You don't understand, now there are two levels on the seriousness scale for nuclear accidents: Chernobyl = the worst (obviously, since it was stinking commies who did it), Fukushima =much less serious, to the point of being almost laughable, since it's "only 10%" of Chernobyl (up to now, but let's not get picky here) and done by Japanese that you hardly can look at with a scorn from a technology point of view.
It's not too many for nuclear power to *still* be the safest power source available. [...] no matter what we do, people will die for energy
Sorry, whatever you try to spin it people are not going to die from concentrated solar power, and please give me a break about plumbers falling from the roofs while installing solar panels, that would be laughable if not sad.
I'd be willing to hear arguments about price but then please take into account all costs, including externalities, risks, insurance, waste, pollution, etc. I'd be genuinely interested in true figures about costs, without political spin.
at least they wouldn't be from scary nuclear power, right?
I'm not scared about nuclear energy, although reading that I should now be careful protecting my new-born from possible iodine contamination is scary - how am I going to know the levels in whatever food I have to buy, I don't have a Geiger counter handy? I'm definitely concerned about nuclear islamists though who, just like the real ones, are convinced they have seen the light, will not change their mind the slightest whatever facts or discussion they come over and are eager to shove their holy book down everybody's throats own way or another.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in... wait for it... containment chambers!
Maybe some kind of the very blind and stupid bias that they are so scornfully mocking in anyone not singing their song? I've come to consider them "nuclear islamists" - very similar condition of blind faith, unshakable conviction to know better and scorn and hatred for everybody who hasn't seen the light yet.
replace them with a more modern design that is more intrinsically safe.
But but but... I was told that nuclear reactors already were perfectly safe. So in fact they were not? But the next one will be, is that right? All this is so delightingly simple - getting paid with words.
You're playing compassionate but this is hypocritical, isn't it? You're really worrying about your asset, i.e., the reputation and future of nuclear energy. Let me know if I'm mistaken.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in... wait for it... containment chambers!
Those figures don't take into account externalities, which is why they don't mean much on the long term; they are only meaningful for short-sighted investors looking for the quickest profit. Long-term energy decisions should be based on true costs, i.e., including externalities, risks, pollution, etc. I bet the order would be immensely different then; well in fact this seems completely obvious.
Solar is prohibitively expensive for now on industrial scale.
Isn't this due to the fact that we invested so much money in oil and nuclear energy during the last four decades, and almost nothing in solar energy? Wouldn't the situation be reversed if we had done the right choice when the time was right? Or even simply if the cost of polluting the biosphere was included in the final price of the kWh?
It all seems to me to be a purely political issue, not a technological or even a financial one.
This is irrelevant because the worst fizzle ever taking place at the appropriate location (e.g., somewhere in Manhattan or Tel Aviv) would be more than enough for any terrorist organization to celebrate victory and a well-deserved retirement. Just look at the reaction of people when possibly confronted to milliSieverts of radiation and imagine reading in the papers that there was a nuclear close-detonation next block to you.
This is why all this talk about the amount of engineering it would take for terrorists to build an A-bomb is ridiculous. A suicide bomber could clamp together to pieces of U235 by hand and this would create enough of an explosion to fulfill all of their wildest dreams.
I've heard there's quite a bit of land to grab for cheap around Fukushima, Japan. I can only advise you to not miss that bargain. I also have a bridge for sell if you have any spare change.
I find this very sad. You've been told all your life that nuclear power is dangerous - life-threatening, planet-threatening dangerous - and you've swallowed this propaganda without question
This is where you are deluded. First yes, nuclear power is dangereous. Radio-nucleides produced during nuclear fission are radiotoxic, carcinogenic and teratogenic, this is a fact. You don't want to ingest them in any quantity. Now the quantity you or your kids may be brought to ingest due to unfortunate circumstances is the crux of the issue with nuclear power. Then please, try to quit your condescending stance and do not assume that I've been told anything. I try to think for myself, following some basic logic and fact-checking.
Open your eyes, please. You don't seem averse to do a bit of googling, so google for "energy production deaths" and read a few of the links.
