Nuclear 'waste' is the SOLUTION and could run the world for 500 years!

Define "modern". All of them were built in the 70's. You're right that these plants are 'more modern' than some designs, but reactor 1 was over 40 years old, and all of them were over 30 years old. The fact there is no way to cool the reactor without power is a significant problem in the design IMO.

Research: Butterflies mutated after Japan’s nuclear leaks, though humans relatively safe - The Washington Post

It's not really clear yet that the radiation leakage was all that "benign" actually. Lot's of people have been displaced from whole cities around the plant.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...g-fallout.html

I tend to agree with you that it's a gross oversimplification to suggest that power plants "eat waste". They all create waste, even nuclear reactors.

The problem IMO is that we have already committed ourselves to hanging on to this radioactive material for all time. In fact we flew to the ex-Soviet union to pick up some of their radioactive material so it would not fall into the wrong hands. We're 'stuck' with the material. It's what we *do* with it that is the issue. IMO it's 'better' to use it and generate electrical energy than to store it as a "bomb" that is expressly designed to kill human beings. It's also "better" that we use this material to generate electrical energy, than simply try to store the material in locations that are all over the country. In some cases it took *enormous* amounts of energy to refine the material. It only makes sense to get some of that energy back from that material.

I hear you on that point. The issues tend to be oversimplified by all sides IMO. It is important to note that hydrocarbon based power plants also pollute and they also cause human cancers and human fatalities. We just don't seem to equate or worry about cancer from hydrocarbon burning the way we seem to fixate on the connection between radiation and human health. Admittedly however, when a hydrocarbon based power plant fails, it rarely results in the permanent evacuation of large areas around the plant.

IMO, most of the current designs of nuclear reactors are seriously flawed. They should be improved so that a total and complete loss of electrical power does not result in nuclear meltdown scenarios. That is an unacceptable scenario IMO. There really is no logical reason that it must be designed that way.

__________________
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."
"Only a life lived for others is a life worth while."
"When the solution is simple, God is answering."
Albert Einstein

Yes you're right it wasn't benign. I should have said relatively benign, for a meltdown there was not the kind of catastrophic leakage seen at a plant like Chernobyl. Japan, and the Japanese people, really over reacted to supposed radiation contamination in areas away from the plant. They destroyed the crops of an entire province because they contained elevated levels of radiation. Even though those levels were still a thousandth of a chest X-ray and you would have eat 8 tons of these irradiated cucumbers to be able to have any negative effect. A portion of the economic damage of the Fukishima meltdown was self-inflicted by Japan because of a knee-jerk reaction to harmless levels of radiation contamination. There was contamination in a localized area around the plant and unfortunately this includes some caesium leakage into the ocean which is not benign, but is it necessarily a disaster either.

And yes, the health effects of hydrocarbons burning is also important. I couldn't find statistics for this post but I believe have seen in past estimates that as many as 4000 cancers deaths in the United States a year a linked to the burning of fossil fuels, and I don't even know how many people are effected by heavy metal poisoning because of plants like that. Maybe if we had as many nuclear plants as we do coal plants we would have the same number of cancer death, maybe more, maybe less. But the point is, as you say, coal power is not free from serious health consequences. We just don't talk about those health consequences very much. Meltdowns are much more dramatic and more fun to talk about.

My biggest problem is that I trust neither the coal industry nor the nuclear industry in the United States to do anything other than a cursory job when it comes to preventing pollution or plant failure.

IMO that is why the government should have been willing to invest itself in helping the US become energy independent, and we should have been willing to help pay for, or at least finance, some of the equipment upgrades. You're right that it's a gamble either way, but IMO part of that is due to the relatively poor design of the 1970's version of a nuclear power plant, and the rather exorbitant costs of "scrubbing" contamination from hydrocarbon power plants, particularly coal based power plants. Both of these issues can be and should be addressed in any future "stimulus" packages.

