The fact that you believe a nuclear plant can explode....

David Orange wrote: Classy, Mary

Classy, David -- selectively cutting and pasting to manufacture an obscene insult. I'm done with your cheap tactics.

Nicholas Eschenbruch wrote: Here is what has been done in my town regarding energy efficient housing, I believe it may be the largest such project worldwide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg (and of course, it has a disproportionate number of aikido clubs...) It's mainly "post-materialist" middle class though, and moderate climate. On a more festive note, in the wake of the Fukushima catastrophe we just ousted the conservative government in my federal state, and will now have a green party prime minister in one of the most technologically innovative regions of the world. So there will be ample occasion to observe what leadership can contribute to changes.

From what I've read, there are towns in a variety of European countries way ahead of what is being done in USA on this. Oh..and congrats on the GP win

Phi Truong wrote: i like solar and wind powers and such. however, i also know that high tech society cannot use those alone. when it comes to nuclear power and its hazardous conditions, it creates such a deep psychological fear.

It's warranted. How many zones of the world can we afford to make like the Chernobyl area? And we don't yet know what will happen around Fukushima. How much area can Japan afford to fence off as impassable and unuseable? Where will the people go if they can't return to their homes? A lot of people displaced by this nuclear carelessness and deception were largely unaffected by the earthquake and tsunami. They were okay and would have continued okay but for the radiation released by that plant. When a nuclear accident occurs, it is ruinous. People have learned not to trust those with a vested interest in profiting off nuclear plants. Tokyo Electric has a history of covering up the truth about its nuclear incidents. They ignored the warnings of geologists about the likelihood of earthquake and tsunami. They misled the people and built that plant against all sound advice and now look what we get.

Phi Truong wrote: interesting though that Japan, a nation that experienced two major nuclear episodes during WWII, chose to use nuclear power to power their society; yet many part of the world, fear of it.

I think there was serious opposition to the adoption of nuclear power in Japan, but that was rolled over by the wealthy interests who wanted to profit at any cost. A lot of the original nuclear proponents died rich and pampered and never had to take responsibility for this. So they don't care. It's the schmucks who followed them that have gotten blamed for this and not unrightly. Nuclear wasn't embraced by the common Japanese. It was pushed on them--forced on them--and other approaches were never seriously considered.

Phi Truong wrote: ... say if they decided to drop all their nuclear power plans, what can they replace it with? can't see them power those maglev trains with solar and wind.

Well, they only have one and it's experimental. The bullet trains are fantastic, but they're not all they're made out to be. The convenience of having them has come at a high price to their culture and the humanity of their society. It's gone from a very unique arrangement on the human scale to a roboticized, mechanical society. I believe they've lost more than they've gained and not everyone (by far) welcomed the change.

Phi Truong wrote: ... or elevators or hospital equipments. the amount of batteries to hold such power would be enormous, not to mention the amount of hazardous materials (and waste) those batteries represent.

That's true, but not everything in the world has to be powered by electricity and nuclear isn't the only way to provide that electricity. Prioritizing really important functions is one way to reduce the "need" to generate power with nuclear plants. And maybe it's time to can uranium plants altogether and go to thorium.

Phi Truong wrote: just want to throw out some thing to contrast. here is the number of automobile deaths from NHTSA (USA) statistics http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx . we have more kill in a year than all the death from nuclear radiation in the US, yet i don't see us banning automobile anytime soon.

Well, if I go out and get killed in a car, or if thousands of people die in car crashes, it doesn't poison thousands of square miles or spread into other countries and poison their lands. It's tragic when anyone dies, but when their deaths include closing of entire regions for thousands of years....that's a big difference.

Phi Truong wrote: ... also, most of the US Navy vessels are nuclear powered. we don't see anyone complaint there do we?