Open your brain please. You seem to be able to follow the basic tenets of logic. As I told you above, when you board a plane, or a care, or do whatever in life there are three things that you consider, being a human being:
1. The worst possible scenario.
2. The probability of that scenario.
3. Possible mitigating actions.
When you get in your car you know intuitively, from experience, the answers. Worst scenario: head-on collision. Probability: not negligible as soon as you drive a few dozen miles. Mitigating actions: buckle seatbelt, drive defensively. When you board a plane, you know that worst scenario = crash. Probability = fairly low. Mitigating actions = nothing (some Japanese are said to buy preferably seats in the tail of the aircraft but that sounds futile).
So you're insisting on point number 2, or more exactly some combination of 1 and 2, when what I'm concerned with is point number 1. This is akin to telling someone who's never seen a boat before: "don't worry, few people ever died boating". That's not the piece of information I'm looking for. What I need to know is that worst case scenario = boat sinks, mitigating action = have a buoy handy. In the case of Fukushima I was, together with a lot of people, in the following situation: worst case scenario = something like Chernobyl, perhaps worse (simple arithmetic, six American reactors plus seven spent fuel pools might reasonably end up worse than one crappy Russian one). More about that below.
far lower than any other form of power production - solar, wind and hydro included
Be cautious with this kind of highly questionable statistics though, they are partisan to the point of being ludicrous. First they are based on the bogus IAEA Chernobyl numbers that I mentioned before. Also the deaths from solar include supposed falls from the rooftops. Do you really think anybody is going to value equally the death of his child from radiation poisoning to the death of his plumber who fell from his roof? These kind of ridiculous comparison are not helping your cause. On the contrary they make the nuclear industry appear as willing to resort to the most preposterous and twisted rethoric, on top of blatant lies and dissimulation (see TEPCO resignations, IAEA reporting of Chernobyl), to push their agenda down the throat of the unwilling public. People are not that dumb and resent being considered so.
But above all there is a more fundamental problem of logic with these numbers, or possibly more of statistics, in that you don't estimate the likely outcome of a long-tailed statistical distribution from a few samples, else nobody would play lottery. For instance even if my last 50 bets brought me only 10$, I am not going to base my expectancy of gain on that, since I could perfectly get 1M$ next time. Same thing with this study. Saying that nuclear hasn't killed many people up to now, even if it happens to be true, does not preclude that it may in the future. Again it all depends on the worst-c
First off, you speculating on what might have happened - while enlightening as to the depths you're willing to go to invent boogymen - has little to do with reality
What you don't seem to understand is that I speculate with the information that I have access too. I'm not willing to invent boogy-men; I was at some point this past week genuinely worried for my two little kids, although I live on the very opposite part of the planet.
I'm too young to remember much about TMI, however I vividly remember Chernobyl. What I retain from this event is that: first the disaster was shamelessly denied by the Soviets, but we really didn't expect much more from them. The consensus in western Europe at the time was that the USSR was a tyrany with gulags and thought police, pretty much similar to what North Korea is now, and that the guys in power would have dropped babies in the nuclear furnace if it would have advanced their fucked-up ideology.
Secondly the French governement lied openly to the public by pretending that the radioactive cloud stopped at the German border. How nice of this pretty little cloud! So the conclusion, right or wrong, was that the nuclear industry in France, in bed with the governement and the military, was ok to let some kids absorb some amount of radionucleides and get a few additional thyroid cancers, provided it could be hidden and avoid turning the public against nuclear energy.
Then the IAEA issued an official report evaluating the consequences of the disaster to 4000 additional deaths by cancer. This figure was afterwards challenged by the WHO itself it seems(!) as being a "political communication tool". Greenpeace says 60,000 deaths, some russian biologistsays 985,000. Who to believe? Definitely not the IAEA who appears as a corrupt organization in bed with industry interests.
Finally a quick search on google brings back haunting images of a world where "the living envy the dead". Since those consequences were seemingly not even considered by the IAEA, brushed away as collateral casualties to the advance of a certain concept of "progress", it reinforces the feeling of a bunch of people who would saw your kids legs if it would allow them to line their own pockets, just like with the Iraq war (who cares about the Iraqi children? Not Cheney nor Rumsfeld it seems), the BP and countless other oil spills, the incredible pollution in Niger, in China, etc, etc. That's for the background.
