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Re: Do you believe that nuclear power is safe?
Author: mook
Date: 08-22-2014 - 09:52
Hundreds of thousands have died from nuclear BOMBS, especially the first (and so far only) 2 used as intended, not power plants. Probably, more will in the future, but not from the power plants.
Tens, perhaps hundreds but less than thousands, counting long-term effects and crews of sunken nuclear submarines that were not lost due to a reactor incident, have died from accidents involving nuclear reactors of all types, not just power, in some way.
Radiation exposure due to burning of coal (not to mention the other forms of pollution from it) causes more medical problems that all the nuclear power reactor accidents so far.
Nothing involving concentrated energy is truly "safe" in the vicinity of ordinary animals (like humans). Including cars, trains, bottles of alcohol, cell phones, and bullets. You take all reasonable precautions, and usually it works. In principle, I don't think nuclear power as presently used is "safe" enough for the long term due to the inherent instability of the fission process used - everything has to work right all the time, and several events have already occurred that were triggered by things nobody ever expected. Murphy's Law will eventually be enforced on a significant subset of the plants. But it usually works, so my motto is "Don't Panic" (yes I stole that) and support efforts to develop alternatives.
Just like with oil trains. They've been around, at low levels of activity, for hundreds of years. As long as there were only a few of them, nobody cared, even though the potential for a local disaster was always there. Lac Megantic woke people up to what could happen, so now it'w "No Oil Trains!" - but that doesn't work because we need the oil. The correct response is to improve the safety of the trains themselves (improving standards for the cars, etc.), improve compliance with safety rules by all concerned (including the oil producers, who have to properly treat the oil before shipping and label it correctly), and improve response capabilities to deal with the inevitable incidents (most of which will NOT be disasters).
IMO if we don't have some form of nuclear power (like fusion or some kind of more fail-safe fission - in development or exists, but too expensive to use commercially right now) it will get really nasty over the next 100 years as the population peak is reached and global warming effects become really noticeable. "Renewable" energy is great idea, and necessary, but there just can't be enough of it (storage included) to power a planet with 20-30 billion people on it. Nobody wants to talk about it, but at present growth rates that kind of population seems inevitable before the whole mess crashes. Without nuclear power, it'll crash faster and harder due to increasing fossil fuel use then exhaustion, enhanced by runaway warming. With nuclear power (broadly defined, not just conventional BWR/PWR fission), there's a chance of recovering with some kind of society better than the stone age (or thermophilic bacteria).
Tens, perhaps hundreds but less than thousands, counting long-term effects and crews of sunken nuclear submarines that were not lost due to a reactor incident, have died from accidents involving nuclear reactors of all types, not just power, in some way.
Radiation exposure due to burning of coal (not to mention the other forms of pollution from it) causes more medical problems that all the nuclear power reactor accidents so far.
Nothing involving concentrated energy is truly "safe" in the vicinity of ordinary animals (like humans). Including cars, trains, bottles of alcohol, cell phones, and bullets. You take all reasonable precautions, and usually it works. In principle, I don't think nuclear power as presently used is "safe" enough for the long term due to the inherent instability of the fission process used - everything has to work right all the time, and several events have already occurred that were triggered by things nobody ever expected. Murphy's Law will eventually be enforced on a significant subset of the plants. But it usually works, so my motto is "Don't Panic" (yes I stole that) and support efforts to develop alternatives.
Just like with oil trains. They've been around, at low levels of activity, for hundreds of years. As long as there were only a few of them, nobody cared, even though the potential for a local disaster was always there. Lac Megantic woke people up to what could happen, so now it'w "No Oil Trains!" - but that doesn't work because we need the oil. The correct response is to improve the safety of the trains themselves (improving standards for the cars, etc.), improve compliance with safety rules by all concerned (including the oil producers, who have to properly treat the oil before shipping and label it correctly), and improve response capabilities to deal with the inevitable incidents (most of which will NOT be disasters).
IMO if we don't have some form of nuclear power (like fusion or some kind of more fail-safe fission - in development or exists, but too expensive to use commercially right now) it will get really nasty over the next 100 years as the population peak is reached and global warming effects become really noticeable. "Renewable" energy is great idea, and necessary, but there just can't be enough of it (storage included) to power a planet with 20-30 billion people on it. Nobody wants to talk about it, but at present growth rates that kind of population seems inevitable before the whole mess crashes. Without nuclear power, it'll crash faster and harder due to increasing fossil fuel use then exhaustion, enhanced by runaway warming. With nuclear power (broadly defined, not just conventional BWR/PWR fission), there's a chance of recovering with some kind of society better than the stone age (or thermophilic bacteria).
