I'm saying that this far, it seems likely that the harm to human health from the nukes, will be a tiny fraction of the damages resulting from the earthquake and tsunami.
I suspect more people are going to wind up getting cancer and dying from smoke inhalation from all the gas, wood, and coal heaters they're using due to the rolling blackouts, than from radiation from this accident. In other words, the loss of electrical generating capacity due to the Fukushima Daiichi plant being offline is probably going to kill more people than the radiation it emits. But death by radiation is more exotic and makes a better story than death by long-term smoke inhalation, so the media splashes it all over their headlines.
Nuclear powerplants has this far gotten a huge fraction of the attention, while actually causing a miniscule fraction of the deaths and injuries. This *may* change if we get a larger release of radioactive substances, offcourse.
Statistically, if you compare the safety of each power source in terms of deaths per TWh generated, this accident would have to kill something like 10,000 people in order for nuclear to lose its title as safest power generation technology (wind is currently second safest - yes, wind power has killed more people Watt-hour for Watt-hour than nuclear). This obsession people have with worst case scenarios is skewing their judgment into making the wrong decision on how safe the technology is. Just like how plane crashes make people think planes are more dangerous than they really are, or how big lottery prizes make people think it's worth buying a ticket when it really isn't.
No, it wont. When you have people that are willing to sink 12hrs+ a day into a game it is impossible to develop enough content to make it non-grindy unless you wanted to sink billions into development.
GW and GW2 are not very level-dependent, and use a skill system where you don't have access to all your skills. You have to pick and choose which skills you have available to you at any given time. That and the interactions between skills creates a complexity and depth of play which provides plenty of replay value for the same scenarios. In other MMORPGs, each class uses pretty much use the same 3-5 skill combos for everything because they're the best. In GW, there are literally millions of different combinations of skills to explore, with dozens and sometimes hundreds of effective combos. The "best" combo will vary almost with every fight. So no, they don't have to sink billions into development to give you something new to try. When the player gains new skills or they add new skills, suddenly the old content becomes new content. It has a very high degree of replayability.
Most MMOs turn into grindfests because that's the best way for the company running them to maximize revenue. People are paying $15/mo to level, so its in the company's best interest to slow down your leveling as much as they can. That way you stick around playing longer, which means they collect more months of fees from you. Sinking 12+ hours a day into the game is also a consequence of that. You want to level faster, but the game deliberately slows down your leveling, so you spend more time playing it every day.
GW and GW2 don't have a monthly fee. You pay for the game, you pay for expansions, and you pay for certain upgrades. That's it. So they have no incentive to make the game a grindfest. In fact the opposite is true - they want to do everything they can to get you through the content quickly so you'll buy the next expansion, but they also want to make every minute you play as fun as possible so you'll feel it's worth spending the money on the next expansion.
Couple this with levels not being very important, and there's no incentive to play 12+ hours a day (unless you find it fun enough to play 12+ hours a day). You just play for as long as you're having fun. I've played GW 12 hours a day, I've played it 1 hour a day, and I've stopped playing it for months at a time. It's very friendly to casual gamers, and the amount of fun per hour is much higher. IMHO it's a much better model than the level/grind fest that other MMOs have become.
A: Bitcoin utilises public-key cryptography. A coin contains the owner's public key. When a coin is transferred from user A to user B, A adds B's public key to the coin, and the coin is signed using A's private key. B now owns the coin and can transfer it further. A is prevented from transferring the already spent coin to other users because a public list of all previous transactions is collectively maintained by the network. Before each transaction the coin's validity will be checked.
Statistically richer developed countries have little to no population growth outside of immigration, and even in those countries the impoverished contribute much more to the birth rate. The statistics clearly show a connection between poverty and population growth.
Completely agreed on the dramatic difference in population growth between developed and developing countries. However, I think characterizing the problem as "poverty" tends to lead to the wrong solutions - solutions which try to address the symptoms rather than the problem. The symptoms are lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of medical care, and lack of/poor quality housing. Even poverty itself (lack of money) is just a symptom. If you simply provide developing nations with food, clean water, medicine, and housing, you're not solving the problem, you're just mitigating the symptoms.
The real problem is that developing nations lack a functional economy. We need to be providing assistance for economic development in those countries. Give those people an education and jobs, loans to help them start their own businesses, engineering assistance to help them build infrastructure. Even having foreign companies contract to build factories to give those people work will help (this is the flip side of the outsourcing that people in industrialized nations complain about). That way they can earn their own money, grow their own food, make their own water purification and distribution systems, build their own hospitals and higher quality houses.
Addressing only the symptoms (like giving them GMO seeds for hardier crops) may actually make the problem even worse. This may sound cold, but by mitigating the primary factors curbing their population growth (mortality), you're saddling the nation with an even larger impoverished population, making it that much harder to get their economy kick-started.
I'm straight out SAYING that when you legitimize corruption then ALL interactions with the government or other businesses in that country exhibit the characteristics that arialCo identified.
You've never actually managed a large group of people or a company with a large corruption problem, have you? Fighting corruption is not as simple as waving a magic wand and declaring that nobody is allowed to do anything evil again. Often times, the only people skilled enough to continue running a company or a government are people who are corrupt. The choice then isn't between a functional country with corruption, or a function country without corruption. It's between a functional country with corruption, or a non-functional country without corruption.
You're usually better off gradually transitioning - eliminating the worst of the corruption while keeping the less corrupt people, allowing new people to be trained with the skills necessary to keep things functioning. Then you eliminate the worst and the most corrupt again and bring in more new people. Repeat and the level of corruption drops each iteration.
And totally irrelevant because, as mentioned before, the countries with the most corruption have the lowest standards of living.
There won't be a middle class there because the corruption prevents it from forming.
That's simply wrong. Both Japan and South Korea developed thriving middle classes despite corruption. China's middle class is growing dramatically. All started off corrupt, and are in various stages of becoming less corrupt. South Korea in fact is a perfect example of a country with moderate to high living standards which until recently had rampant corruption.
I'm not saying the Japan/Korea model will work with every country. Some will need a stricter approach more like yours. Some will react better to to gentler nudging. But your absolute "no corruption allowed" approach simply does not work. It's a great goal to work towards, but demanding strict adherence to it from the get-go rarely helps transition a corrupt society to a non-corrupt one. In fact it's more likely to get you a bullet to the back of your head.
Once corruption is legitimized, those conditions become the norm.
You're somehow inferring that bribery by foreign corporations is what's causing the corruption and leading to it becoming the norm. That's (usually) not true. In most of these countries, bribery and graft were already the norm before the foreign business even got there. In that situation, a country has two ideological choices:
A) Isoluation and refusal to do business. You basically tell the country to screw off and prohibit any of your corporations from doing any business in that country. That you won't do business with it until it cleans up its act first. Then you sit and wait, and hope the people of the country will on their own spontaneously revolt, clean up government and business, and establish a system more compatible with your moral ideology. This is the approach the U.S. is taking with Cuba.
