I'd much rather deal with fossil fuels than the catastrophic risks uniquely posed by nuclear power generation.
The excuse for incidents like Fukushima are "Well, they made these mistakes...". Personally, I'd rather not risk zero-notice forced evacuations, permanent quarantine zones, and making significant portions of populated land uninhabitable for centuries on some people not making mistakes.
For those who write this off, there are some very tragic photo essays from Pripyat and Fukushima that can make this impact feel very real. Do you want to risk that happening to your area?
That comparison is based on properly functioning nuclear power plants and coal. I daresay when you throw in the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, the balance shifts dramatically in the opposite direction. Also, the radiation from nuclear disasters is highly concentrated, while that from coal is distributed at far lower concentrations.
No, even including Chernobyl (an inherently dangerous design that would have been illegal to build anywhere except the Soviet Union) nuclear has been far, far safer than coal. As mikeash pointed out in another comment, "Put another way: coal kills about as many people each year as nuclear has in its entire history if you include the bombs dropped on Japan."
>...Also, the radiation from nuclear disasters is highly concentrated, while that from coal is distributed at far lower concentrations.
The radiation emissions from a properly working coal plant are high enough that the plant would be shut down if the NRC regulated coal plants. But the real danger from coal plants is the massive amounts of CO2 that they emit which is one of the biggest contributors to climate change that might end up destroying our future. It is pretty obvious which power source is more dangerous.
Although it's oil not coal, the deepwater horizon accident was probably worse than Fukushima from both an environmental standpoint and number of lives lost. The most tragic failure of a power generating facility of all time was probably the Banqiao Dam disaster, not Chernobyl.
Certainly true from a direct-deaths standpoint. There were zero killed by the Fukushima explosions, and zero acute deaths due to the radiation release. (It's a lot harder to settle on long-term chronic radiation sickness effects.) 11 were killed at Deepwater Horizon.
Not sure how you could quantify the respective environmental damage, either financially or ecologically.
But there is another effect to consider: total monetary damage. Deepwater Horizon cost BP $62 billion pre-tax[0]. The total cost of Fukushima including victim compensation is currently estimated at about $180 billion[1], but the estimate has skyrocketed over the past 6 years, so one could suspect further escalation.
>And it isn't like coal is immune from having zero-notice forced evacuation, and making land uninhabitable.
From your link:
>the spill caused a mudflow wave of water and ash that covered 12 homes, pushing one entirely off its foundation, rendering three uninhabitable, and caused some damage to 42 residential properties. [...] Though 22 residences were evacuated, nobody was reported to be injured or in need of hospitalization. [...] [T]he spill [...] covered an area of 300 acres (1.2 km2).
42 homes were damaged, 4 to the point of destruction, and 22 homes were evacuated. There was zero human injury from this incident.
Although Wikipedia tries very hard to make it sound like the spill was massive, if you look at the real area affected, 300 acres is less than half of a single square mile, and that area can be cleaned up (if it hasn't been already). People can walk on the ground affected without having to watch a geiger counter, and no exclusion zone is required.
For reference, Fukushima's exclusion zone is about 12 sq miles and Chernobyl's exclusion zone is 1,000 square miles. (both numbers from the relevant Wikipedia entries)
Are you really trying to compare this minor accident to large-scale international incidents that have made caused the permanent evacuation of entire cities? Humans will not safely be able to live in those areas for decades.
The point is not that industrial accidents never happen or that they're pleasant or inconsequential when they do happen. The point is that the cost associated with nuclear accidents is massively higher, and it's entirely reasonable to find that risk unacceptable v. more controllable risks like greenhouse gas emissions.
Even dam breakage, which is about the next-largest threat profile for industrial disasters, won't create a permanently uninhabitable radius of literally-irradiated land. Maybe the land gets too wrecked to rebuild on? OK, but you're not going to get cancer by going to check it out.
It's silly to pretend like you can't tell the difference. Nuclear may be safe while it works, but the question "What happens when it stops working?" is just as important, if not more.
Fossil fuel emissions and other pollutants build up gradually and can be controlled. You're not going to get kicked out of your home and neighborhood forever because of a malfunction at the coal plant.
And nuclear power generation also emits a very dangerous pollutant: nuclear waste.
I think you have a different definition of the word "emit" than I do.