None of the six reactors would go "full meltdown" - an event incidentally not even remotely as horrible as you seem to believe it to be. Furthermore, now that we have had visuals on the spent fuel pools we also know that there wasn't a risk of any of them drying out, catching fire or in any other way exploding in a nasty way.
Again what you don't seem to understand is that nobody gives a shit about what the situation ends up to be, same thing with TMI. What people want to know, need to know is very simple: a precise description of a realistic worst case. If there was an incident on your plane and you land safely you don't want the company to tell you "What are you worrying about, you're safely on the ground now aren't you? Move along." You need to know what happened and how close to dying you went.
I've tried several times now to get a clear picture of a reasonable worst-case scenario for Fukushima from several seemingly knowledgeable persons here and elsewhere, and haven't been able to get any answer yet. And in fact nobody seems to have the answer, so ev
it's a testament to how safe these things are that it's not just a smoking hole in the ground by now.
This is a pathetically preposterous argument put forward by so many nuclear luddites that but put to show the total lack of logical abilities of their befuddled brains. What your kind of joe-six-packs don't take into account obviously is that we brushed in the last few days inches away from a true nuclear disaster, the "big one", that you probably can't even fathom.
Just try to imagine for a few minutes: one additional major radiation leak forces all personnel off the site, for good. The reactors must be abandonned. We were very very close to this situation yesterday, and should thank either God or fucking sheer luck, depending on your beliefs, that it was not the case. What would have happened then? One to six reactors going full meltdown plus a number of thousand of tons of spend fuel rods (a.k.a. "nuclear waste") burning through the air and spewing in the atmosphere. With Chernobyl for comparison about 200 tons of radioactive material went up the air. This is how safe nuclear energy really is, not the feel-good fallacious kool-aid that you ludicrous nuclear islamists gulp to the last drop.
Right back at you; educate yourself on nuclear energy
Wow you're taking a risky bet here buddy, so I'll tell you what I'm gonna do: I'll invite you formally at a honest, open, sincere discussion on the subject "nuclear vs. renewable energies". I won't be the one killing the discussion with fallacious or ad hominem arguments, mark my word. So the possible outcome will be twofold, in my humble opinion needless to say. Either you will go through the discussion and I will shred your arguments to pieces, teach you a hard lesson in humility and bring you to reason. Or you will simply leave the discussion on some bogus or fallacious argument in order to preserve your dear belief.
If you want to include near misses, you have to do that for all other forms of comparable energy generation as well. How many near misses are there per year for oil power plants? Oil refineries? Coal mines? I'll bet there's just as many there.
Of course you need to if you want to assess the true risk associated with any process. Not doing so is totally ludicrous. This is akin to assessing the danger of land mines by the number of deaths, and since land mine mostly don't kill people but only maim them, concluding that they are safe. This is a preposterous way for nuclear islamists to hide the real problem, which is that nuclear energy can (and thus eventually will) lead to disastrous accidents, on a scale simply impossible with any other industrial process.
All within a radius of 20 km have been evacuated already
You obviously have not a clue of the disaster we brushed these last few days.
More people die every year from coal pollution than what's died in all nuclear power plant accidents combined since we started using it.
Your logic is preposterous. What you say only shows that
o Coal energy is handled in a sloppy way, as I said before;
o You don't know the true scale of the consequences of Chernobyl, and have bought the figures put forward by the IAEA, which it admitted later were lies.
o We haven't had the "big one" yet.
However rest assured that we eventually will thanks to the furious blindness of the countless luddites of your kind.
No, it's not, it's a fair and square argument
Yes it is a fallacity due to the "so far" condition. We know the true risk associated with oil for instance, we have had now thanks to BP almost all the possible disasters that can happen, and we know that if we keep on with oil as we do we'll have this or that many leaks and spills per year, with this or that amount spilled in the environment and these and that consequences on the biosphere. We now the "true" risk with oil, let's say with Deepwater Horizon we won the jackpot.
With nuclear we haven't won the jackpot yet, far from it. Put yourself the day after the real disaster at Fukushima, i.e., the true worst case scenario that we missed by an inch, by sheer luck: a major radiation leak forces everybody off the site, for good. The reactors must be abandoned. All cores go to full meltdown and the thousands of tons of spent fuel rods burn off. Now please try to estimate the consequences and reassess the true risk of nuclear, not a feel-good fallacy.