B) Acceptance of the different standards. You recognize that things are done differently there than here, and continue to conduct business playing by their rules. You do this with the long-term hope that the extra economic velocity generated by your business will lead to a thriving middle class, which will gain enough economic and socio-political clout that they're able to bend their own government into cleaning up its act. A peasant state where 95% of the wealth is controlled by 1% of the population doesn't need to listen to what 99% of its population says. But a middle class of 50% of the population controling 40% of the wealth is a force to be reckoned with. This is the approach the U.S. is taking with China.
I won't argue which method is better. I'm not even sure myself. I will say this though: Uncompromising ideology makes a good goal towards which you want to steer society. But it frequently makes for a lousy method with which to steer society. If you say corruption is bad so you should never do anything which encourage it, you just end up going out of business and your opinion doesn't matter anymore. It's better to compromise, allow a little corruption, gain more power and influence, then use that power to try to steer things for the better.
You have to understand that bribery is more or less the expected norm in Asian business. Japan was the first to get away from it but I suspect it still goes on in the form of "gifts" and favors. South Korea started to crack down on it after the Sampoong department store collapse. Incredibly, despite causing over 500 deaths, that in itself probably wasn't enough to force the change in culture. It was one of a spate of building and bridge collapses within a span of a few years, whose cumulative effect was to finally turn public sentiment against the culture of bribery and corruption in business and government. The Chinese government is smart enough to recognize that it's a long-term millstone around the neck of their economic development, and has been cracking down on it. But I suspect at the local level it's still very much entrenched. Basically, if you couldn't/can't bribe, you can't do business, and you might as well pack up your bags and leave the country.
So it's not just a matter of right vs. wrong. There are different standards of normal behavior involved in the debate as well. The same goes true for corporate espionage. In the West it's frowned upon and any company who fired you for refusing to do it would be slapped by a wrongful termination lawsuit. In the East, it's pretty much expected. If you're asked to do it and refuse, you'll probably be fired.
The 150 uSv/hr reading from station 32 corresponds exactly to the 3.6 mSv/day figure used in the xkcd chart, and the station is 30 km NW of the plant. So I suspect they're one and the same. It's pretty easy to mistake a 3 for a 5 when transcribing numbers.
Stations 31, 32, and 33 have consistently been reporting readings 10-100 times higher than the other stations throughout the week. The Japanese press noticed that and have mentioned it several times. All three are being monitored by the JAEA, while other stations are being monitored by different agencies or TEPCO. No doubt there's some investigating going on to try to figure out if those readings are an error, or if they're accurate and there's something about the location making it receive more radiation.
I tried making a graph for you but the scale is so ludicrous I can't get it past Slashdot's lameness filter. So you'll have to use your imagination.
Using the spot you're standing on as the center:
1/5th width of a human hair = eating 1 banana
1/2 width of a human hair = 1 chest x-ray
2/3rds width of human hair = extra dose from 1 day of average reading of towns around Fukushima
0.2 mm = average background radiation for 1 day
0.8 mm = increased radiation from a flight from NY to LA
1.6 mm = average exposure to someone living within 10 miles from the Three Mile Island accident
20 mm = max external dose from Three Mile Island accident
72 mm = 1-day at the highest reading outside Fukushima evacuation zone
73 mm = 1-year average background radiation dose
116 mm = CT scan
140 mm = 1-year of high reading at Tokyo thus far, since you requested it
1 meter = 1-year limit for someone working in a nuclear plant
2 meters = lowest radiation dose linked to a case of cancer
160 meters = fatal dose
1 km = 10 min at Chernobyl during the accident
It's not bananas per se that are radioactive. It's the potassium they contain. Naturally occurring potassium has a radioactive isotope (K-40) which occurs in an unusually high amount for an isotope (0.0117%).
Since your body needs potassium to survive (it's an essential element for sending nerve impulses, and regulating fluid levels in your cells), your exposure to K-40 is unavoidable. If you don't get it from bananas, you have to get it from other food sources, otherwise you'd die.
Actually, there is some evidence that low levels of radiation may actually be good for you. It makes a good point that our warnings about low levels of radiation come from linearly extrapolating harmful high-radiation doses backwards to zero. There's been very little study done on the long-term effects of low-level radiation, and experiments on laboratory animals does seem to suggest it can make them live longer.
Except the tax breaks aren't for families; married couples without children are eligible for them too.
Actually, the deliberate tax break is for having children. More dependents -> less tax.
The tax break you're talking about is entirely unintentional. It comes from two people combining their incomes to file jointly. It used to be that if one partner made a lot and the other little (as was typical in most marriages back in the 1960s when this was first addressed), filing jointly would offer a tax benefit. Someone who used to be in a high tax bracket could get married and file as if he were two people in lower tax brackets.
As a result, Congress tweaked the tax rates for filing jointly to try to equalize this. That worked fine for a while, until more and more women started working. With a greater number of two-income families, filing jointly then resulted in a tax penalty for most couples. So Congress tweaked it again to try try to equalize it. As of 2009, about 51% of joint filters got a tax break averaging $1300, while 42% paid a tax penalty averaging $1380. So we're not exactly talking about huge amounts here.
That makes it an issue of fairness, not greed.
It has nothing to do with fairness or greed. All it is is a mathematical artifact of trying to manually best fit a curve with one degree of freedom to a curve with two degrees of freedom which is changing over time. It can't be fit perfectly, so the best you can do is make sure the averages match. If Congress is doing its job and manually tweaking it right, there is on average no benefit nor penalty.
It looks to me like things are more or less under control. The cores should now be in cold shutdown putting out nominal heat. Barring another accident (explosion, earthquake, tsunami, pump propeller breaking up and tearing a hole through a pipe, etc.) they should have things sorted out in a week or two. Not to say it's not a mess. Food from fukushima might need to be thrown out for a week or two while cesium decays and there will be rolling blackouts until this stabilizes enough for workers to take a look at the other 3 nuclear plants and restart them. but still it won't be anywhere near the disaster the media makes it out to be.
That's pretty much my interpretation of the reports we're getting too. However, it's iodine-131 (half life 8 days) which will disappear in a few weeks. Cesium-137 is more problematic. It's got a dangerous 30 year half life (not long enough to be safe, not short enough to disappear quickly). An although it's only a beta emitter, one of its decay products is a gamma emitter with a half life of 2.5 minutes. So for all practical purposes it's the same as a gamma emitter. If a substantial amount of Cs-137 got out, things are going to be a lot messier to clean up. Fortunately, if the contamination incident in Brazil is any guide, it does not seem prone to spread by air, and there didn't appear to be any substantial fires which could have dispersed it far and wide for a extended period of time. So hopefully it won't be that bad.
