You’re kidding, right?

And yep, dismiss Chernobyl because it doesn’t fit your narrative.

Now I’ve found no data for deaths during nuclear plant construction. The web wasn’t around back then. Perhaps there have been none, but that would be unexpected. Construction work is riskier than doing data entry.

Solar deaths? How many have been during “professional” installations and how many from homeowners falling off their own roof? Current job regulations make it difficult to fall off a roof unless you are working outside the regs. Get up on a roof these days without a harness and/or guard rails and your insurance company will pull your policy.

Fact: No solar array has melted down and killed anyone. No solar array has melted down and created an exclusion zone where humans can’t enter without special protective gear. No solar array requires squads of armed guards to keep terrorists at bay.

Fact: Fukushima could have taken out Tokyo had things played out a bit differently.

How about where safety backup systems get shut off and no one notices for more than a year?

How about places where there are frequent tornadoes which can easily tear down the grid and where the backup generation is kept in a non-hardened building?

Or places where an engineer crawling around the reactor innards might set them on fire with a candle?

Or where leaking pipes can eat almost all the way through the containment dome, only to be discovered by accident?

Or where someone screws up the engineering and installs faulty equipment which results in excessive wear in the tubing that carries radioactive water through the virtually brand new equipment?

Here’s the problem I have with nuclear. Reactors are designed, built and operated by humans. And some of us humans are “Homers”. Almost all of us have a Homer-moment from time to time.

These systems are very complex. The nuclear industry has a long history of
near misses, followed by promises to not let that problem occur again. But
there’s no solution for the unknown unknowns that keep popping up from time
to time.

What if those explosives found on the grounds of the Swedish reactor had
made their way inside the facility and been triggered? Don’t think we’ve
engineered against terrorists blowing stuff up….

Secondly, please don’t antagonize someone so aggressively, and don’t claim that nuclear is definitely so safe when actually we don’t know what consequences Fukushima, for example, will eventually bring. You simply can’t know, and the scientific community is nowhere near unanimous in support of your position. I definitely think we should use nuclear in the U.S. (and Germany) where there probably won’t be earthquakes and I agree it’s much better than fossil fuels, but Japan is clearly not a safe place for nuclear technology, and much of the scientific community feels that things could have been much worse than they were at Fukushima. As the articles linked in this wikipedia page suggest, there are actually lots of potential deaths Fukushima likely caused, and we’ll probably find more problems over time. I’ve also heard there is evidence that there were spikes in various deaths in many affected areas after Fukushima, even as far in the U.S. I wouldn’t be so sure of things, and in the meantime, solar is a great substitute, as the Germans are finding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#Casualties

FACT: Nuclear energy has killed much less people than solar energy.

FACT 2: Nobody has died from radiation at Fukushima, in spite of the power plant being hit directly by 7 tsunami waves and an earthquake.

And coal is not the only option to nuclear power. Isn’t it time for you glow in the dark boys to drop that silly argument? People have largely caught on to that distortion.

Nuclear power is easily the safest form of energy and has the lowest death rate.  I have the facts on my side, you have the paranoia on yours. Did you not bother to read the article I linked to?

The public does not have an irrational fear of nuclear.  The public can look at the wasted land and lives caused by Chernobyl and Fukushima.  And they can look at the ‘near misses’ of Three Mile Island, Davis-Bessie and others.  

To be concerned about something that can blow up in your face is not irrational.  It’s sane.

Fusion – when you can hook a hydrogen bomb up to the grid and generate electricity get back to us.

I expect we’ll figure out fusion.  But we haven’t yet, so fusion is not an option to be considered.  We’ve got to solve the problem of clean, safe energy with the tools at hand.

The nearby Cosmo oil refinery exploded, killing 6 people and spewed toxic gases into the atmosphere and the media didnt care. It did not even make it to the news. And what about the other deaths from the tsunami? Does anyone know how many people died from the actual tsunami .. that number is not even reported .. nobody cares about making other things safe from tsunamis.

I suggest you take a careful look at this:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2Fadvancednano+%28nextbigfuture%29

Coal murders 100 people for every Twh generated compare that with .04 for nuclear. Note, we are talking rate, not number .. if we got into number you’ll just end up feeling humiliated.

As you can see by that URL (which you and I both know you wont bother to click on, let alone understand) nuclear by far is the safest form of energy .. safer than solar and safer than wind.

The public has an irrational fear of nuclear power. If Fukushima was a 4 GW coal power plant .. we would have seen 100s of deaths there and it would not have even been reported.

“As of March 2012, there had been no reported cases of Fukushima
residents suffering ailments related to radiation exposure. Experts
cautioned that insufficient data was available so far to make
conclusions on the impact on residents’ health. Nevertheless, Michiaki
Kai, professor of radiation protection at Oita University of Nursing and Health Sciences, stated, “If the current radiation dose estimates are correct, (cancer-related deaths) likely won’t increase.”

I don’t think you know that hundreds (some years thousands) of people die every year mining coal. And that’s ignoring the people who get ill due to the pollutant by-products of burning coal. Did you know that a coal power plant releases more radiation that a nuclear power plant? Google it. The media doesn’t report anyone getting sick from coal pollutants, dying mining coal or in an explosion at the facility, but if a person sneezes at a nuclear power plant if becomes headline news.

As for your comment about fusion .. fusion will be made to work. If fusion energy was not possible, how does the hydrogen bomb work? How long did it take from when they discovered the principles of aerodynamics till when the first airplane flew. Must have been funny to the people like you who were laughing at all the people trying to make airplanes work. Fusion energy will be a reality someday in spite of nay-sayers like you. Do you realize that people didn’t even know what the heck fusion itself was 80 years ag?

The Japanese people now realize how dangerous nuclear reactors are and they want to get that danger out of their lives.  Yes, that does mean that they’re using some more fossil fuels while they get their renewables installed.  But, like the Germans, they are dealing with what they view as the most immediate danger first.

The Japanese people now realize that they were lied to by the nuclear industry and by complicit government officials who were supposed to be protecting them.  The people who designed and approved the Fukushima reactors knew that the reactors were not adequately protected against a large tsunami and that at least one large tsunami had occurred in the area previously.

That must leave them wondering about how many other corners were cut to make reactors more profitable.

I can fully understand their desire to avoid another $250+ billion disaster.

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“Fusion”?  They should be ramping up fusion?  How about combined cycle gas plants run on unicorn farts?