It's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power

  "The original design-basis tsunami for Fukushima Daiichi of 3.1 
  meters was chosen because a 1960 earthquake off the coast of 
  Chile created a tsunami of that height on the Fukushima coast."

  "one compilation of historical tsunamis in and around Japan lists 
  twelve events since 1498 having a maximum amplitude of more than 
  10 meters, six of which had a maximum amplitude of over 20 meters."

  "Fukushima Daiichi’s design basis tsunami was estimated to have 
  a maximum height of 3.1 meters above mean sea level. Given this, 
  TEPCO decided to locate the seawater intake buildings at 4 meters 
  above sea level and the main plant buildings at the top of a 
  slope 10 meters about sea level"

  "In 2002, on the basis of a new methodology for assessing tsunami 
  safety developed by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, TEPCO 
  voluntarily reevaluated the tsunami hazard and adopted a 
  revised design-basis tsunami height of 5.7 meters. Yet, NISA 
  neither updated the licensing documents to reflect this change 
  nor reviewed TEPCO’s analysis. Given that the revised 
  design-basis tsunami was now 1.4 meters above the seawater pumps, 
  such a review should have been conducted."

This is the same thing. Yes, it is possible to do it right and be perfectly safe. It is also possible for someone to not do it right. And if someone does so, the repercussions are severe.

Having worked in the energy industry, the goal is to minimize risk. Saying it is OK for nuclear to have some inherent risk because so does everyone else is true, but over-simplified. The consequence of a nuclear accident is much greater than the consequence of a wind power accident, so the reduction of risk in nuclear power needs to also be greatly reduced vs. other forms of power generation.

I would not describe myself as anti-nuclear, but I do not believe we need it. I believe solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc, can provide the power we need in this world. Why take on greater consequences to the risks of power generation unless it truly is needed?

While they were clearly biased, I felt they did a good job addressing the issues directly. I too am biased (I tend to not trust anything that requires maintenance on a time scale so much larger than we can comprehend) and my walk-away conclusions were:

* There are a LOT of safety precautions, backups, and more backups - But I still don't trust those will survive human perversity [Edit: And that makes this point hard to settle - if I just don't trust any precautions would be enough, there's no effective way to add precautions that would change my opinion. ]

* Nuclear Power, with all the risks and detriments, has a very strong argument that the fossil-fuel alternatives we're using now are MORE damaging.

That last point was a huge deal to me. Instead of it being "Nuclear Power: Safe/Unsafe", it became "Nuclear Power vs Fossil Fuels (largely coal): Which is the bigger danger today".

I went from anti-nuclear power to "oh gee, I don't know, that's hard", which I generally take as a sign that I've become somewhat enlightened on a topic.

A few days after it all went bad, there was basically nothing we could do to stop it, which is terrifying. No humans could go in there, and there were no robots capable of doing the job.

So we as humans have the ability to build a machine of enormous power and (possibly) radiation, but when things inevitably go bad from time to time, our only course of action is to stand back and say "well, damn".

The big problem in my mind is not that nuclear power can't be safe but that I don't see anything to give me confidence that it can regulated to ensure that it actually is in practice.

He told me that overwhelmingly what went wrong at Chernobyl is that the head of the plant consistently ignored all of the alarms and monitoring in place, because he was overconfident at what the results of his test would be. He apparently died in the control room.

Interestingly, one thing the Russians did notably different was to have a big guy, I want to think at the sister site his name was Sergei, basically live in a hut next to the cooling lake, which was uphill from the plant. In the event of a disaster, he had a humongous mallet he would use to slam open the valve, draining the lake.

... or maybe this was all made up, I couldn't tell you tbh, but it sounded legit to me. ;)

We also need to stop storing used fuel rods at reactor sites. Yucca Mountain may not be perfect, but it's so isolated that even if something goes badly wrong, there's nobody around to be affected. The area was previously used for outdoor nuclear weapons testing, after all.

Even if everybody evacuates after a disaster and it doesn't kill many people, you don't get your city back.

I think the biggest myth in the article is the one where they assume that it will have to be either fission or coal burning, pick one.