Confronted with secrecy and dishonesty people will assume the worst. That's a perfectly natural reaction.
I'd say this goes both ways. When the press dishonestly reports what you're telling them and sensationalizes it to suit their needs, not yours nor the public's, you will assume the worst and become more reluctant to give them as much information in the future. That's a perfectly natural reaction.
The hysteria right now is starting to remind me of Three Mile Island. The press got their hands on an EPA report that there had been minute amounts of radioactivity above normal levels found in the local milk. What followed was almost a witch hunt, with calls for milk to be pulled off the shelves, school officials being publicly hounded and berated for "poisoning" schoolkids by feeding it to them at lunch, etc. All this for amounts of radiation a tiny fraction of what you would get from eating a banana, and almost completely avoidable with iodine tablets. Would you blame government officials for being much more tight-lipped about releasing such reports in the future?
The funny thing is, watching the NHK World broadcasts, there is actually very little sensationalism going on in their reports. They've called in academic and industry experts to help explain some of the more esoteric concepts like Sieverts, hydrogen gas formation, nuclear decay products, etc. Instead of telling you what to think, they're giving you the tools so you can decide for yourself what to think. If NHK is representative of the Japanese coverage, the hysteria is almost exclusive to the Western press.
it was their plant causing considerable economic damage and health risks for so many people. If you can't handle negative media reports about nuclear power, then you don't have the balls to run a nuclear power plant.
Actually, I suspect more people are going to be harmed by all the exhaust from all the gas and wood heating being used in evacuation centers in lieu of electric heating, than from this nuclear accident. But death by breathing in soot is not as sexy as death by radiation, so the press isn't going to report that. You assume the media is some neutral third party, a perfect arbiter of truth and information. It is not. They generally do a pretty good job, but they're just as stubborn as anyone else when you try to point out their mistakes to them.
All that said, I do think they should release the Global Hawk footage. Images are harder to misinterpret than abstract numbers and concepts.
it's paranoid. What sort of disaster are you expecting wherein you would need those kinds of weapons? There aren't many realistic scenarios of that type.
It's not paranoid, it's foresight. You should always include weapons when planning for a disaster scenario. The passivity and politeness you're seeing in Japan is the rare exception. Without the rule of law, human society nearly always degenerates into thuggery and might makes right. You people who think you're so smart planning ahead with stocks of food and water, but pacifist so refuse to keep a weapon? If a major disaster struck, the rule of law became ineffective, and survival depended on that food and water, you would be set upon by hordes of people who didn't plan ahead wanting to forcibly take your food and water from you. And there's nothing you could do about it because you didn't pack any weapons.
Yeah your neighbor whom you've known for the last 10 years probably isn't going to steal from you - he knows you and empathizes with you. He's not the one you have to worry about. You want to worry about the guy who doesn't know you, tired, starving, and thirsty, with no empathy for you. If he finds out you have food and water, he's gonna have no qualms about doing anything he can to take it away from you. He's not gonna think "This guy prepared ahead, I didn't, so I deserve to die." He's gonna think "This guy has lots of supplies, I have none. He should share, but he refuses. So I'm justified in taking it from him."
Too often, people think that the purpose of a weapon is to kill. It can certainly be used for that, but that's not its primary purpose. Its primary purpose is to intimidate. Hundreds of criminals are apprehended every day because the criminal gives up when the policeman draws his weapon. Hundreds of people are mugged every day because the victim willingly gives up his money when threatened with a weapon. All of this happens without a single shot being fired, without a single knife blade contacting flesh. You probably won't even have to use the weapon you pack in your disaster kit - merely waving it around to show people you have it will be enough to get them to leave you alone.
IANAS (I am not a seismologist), but I did study earthquake-resistant building construction safety as part of my structural engineering courses, which involved a fair amount of info on earthquakes and expected degree of shaking.
I don't really buy that. It was a subduction zone. All subduction zones are capable of huge quakes. The article seems to imply that because there had been no quake bigger than 7.5-8.0 from the area in recorded history, scientists didn't believe anything bigger was possible. The problem with that is these huge 9+ quakes typically have intervals of centuries or millenia. So unless you have several thousand years of good records, you're on shaky ground (no pun intended) predicting a huge earthquake cannot happen at a portion of a subduction zone.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the moment magnitude scale used to classify earthquakes is a measure of the energy released by the quake. The energy released is roughly the amplitude of movement of the two chunks of land along the fault multiplied by the surface area (m^2, not area at the surface) of the fault which slipped. Slip-strike faults like the San Andreas have two chunks of land moving past each other sideways. They extend only a few tens of km down into the ground because that's how thick the Earth's crust is. Essentially they're long and skinny. So they only way they can generate huge magnitudes is if a very long segment of the fault (several hundred km, probably several thousand for a 9.0) were to slip. This is (1) unlikely to happen - one segment of the fault is likely to slip before the other thus making several smaller quakes instead of one huge one, and (2) would distribute the energy of the earthquake over a much larger land surface area, blunting its impact on any one area.
A subduction zone quake OTOH involves one plate moving underneath the other. This results in a broader contact area, sometimes a hundred km in breadth or more. A shorter length of the fault slipping involves a larger area because the area which slips is shaped more like a square or broad rectangle, rather than a long, thin rectangle. As a result, a shorter segment of the fault slipping has more energy released, that energy is directed at a smaller land surface area, and because of the broader contact area it's easier for a longer segment of the fault to slip. The segment of earth which slipped in the 1960 Chilean quake (9.5) is estimated to be 800 km long. That'd be like a California earthquake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which is just inconceivable due to the relatively small depth of the San Andreas fault.
People have been predicting a big California earthquake for many years. Yes, it'll happen at some point but if you're really worried about it then don't live in California (or the Pacific Northwest).
The most dangerous area for an earthquake in the continguous U.S. is in the south-central Midwest. That area has produced the largest earthquake in recorded U.S. history (8.0), and because of the infrequency of earthquakes there the building construction codes and preparedness are woefully inadequate. I live in Southern California which has a reputation as a hotspot for earthquakes, but you could not pay me enough to live around St. Louis. Well, maybe if I got to design and build my own house, and it came with its own drinking water well and power generation facilitie
One that doesn't have a catastrophic failure mode?
The most catastrophic failure of a power generation facility in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. An estimated 171,000 people died (c.f. est. 4000 for Chernobyl).
So you think we should phase out our hydroelectric plants first?
The actual earthquake, Where the ground moved around, did no significant damage to the plant. It was the tsunami that destroyed the tanks for the diesel fuel for the emergency diesel generators (all 13 EDGs).