I'd like to say that that's due to the discipline of the Navy and their complete lack of a profit motive or concern for shareholders. Every move they make is highly regimented and planned out, whereas, with nuclear plants, corners are cut, lies are told, procedures are ignored, haphazard experiments are conducted (see Chernobyl...and the Fukushima "accident" resulted largely from seriously erroneous "trial and error" responses to the loss of reactor coolant). In the Navy, when a pilot lands a jet on a carrier, there are video tapes from the cockpit, from the tower, from the deck. Any minor variation or error results in extensive grilling of the pilot and, often, disciplinary action and possibly reduction of rank and pay. And they run their reactors with the same strict discipline.

However, look at the history of Russian Naval nuclear reactors. Very, very bad.

Again, consider that we've had about 70 years of history with nuclear reactors--maybe more. And in the past 32 years, we've had three major land-based accidents--and they seem to be getting worse as time goes by; and how many sea-based incidents? At least two, I believe, and most of the information on those was hidden by the Russian Navy.

At the very least, we need to identify vulnerable reactors such as Fukushima and Monju (where there has already been at least one accident) and shut those down. They are not the panacea they were sold as and they are a very serious threat to human society and life as we know it.

Best to you, Phi.

David

"It is not my purpose to persuade you that we indeed face an environmental, financial, political, energy, soil, medical, or water crisis. Others have done so far more compellingly than I could. Nor is it my aim to inspire you with hope that they may be averted. They cannot be, because the things that must happen to avert them will only happen as their consequence. All present proposals for changing course in time to avert a crash are wildly impractical. My optimism is based on knowing that the definition of "practical" and "possible" will soon change as we collectively hit bottom.
Another way to put it is that my optimism depends on a miracle. No, not a supernatural agency come to save us. What is a miracle? A miracle comes from a new sense of what is possible, born from a surrender of the attempt to manage and control life. In individual experience miracles often happen when life overwhelms us. For an alcoholic, to suggest "just stop drinking" is ludicrous, impossible, unimaginable. It takes a miracle. The changes that need to happen to save the planet are the same. No mainstream politician is proposing them; few are even aware of just how deep the changes must go.
When the above-mentioned crises converge, when we experience acutely and undeniably that the situation is out of control, when the failure of the old regime is utterly transparent, then solutions that appear hopelessly radical today will become matters of common sense.
And this will happen. The timing of each crisis is uncertain, but the forces driving them are inexorable and cannot fail to be expressed sooner or later. Processes set in motion long ago have accelerated past critical mass; we are just beginning to taste their effects. Even if we somehow stopped making new pollution right now, the cumulative effects of existing ecological damage are enough to generate catastrophe. The same inevitability is true in other realms as well: public health, education, finance, and politics. It is already too late. It is only a matter of how soon, how bad, how long. However bad you think it is, it is probably worse. Read books like The Dying of the Trees or Boiling Point if you don't believe me.
Like the Titanic, the momentum of technological society is so huge that even if we reversed the engines and steered hard right now, the short-term and mid-term course of events would not change much. We are on a collision course with nature that can no longer be averted. Yet not only have we done little to brake or steer away from the looming iceberg, we have maintained an oblivious policy of "full speed ahead!" In the United States, Republican policy has been essentially, "What iceberg?" while the Democrats try to change course by a few degrees—but not so quickly as to spill the drinks on the first class deck. The "practical" proposals and workable compromises on the table are woefully inadequate. One party repudiates the Kyoto Treaty and the other endorses it, but few acknowledge that even that is far too little, far too late. Outside the United States, "developing" countries such as India and China, abetted by Western institutions, stoke the Titanic's furnaces with their headlong industrialization using the old linear model of extraction, processing, consumption, and waste.
And meanwhile, on deck the party continues, as it will continue to continue even after the first crunch reverberates through the ship, even as the icy torrent consumes compartment after compartment. On the top deck the band will play on even as the ship lists and rolls, maintaining a desperate and deadly illusion of normalcy.
At this point the utter bankruptcy of the program of competition, security, and financial independence will begin to become so flagrantly obvious that no one will be able to ignore it. I once read a pessimistic book of the business genre forecasting a polarized society of crime-ridden slums and wealthy walled, gated, fenced, alarmed, guarded communities. The author's advice was to contrive to live in the latter! This is tantamount to climbing to the highest deck of a sinking ship. Everyone speaks of the intensifying competitiveness of the present era, evoking in my mind masses of rats struggling and clawing for the top—where they will perish but a few minutes later than the rest.
Yes, you can locate yourself as far as possible from the war zones, trash incinerators, toxic waste dumps, smog zones, bad neighborhoods, and other perils of an increasingly toxic world, but sooner or later the converging crises of our era will obliterate all defenses. No matter how diversified your investments, no matter how many guns in your walled compound or cans of food in your basement, the tide of calamity will eventually engulf you. Gates, locks, razor wire and guns can ensure security only temporarily, and a fraudulent, anxious security it is. Eventually we will abandon our bunker mentality and understand that the only security comes through giving, opening, and being at the center of a flux of relationships, not taking more and more for self; security comes not from independence but from interdependence. The survivors will not be those who try to insulate themselves in a fortress, but who are able to give, to help, and to contribute to a community. They will form the basis of a new kind of civilization." Excerpt from Ascent Of Humanity

