No, what is needed are not cameras. What is needed are some combination of:
One thing you missed: Better traffic lights.
Traffic lights do contribute to delays of traffic flow. They slow down traffic, and the contribute to useless delays, as anyone who has sat at a long red light, waiting for cross traffic that doesn't exist.
I'd argue that any large country (I'm looking at you, US) has an incentive to improve traffic light. Right now, the most common intelligent traffic light has ground loops to detect when cars are at the intersection. In this day and age, couldn't we do better?
Imagine a traffic light that could "see" traffic approaching from a distance. It could also see traffic backed up to the light. Instead of turning red when a car or two is approaching and the cross traffic is non-existent, it could remain green. Instead of turning green when traffic is backed up to the light, it could let other traffic, which is clear to continue, go.
Just imagine the time and fuel savings!
And finally, I'd have to say, in this day and age, sometimes intelligence is overrated (even though this negates the above). As a young adult, the traffic lights in my town sensibly shifted to blinking yellow and red at late hours when the traffic was light. The most common through traffic would get blinking yellows. The underused cross streets would get a blinking red. Then, years later, they replaced the traffic lights with a more modern type that would detect when a car was waiting and change the light. This was useless in a small town - approaching from a cross street would result in a longer delay (as the other light would go through a yellow/red change), and if you were on the main street when a car had to cross, you'd have to wait for the red/green change for just one vehicle.
Really, considering how much time Americans spend on the road, and how much time is lost, small improvements result in a big gain in time not lost and gas not burned.
When I first read this, I thought it was heating the engine block and then injecting water that flashes to stream, driving the power stroke. (So basically a two cycle engine - when the piston is at the top of the cylinder, water is injected, it flashes to steam, that drives the piston down, and when the piston comes back up on the second stroke, an exhaust valve allows the steam to escape. The exhaust valve closes at the top of the stroke, and the process is repeated.
That would "consume" water, but would avoid the messy oil/water extraction step. (It's basically a 6 stroke Crowler engine missing the first four strokes.)
This is a lot more complicated, and the vagueness of the claims makes me think they do not have a working prototype. They are making vague claims of efficiency as well (15%+ efficiency).
I think I'll come and sit in the skeptic's corner with you.
Could you please link to a single person who was exonerated after being executed in the U.S. in the last 20 years or so (when DNA evidence became popular)? Thanks!
There's been no exonerations that I recall in the past 20 years. There has been a few executions where (IMO) there's a case for reasonable doubt.
For example, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the deaths of his three children in a fire. The justice system claimed the fire was due to arson. Five years after his execution, a state-ordered investigation concluded that "a finding a arson could not be sustained".
The trial was also notable for using Iron Maiden and Led Zepplin posters as evidence of Cameron's mental state.
I'm not sure if he was innocent or guilty. He appears to have had quite a few run-ins with the law. But the interpretation of the evidence and trial appears deeply flawed, and I am not comfortable executing people based on such evidence.
Although according to his cook, he liked squab. So that's like being a vegetarian who eats fish and chicken.
I will point out that strictly by the numbers, it's likely more meat eaters commit cheat, lie, break promises, and commit sex crimes. Of course, strictly by the numbers, the population of meat eaters is greater than that of vegetarians, but why not have fun with misleading statistics?;)
Anyway, vegan since 15+ years and lacto-ovo-vegetarian since about 25 year here but European and I think Peta is lame and have never understood this nudity crap.
Vegan, American, and still think PETA is lame.
To put it in perspective for non-vegs, think of the most inane, zealous type of individual who supports the same political views as you do. The sort of individual who does more damage to your beliefs than the most ardent opponent. That's PETA in a nutshell.
Look, I pedal to work on the few days a year when it seems likely that I won't arrive drenched in either rain, sweat or blood, but let's not pretend that it's a realistic transport panacea.
A countless amount of people manage to ride the bus everyday to and from work. That almost always includes a walk to or from a bus stop.
If these individuals manage to walk without any issue, I don't see why they can't replace that leg of a trip with a bicycle (electric or otherwise).
Riding a recumbent fixes this. Stop riding an out of date bicycle. I can ride 2X the distance in comfort on my recumbent than the best trained regular bike guy can.
I've done 160 miles on a regular bike. No pain the next day.
I'm waiting for your 320 miles.;)
In all seriousness, recumbents are pretty neat. They are a tad spendy though when compared to what I ride. Also I never understood the avoidance of underseat steering that most 'bent riders have.
