Reply To: Earthquake v. Powerplants

[Rezwan]

rashidas wrote: Death Knell for the Nuclear Power Industry:

The recent disaster in Japan will be very bad for the nuclear power industry around the world. Just as Chernobyl did 25 years ago, this disaster will brand fission power as dangerous and unreliable in the public mind…

This is mostly because people calculate risk as a function of actual risk multiplied by outrage.

Perceived Risk = (Actual Risk)*(outrage)

Take being killed by toxins while working in energy when the energy is coal, vs. nuclear. The death toll is much higher, and quite horrible with coal, but we’re used to it. Nuclear energy, is nuclear! And even one extra cancer is unacceptable.

It seems they still have a chance to contain this. Some amazingly brave people are working on it. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42101198/ns/world_news-asia-pacific/ As long as they can contain this it’s not that bad. Impressive even, considering it was an 8.9 quake and a tsunami.

Ah, some numbers. Compare: Even without unprecedented global geo-catastrophes to trigger them, coal mines routinely kill and poison a lot of people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining#Safety Over 6000 miners in one year in China. 10,000 new cases of black lung every year in China, 4000 in the US. Over 100,000 people have died in America from coal mining since that industry started (average of 1000 a year. Much less recently). I don’t think the history of nuclear energy has anywhere near that many deaths or cancers behind it. Re Chernobyl:

# Two Chernobyl plant workers died on the night of the accident, and a further 28 people died within a few weeks as a result of acute radiation poisoning.
# UNSCEAR says that apart from increased thyroid cancers, “there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident.”

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html

Nuclear energy is a pretty useful thing. Nuclear weapons, in contrast…We spend hundreds of billions nursing those weapons so that one day we can rain down destruction. The outrage against nuclear energy might really be misplaced frustration about weapons.