fukishima and the end of the world

Because you hope that the big boom won't happen in your personal live time

Oh dear, things got heated here quickly.

MadScientist, the reason why people will always feel that the danger of nuclear power (or anything related) is less acceptable than a much higher risk from everyday stuff like driving a car is that they have a choice. You can choose to drive your car or not. And it's under your control (mostly). Nobody can really choose if some large company builds a power plant somewhere where it might be dangerous. That's the emotional side. Add that you can't see, feel, smell or taste radiation...

One big boom every couple of thousand years is better than a couple of thousand small booms every year? Heck, no! Look at Central Europe. Doesn't matter where the nuclear power plant was when shite hits the fan really. Doesn't even have to be in your country. I remember Chernobyl well enough. And that was far, far away.

You are quoting sources about the number of deaths. Those numbers hardly matter if you have to think about evacuating a major population area. Western Germany, North Rhine-Westphalia? We are talking about more than ten million people in an area within a hundred kilometer radius. How do you plan to evacuate 10 million? How do you shelter and feed them for weeks and months? How long will it take to recover from a bad nuclear accident?

Looking at a statistic with possible death tolls is one thing. Looking at a radioactive wasteland that was once the city your were born in, raised, had wife and kids, relatives, friends, your house, car, work... is something entirely different. That is a quality of disaster you don't get with car accidents. (Mind you, 2500 deaths in car accidents here per year, not a lot for a country the size of Germany.)

Sorry, but your comparison between nuclear disasters and car accidents stinks. My hometown (Cologne, 1 million pop) can deal with 20-25 deaths from car accidents every year but I'm fairly sure we don't want to try a nuclear accident - ever.

And to be frank, I find it cynic to bring up a statistic like that considering what happened in Fukushima or Chernobyl. Those tragedies can't be summed up and written off. Nuclear power is an unnecessary risk. We have better alternatives.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fossil fuels obviously suck due to carbon dioxide but we still have windpower (shreds birds, ugly, loud) and solar power (not that reliable). There is no perfect source of energy so far but imo wind and solar power should be used whenever possible.

I prefer the solar panels everywhere, forests of wind power plants and water power. Geothermal energy might be an option in some areas, fossil fuels if nothing else works reliably. I think we already have like 25% 'green power' from renewable energies here in Germany and it would not cost a lot more if our politicians had not fvcked the laws up... *sigh*

hundreds of millions of mice on running wheels is the most reliable and efficient form of energy

Im not trying to scare people but we need to wake up before things self destruct and go far beyond driven. I feel my kids and their grandkids are going to be living through a mess over what our generations and our parents gens ruined for them.

When the government covers up the truth how can we fix the broken or understand why?

I mean for example people are against step cell research... What if this could cure things yet the government is against it. If people put their heads together isnt there some kind of filtering we could do to counter or remove the radiation?

Not trying to scare people?

HAHAHAHA. Oh, you.

Well since I am less concerned about any nuclear power plants going boom I have to wonder, what will happen if human consumes 1 cup of nuclear waste? Unfortunately you don't turn into a ninja turtle I suppose. Anyone?

He turns into Gollum only with the life expectancy measured in hours.

And who is going to clean out all the cages, Knickles? You? You never think those things through!

Again, I don't think that you are understanding the phrase I keep saying. Everything has risk.

Everything.

Let us suppose, hypothetically, that there is a city of five million people, powered by a nearby nuclear power-plant. Now let us suppose, that there has been a nuclear accident on the order of Fukishima. The obvious
response is to evacuate, and it's clearly the option that you have jumped to. But let's go back to that phrase everything has risk. There is a risk for those people staying in the area, as if they are exposed to radioactive isotopes over the rest of their lives, then there is an increased risk of cancer. There could be a risk for future generations as well, but this is very dependant upon the type of radioactive material released during the accident. However, there is also a risk in evacuating them. In order to evacuate them, there will be a large number of people moving out all at once, which will likely cause accidents. They will almost certainly have to be put in temporary accommodation, which tend to have poor sanitation and infrastructure, resulting in more deaths. Some of that large population will not be very mobile, particularly the very old, the very young, and those on permanent medical care. Moving these people causes yet more deaths. Finally, the evacuation will cause a significant amount of stress and anxiety in the evacuees, which results in an exacerbation of depression related suicides, heart conditions, and other potential long term maladies.