There you go. You may want to read Horatio Hornblower some time to see why all of Weber's space ships have sails.
Admittedly, Honor Harrington is Horatio Hornblower in Spaaaace!, and consciously so (among other things, check the initials), but Weber at least does some attempt at explaining about why there'd be ships of the line (actually ships of the wall - 3D combat) in space.
I'd give him credit for that. Is it obvious about what he's paying homage to? Yes. Heck, know anything about history and you can pick out the analogies. But is it a decent read? I think so, but YMMV.
I also do like the fact that Weber tends to have "gender-blind casting". It feels as if he almost roles a die each time when it comes to picking a character's gender. It's refreshing.
Is Weber excellent? No. He's not a grand master of SF by any means. But I find his stories readable, which is more than I can say for a lot of writers.
Re:Only way to solve this is pay women for domesti
on
Sexism In Science
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· Score: 1
Only way to resolve this issue is to actually pay women money to raise their own kids and/or tending house. I can't see another way around it.
Another way around it would be mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave. So if you hire someone of child-bearing age, regardless of gender, they are equally apt to disappear to have children.
And since this is the 21st century, it is actually possible for a father to cook, clean, change diapers, etc. Childbirth isn't exactly a minor event - having someone else around to help after the birth wouldn't be a bad idea. Perhaps, if the father had the time and opportunity to bond with his child, instead of being forced into the traditional breadwinner role, families would be stronger.
Did the author provide some sort of collaboration that other people could verify? Or was this due to correspondence between him and a Wikipedia admin? After all, if I changed a Wikipedia article to claim a fact that nobody else could check, does that serve Wikipedia's fact checkers?
But it is a very different, much more drastic procedure. Not comparable.
There is a form of female circumcision that only removes the clitoral hood. The clitoral hood is similar to the foreskin in males, in that it protects the clitoral glans.
So at least one form of female circumcision is similar to male circumcision.
If it is feasible (and he has a rather odd title for a feasible plan), I wonder how it compares to fertilizing parts of the ocean with iron to encourage carbon sequestration through plankton growth. (Short explanation - in parts of the ocean, plankton growth is limited due to low iron levels, this plan adds iron to the ocean, the plankton take up CO2, die, then some of that CO2 ends up in the ocean abyss, where it tends not to escape (hopefully).)
I don't suppose much is known about the rate at which it replenishes, but I bet scientists will be able to find out about that long before we begin to see measurable depletion of seawater uranium on a global scale.
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
No, seriously. There is no food crisis. As a species we have a food distribution problem, and a food wastage problem and they're rather shocking at that, but we really have no issue with feeding the population of earth today without resorting to eating genetically modified photosynthetic aphids.
Plus the logic is bad. We already have mechanisms for turning sunlight into food, they are called "plants". Why not eat high-protein plants instead of aphids in the first place?
That's why I ended up with a Nook first edition. Unfortunately, it got smashed on my current trip, but I've had it for years.
That happened to my first Kindle. I wised up and picked up a Pelican hard case for the second. IIRC, it was $40 off of Amazon, but well worth it, since I can now throw the kindle into any bag or case without too much worry.
Yes, let's poison the inner core of the world until plates move around enough to fuck shit up really really good...
Technically, the earth is already "poisoned".
Radioactive elements are in the earth's crust and mantel, and contribute to earth's geothermal heat.
However, even if we buried nuclear waste deep inside the earth's crust, as far as I can tell, it is unlikely to make its way to the inner core of the earth. From what I can tell, most of elements in nuclear waste is lithophilic - that is, it tends to stay in the mantle, or so states several webpages I checked on geology.
To compare the radiation from radon gas to the insanely toxic radioactive isotopes that were released into the air, water, and soil is retarded. (e.g.: Caesium, Plutonium, Strontium, Iodine, etc) It has gotten into the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. And when it gets into the body, it will cause cancer.
Shouldn't you say "it may cause cancer"? After all, at low enough doses, the radiation a victim is exposed to is probably unlikely to cause cancer. I base this assumption on the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in our body that also expose people to radiation. For example (using numbers from Wikipedia), we have 140 grams of potassium in our body, which naturally would dose us with about 4 kBq. (31 bq per g of potassium,.14 kg of potassium in the average human body.)
Presumably, considering that many people do not suffer from cancer in their life-times, exposure at low enough levels of radiation is not guaranteed to cause cancer.
