Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[Tulse]

benf wrote: Is a body count the sole criterion?

It’s an objective criterion, and the one people most often cite.

The thing about a DPF, as I understand it is that if something goes wrong it just turns off. No meltdown potential. Kind of like the way a lightbulb goes out. There would be no release of radioactive materials that takes years, decades or centuries to abate. Why not try our damnedest to get it to work?

Absolutely! I wasn’t intending to imply at all that FF wasn’t the best option, or that we shouldn’t be pursuing it as vigorously as possible.

My only point was that people tend to focus on the possibilities of fission plant accidents, and fail to account for the accepted negative impacts of other forms of power generation. Regarding coal specificially, more than 100,000 US coal miners have been killed in accidents over the past century, and in modern times roughly 30 die [em]every year[/em]. That’s just deaths from mining, and not the more difficult to quantify impacts of emissions from coal plants (which includes natural radioactivity and other substances such as mercury). When arguing against fission power, I think it is important to compare apples to apples, and overall deaths involved in producing power seems like a reasonable criterion.