No you fucking moron, you're parroting things out of your ass that you don't understand. This design is the worst design ever, newer reactor designs locate the spent fuel pools inside of the containment chamber, but other countries don't store spent fuel on site but in dry casks off site (yeah, guess what, more expensive).
The real danger on this planet are not terrorists but nuclear islamists like yourself who believe their own bullshit, are too fucking dumb to educate themselves (it took me five seconds to locate the above articles on Google) but insist on force-shoving their crap down everybody's throat.
Nuclear power is the safest form of power generation we have.
Educate yourself on renewable energies you asshole, our kids and grand-kids might thank you once in the future for changing your mind.
Yeah because what we really need is a huge reprocessing industries with more trucks, trains and boats moving around more an more tons of radioactive waste from here to there all the time. We know nothing is ever spilled, boats don't sink, a truck cannot be stolen, bearded fanatics are not wet-dreaming of pulverizing radio-nucleides in your tap water, right. And anyone expressing concerns regarding those issues is a "luddite", right?
It's taken an 8.9 scale earthquake to start causing problems with these reactors
This argument is a fallacy, in 2002 the David-Besse reactor passed inches away of a loss of coolant accident with impossibility to insert the control rods from a single leak. Isn't this the very definition of a single point of failure? That's the very first example I looked at, there are near misses all the time, in the nuclear industry like in any other. However people seem to like avoiding to envision "what would have happened if..." and above all making the results public.
The local residents have been given many days warning of the problems. If anyone gets hurt it will be because they were not listening.
The residents have been told there's nothing to fear for a simple reason: in case of a major radiation leak there is nothing to do anyway, it's impossible to evacuate a whole country. So the guys can only do their best and hope for the best.
Did you not notice that more people were injured in the oil refinery inferno than the nuclear reactors so far?
That's a totally fallacious and ludicrous argument that is unfortunately parroted all the time. First this only points to how sloppily the oil and coal industries are (cf BP oil spill), not how safe nuclear is. But above all this is akin to driving at 100mph and saying "I haven't had any major accident yet, see how safe my driving is?" Except the guy is not a motorist, he's a school bus driver with one million kids in his bus.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand, now there are two levels on the seriousness scale for nuclear accidents: Chernobyl = the worst (obviously, since it was stinking commies who did it), Fukushima =much less serious, to the point of being almost laughable, since it's "only 10%" of Chernobyl (up to now, but let's not get picky here) and done by Japanese that you hardly can look at with a scorn from a technology point of view.
t here on /. the average intelligence is above that of the general population
Let's say this is what people here like to fancy. Now is it the truth? Not at all obvious to me.
You're thinking 1 GW peak and 392 MW average.
How does this fit with the announcement that radiation risks from Fukushima (from food contamination) are 'no longer negligible' in Europe then? Oh, maybe you're simply confusing internal and external exposures? Such a tiny difference in words, isn't it?
It's not too many for nuclear power to *still* be the safest power source available. [...] no matter what we do, people will die for energy
Sorry, whatever you try to spin it people are not going to die from concentrated solar power, and please give me a break about plumbers falling from the roofs while installing solar panels, that would be laughable if not sad.
I'd be willing to hear arguments about price but then please take into account all costs, including externalities, risks, insurance, waste, pollution, etc. I'd be genuinely interested in true figures about costs, without political spin.
at least they wouldn't be from scary nuclear power, right?
I'm not scared about nuclear energy, although reading that I should now be careful protecting my new-born from possible iodine contamination is scary - how am I going to know the levels in whatever food I have to buy, I don't have a Geiger counter handy? I'm definitely concerned about nuclear islamists though who, just like the real ones, are convinced they have seen the light, will not change their mind the slightest whatever facts or discussion they come over and are eager to shove their holy book down everybody's throats own way or another.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
As a said earlier: containment chambers indeed!
Maybe some kind of the very blind and stupid bias that they are so scornfully mocking in anyone not singing their song? I've come to consider them "nuclear islamists" - very similar condition of blind faith, unshakable conviction to know better and scorn and hatred for everybody who hasn't seen the light yet.
replace them with a more modern design that is more intrinsically safe.