Also, I just want to point out again: 4 kBq. That's 4,000 atoms decaying every second. In the 2 minutes or so it took me to write this post, my body had about half a million atoms decay. And I survived. It sounds rather impressive, doesn't it?
I really prefer e-ink for reading. Its nice on the eyes, and the low-power consumption of the screen gives excellent battery life. Plus, most of the e-ink readers I see seem a little lighter than the corresponding tablets.
Right now I have a Kindle Keyboard. The screen may be too small if you read books with a lot of diagrams or illustrations. The Kindle DX would be better in this regards, but it is a tad spendy.
Regardless of what you get, I'd recommend Calibre for managing your library, and I would strongly suggest checking out your local library system's ebook lending. It is extremely convenient to be able to borrow books at any hour of the day or night. If you have access to different library systems, check out the ebook lending offers at each - sometimes one system will have a wider selection.
And if we built a few modern reactors (i.e. something less than 20years old) a lot of that waste would become a source of fuel. But we sure as hell can't build a new reactor. We have wind power!
I really do like the potential wind, geothermal and solar power has. They aren't bad things to develop.
But it seems that the purpose of a wind turbine is to make us feel green, while we generate most of our electricity from coal.
There's also the issue that monocultures are bad. We should have a diversity of energy sources. And we should have more electricity. Electrical use should be to replace fossil fuel heating, for example. It should be used to power our transportation, either directly or indirectly.
All My Sins Remembered, by Joe Haldeman.
About an idealistic young Anglo-Buddhist who joins the galactic version of the UN because he believes in the duty of protecting humans and other sentients. They turn him into a deep cover spy by changing his appearance and implanting different personalities and memories in him. He doesn't handle it well during his debriefings.
By "kill" do you mean that 1) on one day, someone was just walking down the sidewalk, happy-go-lucky, prime of life, sunny day, and the next day just died?
Or 2) It's estimated that a person who hasn't done too much excercise or is a smoker might have lived to 73 and actually died at 72.5 years?
I'm guessing it's somewhere between the two, but I don't see the details needed.
I did some digging, and for lung cancer, it seems the average age of diagnosis is 71. Considering that life expectancy is about 78 years in the US, and assuming 1 year average between diagnostic and death (the 5 year survival rate of lung cancer is pretty low, so lets err on the side of overstating the impact), that gives an estimated 6 years lost per victim, or the equivalent of 215 full lifetimes lost per year.
Not sure what the expected Fukushima cancer death toll will be. It looks like the median age is about 45 years in Japan. Guess about 10 years between exposure to low-lying radiation and cancer. Say it's as deadly as lung cancer, and on average kills the person 1 year later. Life expectancy in Japan is 83. That's 83 - 56 = 27 years lost per victim. So if Fukushima, on average, would cause about 510 additional (Japanese) deaths each year due to cancer, it would be the same amount of years lost as is due to lung cancer via coal power plant pollution in the US. (Presuming no other nasty nuclear accidents in Japan at the time.) Admittedly, we're comparing apples and oranges, somewhat, since the population of the US is 2.6x that of Japan. So really, 196 additional cancer deaths each year would be needed to put the Japanese nuclear industry (including Fukushima) on par with the US.
First google search for estimated Fukushima deaths from cancer puts the most likely number at 130 total. (Not per-year.)
All of this post is admittedly a back-of-the-napkin calculation with several guesstimates. There's also some flaws in the methodology. I'm also comparing a smaller country with a higher population density but smaller total population to a much larger country with a lower population density but higher total population. But it seems that for the risk of cancer deaths, the Japanese nuclear industry is far safer, including the meltdown, than the US coal power industry, unless one of my guestimates was wildly out of line. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10 in underestimating the risk of Fukushima, or overestimated the risk in coal, Fukushima-catastrophes would have to strike about once a decade in Japan to have a similar amount of years lost in proportion to the total population.
There's a few other factors involved as well. I ignored the 600 evacuation deaths from Fukushima. That's a one time event, but it does up the amount of deaths from Fukushima significantly. On the other hand, I haven't considered the majority of estimated deaths from coal power is not due to lung cancer. Assuming that the non-cancer deaths from coal are similar to the cancer deaths (6 years lost per victim), and figure that the evacuation deaths are evenly spread out among the Japanese population (39 years lost per victim). We'll go with about 10,000 dead from coal power that isn't lung cancer (going with the later study that shows a lower death toll), and that gives us 60,000 years of human life lost each year. While Fukushima's 600 evacuation deaths are at around 24,000 years of human life lost. But remember, US has 2.6 times the population, so Fukushima so it actually works out as slightly more years (60,840 years vs 60,000 years) of human life if the populations are equalized.