At the end of the day, there is actually a straight-forwards calculation in all this. If more people are killed or hurt in the evacuation, then would be killed or hurt by radiologically caused diseases over the hazardous lifetime of the isotopes, then the people should stay put. If, on the other hand, the radiological threat is greater, then they should leave, and never come back.

The point I'm trying to get across here is that most people massively overestimate that radiological risk. As you've demonstrated, you have immediately jumped to the case of nuclear disaster==mass evacuation, Without evaluating if that is actually true or not. To illustrate this, let's bust out some citations, and look at Fukushima.

As I have already stated, the World Health Organisation's report has suggested that the actual death toll from radiation at Fukushima is going to be too small to measure [1]. I'm going to clarify that a little, by saying this doesn't mean there isn't one. It just means that it's so small that the natural variance in deaths over the next hundred years or so will eclipse it so thoroughly that it is not measurable. The young in particular will experience a slightly higher cancer risk factor, over the hazardous lifetime of the isotopes, although it is small. Most potential death tolls from radiation I have seen fall between a lower bound of 10 and an upper bound of 130 in the area itself [1,2]. This is the risk of the people staying in the area long term. There is also a (slightly dubious, given the methodology) maximum risk of 180 deaths worldwide, just to put things in perspective.

On the other hand, we actually do have a death toll for the evacuation. As of August 2013, it was about 1600 people who died in the relocation centres and during transit [3]. This does not yet take into account the long term effects such as psychological conditions and chronic diseases, so it should be taken as a lower bound.

To put it simply, the worst nuclear disaster for the past 27 years had such a low radiological risk, that people would have been safer if they hadn't evacuated. The fear of radiation, and the poor estimation of the risks involved has killed more people than the radiation itself would have. This is the key point I'm trying to get across here - that radiological disasters are far less deadly than people think they are. Even in worst case scenarios.

Of course, you may want to suggest a third alternative to these two scenarios, namely don't build the reactor in the first place:

In Germany you have 25% capacity from renewables, which is very, very different from saying you have 25% of your power from renewables [4]. In reality, the actual consumption was less than half of that. Furthermore, The majority of the remainder of Germany's power output comes from coal stations, predominantly lignite, which is the worst type of coal [5]. This is largely a response to the German shutdown of nuclear power plants following Fukushima, and has actually lead to an increase in overall CO2 emission [6] and an increase in cost to the consumer [7]. you may want to read up on this, if energy is a politically important issue to you, although this is a complex topic.

Again, this boils down to an appreciation of knowing which is the least worse option. We all appreciate that fossil fuels are not a long term viable option, although gas (shale or otherwise) may be acceptable as a short term transitional power source. This leaves us with two options - nuclear or renewables.

Unfortunately, renewables at the moment, are just not viable. They may be one day, and I can foresee a bright future for solar in particular, but at the moment, they are just not able to cut the mustard. The biggest issue is intermittancy. To go back to our running theme of everything has a risk, if the power goes out, people die. Whether it's from short term accidents (traffic lights, hospitals, aircraft control computers), or long term issues (collapse of sanitation and infrastructure), the first and most important consideration is to keep the lights on.

When your power source is intermittent, this leaves you with two options. Either you have a backup power-station ready to kick in, or you build lots and lots of your intermittent source, and you store the power when you are making too much of it. The problem with the first one is that it doesn't displace much in the way of carbon dioxide, as you are still going to be burning fossil fuels 70% of the time. As for storage, nobody has come up with a sensible way of doing it yet. We could flood thousands of valleys in order to make pumped storage plants [9], but at a tremendous cost to the environment, and involve displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Intermittancy also places a massive strain on national electricity girds[7]. Indeed, I have heard of an engineer from the UK's national grid control centre joke (not completely untruthfully) that it would be easier to balance the grid and keep the lights on if he had to deal with live hand-grenades being randomly tossed into the control centre than have to integrate a grid with more than 30% intermittent renewables.