But but but... I was told that nuclear reactors already were perfectly safe. So in fact they were not? But the next one will be, is that right? All this is so delightingly simple - getting paid with words.
You're playing compassionate but this is hypocritical, isn't it? You're really worrying about your asset, i.e., the reputation and future of nuclear energy. Let me know if I'm mistaken.
I think the international community can make an exception this time
I find your comment kind of funny, in a somewhat sad way, especially when comparing it to one of the very first comment that was made about the disaster:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE! An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
Containment chambers indeed.
Those figures don't take into account externalities, which is why they don't mean much on the long term; they are only meaningful for short-sighted investors looking for the quickest profit. Long-term energy decisions should be based on true costs, i.e., including externalities, risks, pollution, etc. I bet the order would be immensely different then; well in fact this seems completely obvious.
"x-rays, cosmic rays, plane flights"
You forgot "bananas".
Solar is prohibitively expensive for now on industrial scale.
Isn't this due to the fact that we invested so much money in oil and nuclear energy during the last four decades, and almost nothing in solar energy? Wouldn't the situation be reversed if we had done the right choice when the time was right? Or even simply if the cost of polluting the biosphere was included in the final price of the kWh?
It all seems to me to be a purely political issue, not a technological or even a financial one.
I think you're doing it wrong.
This is why all this talk about the amount of engineering it would take for terrorists to build an A-bomb is ridiculous. A suicide bomber could clamp together to pieces of U235 by hand and this would create enough of an explosion to fulfill all of their wildest dreams.
I've heard there's quite a bit of land to grab for cheap around Fukushima, Japan. I can only advise you to not miss that bargain. I also have a bridge for sell if you have any spare change.
Renewable energy appears expensive mainly because currently polluting the biosphere is free. Tragedy of the commons.
The fact that you believe them doesn't make them true.
I find this very sad. You've been told all your life that nuclear power is dangerous - life-threatening, planet-threatening dangerous - and you've swallowed this propaganda without question
This is where you are deluded. First yes, nuclear power is dangereous. Radio-nucleides produced during nuclear fission are radiotoxic, carcinogenic and teratogenic, this is a fact. You don't want to ingest them in any quantity. Now the quantity you or your kids may be brought to ingest due to unfortunate circumstances is the crux of the issue with nuclear power. Then please, try to quit your condescending stance and do not assume that I've been told anything. I try to think for myself, following some basic logic and fact-checking.
Open your eyes, please. You don't seem averse to do a bit of googling, so google for "energy production deaths" and read a few of the links.
Open your brain please. You seem to be able to follow the basic tenets of logic. As I told you above, when you board a plane, or a care, or do whatever in life there are three things that you consider, being a human being:
When you get in your car you know intuitively, from experience, the answers. Worst scenario: head-on collision. Probability: not negligible as soon as you drive a few dozen miles. Mitigating actions: buckle seatbelt, drive defensively. When you board a plane, you know that worst scenario = crash. Probability = fairly low. Mitigating actions = nothing (some Japanese are said to buy preferably seats in the tail of the aircraft but that sounds futile).
So you're insisting on point number 2, or more exactly some combination of 1 and 2, when what I'm concerned with is point number 1. This is akin to telling someone who's never seen a boat before: "don't worry, few people ever died boating". That's not the piece of information I'm looking for. What I need to know is that worst case scenario = boat sinks, mitigating action = have a buoy handy. In the case of Fukushima I was, together with a lot of people, in the following situation: worst case scenario = something like Chernobyl, perhaps worse (simple arithmetic, six American reactors plus seven spent fuel pools might reasonably end up worse than one crappy Russian one). More about that below.
far lower than any other form of power production - solar, wind and hydro included
Be cautious with this kind of highly questionable statistics though, they are partisan to the point of being ludicrous. First they are based on the bogus IAEA Chernobyl numbers that I mentioned before. Also the deaths from solar include supposed falls from the rooftops. Do you really think anybody is going to value equally the death of his child from radiation poisoning to the death of his plumber who fell from his roof? These kind of ridiculous comparison are not helping your cause. On the contrary they make the nuclear industry appear as willing to resort to the most preposterous and twisted rethoric, on top of blatant lies and dissimulation (see TEPCO resignations, IAEA reporting of Chernobyl), to push their agenda down the throat of the unwilling public. People are not that dumb and resent being considered so.