There's also the environmental and economic effects. Fukushima took out a few hundred square miles of land due to fallout. That's going to have a real cost. OTOH, we could estimate the land lost to global warming, and figure out carbon power plants in the US's share of the pie, and that's going to have a real economic cost as well. No comparison will be perfect. And we could redo all of
[1]: Safer because it doesn't conjure up the radioactive boogyman, even though some statistics say coal plants toss up more radioactive crap in the air on an annual basis than nuclear reactors even use.
A more recent source "only" blames coal for 13,000 deaths a year in the US.
We would be outraged if normally functioning nuclear power plants caused even a tenth of that death toll in the US each year. Why do we tolerate non-nuclear power plants that kill literally thousands each year?
Slashdot Mirror
One thing you missed: Better traffic lights.
Traffic lights do contribute to delays of traffic flow. They slow down traffic, and the contribute to useless delays, as anyone who has sat at a long red light, waiting for cross traffic that doesn't exist.
I'd argue that any large country (I'm looking at you, US) has an incentive to improve traffic light. Right now, the most common intelligent traffic light has ground loops to detect when cars are at the intersection. In this day and age, couldn't we do better?
Imagine a traffic light that could "see" traffic approaching from a distance. It could also see traffic backed up to the light. Instead of turning red when a car or two is approaching and the cross traffic is non-existent, it could remain green. Instead of turning green when traffic is backed up to the light, it could let other traffic, which is clear to continue, go.
Just imagine the time and fuel savings!
And finally, I'd have to say, in this day and age, sometimes intelligence is overrated (even though this negates the above). As a young adult, the traffic lights in my town sensibly shifted to blinking yellow and red at late hours when the traffic was light. The most common through traffic would get blinking yellows. The underused cross streets would get a blinking red. Then, years later, they replaced the traffic lights with a more modern type that would detect when a car was waiting and change the light. This was useless in a small town - approaching from a cross street would result in a longer delay (as the other light would go through a yellow/red change), and if you were on the main street when a car had to cross, you'd have to wait for the red/green change for just one vehicle.
Really, considering how much time Americans spend on the road, and how much time is lost, small improvements result in a big gain in time not lost and gas not burned.
When I first read this, I thought it was heating the engine block and then injecting water that flashes to stream, driving the power stroke. (So basically a two cycle engine - when the piston is at the top of the cylinder, water is injected, it flashes to steam, that drives the piston down, and when the piston comes back up on the second stroke, an exhaust valve allows the steam to escape. The exhaust valve closes at the top of the stroke, and the process is repeated.
That would "consume" water, but would avoid the messy oil/water extraction step. (It's basically a 6 stroke Crowler engine missing the first four strokes.)
This is a lot more complicated, and the vagueness of the claims makes me think they do not have a working prototype. They are making vague claims of efficiency as well (15%+ efficiency).
I think I'll come and sit in the skeptic's corner with you.
There's been no exonerations that I recall in the past 20 years. There has been a few executions where (IMO) there's a case for reasonable doubt.
For example, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed for the deaths of his three children in a fire. The justice system claimed the fire was due to arson. Five years after his execution, a state-ordered investigation concluded that "a finding a arson could not be sustained".
The trial was also notable for using Iron Maiden and Led Zepplin posters as evidence of Cameron's mental state.
I'm not sure if he was innocent or guilty. He appears to have had quite a few run-ins with the law. But the interpretation of the evidence and trial appears deeply flawed, and I am not comfortable executing people based on such evidence.
Maybe you are.
I'm against it because it gives the state too much power.
I will say it's odd how a lot of people who claim to be for more limited government tend to also be for giving government the ability to end a life.
Although according to his cook, he liked squab. So that's like being a vegetarian who eats fish and chicken.
I will point out that strictly by the numbers, it's likely more meat eaters commit cheat, lie, break promises, and commit sex crimes. Of course, strictly by the numbers, the population of meat eaters is greater than that of vegetarians, but why not have fun with misleading statistics? ;)
Vegan, American, and still think PETA is lame.
