Fair enough - but we're looking at thousands of reactor-years and 1 accident. Doesn't that prove the risks are negligible?
There is no logical 1 sentence response that properly explain why nuclear is safe.
There were two serious nuclear accidents in the whole history of nuclear power, Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Chernobyl was USSR stupidity at its finest. Its like building a building with way, way, way inferior materials, totally outside of code and when the building crumbles trying to say all buildings are unsafe. Chernobyl was BAD, but it shouldn't EVER happen again. Like trying to point out some airliner crash in the early jet age and use that to say that all airliners should be shutdown. Nuclear safety standards adopted in the early 70s in North America and western Europe were enough to prevent Chernobyl easily.
Fukushima was very different. It was the result of one of the strongest earthquakes to hit the earth over the last 2 centuries. It shifted the rotational axis of the earth by a few milimeters. It moved the whole Japanese mainland by 8 inches away from China. Yet the reactor survived both the earthquake and the tsunami. Then the tsunami washed over the emergency diesel reactors, fatally damaging them, preventing a critical heat decay removal function. It was one of the oldest reactor designs still allowed to operate in the world. There were reports telling TEPCO that both its tsunami defenses were insufficient and emergency generators were improperly positioned. It was a 40 year old reactor ! Still if one of the three emergency diesel generators were installed in higher ground the reactor would have been fine.
Should the tsunami washed over any Gen III+ reactor the reactor would have easily survived the event (even if it happened with a 50 year old Gen III+ reactor, lets say a reactor brought online by 2020 hit by a tsunami in 2070). AP1000 / ESBWR reactors don't need any power to shutdown safety. They only need a tiny emergency water pump (15hp) 72 hours after shutdown to replenish an emergency water tank.
The attitude that nuclear is unsafe is 99.9% the opinion of non engineers that understand nothing about designing (engineering) things. That don't want to study the subject before stating an opinion. That make a summary judgement based on emotional opinions.
Coal is unsafe. It kills 500 people daily worlwide (200000 people yearly worldwide). Natural gas kills 10000 people yearly worldwide. Oil kills 20000 people yearly worldwide.
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When I used to intern at a particle accelerator as part of my nuclear physics training many years ago it seemed the scientists consensus that fusion would be a 2035-2050 thing and fission was always seen as a dirty ugly messy transition technology. Back then the urgency of the carbon situation wasn't even so well understood although every educated person realized running on fossils wasn't sustainable. And newer gen slow burn reactors were just speculations.
The risks and costs go beyond documented powerplant failure, basically it is a brittle and power concentrating (as in political /economic) technology. Contrast to solar that encourages organic, self reliant deployment+supply+waste chain.
My personal stance is that today we are in a literal pick your poison problem, and we don't know whether we are equipped (tech, politically, mentally) to deal with either.
But the debate will have to be accelerated- Everything is relative but the speed of light and a bunch of other important things like the carbon in our atmosphere.
Fusion was always been at least 20 years away. 10 years from now it will still be 20 years away.
And nuclear is expensive because it has been viciously attacked by the environmentalist groups, by politicians trying to appease to their anti nuclear base.
This forced reactors to incorporate an insane level of safety features and an insane level of regulatory overload by the NRC (and equivalents), but its still not enough.
But the fact is water cooled nuclear reactors (the most common kind) are expensive because they were convenient for Naval needs but crappy for land needs, yet nobody wanted to spend tens of billions to design a new type of reactor when the Navy had already paid for water cooled reactors.
The Thorium Molten-Salt Reactor: Why Didnt This Happen (and why is now the right time?) - YouTube
Actually Alvin Weinberg and his Oak Ridge gang tried to do it. And got shutdown because Thorium molten salt reactors were their thing, everybody else was doing fast sodium breeder reactors. Then fast breeders got canned by Clinton/Gore/Kerry in the 90s.
Russia, China, Japan and a few other countries have operational fast reactors. Russia is moving forward with the BN800 and BN1200. India is starting their fast reactor in early 2015.
Molten Salt Reactors are also moving forward. The most credible effort seem to be Canadian (
http://www.terrestrialenergy.com) but there are credible efforts in China, India and Czech Republic.
LFTR is a very fancy, technically amazing thorium breeder reactor, but it has a lot of technical/regulatory hurdles. A very down to earth nuclear scientist named Dr. David LeBlanc took the essence of MSR reactors, stripped everything that wasn't absolutely essential for a very safe and very economical MSR reactor and the IMSR was born. They're aiming to get to market by 2021 (at least in Canada, where the NRC equivalent, the CNSC has a very rational framework for small/modular reactors, in stark contrast with the NRC insane attitude towards any "new" nuclear designs).
Finally, its not solar or nuclear, its not wind or nuclear. We need all of the above. Solar is useless in Alaska, Finland, Sweden, Siberia. Solar is great in North Africa, but even there the sun doesn't shine at night. Many areas of the world don't have a whole lot of strong winds. Solar and wind are economical if you generate electricity for local markets, solar and wind are way too expensive to generate and transmit to a thousand miles away (only big hydro is economical for that).
Finally the electric grid is just a part of the problem. There's industrial process heat. There's building heating. There's road, rail and sea transportation. We need a solution for all of that. Nuclear is the only low carbon solution to industrial process heat. Wind is worthless for process heat. Solar is too limited (industries typically must operate 24x7 to be economical). If oil refineries used nuclear heat instead of burning natural gas the total CO2 intensity of gasoline/diesel would be substantially lower. If tar sands were extracted using nuclear heat instead of burning natural gas (plus was refined with nuclear heat), same thing.
While electric cars are a great solution, nobody dares say we'll have electrical locomotives or electrical ships. MSR nuclear is optimal for large ships. Hydrogen fuel cells (with hydrogen made with high temp nuclear) is an alternative for rail/trucking and buses. High temp nuclear can make synthetic jet fuel/gasoline/diesel replacements from CO2 and water or coal+water. Making synthetic fuels from coal is argued to be cleaner than refining oil, but I'm not a big believer in that. But hydrogen today is being made from natural gas or rarely with hydro electricity. Making hydrogen with electricity is very inefficient.
We must stop with this anti nuclear ideology. Its just as stupid as radical left, radical right politics, its just as bad as religious fundamentalism. Its rooted on feelings instead of facts.