Ultimately, this boils back down to the question of which is the least dangerous for the amount of power it produces, and that is something that nuclear wins. To put it in perspective from the data I have already shown, there would have to be multiple Chernobyl level disasters every decade before nuclear stops being the safest form of power generation. There would have to be hundreds before it became the worst.

However, I suspect that this won't matter, to most people, because they know that nuclear is dangerous. I could show every peer reviewed and well sourced scientific study to the contrary and people would still think (or perhaps more accurately, feel) that nuclear is the most dangerous thing there is. It doesn't matter that it is irrational, emotional, and based upon misinformation instead of observation. It's just what people will believe.

And sadly, that belief is killing people now who didn't have to die.

References
1. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/78218/1/9789241505130_eng.pdf
2. http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pdf
3. http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/...-than-earthquake-and-tsunami-survey-says?lite
4. http://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/.../PDFs__XLS/20130110_EEiZIU_E_PPT_2011_FIN.pdf
5. http://www.dw.de/lignite-still-germanys-primary-energy-source/a-16854175
6. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...hift-backfires-as-german-pollution-jumps.html
7.http://www.economist.com/news/speci...ountrys-european-leadership-tilting-windmills
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

I live not that far from Fukushima and I can tell that neither me nor the people around me give a flying f-ck.

Hours? I thought it would be seconds.

@YourLocalMadSci, I have a question for you.

Over the average human lifetime, who is more likely to be exposed to a larger amount of airborne radioactive particles;

1. a person that lives 20km away from a 500MW coal fired power station, or
2. a person that lives 20km away from a 500MW nuclear power station?

Why is this?

So yeah in Fukushima they might have been "lucky" with how radiation was spread, I remember news about weather that blew it away from the land, and thus the overall radiation might be "harmless".

So imagine you don't evacuate and you end up "unlucky". A big cloud of radiation forms and spreads across the lands.
What then?

Not to mention how things in Fukushima keep going wrong left and right and are far away from save. The plant was not save before it exploded, now it is a ruin that still contains very dangerous materials. Who in their right mind would want to live near that?

Can you give any historical accounts for when radiation spread in an unlucky manner?

So you are trying to argue that because nothing ever went wrong nothing will ever go wrong?

I could go an skim the web for hours, but unlike YourLocalMadSci I am not trying to convert anyone into believing something else. At least germany is currently on a way away from this technology, which makes me rather happy.
However simply visiting the wikipedia pages for nuclear accidents shows a lot of information and a lot of sources that clearly state that it is highly dubious that humanity can handle nuclear power in a truly save way.
For example there is this part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents#Human_error
that kind of fortifies my argument that there won't be any real safety as long as humans operate the planets.
Even if they happen to be perfectly planned out in those security analysis tests and research that YourLocalMadSci keeps arguing with. Something stupid still can happen and make it blow up.

Skimming the sources on wikipedia also show up plenty articles that clear state quite the opposite of what the articles from YourLocalMadSci state. All of these articles look pretty well worked out and have far more pages than I care to read now (or are simply locked behind paywalls or are written on a level I won't understand anyway). So yeah I won't conduct research further by myself, but it is blatantly obvious that very serious researchers exist that argue with my line of thinking just as much with YourLocalMadSci ones.
So given this information I can conclude that it probably not very sure if it is actually secure and the best way to generate energy(after all if it really actually would be totally save why are there scientists still arguing?).
In addition to that there is the stuff that I think I know and that is the constant stream of news of how incompetent some responsible people in these areas sometimes act (again the human error thing) or that a worst case radiation accident (imagine some crazy terrorist somehow blowing up a bomb in a power plant that blows a few tons of radioactive fuel into the air) is a possibility that cannot be denied and thus it is saver to go the non nuclear way.

Not to mention that if we go down the nuclear path further and further it will be harder and harder to get out of it, as it will reduce how much money is invested on improving other, saver, technologies.