But above all there is a more fundamental problem of logic with these numbers, or possibly more of statistics, in that you don't estimate the likely outcome of a long-tailed statistical distribution from a few samples, else nobody would play lottery. For instance even if my last 50 bets brought me only 10$, I am not going to base my expectancy of gain on that, since I could perfectly get 1M$ next time. Same thing with this study. Saying that nuclear hasn't killed many people up to now, even if it happens to be true, does not preclude that it may in the future. Again it all depends on the worst-c
First off, you speculating on what might have happened - while enlightening as to the depths you're willing to go to invent boogymen - has little to do with reality
What you don't seem to understand is that I speculate with the information that I have access too. I'm not willing to invent boogy-men; I was at some point this past week genuinely worried for my two little kids, although I live on the very opposite part of the planet.
I'm too young to remember much about TMI, however I vividly remember Chernobyl. What I retain from this event is that: first the disaster was shamelessly denied by the Soviets, but we really didn't expect much more from them. The consensus in western Europe at the time was that the USSR was a tyrany with gulags and thought police, pretty much similar to what North Korea is now, and that the guys in power would have dropped babies in the nuclear furnace if it would have advanced their fucked-up ideology.
Secondly the French governement lied openly to the public by pretending that the radioactive cloud stopped at the German border. How nice of this pretty little cloud! So the conclusion, right or wrong, was that the nuclear industry in France, in bed with the governement and the military, was ok to let some kids absorb some amount of radionucleides and get a few additional thyroid cancers, provided it could be hidden and avoid turning the public against nuclear energy.
Then the IAEA issued an official report evaluating the consequences of the disaster to 4000 additional deaths by cancer. This figure was afterwards challenged by the WHO itself it seems(!) as being a "political communication tool". Greenpeace says 60,000 deaths, some russian biologistsays 985,000. Who to believe? Definitely not the IAEA who appears as a corrupt organization in bed with industry interests.
Finally a quick search on google brings back haunting images of a world where "the living envy the dead". Since those consequences were seemingly not even considered by the IAEA, brushed away as collateral casualties to the advance of a certain concept of "progress", it reinforces the feeling of a bunch of people who would saw your kids legs if it would allow them to line their own pockets, just like with the Iraq war (who cares about the Iraqi children? Not Cheney nor Rumsfeld it seems), the BP and countless other oil spills, the incredible pollution in Niger, in China, etc, etc. That's for the background.
None of the six reactors would go "full meltdown" - an event incidentally not even remotely as horrible as you seem to believe it to be. Furthermore, now that we have had visuals on the spent fuel pools we also know that there wasn't a risk of any of them drying out, catching fire or in any other way exploding in a nasty way.
Again what you don't seem to understand is that nobody gives a shit about what the situation ends up to be, same thing with TMI. What people want to know, need to know is very simple: a precise description of a realistic worst case. If there was an incident on your plane and you land safely you don't want the company to tell you "What are you worrying about, you're safely on the ground now aren't you? Move along." You need to know what happened and how close to dying you went.
I've tried several times now to get a clear picture of a reasonable worst-case scenario for Fukushima from several seemingly knowledgeable persons here and elsewhere, and haven't been able to get any answer yet. And in fact nobody seems to have the answer, so ev
it's a testament to how safe these things are that it's not just a smoking hole in the ground by now.
This is a pathetically preposterous argument put forward by so many nuclear luddites that but put to show the total lack of logical abilities of their befuddled brains. What your kind of joe-six-packs don't take into account obviously is that we brushed in the last few days inches away from a true nuclear disaster, the "big one", that you probably can't even fathom.
Just try to imagine for a few minutes: one additional major radiation leak forces all personnel off the site, for good. The reactors must be abandonned. We were very very close to this situation yesterday, and should thank either God or fucking sheer luck, depending on your beliefs, that it was not the case. What would have happened then? One to six reactors going full meltdown plus a number of thousand of tons of spend fuel rods (a.k.a. "nuclear waste") burning through the air and spewing in the atmosphere. With Chernobyl for comparison about 200 tons of radioactive material went up the air. This is how safe nuclear energy really is, not the feel-good fallacious kool-aid that you ludicrous nuclear islamists gulp to the last drop.