Nuclear waste is stable, does not migrate when handled properly in containment pools, and can be reprocessed if required. All existing spent nuclear fuel in the united states is stored on-site. It's been that way since the beginning of the industry.
In contrast, particulate and greenhouse gas (including CO2) emissions from coal-fired plants migrate with the wind, often polluting areas far from the plant.
I don't see how you can compare the two.
It's true that spent fuel is very toxic but every single attempt to deal with this issue has been stymied with rampant NIMBYism and non-science based fear mongering.
You can control the operational risks associated with nuclear power. Doing so with fossil fueled plants is not nearly as easy.
That's the crux of the nuclear issue. Everything works great in the theoretical world where everything is handled properly, all factors are properly accounted for, and all tradeoffs were wisely made. That is simply not how the real world works, and Fukushima reminds us of that.
No matter how many failsafes you put in place, they will, at some point or another, be breached. The question is then "What happens when every failsafe fails, and is that risk acceptable compared to the alternatives?"
So long as it's stored in stable geologic formations, or controlled by stable human institutions. Where "stable" is a period of time longer than human history in many cases.
>does not migrate when handled properly in containment pools
Which are dependent on active management and security indefinitely. This is challenging as the service life of the plant where the pool is located and revenue is generated is less than indefinately.
Obviously you haven't looked into the cost of enriching nuclear waste. It is prohibitively high for all but dedicated nation-state actors, who if have the technology to enrich radioactive materials to weapon-grade material aren't going to use nuclear waste.
Worst case for proliferation is being used in a dirty bomb, which just kind of spreads the waste across a limited area. Even then you're looking at alpha-emitting particles that won't cause any radioactive damage unless you ingest it. Take a shower and you'll be fine.
>We've had not one but several nuclear disasters in the past several decades and in each case the sky hasn't come crashing down.
Unless of course you're one of the people who lived in the nuclear exclusion zones created by Chernobyl and Fukushima, in which case, yes, everything you own and possess, very potentially including your long-term health, were destroyed in a matter of hours. Those residents can never go back for more than a quick temporary visit, and they can not take back their belongings because they've been irradiated. They will always be asking themselves if they got enough of a dose of radiation to cause early disease.
Call that localized and controllable all you want, and if you propose building these plants in areas with no nearby inhabitants for many sq miles, maybe it works OK. The current system, where we say "Don't worry, it's all perfectly safe, we double-pinkie-promise that we won't make the mistakes those guys in Ukraine or Japan made, and if you disagree you're an idiot who hates science" is just not going to fly.
This is not general alarmism about being unable to mitigate every risk in life. This is a comparative analysis of the potential risk profiles of fossil fuels and nuclear, and fossil fuels being much better because the cost of a catastrophic non-nuclear failure is much smaller than the cost of a catastrophic nuclear failure.
I would argue that if you compared the risk profiles of fossil fuels vs nuclear power you'd come to the conclusion that nuclear has and continues to have, by a wide margin, the safest profile of ANY energy source except maybe wind and solar. I'm only excluding solar because I don't think we fully understand all of the safety impact of the construction of large windmills all over the windiest parts of the planet nor do we fully understand the impact of solar panel manufacturing.
When you account for the full lifecycle of fossil fuels, from the extraction, refining, transportation, and ultimate consumption and measure that impact in both short-term impact (coal-mining deaths) vs. long-term impact (climate change, pollution, cancer) you'd find that nuclear is the best option.
I'd risk a %0.00001 chance of dying by cancer sooner living next to a nuclear plant vs. a 1.0% chance of dying in a road collision with a fuel tanker or a 0.05% chance of dying sooner with emphysema by living close to a coal-fired plant. (I made those numbers up by the way; but my order of magnitude is spot-on)
As a person who worked in this industry, understands the economics of it, and has compared the costs of coal/wind/gas/nuclear, I can confidently say that nuclear can be safe and affordable as an energy source if we are committed to safe and conscientious use of it.
(BTW, for a month, I slept next to a nuclear reactor that was approximately 500 feet away from my bunk. My total radiation dose for that trip was less than I'd get in the same time hanging out at Grand Central Terminal (a location that would it to be certified as a functioning nuclear reactor would be out of specification as emitting too great a dose of radiation to those who work there)
>if we are committed to safe and conscientious use of it.
