclear and hydro. All three kill people. But you somehow can't wrap your head around that idea! We've got better data to support that nuclear is killing less people than the other two than to support AGW. Yet the politicians wave the "Anthropogenic Global Warming" flag, because there's no "radiation" in it, so the general population doesn't throw rationality out of the window and don't yell "conspiracy!".
As for sustainability of nuclear: There's a difference between "I will have to deal with the problem" and "My children's children certainly won't need to deal with the problem" (where the problem is energy shortage): it's very likely we may not harness fusion to the end of century (especially wide adoption is highly unlikely), it's very unlikely we won't harness fusion and won't use it commercially in 4 or 5 centuries (solving the problem for foreseeable future). We need technology that will bridge the gap.
Oh, and Greenpeace doesn't like fossil because it's "causing Global Warming", not because it's killing people working in mines or living near power plants.
not really understanding that by blocking/shutting down/destroying nuclear plants and dams, they're just upping our coal and NG production
That's Luddites for you.
You question validity of minimal estimates for deaths from fossil fuels, isn't that a proof for your involvement in fossil industry or effectiveness of their lobbying? I don't hate Greenpeace, I just considers them terrorists and luddites at best (also, they hate coal for completely different reasons). You still haven't provided any data what so ever supporting your world view: that we can somehow live without energy or that fossil fuels don't cause vastly more deaths and pollution than nuclear. I'm still waiting for that reports/papers/data... or will you tell me that the nuclear industry is much more powerful than fossil fuel industry and so can silence any such report? Nuclear isn't renewable, but at least estimates for known and proven uranium and plutonium ores will last at least few centuries, unlike fossil, which won't last to the end of current century (if our estimates for undiscovered resources aren't overstated and we don't kill ourselves over what's left).
who are considered by many to have far too much vested interest in the success of nuclear to be considered objective
Because fossil fuel industry has absolutely no lobbying incentive and no vested interest to sustain the public perception of nuclear power, yeah, sure. All those scientists are on nuclear power payrolls. We have nothing to talk about about then, just watch out for your tinfoil hat it seems to be blocking blood flow.
You may also want read more about Sievert unit, or not, you may actually learn something...
Finally, 13% is hardly something to start screaming the end of the world over
Because coal, oil and natural gas (those that make up over 80% of energy sources) will last forever, solving the problem once and for all, ONCE AND FOR ALL.
There's nothing funny about brain-dead hardware. ASPM - 2011 era Winmodems.
Sorry, but if you want AD you need to go Windows Server. The only alternative is Samba 4.0 and it's not even beta at this time.
Duel screens is where the real time is lost.
Also, as you go forward in time, the estimates for total death-toll from Chernobyl are being reduced, not increased!
As I said, Fukushima released only half the radioactivity Chernobyl did and only 4% of the released material landed on dry land, 96% landed in ocean. At no time, the amount of caesium and iodine in sea exceeded regulatory limits. No member of public received or will receive doses of radiation higher than a single CT scan (in the range of 5-20mSv). Scientific reasoning assumes there must be a cause to cause an effect. If there is no cause, there will be no effect. If the cause is small then the effect will be small (like with the worst possible case model: LNT).
After: http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/5/27.full
Assuming that the risk is proportional to dose (the linear no-threshold hypothesis), a 10-rem whole-body dose would bring with it a risk of cancer death later in life of about half of one percent.
The very high thyroid doses from the Chernobyl disaster were due in large part to the failure of authorities to block the consumption of milk produced by cows grazing on contaminated grass. By contrast, in Japan, shipments of raw milk and vegetables from Fukushima and three neighboring prefectures were blocked on March 21, six days after the large release that caused the high contamination. Screening of produce for radioactivity began the next day
Very little potassium iodide was distributed in the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl accident. In Poland, however, more than 10 million children, 16 years of age and under, and approximately seven million adults received at least one dose of potassium iodide, reducing their thyroid doses to “negligible levels”.
Finally, it is important to note that, if not dealt with properly, the psychological consequences associated with accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushima could damage many more lives than the cancer consequences.
My "belief system" include bringing data together from different sources. For example: comparing doses received by residents with typical CT or X-ray.
After Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6032/908.full
He thinks the reaction to low doses could be quite complex. “There's not going to be a uniform response of all biological functions to low levels of radiation,”
Some researchers doubt that any study in Fukushima, no matter how well devised, will reveal much. The radiation exposure of the general population “is too small to give a statistically significant increase in stochastic effects such as cancer,” argues Ohtsura Niwa, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Kyoto University.
We need power or people will die from malnutrition, hypothermia and diseases (just like in developing countries right now) in much higher numbers than even those caused by coal burning, as no other technology has proved itself in high-scale power production, we can make it only from fossil or from nuclear. You have not provided any source stating that nuclear is less safe than fossil. If you want to live in developing country, then please, do so. You may take your Greenpeace pals with you. In the meantime, by using coal electricity, you're responsible for more deaths than it is necessary.
They are assuming that over 10% of energy that reaches earth is usable on surface to produce electricity. I'd say that's a high estimate.