To put it in perspective for non-vegs, think of the most inane, zealous type of individual who supports the same political views as you do. The sort of individual who does more damage to your beliefs than the most ardent opponent. That's PETA in a nutshell.
A countless amount of people manage to ride the bus everyday to and from work. That almost always includes a walk to or from a bus stop.
If these individuals manage to walk without any issue, I don't see why they can't replace that leg of a trip with a bicycle (electric or otherwise).
Googling "digital photo frames hacks" I find the following suggestions as well:
I've done 160 miles on a regular bike. No pain the next day.
I'm waiting for your 320 miles. ;)
In all seriousness, recumbents are pretty neat. They are a tad spendy though when compared to what I ride. Also I never understood the avoidance of underseat steering that most 'bent riders have.
Admittedly, Honor Harrington is Horatio Hornblower in Spaaaace!, and consciously so (among other things, check the initials), but Weber at least does some attempt at explaining about why there'd be ships of the line (actually ships of the wall - 3D combat) in space.
I'd give him credit for that. Is it obvious about what he's paying homage to? Yes. Heck, know anything about history and you can pick out the analogies. But is it a decent read? I think so, but YMMV.
I also do like the fact that Weber tends to have "gender-blind casting". It feels as if he almost roles a die each time when it comes to picking a character's gender. It's refreshing.
Is Weber excellent? No. He's not a grand master of SF by any means. But I find his stories readable, which is more than I can say for a lot of writers.
Another way around it would be mandatory paid maternity and paternity leave. So if you hire someone of child-bearing age, regardless of gender, they are equally apt to disappear to have children.
And since this is the 21st century, it is actually possible for a father to cook, clean, change diapers, etc. Childbirth isn't exactly a minor event - having someone else around to help after the birth wouldn't be a bad idea. Perhaps, if the father had the time and opportunity to bond with his child, instead of being forced into the traditional breadwinner role, families would be stronger.
Did the author provide some sort of collaboration that other people could verify? Or was this due to correspondence between him and a Wikipedia admin? After all, if I changed a Wikipedia article to claim a fact that nobody else could check, does that serve Wikipedia's fact checkers?
There is a form of female circumcision that only removes the clitoral hood. The clitoral hood is similar to the foreskin in males, in that it protects the clitoral glans.
So at least one form of female circumcision is similar to male circumcision.
If it is feasible (and he has a rather odd title for a feasible plan), I wonder how it compares to fertilizing parts of the ocean with iron to encourage carbon sequestration through plankton growth. (Short explanation - in parts of the ocean, plankton growth is limited due to low iron levels, this plan adds iron to the ocean, the plankton take up CO2, die, then some of that CO2 ends up in the ocean abyss, where it tends not to escape (hopefully).)
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
- Source
Plus the logic is bad. We already have mechanisms for turning sunlight into food, they are called "plants". Why not eat high-protein plants instead of aphids in the first place?
That happened to my first Kindle. I wised up and picked up a Pelican hard case for the second. IIRC, it was $40 off of Amazon, but well worth it, since I can now throw the kindle into any bag or case without too much worry.
Technically, the earth is already "poisoned".
Radioactive elements are in the earth's crust and mantel, and contribute to earth's geothermal heat.
However, even if we buried nuclear waste deep inside the earth's crust, as far as I can tell, it is unlikely to make its way to the inner core of the earth. From what I can tell, most of elements in nuclear waste is lithophilic - that is, it tends to stay in the mantle, or so states several webpages I checked on geology.
Shouldn't you say "it may cause cancer"? After all, at low enough doses, the radiation a victim is exposed to is probably unlikely to cause cancer. I base this assumption on the naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in our body that also expose people to radiation. For example (using numbers from Wikipedia), we have 140 grams of potassium in our body, which naturally would dose us with about 4 kBq. (31 bq per g of potassium, .14 kg of potassium in the average human body.)
Presumably, considering that many people do not suffer from cancer in their life-times, exposure at low enough levels of radiation is not guaranteed to cause cancer.
Also, I just want to point out again: 4 kBq. That's 4,000 atoms decaying every second. In the 2 minutes or so it took me to write this post, my body had about half a million atoms decay. And I survived. It sounds rather impressive, doesn't it?
Right now I have a Kindle Keyboard. The screen may be too small if you read books with a lot of diagrams or illustrations. The Kindle DX would be better in this regards, but it is a tad spendy.