It also didn't mention link between spent nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons. Seems to me that's a good reason to avoid it. (Yes, it might be possible to separate these two, but it seems to me it's still a few years down the road.)

There's a pretty good summary of the negative effects here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEYbgyL5n1g

I'm so sad that we're still having this debate 25 years later and nothing has changed.

and then, perhaps a bigger issue, waste management. just look at Germany [1], supposedly a role model country. please note that the New Scientist text is mostly about light waste, "just" 1000 years storage time. there's a committee trying to plan storage of highly radioactive waste - for 1 million years! we are a species of idiots. none of the plants generating that waste is going to give us a million years of power.

as others have mentioned, Fukushima could have been prevented. and Japan has also had accidents and cover-ups before [2]. all in all, it seems too risky.

and finally, what happened to Thorium plants? aren't they much much safer? or the breeder reactors, how are those coming along?

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075615-radioactive-was... [2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20263-japans-record-o...

The green movement has yet to take responsibility for the disastrous effect our rabid anti-nuclear narrative has had on the health of this planet. For a movement that prides itself on conscientious reflection and progressive evidence based policy our track record on this matter is truly dismal.

Green Party policy on nuclear power is a massive failure.

I do agree that we need way more of that, but what's the required size of a solar power plant that's feeding an aluminum plant?

Get a few (modern) nuclear reactors for baseline load, fill the rest with renewables. And shutdown the damned coal plants, those things spew radiation.

Part of the problem is that in general, and particularly with expensive / unattractive projects such as nuclear power plants, those who benefit the most (power company execs, building contractors) assume the least amount of risk - e.g. nearby residents and taxpayers. Same for jails and landfills - same game with a different name.

As other commenters have suggested, those who believe in nuclear should consider making a bold gesture. A petition drive might be interesting, but expect a lot of doors slammed into one's face. But to me it still sounds too conventional. Crowdfunding, anyone?

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiation-What-You-Need-Know-ebook/d...

But in the real world, human error always causes problems. The problem with nuclear power is that the results of these problems are enormous and long lived. That's why I am against nuclear power.

We have much, much safer alternatives in wind, solar, geothermal and hydro electric. (Yes dam disasters have killed many, many people, I am not in favor of building any more dams where that kind of risk is a possibility.) In my mind there's no need for the risk that comes with nuclear power, we can build out our power infrastructure with safer, renewable sources of energy.

Edit: and a broken dam in a (at the time) third world country that kills >80% of 170.000 people later through famine and epidemics is nothing that translates to the first world. I agree that hydro-electric power has some big down-sides (like mentioned terrorist attacks) but still you should give things in context. Fukushima happening in Angola would have been a different story than in Japan.

> The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-22/nuclear-reactor-closin...

Nuclear power is not economical. It actually works really well on the small scale, but not for city power generation.

Nuclear power is simply the worlds most expensive way to boil water. There are cheaper ways to boil water! http://www.nea.is/geothermal/electricity-generation/

"In the wake of Fukushima, Germany acquiesced to demands from lobby groups to shut down its nuclear sector, building heavily polluting fossil-fuel plants in their stead."

This is probably the worst part in this article, because coal is also decreasing in Germany. Not as fast as nuclear but nuclear was always the smaller than coal.

My main issue is, that again, someone believes that nuclear power is a way of solving the climate change crisis. It isn't for that nuclear power never had a big enough market share to begin with. Even the current plants which are being build won't change that.

Also nuclear power is extremely expensive. The ones currently being build in Finland and France are 3x over budget and are lagging behind years. Those two plants will supply 1600 Watts for the grid.

You can get that from renewable energies in less than a year.

And yesterday I read that Chinese researchers developed a solar panel which can even use also rain.

Why do people want a an energy source, which comes with so many unsolved issues and only promises to solve them later. In the last 50 years none of the issues could be solved. None! (I'm not talking about safety!)

High fissile vs low fissile equates to different principals? What a load of FUD in an article claims to show some insight on the matter.