This is something that has troubled me for a while. Too often, engineers try to build redundancy into a system simply by adding multiple copies of the same backup. The thinking is that if something is 90% reliable, the having two of them makes it 99% reliable, three are 99.9% reliable, 6 and hey you've met the 6 sigma criteria.
But that assumes failures are independent events. If you buy a dozen external drives to backup your computer's data, yeah it's more protected than if you just used one external drive. But if your house burns down those dozen drives offer no additional protection over one drive.
I can't help but think that the Japanese mentality for order and symmetry contributed to the disaster here. They probably put all those diesel generators and fuel tanks in a line at the same level. Yeah it probably looked great. But when a tsunami takes one of them out, it takes all of them out. They should have mounted the generators in different locations and altitudes. Some on top of a hill, some enclosed in a basement, etc.
3) At the same time, four trains were derailed as a result of the earthquake, one of which appears to have vanished without a trace. Tens of thousands of people are dead; many times that number are injured or missing. But you don't hear about that; all you hear about is the "evil nucular meltdown". If the media weren't hyped up on nuclear fearmongering, this would rightly be a story about how well nuclear safety engineers are doing
While I'm pro-nuclear, I don't think what's going on in the media is necessarily anti-nuclear fear-mongering.
The media thrives on drama. As the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy said, you can only run so long with a story that doesn't change. "Mystery of the vanished dolphins still unsolved" and "Dolphin absence continues for the 3rd week" aren't exactly compelling headlines. Yes the earthquake and tsunami was bad, the devastation incomprehensible. But those events are over and done with. There's no drama. Everyone knows the consequences and what's going to be involved in the clean-up. Those things aren't going to change much. "Japan continues clean-up" doesn't make for an attention-grabbing story.
The nuclear power plant story OTOH has drama. We don't know what's going to happen. Will the workers save the day? Will a catastrophic fire break out and we have Chernobly, the Sequel? Nobody knows. And it's this uncertainty which creates tension and drama, and gets people to tune in to a Good Story.
That's why the media is running with it. I have some gripes about their accuracy and their sensationalizing. But I can't blame them for paying extra attention to this story.
Actually, the plant could go Nova and wipe out Tokyo, and nuclear power will still not have killed as many people as coal has killed since Chernobyl. Coal mining and pollution kills an estimated 1 million people each year.
Your problem is you're appraising the safety of nuclear at the potential magnitude of a single event. That's like deciding whether or not it makes financial sense to buy a lottery ticket based on the size of the prize, or deciding to drive instead of fly because an airplane crash is more horrific than a car crash. Long-term historical tallies of deaths vs. power generated prove nuclear power to be the safest power generation technology we have ever used.
I can see merit to researching renewables to try to drive their price lower. Their fatality rate is not that much higher than nuclear, and for wind and geothermal their cost is within spitting distance of nuclear and coal. But it is absolutely criminal that we are not replacing our fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants, and unbelievable that we're even contemplating replacing nuclear plants with more coal plants.
Would you build one of these plants within 30km of a major city like Tokyo, London or New York?
No. But neither would I build a large hydroelectric dam upriver from them. Nor a coal plant upwind from them. All of these plants are very safe, but there's no sense taking that risk if there's lots of open space in a relatively uninhabited area where you can put the plant.
Are you prepared to write off one major metropolitan area every thirty years or so?
We already do far more than that. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill about 1 million people each year worldwide. Yeah all those deaths are distributed around the world. But 30 million deaths every 30 years would easily exceeds a major metropolitan area.
Your entire spiel on Banqiao is an elaborate straw man. China has been subject to catastrophic floods for millennia. It has a lot to do with geography, but basically China is flat as a pancake and its major rivers have enormous watersheds. The dam is only part of the problem.
I wanted to address this last because you're introducing another variable (a good one) into the comparison. Mainly, the presence of the hydroelectric dams cannot be compared against a vacuum where nobody dies. If the dams were not there, those regions of China would experience more annual flooding. Sure, the Banqiao dam failure resulted in a huge number of deaths that fateful day, but we have to also take into account the number of lives saved by the presence of those dams in other years.
The net effect could be that having the dam actually resulted in a net savings of life. If flooding normally caused 8000 deaths in the region per year, and the dams stopped that for 24 years, then it saved a total of 192,000 lives. 171,000 lives were lost when the Banqiao dam burst. So over those 24 years, there would've actually been a net benefit of 21,000 lives saved.
But if you do that for hydro, you also have to do it for nuclear. You can't compare nuclear power to a vacuum where nobody dies. If nuclear power plants didn't exist, the need for the power they generate would still be there. Something else would have to provide that power. The most likely candidate is coal plants. Both are the constantly on type of power generation referred to as base load (oil, gas, and hydro plants are usually used to adjust for variability in demand, solar and wind provide a negligible contribution to power generation). So if our currently existing nuclear plants had never been built, we'd most likely be using coal plants in their place.
Statistically, coal plants cause about 161 deaths per TWh of power generated. Worldwide, nuclear power generates about 2500 TWh per year. Its average fatality rate has bee 0.04 deaths per TWh. So if all our nuclear plants had never been built, and were coal plants instead, we'd be looking at (161-0.04)*2500 = 402,400 more deaths per year from the additional coal mining and pollution.
In other words, if we analyze safety the way you're proposing, nuclear power saves 400,000 lives each year.
Bad Oehmen: Confirmation Bias, Sources & Astroturfing
Describes the curious case of how a reassuring first time web post ("Why I am not worried about Japans nuclear reactors") from a guy working on a liason project at MIT in a non-nuclear engineering or physicist role somehow got reposted 30,000 times in one day.
Indeed. Do you want another example of confirmation bias and astroturfing? Have you ever heard of Banqiao? It was a Chinese nuclear plant which in 1975 suffered a severe accident. The Chinese covered it up for 30 years and quietly admitted it to the world in 2005. So quietly that most people still haven't heard of it. The toll compared to Chernobyl is just staggering:
26,000 immediate deaths (57 for Chernobyl)
145,000 long-term deaths (4000 estimated cancer deaths for Chernobyl)
11 million people relocated (336,000 people relocated for Chernobyl)
Nearly 6 million homes and buildings made uninhabitable
768 km^2 rendered uninhabitable (489 km^2 exclusion zone for Chernobyl)
Horrific, isn't it? Worse than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Clearly proof that nuclear power is too dangerous to use, right?
I'm sorry. I lied. Banqiao wasn't a nuclear plant. It was a hydroelectric dam. Everything else I said is true though. In 1975, during a typhoon and torrential rainfall, it filled to over capacity. After several attempts to lower its water level by opening sluice gates, the dam above it burst. The swell of water overwhelmed the Banqiao dam, and it too burst. 700 million tons of water were released, and it precipitated a cascade failure of dams beneath it. In all, 62 dams burst or were deliberately destroyed in attempts to divert water into flood plains, with a total of 15.7 billion tons of water released.
