Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

Except nuclear power is not the safest form of energy. Not by a long shot.

What's the worst that could happen if an earthquake or a terrorist strike devastated a solar array or a wind farm?

Apart from cutting off the power supply, nothing much.

Compare that to a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Or the nuclear proliferation risk caused by the theft of fissile material. Not to mention the hazards posed by nuclear waste.

As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer operational) for the 12 reactors in countries that start with "A", yielding some 322 reactor-years of operation. If 12 of the 500-ish civilian, non-experimental reactors, including decommissioned, in the world have a combined 322 reactor-years of criticality, let's guesstimate that there's been something on the order of 12000 reactor-years of criticality globally, across all non-experimental, non-military reactors.

In that time, there have been 27 civilian nuclear "accidents" (defined as damage to persons or property directly attributable to something Going Wrong at a reactor), and 8 -- count them, eight -- "incidents" (defined as something Going Wrong at a reactor, but not causing damage to persons or property outside the plant, itself). (Again, this data is from Wikipedia, so its accuracy is open to debate.)

Given the choice between one "accident" every 500-odd reactor-years (again, take that number with a cup of salt), and continually pumping ten gigatons of just CO2 into the atmosphere every year -- and that just from coal-burning power plants -- I know which I'd prefer.

That said, I agree with you on one point: we damn well should be investing massively more than we are into "green" energy technology. Much of that is unproven, and often has its own set of ecological consequences. Even leaving that aside, the best estimates say it will be decades, at least, before any of it can even start to supplant current energy sources.

What, exactly, should we do in the interim?

(EDIT: math is hard past 0300.)

Coal ash produced by coal power plants actually release more radioactive waste than the equivalent power generated via nuclear. Not only that, nuclear waste is highly controlled and the general population has no contact with it save extremely rare catastrophes - compare with pumping this ash into the atmosphere. Not to mention that inhaling radioactive material is orders of magnitude more dangerous than physical contact.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...

Nuclear energy isn't perfect - but it's a hell of a lot better than anything else we've got.

Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable.

More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting large human structures, and they both happened within a few minutes of each other in New York.

To your other point, OF COURSE ENGINEERS THOUGHT ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. They're freaking NUCLEAR PLANTS. They don't build these things on fucking fault lines and then say "oops". They aren't franchise McDonald's that take 3 weeks to build and then ask if you want fries with your uranium.

Any plant takes years, if not a decade in some cases, of zoning and study before they move a bull dozer onto a site. This earthquake SHIFTED THE ENTIRE PLANET. Its quite within the realm of being ok that a 40+ year old nuclear plant isn't handling being shaken by that kind of force very well.