Mary Malmros wrote: Classy, David -- selectively cutting and pasting to manufacture an obscene insult. I'm done with your cheap tactics.

Mary, it seems that you reach this point with someone on this forum about once a week. Strange that it's always the other person who uses cheap tactics, even though we can all see how you distort what others say and lead the topic into all kinds of irrelevant side issues. You take a hard line opposition and hold it irrationally against all explanations, throwing insults and snide comments until you finally, time after time, get tired of "the other person's" cheap tactics.

Maybe it would do you some good to look back through the threads where you finally 'get done' and consider what you, yourself, have said. I assure you, it will be very enlightening if you honestly look at your own approach.

Meanwhile, I stand by the topic I started here: nuclear plants can and do "blow up" and this one will not be the last. We can't afford to allow that to continue. The change has to come from the bottom up and half of that means demanding change from the top down.

Speaking truly.

David

I still don't see the danger in nuclear power. Even with the latest bad news today it's still nowhere near Chernobyl. In fact, this disaster just shows how secure and safe this power really is. This is a reactor that is very old and a design we would never build today and it has for the most part survived everything the earth could throw at it without making the land unlivable or killing us all.

Right now we are talking about 10000 mSv and 10 minutes next to Chernobyl when it blew up was 50 Sv. For the record 1000 mSv = 1 Sv which means it is 50 times less. Further more, most of the radiation released has very short lifetimes and will be 100% gone in a few weeks to months.

Modern reactors are even safer. Most use gravity fed systems which would have made the issue of no water for the pumps irrelevant. There are other designs that we do not use (mostly because they didn't gain favor for a lack of producing weapons grade materials) that are way safer than the media wants to report on. One example that comes to mind is the pebble bed reactor. Newer designs also have changed the fuel types to fuel that is much safer and produce much shorter lived radiation. The influx of passive safety systems has made modern reactor designs almost extremely safe.

90% of what we read is pure scare propaganda. It's good to drum of sales of papers and viewers of a tv channel. But don't be fooled, japan is not going to be a unlivable wasteland and this event while tragic is no where near being another Chernobyl. It is dangerous and unsafe for the short term however and needs to be taken seriously.

All energy solutions have dangers and negative impacts. Coal has pollution, and coal fires (did you know there is an entire town in the USA that is unlivable due to coal fires? Did you know no one will be able to live there for hundreds or maybe even thousands of years?) Nuclear has the very rare chance of radiation disasters (and it is even more rare with each generation of the technology), most modern day soloar power depends on toxic chemicals and oil to produce the devices we need to make that power, or requires burning hydrogen produced by the solar cells and thus creates the hazards of storing hydrogen, etc. The trick is to make things as safe and as efficient as possible. I think that with the current trends of research (and if we can keep our irrational fears at bay) that we can create 100% safe nuclear power plants.