Right back at you; educate yourself on nuclear energy
Wow you're taking a risky bet here buddy, so I'll tell you what I'm gonna do: I'll invite you formally at a honest, open, sincere discussion on the subject "nuclear vs. renewable energies". I won't be the one killing the discussion with fallacious or ad hominem arguments, mark my word. So the possible outcome will be twofold, in my humble opinion needless to say. Either you will go through the discussion and I will shred your arguments to pieces, teach you a hard lesson in humility and bring you to reason. Or you will simply leave the discussion on some bogus or fallacious argument in order to preserve your dear belief.
If you want to include near misses, you have to do that for all other forms of comparable energy generation as well. How many near misses are there per year for oil power plants? Oil refineries? Coal mines? I'll bet there's just as many there.
Of course you need to if you want to assess the true risk associated with any process. Not doing so is totally ludicrous. This is akin to assessing the danger of land mines by the number of deaths, and since land mine mostly don't kill people but only maim them, concluding that they are safe. This is a preposterous way for nuclear islamists to hide the real problem, which is that nuclear energy can (and thus eventually will) lead to disastrous accidents, on a scale simply impossible with any other industrial process.
All within a radius of 20 km have been evacuated already
You obviously have not a clue of the disaster we brushed these last few days.
More people die every year from coal pollution than what's died in all nuclear power plant accidents combined since we started using it.
Your logic is preposterous. What you say only shows that
However rest assured that we eventually will thanks to the furious blindness of the countless luddites of your kind.
No, it's not, it's a fair and square argument
Yes it is a fallacity due to the "so far" condition. We know the true risk associated with oil for instance, we have had now thanks to BP almost all the possible disasters that can happen, and we know that if we keep on with oil as we do we'll have this or that many leaks and spills per year, with this or that amount spilled in the environment and these and that consequences on the biosphere. We now the "true" risk with oil, let's say with Deepwater Horizon we won the jackpot.
With nuclear we haven't won the jackpot yet, far from it. Put yourself the day after the real disaster at Fukushima, i.e., the true worst case scenario that we missed by an inch, by sheer luck: a major radiation leak forces everybody off the site, for good. The reactors must be abandoned. All cores go to full meltdown and the thousands of tons of spent fuel rods burn off. Now please try to estimate the consequences and reassess the true risk of nuclear, not a feel-good fallacy.
The real danger on this planet are not terrorists but nuclear islamists like yourself who believe their own bullshit, are too fucking dumb to educate themselves (it took me five seconds to locate the above articles on Google) but insist on force-shoving their crap down everybody's throat.
Nuclear power is the safest form of power generation we have.
Educate yourself on renewable energies you asshole, our kids and grand-kids might thank you once in the future for changing your mind.
Yeah because what we really need is a huge reprocessing industries with more trucks, trains and boats moving around more an more tons of radioactive waste from here to there all the time. We know nothing is ever spilled, boats don't sink, a truck cannot be stolen, bearded fanatics are not wet-dreaming of pulverizing radio-nucleides in your tap water, right. And anyone expressing concerns regarding those issues is a "luddite", right?
It's taken an 8.9 scale earthquake to start causing problems with these reactors
This argument is a fallacy, in 2002 the David-Besse reactor passed inches away of a loss of coolant accident with impossibility to insert the control rods from a single leak. Isn't this the very definition of a single point of failure? That's the very first example I looked at, there are near misses all the time, in the nuclear industry like in any other. However people seem to like avoiding to envision "what would have happened if..." and above all making the results public.
The local residents have been given many days warning of the problems. If anyone gets hurt it will be because they were not listening.
The residents have been told there's nothing to fear for a simple reason: in case of a major radiation leak there is nothing to do anyway, it's impossible to evacuate a whole country. So the guys can only do their best and hope for the best.
Did you not notice that more people were injured in the oil refinery inferno than the nuclear reactors so far?
That's a totally fallacious and ludicrous argument that is unfortunately parroted all the time. First this only points to how sloppily the oil and coal industries are (cf BP oil spill), not how safe nuclear is. But above all this is akin to driving at 100mph and saying "I haven't had any major accident yet, see how safe my driving is?" Except the guy is not a motorist, he's a school bus driver with one million kids in his bus.