26,000 people lost their lives in the flooding. Over 1 million people were left stranded by the waters, cut off from disaster relief, and had to have food and water airlifted to them for weeks. An estimated 145,000 of them (Chinese govt figures) died of the famine and disease caused by the disaster. Nearly 6 million buildings were destroyed, and 11 million people had to be relocated. When the dam was rebuilt, 768 km^2 was flooded to form the flood catchbasin.
Horrific, isn't it? Worse than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Clearly proof that hydroelectric power is too dangerous to use, right?
No? Why not? It's the exact same evidence. When it was presented against nuclear, you were probably in full agreement. But when told the truth and you find out that it's really evidence against hydro, your mind rejects it. Hydroelectric is more dangerous than nuclear? Can't be! Why not? Confirmation bias against nuclear power. You hear all those terrible things that happened, and when nuclear power is to blame, you accept it. But then you find out that hydro power is to blame, and your mind rejects it. You have an anti-nuclear bias. A double standard created by astroturfing propaganda from anti-nuclear activists.
Let me address all the objections you're probably going to bring up. The same ones you dismissed when the pro-nuclear side brought them up with Chernobyl.
But Banqiao was a clay dam. Western dams are typically concrete.
Chernobyl was a dangerous and unstable reactor design never used in the West.
It was Chinese. They had shoddy building and operating standards. (My apologies to the Chinese)
Chernobyl was built and run by the Soviets with substandard construction and operating standards.
Banqiao was one incident, in fact the only hydroelectric dam failure in history with a large number of deaths up to today.
Chernobyl was one incident, in fact the only nuclear accident in history with a large number of deaths up to today.
It was built in 1951. It was 25 year-old technolog
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I suspect more people are going to wind up getting cancer and dying from smoke inhalation from all the gas, wood, and coal heaters they're using due to the rolling blackouts, than from radiation from this accident. In other words, the loss of electrical generating capacity due to the Fukushima Daiichi plant being offline is probably going to kill more people than the radiation it emits. But death by radiation is more exotic and makes a better story than death by long-term smoke inhalation, so the media splashes it all over their headlines.
Statistically, if you compare the safety of each power source in terms of deaths per TWh generated, this accident would have to kill something like 10,000 people in order for nuclear to lose its title as safest power generation technology (wind is currently second safest - yes, wind power has killed more people Watt-hour for Watt-hour than nuclear). This obsession people have with worst case scenarios is skewing their judgment into making the wrong decision on how safe the technology is. Just like how plane crashes make people think planes are more dangerous than they really are, or how big lottery prizes make people think it's worth buying a ticket when it really isn't.
GW and GW2 are not very level-dependent, and use a skill system where you don't have access to all your skills. You have to pick and choose which skills you have available to you at any given time. That and the interactions between skills creates a complexity and depth of play which provides plenty of replay value for the same scenarios. In other MMORPGs, each class uses pretty much use the same 3-5 skill combos for everything because they're the best. In GW, there are literally millions of different combinations of skills to explore, with dozens and sometimes hundreds of effective combos. The "best" combo will vary almost with every fight. So no, they don't have to sink billions into development to give you something new to try. When the player gains new skills or they add new skills, suddenly the old content becomes new content. It has a very high degree of replayability.
Most MMOs turn into grindfests because that's the best way for the company running them to maximize revenue. People are paying $15/mo to level, so its in the company's best interest to slow down your leveling as much as they can. That way you stick around playing longer, which means they collect more months of fees from you. Sinking 12+ hours a day into the game is also a consequence of that. You want to level faster, but the game deliberately slows down your leveling, so you spend more time playing it every day.
GW and GW2 don't have a monthly fee. You pay for the game, you pay for expansions, and you pay for certain upgrades. That's it. So they have no incentive to make the game a grindfest. In fact the opposite is true - they want to do everything they can to get you through the content quickly so you'll buy the next expansion, but they also want to make every minute you play as fun as possible so you'll feel it's worth spending the money on the next expansion.
Couple this with levels not being very important, and there's no incentive to play 12+ hours a day (unless you find it fun enough to play 12+ hours a day). You just play for as long as you're having fun. I've played GW 12 hours a day, I've played it 1 hour a day, and I've stopped playing it for months at a time. It's very friendly to casual gamers, and the amount of fun per hour is much higher. IMHO it's a much better model than the level/grind fest that other MMOs have become.
Completely agreed on the dramatic difference in population growth between developed and developing countries. However, I think characterizing the problem as "poverty" tends to lead to the wrong solutions - solutions which try to address the symptoms rather than the problem. The symptoms are lack of food, lack of clean water, lack of medical care, and lack of/poor quality housing. Even poverty itself (lack of money) is just a symptom. If you simply provide developing nations with food, clean water, medicine, and housing, you're not solving the problem, you're just mitigating the symptoms.
The real problem is that developing nations lack a functional economy. We need to be providing assistance for economic development in those countries. Give those people an education and jobs, loans to help them start their own businesses, engineering assistance to help them build infrastructure. Even having foreign companies contract to build factories to give those people work will help (this is the flip side of the outsourcing that people in industrialized nations complain about). That way they can earn their own money, grow their own food, make their own water purification and distribution systems, build their own hospitals and higher quality houses.
Addressing only the symptoms (like giving them GMO seeds for hardier crops) may actually make the problem even worse. This may sound cold, but by mitigating the primary factors curbing their population growth (mortality), you're saddling the nation with an even larger impoverished population, making it that much harder to get their economy kick-started.
Reference link for those who haven't seen it yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2HQ1K7YyQM
You've never actually managed a large group of people or a company with a large corruption problem, have you? Fighting corruption is not as simple as waving a magic wand and declaring that nobody is allowed to do anything evil again. Often times, the only people skilled enough to continue running a company or a government are people who are corrupt. The choice then isn't between a functional country with corruption, or a function country without corruption. It's between a functional country with corruption, or a non-functional country without corruption.
You're usually better off gradually transitioning - eliminating the worst of the corruption while keeping the less corrupt people, allowing new people to be trained with the skills necessary to keep things functioning. Then you eliminate the worst and the most corrupt again and bring in more new people. Repeat and the level of corruption drops each iteration.
That's simply wrong. Both Japan and South Korea developed thriving middle classes despite corruption. China's middle class is growing dramatically. All started off corrupt, and are in various stages of becoming less corrupt. South Korea in fact is a perfect example of a country with moderate to high living standards which until recently had rampant corruption.
I'm not saying the Japan/Korea model will work with every country. Some will need a stricter approach more like yours. Some will react better to to gentler nudging. But your absolute "no corruption allowed" approach simply does not work. It's a great goal to work towards, but demanding strict adherence to it from the get-go rarely helps transition a corrupt society to a non-corrupt one. In fact it's more likely to get you a bullet to the back of your head.