If anything should be debated here, it is how long we should allow aging and outdated security systems to remain in place. This reactor was first in use in the 1970's. Many problems with the designs of these plants have been discovered and resolved in the 3 to 4 decades this plant has been in operation. We should be asking why these safety measures were not retrofitted. It is clear these plants were marked for replacement, but perhaps that should have been done 10 or 15 years ago. That said, we can all monday morning quarterback.

Solar power may one day be efficient enough to replace our power consumption, but I don't see it being a reality in the near future. While it can reduce our energy footprint (and thus reduce the need for as many power plants in the short term), energy use, like bandwidth needs will be every increasing. More and more of the world is moving into an age where they need constant power for their day to day lives. It's not just that our current 1st world people are using more power, its that more and more 3rd world people are starting to need 1st world levels of power. Add to that an ever increasing population and you find energy demands will be growing exponentially and solar efficiencies are not.

This is coming from a environmentally conservative member of society. I have bought high efficiency washers and dryers to reduce my water impact, I use those horrid light bulbs (i miss real light bulbs) to reduce my power footprint and replaced my heating and air with 95% efficient systems. I have all my computers set to wake on lan and power save modes so they run as little as possible, and I'm responsable for consolidating my server farm at work with the sole goal of reducing power and cooling requirements. I actively fight technologies that are bad for the environment like fracturing for natural gas. However, I think that nuclear power is an important step in meeting our energy needs and it can be done much safer and cleaner then any mainstream power generation currently in use.

Lastly, let's put radiation into prospective. http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Hi Don, problem is, there are still WAY too many of that or similar designs around, and in really bad places (fault lines and such). I mean, even with the mitigating factors you mentioned, this incident is NOT an add for nuclear power, in my estimation.

But hey, what do I know, I was an english major...

Good reading you again,
Best,
Ron (and look how far THAT degree got me...)

Wow, that chart seems pretty informative...but did I miss where they discuss the links to cancers like thyroid cancer? Probly did...let me go read some more...

B,
R

Ron Tisdale wrote: Hi Don, problem is, there are still WAY too many of that or similar designs around, and in really bad places (fault lines and such). I mean, even with the mitigating factors you mentioned, this incident is NOT an add for nuclear power, in my estimation. But hey, what do I know, I was an english major... Good reading you again, Best, Ron (and look how far THAT degree got me...)

I'm not saying not to learn from it. I say we need to be using this as leverage to replace or retrofit existing designs. But I do think this shows how safe these things really are. There is no wide scale radiation deaths, the containment structures and safety systems are for the most part doing what they are built to do and while this is dangerous, so far it is being handled and it seems like the long term effects will be minimal. Now imagine if this was a brand new reactor with modern safety systems (such as passive gravity feed cooling).

The earthquake did nothing to hurt these reactors, the safety systems worked perfectly (in fact too well, the auto shutdown cut the very power they needed when the wave washed out the generators). This is not an ideal situation, but it does show that even in the worst circumstances these things are still very safe, and especially safe when compared to the worst designs we have ever built (like chernobyl).

So what I'm saying is that instead of knee jerk fear based reactions setting back the world decades, let's instead learn from this, and get to work right now retrofitting and replacing our reactors to make them safer. In fact new reactors are more efficient, which means we will probably need less of them and thus make the whole thing even safer.

From your lips to god's ears...

I hope I am not having a "knee jerk" reaction but...I don't know if I want to live within 50 miles of those reactors for the next 5 to 10 years. And I can't help but imagine the dislocation the folks who DO live in that area are going through now, and will continue to go through for some time. I just hope it all works out.

Best,
Ron

Nicholas Eschenbruch wrote: Here is what has been done in my town regarding energy efficient housing, I believe it may be the largest such project worldwide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban,_Freiburg (and of course, it has a disproportionate number of aikido clubs...) It's mainly "post-materialist" middle class though, and moderate climate. On a more festive note, in the wake of the Fukushima catastrophe we just ousted the conservative government in my federal state, and will now have a green party prime minister in one of the most technologically innovative regions of the world. So there will be ample occasion to observe what leadership can contribute to changes.