Specifically, the analysis of the negative effects of each respective meltdown, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I personally believe there's reason to distrust any study on Chernobyl because of the blatant cover-up mentioned and the interference of the Soviet government, so it doesn't really work well as a citation to convince skeptics of the safety of nuclear energy. Likewise, I don't know that we've seen the full effects of Fukushima yet.

Here is one article that shows some of the milder social effects on residents: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/life-in...

"Some of the smallest children in Koriyama, a short drive from the ruined Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, barely know what it’s like to play outside — fear of radiation has kept them indoors for much of their short lives."

I lived at one point in time relatively near the Fukushima plant (100 km away) at about 2 months after the disaster and I did follow pretty closely at that time the pattern of fallout, but since returning to the USA it is not something I have followed as closely as I should.

For me, the hardest part is seeing the impact on people I met and their friends and families. But I also saw many people doing well even in the hardship.

I did live somewhere (a university campus) with continual radiation level monitoring, with levels somewhere below 0.12 uSv/hour or maybe twice the background radiation of Rome, and I also took Iodine pills in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. For that reason, maybe somewhat selfishly, and because of all of the obvious reasons, I do believe that nuclear energy is essential.

Side note: Fukushima Prefecture has the University of Aizu, which is the only public, graduate-level university in Japan dedicated to computer science and engineering.

I much prefer being self-sufficient with solar panels on my roof and some far away plant as backup. Once nuclear power is safe, I'll happily put a small reactor in my basement as backup too.

1. Natural gas

2. Hydro

3. Coal

4. Nuclear

5. Solar

6. Wind

The book to read in this context is Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents.

http://www.ohio.edu/people/piccard/entropy/perrow.html

Humans have had roughly 50 years' commercial generating experience with nuclear power. It took 25 years from first criticality to come up with passibly useful and safe reactors. Of the fewer than 500 commercial reactors which have been built, three have experienced significant core failures, and, despite design deficiencies in each, the core failings in all of these cases, as well as numerous other non-reactor or non-core failures, have been organisational.

Bad management. Bad design. Bad emergency response. A continuous underappreciation of the seriousness of what's at hand when you decide to start splitting atoms.

Fukushima was infiltrated by the Japanese mob. Future Gen IV and Gen V reactor designs, other than not being currently proven, raise risks of proliferation and novel chemistry experiments (600C highly radioactive florine salts -- what could possibly go wrong?) with a long-tail horizon of tens of thousands to millions of years.

We don't have any human institutions that are of comparable longevity. Our companies, governmentals structures, even major religions and languages are nowhere near that old. This is a mucking with things at scales we're nowhere near capable of handling. Hell, the smartest minds in Silicon Valley can't deliver cat gifs without stuffing browser exploits into the accompanying ads networks.

Human and organisational problems don't have technical solutions. The scale at which nuclear energy would need to be extended to replace existing fossil fueled systems is on the order of 15,000 reactors, worldwide. At present levels of energy consumption. Uranium itself won't deliver the energy we need (proven resources are good for about 8 decades at present levels of nuclear energy, six years if all present energy were nuclear sourced). At present rates of one core failure per roughly 100 reactor years, we'd see a meltdown per century. How much safer are future designs, organisations, and people going to be? 10x? 100x? 1000x? Is creating a new radioactive wasteland only once a century, until forever, acceptable?

Solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass have issues. Leaving glowing holes in the ground, or nondiscretionary slightly mutagenic wildlife preserves, isn't one of them.

The bigger lesson is that humans need to embrace limits. There are far too many of us, consuming far too much, and ignoring for far too long the warnings that we're exceeding any rational sustainable bounds.

Nuclear energy isn't going to address any of those issues. Facing reality might.

All fine until it blows - but when it blows, the catastrophe is really big.

If a windmill fails catastrophically, the area around it does not become uninhabitable for at least decades.

Nuclear is a fossil fuel too (uranium has to be extracted and is limited), costs a tremendous amount of money in power-plant building and dismantling costs, and concentrate the production of energy in a few remote places (which makes transport costs higher).

Meanwhile, the number of places running on 100% renewable energies is surprisingly high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy#Places...). Why would we need nuclear again?