Ding ding ding. This is always the caveat tucked away in nuclear discussions. "It will be fine, as long as everything is going fine." Things don't always go fine. When they don't go fine at a coal plant, things are bad, but they are recoverable; they can be cleaned up, and that land can be repurposed, even if its prior purpose is no longer feasible due to structural changes or pollution. There is no permanent, decades-long exclusion zone.
>I'd risk a %0.00001 chance of dying by cancer sooner living next to a nuclear plant vs. a 1.0% chance of dying in a road collision with a fuel tanker or a 0.05% chance of dying sooner with emphysema by living close to a coal-fired plant. (I made those numbers up by the way; but my order of magnitude is spot-on)
Not going to nitpick your made-up numbers, but the difference is that this is a bigger thing "than I want to take this risk". This is taking the risk that the area become a nuclear wasteland (from radiation, not explosion) for the next 100 years, an area that no person can enter without risking their immediate health just by being present. If you get too close to the hotspots without the right gear and monitoring, you will die quickly.
Are other things dirty? Do other things have tradeoffs and downsides? Is there even some risk that nearby property will be damaged or destroyed? Sure. I'm not trying to say that other industrial accidents are no big deal. But nuclear is the only thing that can, almost instantly, take a big chunk of land and permanently and irrevocably irradiate it for 100 years (and, that's just the most severe risk with nuclear power generation; there are others that haven't been discussed).
You can say that greenhouse gasses have the same potential non-local impact, which is fine, but quite the inverse of nuclear power, greenhouse gas emissions take decades to effect this impact and are measurable and controllable. We know it's coming and can do things to stop it.
As far as I know, the most catastrophic failure at a conventional plant would impact local air quality temporarily. The most catastrophic failure at a nuclear plant can impact everything about the surrounding area (for loose values of "surrounding"; Chernobyl created a 1000 sq mile no-go zone) for generations. Those failures can and do happen overnight.
Risk assessment of probability of an incident and impact of an incident.
Chernobyl happened. Fukushima happened. If a similar incident happened at the plant just north of NYC, the evacuation zone would include hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
> You're not going to get kicked out of your home and neighborhood forever because of a malfunction at the coal plant.
Until we get a couple more of degrees globally and we'll see floods in many coastal cities. Not to mention destroying the stability of weather we had for ~12,000 years and allowed farming to thrive.
"Coal plants are the nation’s top source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the primary cause of global warming. In 2011, utility coal plants in the United States emitted a total of 1.7 billion tons of CO21. A typical coal plant generates 3.5 million tons of CO2 per year2."
Ever wonder why you read that you should avoid eating fish because of mercury?
"...Every state in America has issued health
advisories warning people to limit or avoid eating certain species of fish due to toxic mercury contamination, many of which cover every waterbody in the state.
...Coal-fired power plants are the single largest source of mercury contamination in the U.S., responsible for
approximately 50% of human-caused mercury emissions."
These are long terms effects of burning coal - in the short term tens of thousands die each year from the air pollution from coal plants.
The failure of government is that we allow coal and natural gas to be burned when there are alternatives that are much better for the environment and much better for the general health.
In hindsight, yes they should not have built a nuclear power plant in an earthquake-prone area like Japan. But there are plenty of places that are completely safe to build nuclear reactors, and given the alternatives, we should lend the advantages credence. Hopefully the whole debate will be moot when either solar/wind gets to a certain point or we figure out nuclear fusion.
The location of the plant, next to the ocean, placed it in greater danger from the tsunami. Had the plant been located up higher, above the centuries-old tsunami warning stones, then there maybe would have been a different outcome.
My understanding is that the plant was built seaside to make use of the ocean water for cooling. There are definitely alternatives to this, but in the cost analysis, how many other tradeoffs re: the expediency and safety of nuclear technology are we making that are going to prove to have been in the wrong direction? What is the failure cost going to be?
No place is "completely safe" to build a nuclear power plant (or anything else!). If nothing else, no matter where you build it, it is not 100% proof against attack by military action or evildoers.
The excuse for incidents like Fukushima are "Well, they made these mistakes...". Personally, I'd rather not risk zero-notice forced evacuations, permanent quarantine zones, and making significant portions of populated land uninhabitable for centuries on some people not making mistakes.
For those who write this off, there are some very tragic photo essays from Pripyat and Fukushima that can make this impact feel very real. Do you want to risk that happening to your area?