Regardless of what you get, I'd recommend Calibre for managing your library, and I would strongly suggest checking out your local library system's ebook lending. It is extremely convenient to be able to borrow books at any hour of the day or night. If you have access to different library systems, check out the ebook lending offers at each - sometimes one system will have a wider selection.
Well, heteronormativity seems to be. ;)
(No, I don't know the gender orientation or preferences of the individuals who selected this image. I'm just pointing out the assumption being made.)
I really do like the potential wind, geothermal and solar power has. They aren't bad things to develop.
But it seems that the purpose of a wind turbine is to make us feel green, while we generate most of our electricity from coal.
There's also the issue that monocultures are bad. We should have a diversity of energy sources. And we should have more electricity. Electrical use should be to replace fossil fuel heating, for example. It should be used to power our transportation, either directly or indirectly.
All My Sins Remembered, by Joe Haldeman. About an idealistic young Anglo-Buddhist who joins the galactic version of the UN because he believes in the duty of protecting humans and other sentients. They turn him into a deep cover spy by changing his appearance and implanting different personalities and memories in him. He doesn't handle it well during his debriefings.
I'm guessing it's somewhere between the two, but I don't see the details needed.
I did some digging, and for lung cancer, it seems the average age of diagnosis is 71. Considering that life expectancy is about 78 years in the US, and assuming 1 year average between diagnostic and death (the 5 year survival rate of lung cancer is pretty low, so lets err on the side of overstating the impact), that gives an estimated 6 years lost per victim, or the equivalent of 215 full lifetimes lost per year.
Not sure what the expected Fukushima cancer death toll will be. It looks like the median age is about 45 years in Japan. Guess about 10 years between exposure to low-lying radiation and cancer. Say it's as deadly as lung cancer, and on average kills the person 1 year later. Life expectancy in Japan is 83. That's 83 - 56 = 27 years lost per victim. So if Fukushima, on average, would cause about 510 additional (Japanese) deaths each year due to cancer, it would be the same amount of years lost as is due to lung cancer via coal power plant pollution in the US. (Presuming no other nasty nuclear accidents in Japan at the time.) Admittedly, we're comparing apples and oranges, somewhat, since the population of the US is 2.6x that of Japan. So really, 196 additional cancer deaths each year would be needed to put the Japanese nuclear industry (including Fukushima) on par with the US.
First google search for estimated Fukushima deaths from cancer puts the most likely number at 130 total. (Not per-year.)
All of this post is admittedly a back-of-the-napkin calculation with several guesstimates. There's also some flaws in the methodology. I'm also comparing a smaller country with a higher population density but smaller total population to a much larger country with a lower population density but higher total population. But it seems that for the risk of cancer deaths, the Japanese nuclear industry is far safer, including the meltdown, than the US coal power industry, unless one of my guestimates was wildly out of line. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10 in underestimating the risk of Fukushima, or overestimated the risk in coal, Fukushima-catastrophes would have to strike about once a decade in Japan to have a similar amount of years lost in proportion to the total population.
There's a few other factors involved as well. I ignored the 600 evacuation deaths from Fukushima. That's a one time event, but it does up the amount of deaths from Fukushima significantly. On the other hand, I haven't considered the majority of estimated deaths from coal power is not due to lung cancer. Assuming that the non-cancer deaths from coal are similar to the cancer deaths (6 years lost per victim), and figure that the evacuation deaths are evenly spread out among the Japanese population (39 years lost per victim). We'll go with about 10,000 dead from coal power that isn't lung cancer (going with the later study that shows a lower death toll), and that gives us 60,000 years of human life lost each year. While Fukushima's 600 evacuation deaths are at around 24,000 years of human life lost. But remember, US has 2.6 times the population, so Fukushima so it actually works out as slightly more years (60,840 years vs 60,000 years) of human life if the populations are equalized.
There's also the environmental and economic effects. Fukushima took out a few hundred square miles of land due to fallout. That's going to have a real cost. OTOH, we could estimate the land lost to global warming, and figure out carbon power plants in the US's share of the pie, and that's going to have a real economic cost as well. No comparison will be perfect. And we could redo all of
According to a study done by under the Bush administrator, coal power plants kill 24,000 a year, including 2,800 lung cancer deaths, in the US alone.
A more recent source "only" blames coal for 13,000 deaths a year in the US.
We would be outraged if normally functioning nuclear power plants caused even a tenth of that death toll in the US each year. Why do we tolerate non-nuclear power plants that kill literally thousands each year?