You're somehow inferring that bribery by foreign corporations is what's causing the corruption and leading to it becoming the norm. That's (usually) not true. In most of these countries, bribery and graft were already the norm before the foreign business even got there. In that situation, a country has two ideological choices:
A) Isoluation and refusal to do business. You basically tell the country to screw off and prohibit any of your corporations from doing any business in that country. That you won't do business with it until it cleans up its act first. Then you sit and wait, and hope the people of the country will on their own spontaneously revolt, clean up government and business, and establish a system more compatible with your moral ideology. This is the approach the U.S. is taking with Cuba.
B) Acceptance of the different standards. You recognize that things are done differently there than here, and continue to conduct business playing by their rules. You do this with the long-term hope that the extra economic velocity generated by your business will lead to a thriving middle class, which will gain enough economic and socio-political clout that they're able to bend their own government into cleaning up its act. A peasant state where 95% of the wealth is controlled by 1% of the population doesn't need to listen to what 99% of its population says. But a middle class of 50% of the population controling 40% of the wealth is a force to be reckoned with. This is the approach the U.S. is taking with China.
I won't argue which method is better. I'm not even sure myself. I will say this though: Uncompromising ideology makes a good goal towards which you want to steer society. But it frequently makes for a lousy method with which to steer society. If you say corruption is bad so you should never do anything which encourage it, you just end up going out of business and your opinion doesn't matter anymore. It's better to compromise, allow a little corruption, gain more power and influence, then use that power to try to steer things for the better.
You have to understand that bribery is more or less the expected norm in Asian business. Japan was the first to get away from it but I suspect it still goes on in the form of "gifts" and favors. South Korea started to crack down on it after the Sampoong department store collapse. Incredibly, despite causing over 500 deaths, that in itself probably wasn't enough to force the change in culture. It was one of a spate of building and bridge collapses within a span of a few years, whose cumulative effect was to finally turn public sentiment against the culture of bribery and corruption in business and government. The Chinese government is smart enough to recognize that it's a long-term millstone around the neck of their economic development, and has been cracking down on it. But I suspect at the local level it's still very much entrenched. Basically, if you couldn't/can't bribe, you can't do business, and you might as well pack up your bags and leave the country.
So it's not just a matter of right vs. wrong. There are different standards of normal behavior involved in the debate as well. The same goes true for corporate espionage. In the West it's frowned upon and any company who fired you for refusing to do it would be slapped by a wrongful termination lawsuit. In the East, it's pretty much expected. If you're asked to do it and refuse, you'll probably be fired.
The 150 uSv/hr reading from station 32 corresponds exactly to the 3.6 mSv/day figure used in the xkcd chart, and the station is 30 km NW of the plant. So I suspect they're one and the same. It's pretty easy to mistake a 3 for a 5 when transcribing numbers.
Stations 31, 32, and 33 have consistently been reporting readings 10-100 times higher than the other stations throughout the week. The Japanese press noticed that and have mentioned it several times. All three are being monitored by the JAEA, while other stations are being monitored by different agencies or TEPCO. No doubt there's some investigating going on to try to figure out if those readings are an error, or if they're accurate and there's something about the location making it receive more radiation.
I tried making a graph for you but the scale is so ludicrous I can't get it past Slashdot's lameness filter. So you'll have to use your imagination.
Using the spot you're standing on as the center:
1/5th width of a human hair = eating 1 banana
1/2 width of a human hair = 1 chest x-ray
2/3rds width of human hair = extra dose from 1 day of average reading of towns around Fukushima
0.2 mm = average background radiation for 1 day
0.8 mm = increased radiation from a flight from NY to LA
1.6 mm = average exposure to someone living within 10 miles from the Three Mile Island accident
20 mm = max external dose from Three Mile Island accident
72 mm = 1-day at the highest reading outside Fukushima evacuation zone
73 mm = 1-year average background radiation dose
116 mm = CT scan
140 mm = 1-year of high reading at Tokyo thus far, since you requested it
1 meter = 1-year limit for someone working in a nuclear plant
2 meters = lowest radiation dose linked to a case of cancer
160 meters = fatal dose
1 km = 10 min at Chernobyl during the accident
It's not bananas per se that are radioactive. It's the potassium they contain. Naturally occurring potassium has a radioactive isotope (K-40) which occurs in an unusually high amount for an isotope (0.0117%).
Since your body needs potassium to survive (it's an essential element for sending nerve impulses, and regulating fluid levels in your cells), your exposure to K-40 is unavoidable. If you don't get it from bananas, you have to get it from other food sources, otherwise you'd die.
Actually, there is some evidence that low levels of radiation may actually be good for you. It makes a good point that our warnings about low levels of radiation come from linearly extrapolating harmful high-radiation doses backwards to zero. There's been very little study done on the long-term effects of low-level radiation, and experiments on laboratory animals does seem to suggest it can make them live longer.
Actually, the deliberate tax break is for having children. More dependents -> less tax.
The tax break you're talking about is entirely unintentional. It comes from two people combining their incomes to file jointly. It used to be that if one partner made a lot and the other little (as was typical in most marriages back in the 1960s when this was first addressed), filing jointly would offer a tax benefit. Someone who used to be in a high tax bracket could get married and file as if he were two people in lower tax brackets.
As a result, Congress tweaked the tax rates for filing jointly to try to equalize this. That worked fine for a while, until more and more women started working. With a greater number of two-income families, filing jointly then resulted in a tax penalty for most couples. So Congress tweaked it again to try try to equalize it. As of 2009, about 51% of joint filters got a tax break averaging $1300, while 42% paid a tax penalty averaging $1380. So we're not exactly talking about huge amounts here.
It has nothing to do with fairness or greed. All it is is a mathematical artifact of trying to manually best fit a curve with one degree of freedom to a curve with two degrees of freedom which is changing over time. It can't be fit perfectly, so the best you can do is make sure the averages match. If Congress is doing its job and manually tweaking it right, there is on average no benefit nor penalty.
That's pretty much my interpretation of the reports we're getting too. However, it's iodine-131 (half life 8 days) which will disappear in a few weeks. Cesium-137 is more problematic. It's got a dangerous 30 year half life (not long enough to be safe, not short enough to disappear quickly). An although it's only a beta emitter, one of its decay products is a gamma emitter with a half life of 2.5 minutes. So for all practical purposes it's the same as a gamma emitter. If a substantial amount of Cs-137 got out, things are going to be a lot messier to clean up. Fortunately, if the contamination incident in Brazil is any guide, it does not seem prone to spread by air, and there didn't appear to be any substantial fires which could have dispersed it far and wide for a extended period of time. So hopefully it won't be that bad.