__________________
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."
"Only a life lived for others is a life worth while."
"When the solution is simple, God is answering."
Albert Einstein

We should invest more in fusion power research imo. Much safer, much less radiation, and abundant fuel.

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Substance does not undergo process. Process is primary and what we call substance is merely a temporary pattern produced by that process.

My understanding is that fusion as an energy source is now largely viewed as infeasible in the near term in the scientific community.

The Panic Over Fukushima - WSJ.com

I thought this was a timely article in light of our recent discussions.

__________________
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."
"Only a life lived for others is a life worth while."
"When the solution is simple, God is answering."
Albert Einstein

Well, in case you hadn't noticed, we've been using it for hundreds of millenia. The reactor is a little too close to be safe, but the containment is top of the line and very economical. The Biggest problem with it is that it doesn't fit in to the capitalist system. We haven't yet figure out how to charge for the power.

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Michael, that's a fantastic article. Thank you! So Denver gets 3 times the radiation of the 'hot spots' in Fukishima. What a farce! What a paranoid, fear inducing, irrational and panic spreading government reaction. "0.1 rem's a year, oh no, we're all going to die!" And the average citizen of Denver gets 0.3 rems a year! Quick, evacuate Denver, won't someone think of the children!"

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Global Warming is now so serious I am convinced that we will have to use SPICE** to save civilisation. Our grandchildren may be forced to paint the skies white! Blue skies may not be permitted for many centuries to come! Clean energy has been too little too late. We have failed. Our grandchildren will curse us for ignorant fools.

** (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering)

I don't think it's a great idea to oversimplify the issue one direction or the other, but the article does touch on all the key issues.

Humans are typically and "naturally" exposed to some amount of background radiation day in, day out, year in, year out for their entire lives. That exposure can vary from about .62 rems per year, to about .92 rems in the US without any discernible pattern between the amount of natural radiation exposure and cancer rates for a given population. Even though Denver experiences more radiation than many US cities, it has a *lower* cancer rate than most cities, not a higher rate. The human body is naturally exposed to some radiation and it has "natural" ways to deal with it in most cases.

Right after the explosions, the original radiation rates around some of the cities in Japan quite likely warranted a "temporary" evacuation of many areas around the plant. It's less clear however, and unlikely in fact, that this event warranted a "long term" evacuation. The human "fear factor" tends to play an enormous (melodramatic) role in such events, and unfortunately the lack of knowledge about typical background radiation levels tends to create panic among the population.

The article does touch upon some of the complexities about cancer rates as well. Even though this event may (and probably will) cause a few additional cancer deaths in the human population, everyone around the plant who might contract cancer would be likely to believe it was the event in question that "caused" their cancer, even though this particular event may have had nothing (or little) to do with that particular cancer. The problem is that there is no sure way to know which health problems might be related to "other" factors in their life, vs. the one event in question. Since cancers occur in all populations for many reasons, it's difficult to know for sure which factor was involved, particularly when the background rates are low, and we are not discussing thyroid cancers.

The bottom line however is that the area in question now experiences only about 1/3rd of the "typical variation" experienced in the US, and we have not been able to show any correlation between cancer rates in Denver, vs cancer rates anywhere else. That would suggest that the radiation rate in question isn't likely to be worth abandoning the land around he plant permanently, or even all that "long term".

If however you're a parent of young children, you can't help but ask yourself: "Is it really worth the health risks to my family to return to that area?"

Most people do not understand the statistics properly, nor do they typically realize that they are exposed to radiation every day of their lives in far greater numbers than they realize. The event in question was unfortunate, expensive and certainly dangerous, but thus far the tsunami itself was the only thing that has caused any "deaths". So far it's just pure speculation that anyone has been significantly harmed by the radiation released from the plants.

__________________
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self."
"Only a life lived for others is a life worth while."
"When the solution is simple, God is answering."
Albert Einstein

Perhaps that is one of the reasons our jobs go over to China. They do not have the requirements there for clean air compared to what industry has to deal with here. Their standards are just not as high as ours.