See, here is the difference Colin. I have not, nor have I ever argued that nuclear accidents do not happen. The accidents you have linked to have all happened, and nobody is denying that. You are interpreting "low risk" as "does not happen" when it can also mean "happens, but isn't that concerning". What you seem to mis-understand, and the brick wall I keep running into is that even when nuclear accidents do happen to the worst possible degree, they are no more dangerous than any other industrial accident. Take a quick look at this list of man-made disasters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manmade_disaster

It has a comprehensive list of an awful lot of disasters. Nuclear doesn't even come close to having the same killing power. Whether it's making explosives or pesticides or air travel or boat travel or particulate pollution or buildings falling over or stampedes or fires, human stupidity has provided an endless cavalcade of disasters with endless death tolls. Even god-damned sporting events kill more people than nuclear power!

The part you seem to be having a problem with is that you seem to think nuclear belongs in it's own special category. That it shouldn't be judged by the same standards as any other industry. That a nuclear disaster will somehow automatically be worse than a chemical plant fire or a dam collapse. Why is the very essence of nuclear power somehow tied up with more danger than any other activity? Why does it deserve special treatment? Why does a nuclear "disaster" which killed nobody deserve more scrutiny and concern than an oil refinery fire which killed hundreds? Or a chemical plant leak which killed thousands? Or a dam collapse which killed hundreds of thousands? You have an image in your head of nuclear disasters leading to radioactive wastelands, where not even weeds will grow.

This. Is. Not. True.

I don't care whether or not you support nuclear power or not. I'm not here to convert people. What I'm here to do is try and show up those demonstrable misconceptions where people have honestly got the wrong end of the stick. If someone told you that the moon was made of cheese, then you would probably try to explain that it wasn't, regardless of if you wanted them to be an advocate of space travel or not.

It's easy to play the what if game. What if the wind had been blowing the other way? Not a lot really, as the release was not massive, the isotopes were short-lived ones, and the local diet was not iodine deficient. Prevailing wind direction and local population density is a consideration in locating Nuclear power plants. Should we keep playing the what if game? What if the operators were asleep, and didn't activate what cooling systems in the first 8 hours of the disaster while battery backup was still available? What if they decided to dump a load of graphite in the core, and trigger a power excursion for amusement? What if terrorists had chosen to attack during the tsunami? What if terrorists caused the tsunami in order to sabotage the reactor? What if a plane crashed into the reactor? What if a rocket crashed into the reactor? What if aliens attacked the reactor? What if terrorist aliens crashed a rocket-plane into the reactor, loaded with graphite, while the wind was in the wrong direction, after causing the tsunami?

While we are playing this game, it's only fair that we should play it with all those other industries as well. What if the Bhopal chemical plant was making nerve gas instead of pesticides? What if the Happy Valley Racecourse had it's exits jammed shut before it caught fire? What if the Titanic had no life-rafts at all instead of the handful that it did?

We can play the what if game until we are blue in the face, but if we aren't coming up with sensible "what ifs", then it is little more than an exercise in paranoia. That's why an awful lot of very clever people are employed to come up with such what-ifs, and they are doing a bloody good job. The testament to this is that we have been using nuclear reactors for the past 50 years, and the death toll is below most other comparable industries. Yet no matter what citations I could bring up, or what evidence I could show, people still refuse to look at the evidence, and would choose to listen to vague intuitions.

When I here a credible concrete example as to how a nuclear power plant could genuinely cause untold death and destruction, I will re-evaluate this. However I have been examining this sector of industry closely over the past 4-7 years of my life, and although I can find the same mistakes and stupidity one could find in any industry, I have found nothing to suggest that this is any worse than anything else we put up with on a daily basis.

Man bites dog.

PS, god bless you YourLocalMadSci for taking on the mantle of Patient Defuser Of Fear, I've done it a few times but I've got no patience for it at the moment, and it's a really important thing to do.

Yeah weed grows. Everywhere. Even where I do not want it to grow.
Your argumentation now drifts to "other stuff is just as bad or worse". This might be true, but I have not stated that the other stuff is good. In fact there are probably other things that should be done either in a more secure way or not at all.

Those poor mice..... Are they at least given little sneakers first?