I'd say this goes both ways. When the press dishonestly reports what you're telling them and sensationalizes it to suit their needs, not yours nor the public's, you will assume the worst and become more reluctant to give them as much information in the future. That's a perfectly natural reaction.
The hysteria right now is starting to remind me of Three Mile Island. The press got their hands on an EPA report that there had been minute amounts of radioactivity above normal levels found in the local milk. What followed was almost a witch hunt, with calls for milk to be pulled off the shelves, school officials being publicly hounded and berated for "poisoning" schoolkids by feeding it to them at lunch, etc. All this for amounts of radiation a tiny fraction of what you would get from eating a banana, and almost completely avoidable with iodine tablets. Would you blame government officials for being much more tight-lipped about releasing such reports in the future?
The funny thing is, watching the NHK World broadcasts, there is actually very little sensationalism going on in their reports. They've called in academic and industry experts to help explain some of the more esoteric concepts like Sieverts, hydrogen gas formation, nuclear decay products, etc. Instead of telling you what to think, they're giving you the tools so you can decide for yourself what to think. If NHK is representative of the Japanese coverage, the hysteria is almost exclusive to the Western press.
Actually, I suspect more people are going to be harmed by all the exhaust from all the gas and wood heating being used in evacuation centers in lieu of electric heating, than from this nuclear accident. But death by breathing in soot is not as sexy as death by radiation, so the press isn't going to report that. You assume the media is some neutral third party, a perfect arbiter of truth and information. It is not. They generally do a pretty good job, but they're just as stubborn as anyone else when you try to point out their mistakes to them.
All that said, I do think they should release the Global Hawk footage. Images are harder to misinterpret than abstract numbers and concepts.
The "No blood for oil" mantra came from opposition to the first Gulf War (when Iraq invaded Kuwait), which had a UN resolution authorizing it.
It's not paranoid, it's foresight. You should always include weapons when planning for a disaster scenario. The passivity and politeness you're seeing in Japan is the rare exception. Without the rule of law, human society nearly always degenerates into thuggery and might makes right. You people who think you're so smart planning ahead with stocks of food and water, but pacifist so refuse to keep a weapon? If a major disaster struck, the rule of law became ineffective, and survival depended on that food and water, you would be set upon by hordes of people who didn't plan ahead wanting to forcibly take your food and water from you. And there's nothing you could do about it because you didn't pack any weapons.
Yeah your neighbor whom you've known for the last 10 years probably isn't going to steal from you - he knows you and empathizes with you. He's not the one you have to worry about. You want to worry about the guy who doesn't know you, tired, starving, and thirsty, with no empathy for you. If he finds out you have food and water, he's gonna have no qualms about doing anything he can to take it away from you. He's not gonna think "This guy prepared ahead, I didn't, so I deserve to die." He's gonna think "This guy has lots of supplies, I have none. He should share, but he refuses. So I'm justified in taking it from him."
Too often, people think that the purpose of a weapon is to kill. It can certainly be used for that, but that's not its primary purpose. Its primary purpose is to intimidate. Hundreds of criminals are apprehended every day because the criminal gives up when the policeman draws his weapon. Hundreds of people are mugged every day because the victim willingly gives up his money when threatened with a weapon. All of this happens without a single shot being fired, without a single knife blade contacting flesh. You probably won't even have to use the weapon you pack in your disaster kit - merely waving it around to show people you have it will be enough to get them to leave you alone.
The system isn't broken. It's working as intended - following the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules.
I don't really buy that. It was a subduction zone. All subduction zones are capable of huge quakes. The article seems to imply that because there had been no quake bigger than 7.5-8.0 from the area in recorded history, scientists didn't believe anything bigger was possible. The problem with that is these huge 9+ quakes typically have intervals of centuries or millenia. So unless you have several thousand years of good records, you're on shaky ground (no pun intended) predicting a huge earthquake cannot happen at a portion of a subduction zone.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the moment magnitude scale used to classify earthquakes is a measure of the energy released by the quake. The energy released is roughly the amplitude of movement of the two chunks of land along the fault multiplied by the surface area (m^2, not area at the surface) of the fault which slipped. Slip-strike faults like the San Andreas have two chunks of land moving past each other sideways. They extend only a few tens of km down into the ground because that's how thick the Earth's crust is. Essentially they're long and skinny. So they only way they can generate huge magnitudes is if a very long segment of the fault (several hundred km, probably several thousand for a 9.0) were to slip. This is (1) unlikely to happen - one segment of the fault is likely to slip before the other thus making several smaller quakes instead of one huge one, and (2) would distribute the energy of the earthquake over a much larger land surface area, blunting its impact on any one area.
A subduction zone quake OTOH involves one plate moving underneath the other. This results in a broader contact area, sometimes a hundred km in breadth or more. A shorter length of the fault slipping involves a larger area because the area which slips is shaped more like a square or broad rectangle, rather than a long, thin rectangle. As a result, a shorter segment of the fault slipping has more energy released, that energy is directed at a smaller land surface area, and because of the broader contact area it's easier for a longer segment of the fault to slip. The segment of earth which slipped in the 1960 Chilean quake (9.5) is estimated to be 800 km long. That'd be like a California earthquake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, which is just inconceivable due to the relatively small depth of the San Andreas fault.
The most dangerous area for an earthquake in the continguous U.S. is in the south-central Midwest. That area has produced the largest earthquake in recorded U.S. history (8.0), and because of the infrequency of earthquakes there the building construction codes and preparedness are woefully inadequate. I live in Southern California which has a reputation as a hotspot for earthquakes, but you could not pay me enough to live around St. Louis. Well, maybe if I got to design and build my own house, and it came with its own drinking water well and power generation facilitie
The most catastrophic failure of a power generation facility in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. An estimated 171,000 people died (c.f. est. 4000 for Chernobyl).
So you think we should phase out our hydroelectric plants first?
This is something that has troubled me for a while. Too often, engineers try to build redundancy into a system simply by adding multiple copies of the same backup. The thinking is that if something is 90% reliable, the having two of them makes it 99% reliable, three are 99.9% reliable, 6 and hey you've met the 6 sigma criteria.
But that assumes failures are independent events. If you buy a dozen external drives to backup your computer's data, yeah it's more protected than if you just used one external drive. But if your house burns down those dozen drives offer no additional protection over one drive.
I can't help but think that the Japanese mentality for order and symmetry contributed to the disaster here. They probably put all those diesel generators and fuel tanks in a line at the same level. Yeah it probably looked great. But when a tsunami takes one of them out, it takes all of them out. They should have mounted the generators in different locations and altitudes. Some on top of a hill, some enclosed in a basement, etc.
While I'm pro-nuclear, I don't think what's going on in the media is necessarily anti-nuclear fear-mongering.
