The United States' Nuclear Nightmare | Rolling Stone

------" The official death toll from Chernobyl is between 60 and 4,000 twenty-five years later"-------

The official death count as published by the Ukrainian government is 985,000.

Get your facts straight.

About a million deaths is the unofficial number when factoring in cancer claims but this number is not accepted by peer reviewed journals.
While thyroid cancer did increase somewhat in the decade after Chernobyl just 2% died according to the data. Leukemia rates did not increase from the norm according to studies by the World Health Organization. Nor did any other cancer deaths. Google it.
As with global warming I accept the concensus of scientists on this issue.

The point is coolplanet----some types of radiation is not particularly hazardous or long lived. Some is only dangerous under certain conditions. Some statistical methods of calculation may be valid, others may not be valid. Argue all day long about it if you want.

I say, it doesn't matter how Fukushima compares to Chernobyl----different accidents, different results.

However, at the end of the day, radiation has been released. Some of it is short lived and not particularly dangerous. But some is. Release some radiation here, release some radiation there, release a little more over there, pretty soon, you have radiation everywhere. The more nuclear reactors you have, the greater your chances of radioactive release. The more time you have them, the more likely you are to have a release. The greater the number of reactors and the longer you have them, the closer you come to statistical certainty that sooner or later you will have major disasters.

How brilliant is this? Let's put nuclear reactors on ships and then send them out where people are intentionally going to shoot missiles at them to try to sink them?

Explain to me how safe THAT is.

-----"....... it is almost impossible to have an informed discussion about it."-------

I am trying to have an informed and civil discussion with you coolplanet.

I agree that coal and petroleum are also destructive and we need to get rid of them.

I don't agree with nuclear power because it is also very dangerous in its own way.

We have better options.

I prefer methane, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and biofuels. All are renewable and sustainable. None are particularly damaging to health or the environment. We can live with them for a long, long, time.

I much prefer methane, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, biofuel and wave energy too.

But according to experts those technologies are still several decades away from replacing fossil fuels. The only power source available right now, besides hydro, to immediately phase out coal and oil is nuclear.

Global warming is by far the most serious threat we face or have ever faced as a species.

Please read what James Lovelock in 'The Revenge of Gaia' (2006) and Jim Hansen in 'Storms of My Grandchildren' (2009) have to say about nuclear power being our only hope to prevent a climate meltdown within this decade.

The "experts" are wrong coolplanet. It takes 8-10 years to bring a nuclear power plant online. Even when everything goes perfectly according to schedule. And it is terribly expensive. It is not uncommon at all for nuclear power to end up costing 3-4 times what the original cost estimate was. There are two plants planned in Florida right now---the cost estimates have more than doubled since they were approved, and not one shovel of dirt has been lifted to even begin construction. And even when they do come online, they will do nothing to replace any oil. There are no electric cars---and at the cost and rate of manufacture, there will not be any significant number of cars using electricity for 40 or 50 years.

Nuclear power will run us into the poor house faster than anything else I can think of, and do absolutely nothing about global warming.

We can replace coal use with natural gas easily within 5-10 years. No strip mines, no smokestacks belching toxic clouds of smoke(methane burns completely cleanly, look at a gas stove, and it contains no toxins). And using methane to produce the same amount of energy as with coal only produces 44% of the CO2. Even using fossil methane, we more than cut CO2 in half. And it is quick, cheap and easy. All we do is take out the coal grate furnaces and put in gas burners. Like a giant water heater---because that is all we are doing, boiling water. Everything else stays the same, buildings, boilers, turbines, generators, condensers, controls, grid connections. We can easily do that within 5-10 years. We already generate more power with methane than we ever have with nuclear.

We can run our vehicles on methane. We can even use petroleum, biofuels and methane in the same engine. Multifuel vehicles are already on the road and in use by consumers in South America, Asia and Europe. Methane costs about 1/4 as much as gasoline to produce the same amount of energy. And even using fossil methane, produces only 65% of the CO2, and almost 0 other pollutants. That means no smog, anywhere. And, if all cars on the road used methane, it would be the equivalent of taking every third vehicle off the road. Oh yes, it is impossible to spill methane in water----it just bubbles up and blows away.

And, we can make methane easily and cheaply out of any kind of biomass waste at all, including sewage and landfills. When we do that, new CO2 going into the atmosphere drops to 0.

And fossil methane and biomethane can be mixed in any proportion with no loss of performance in any application---it is the same stuff CH4.

I am a utopian too.
I thought 40 years ago that the world would have switched to clean energy by now.
We baby boomers were just too busy partying to make it happen.
Experts say it will take at least 20 years to replace fossil fuel with renewable energy.
We don't have 20 years to reduce atmospheric carbon and prevent climate meltdown!
Methane from landfills can not possibly supply the world's energy usage (although if we found a way to capture methane from melting tundra THAT would be different but still decades away).
The reason it takes a nuclear power plant 6 years to be built is primarily because of environmentalist lawsuits. The argument has been made that, if environmentalists (like me) had not stopped Jimmy Carter's plan to replace fossil fuel electric generation with atomic energy, then global warming wouldn't be the emergency it is today.
I've been a 'deep ecologist' all of my life. But I clearly see the massive mess we're in. We need to get down to earth and do the math. And research.
All I see are a bunch of dreamers, left and right.

Hitler set the standard by which we live & operate today. Adolph Hitler rolls in the grave laughing at scientists for the Evil they do. He rolled the bowling ball, we keep playing his game, the game he showed us => the game of experimentation.

But it did give us COMPUTERS, a widely accepted trade-off. Follow the yellow brick Hitler Road and get the instructions for math co-processors (number crunchers that run stupidly through all conceivable answers til it solves for X = experimentation).

Looks like our scientific community has decided to break us to improve us.

Tonight I realized how to make a change to gasoline engines to get 6,000 miles from one tank of gasoline.

Another idea on the shelf I guess.

So, do you think utopia would be a lot CLOSER if all vehicles had the equivalent of a nuclear power plant under the hood?

I bet Wetdog would once he knew it uses all fuels like he always wants.

Birds would be in utopia if my windmill design was built. I have a design that does not kill birds in the vanes.

I've had this design for 2+ years but since all my other engines were turned away at the gate I haven't had the wherewithal to do anything with this one.

Apparently some people do not share your dream of utopia but, I will hand you this much => your utopia is not an unreachable goal.

I've been standing at the gate my arms loaded down with utopia-class engines a long time. I guess I'm supposed to go searching for the head kiss up and start kissing up.

I'll Pass.

Maybe the Chinese would like to have both of them, the wind machine that doesn't kill birds AND a car engine that runs up 6,000-mile trip meters per tank of gasoline. Hmm. Perhaps we could pay off the entire Chinese Debt.

That would be sorta nice.