The media thrives on drama. As the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy said, you can only run so long with a story that doesn't change. "Mystery of the vanished dolphins still unsolved" and "Dolphin absence continues for the 3rd week" aren't exactly compelling headlines. Yes the earthquake and tsunami was bad, the devastation incomprehensible. But those events are over and done with. There's no drama. Everyone knows the consequences and what's going to be involved in the clean-up. Those things aren't going to change much. "Japan continues clean-up" doesn't make for an attention-grabbing story.
The nuclear power plant story OTOH has drama. We don't know what's going to happen. Will the workers save the day? Will a catastrophic fire break out and we have Chernobly, the Sequel? Nobody knows. And it's this uncertainty which creates tension and drama, and gets people to tune in to a Good Story.
That's why the media is running with it. I have some gripes about their accuracy and their sensationalizing. But I can't blame them for paying extra attention to this story.
Actually, the plant could go Nova and wipe out Tokyo, and nuclear power will still not have killed as many people as coal has killed since Chernobyl. Coal mining and pollution kills an estimated 1 million people each year.
Your problem is you're appraising the safety of nuclear at the potential magnitude of a single event. That's like deciding whether or not it makes financial sense to buy a lottery ticket based on the size of the prize, or deciding to drive instead of fly because an airplane crash is more horrific than a car crash. Long-term historical tallies of deaths vs. power generated prove nuclear power to be the safest power generation technology we have ever used.
I can see merit to researching renewables to try to drive their price lower. Their fatality rate is not that much higher than nuclear, and for wind and geothermal their cost is within spitting distance of nuclear and coal. But it is absolutely criminal that we are not replacing our fossil fuel plants with nuclear plants, and unbelievable that we're even contemplating replacing nuclear plants with more coal plants.
Floods don't. Hydroelectric dams do. In fact, quite a few more people are relocated for dams than from Chernobyl.
No. But neither would I build a large hydroelectric dam upriver from them. Nor a coal plant upwind from them. All of these plants are very safe, but there's no sense taking that risk if there's lots of open space in a relatively uninhabited area where you can put the plant.
We already do far more than that. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill about 1 million people each year worldwide. Yeah all those deaths are distributed around the world. But 30 million deaths every 30 years would easily exceeds a major metropolitan area.
I wanted to address this last because you're introducing another variable (a good one) into the comparison. Mainly, the presence of the hydroelectric dams cannot be compared against a vacuum where nobody dies. If the dams were not there, those regions of China would experience more annual flooding. Sure, the Banqiao dam failure resulted in a huge number of deaths that fateful day, but we have to also take into account the number of lives saved by the presence of those dams in other years.
The net effect could be that having the dam actually resulted in a net savings of life. If flooding normally caused 8000 deaths in the region per year, and the dams stopped that for 24 years, then it saved a total of 192,000 lives. 171,000 lives were lost when the Banqiao dam burst. So over those 24 years, there would've actually been a net benefit of 21,000 lives saved.
But if you do that for hydro, you also have to do it for nuclear. You can't compare nuclear power to a vacuum where nobody dies. If nuclear power plants didn't exist, the need for the power they generate would still be there. Something else would have to provide that power. The most likely candidate is coal plants. Both are the constantly on type of power generation referred to as base load (oil, gas, and hydro plants are usually used to adjust for variability in demand, solar and wind provide a negligible contribution to power generation). So if our currently existing nuclear plants had never been built, we'd most likely be using coal plants in their place.
Statistically, coal plants cause about 161 deaths per TWh of power generated. Worldwide, nuclear power generates about 2500 TWh per year. Its average fatality rate has bee 0.04 deaths per TWh. So if all our nuclear plants had never been built, and were coal plants instead, we'd be looking at (161-0.04)*2500 = 402,400 more deaths per year from the additional coal mining and pollution.
In other words, if we analyze safety the way you're proposing, nuclear power saves 400,000 lives each year.
Indeed. Do you want another example of confirmation bias and astroturfing? Have you ever heard of Banqiao? It was a Chinese nuclear plant which in 1975 suffered a severe accident. The Chinese covered it up for 30 years and quietly admitted it to the world in 2005. So quietly that most people still haven't heard of it. The toll compared to Chernobyl is just staggering:
26,000 immediate deaths (57 for Chernobyl)
145,000 long-term deaths (4000 estimated cancer deaths for Chernobyl)
11 million people relocated (336,000 people relocated for Chernobyl)
Nearly 6 million homes and buildings made uninhabitable
768 km^2 rendered uninhabitable (489 km^2 exclusion zone for Chernobyl)
Horrific, isn't it? Worse than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Clearly proof that nuclear power is too dangerous to use, right?
I'm sorry. I lied. Banqiao wasn't a nuclear plant. It was a hydroelectric dam . Everything else I said is true though. In 1975, during a typhoon and torrential rainfall, it filled to over capacity. After several attempts to lower its water level by opening sluice gates, the dam above it burst. The swell of water overwhelmed the Banqiao dam, and it too burst. 700 million tons of water were released, and it precipitated a cascade failure of dams beneath it. In all, 62 dams burst or were deliberately destroyed in attempts to divert water into flood plains, with a total of 15.7 billion tons of water released.
26,000 people lost their lives in the flooding. Over 1 million people were left stranded by the waters, cut off from disaster relief, and had to have food and water airlifted to them for weeks. An estimated 145,000 of them (Chinese govt figures) died of the famine and disease caused by the disaster. Nearly 6 million buildings were destroyed, and 11 million people had to be relocated. When the dam was rebuilt, 768 km^2 was flooded to form the flood catchbasin.
Horrific, isn't it? Worse than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Clearly proof that hydroelectric power is too dangerous to use, right?
No? Why not? It's the exact same evidence. When it was presented against nuclear, you were probably in full agreement. But when told the truth and you find out that it's really evidence against hydro, your mind rejects it. Hydroelectric is more dangerous than nuclear? Can't be! Why not? Confirmation bias against nuclear power. You hear all those terrible things that happened, and when nuclear power is to blame, you accept it. But then you find out that hydro power is to blame, and your mind rejects it. You have an anti-nuclear bias. A double standard created by astroturfing propaganda from anti-nuclear activists.
Let me address all the objections you're probably going to bring up. The same ones you dismissed when the pro-nuclear side brought them up with Chernobyl.
But Banqiao was a clay dam. Western dams are typically concrete.
Chernobyl was a dangerous and unstable reactor design never used in the West.
It was Chinese. They had shoddy building and operating standards. (My apologies to the Chinese)
Chernobyl was built and run by the Soviets with substandard construction and operating standards.
Banqiao was one incident, in fact the only hydroelectric dam failure in history with a large number of deaths up to today.
Chernobyl was one incident, in fact the only nuclear accident in history with a large number of deaths up to today.
It was built in 1951. It was 25 year-old technolog