Hi Nicholas,

you are fortunate to reside in such a place, we are aware in the UK that Germany has been far more forward thinking than us when it comes to applying innovative technological solutions to the environmental problems we create for ourselves.

I remember reading about the ideas in the link I've provided below. The use of CSP and the easy to produce low tech hardware I think is encouraging. This particular project won't provide all of Europe's power needs, but it will make a sizeable contribution. And if it works well, it will no doubt spur on other countries (with the right conditions) to follow suit. I think that a side effect of this type of power production is that salt water can be used and is de-salinated in the process, the shade provided by the mirrors, combined with the water, could turn former desert into productive food producing acreage.

http://www.newenergyworldnetwork.com...n-deserts.html

Keep pushing and innovating over there, we will be following our more enlightened european cousins and no doubt buying your technology in the future. Having said that, we do have some wave power projects going around the UK that are I believe, pushing on being larger than anywhere else in the world.

regards

Mark

Ron Ragusa wrote: Does the type of explosion really matter? The fact is that as a consequence of both explosions radioactive material has been released into the environment. Pretty much sucks if you happen to live in the neighborhood regardless of the type of explosion.

Yes, the type of explosion absolutely matters. If someone is going to throw around nightmare scenarios like "they could lose Tokyo," then that person should have some understanding of what might lead to such a scenario. A few puffs of exploding hydrogen simply aren't going to cause that kind of large scale, long term contamination. Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl because they "both had explosions" is profoundly ignorant at best, and deliberately misleading fear mongering at worst.

Katherine

David Orange wrote: Is their entire parking lot covered with a solar roof? I don't think anyone has done that yet.

Satellite image at: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UT...,0.005735&z=18

The entire parking area isn't covered, probably because they would have had to cut down trees to do that. But most of the usable roof area is.

Well, frankly, you're wrong. The Fukushima explosions are exactly the kind of accident I referred to: a breech of core containment and release of core material to the environment. If it doesn't get far worse than it currently is, it will be a miracle--not a technological triumph.

I don't think anyone has actually confirmed that the core containment has been breached. Or do you have better access to the site than Tepco does?

But I do know that they all result from nuclear industry lies and underestimations of the dangers of building a nuclear plant anywhere--but especially in an earthquake prone area and dismissing the very real likelihood of a massive tsunami. We can certainly expect something at least this bad in California.

Really? The tsunami was more than double the Japanese design estimate. The quake was larger than any that have hit California (or Japan, for that matter) since seismic measurements began. 9.0 earthquakes simply are not that common anywhere in the world.

First, the hydrogen ignition occurred when the hydrogen mixed with the atmosphere. And that explosion destroyed the spent-fuel cooling pool on top of the reactor building . Those spent fuel rods were left dry, exposed to the atmosphere, melting down and releasing radiation to the environment. How much radiation? We cannot tell because that information is in the hands of Tokyo Electric Power Company--a corporation covering its association for criminal negligence.

Actually, Greenpeace has been doing independent measurements. I'm not a fan, but they certainly can't be accused of being pro-nuke. Their map is here:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UT...,1.468048&z=10

It should be read in conjunction with this helpful table, showing just how much radiation a microsievert is:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Katherine

David Orange wrote: This event has been ranked with Chernobyl. It's certainly one of the two worst nuclear events in history.

Yes, it is worse than Three Mile Island, and therefore is the second worst (of three total) nuclear events.

That's somewhat like comparing salmonella to the Black Death. They're both caused by bacteria, after all.

Katherine

David Orange wrote: And you haven't seen the end of it yet. Or is a ruptured reactor containment a mere inconvenience, outweighed by Chinese waste dumping in a field? What I see as your big mistake is to drastically overstate the pollution of photovoltaic manufacture and to drastically minimize the toxicity and scale of the nuclear waste problem.

And yours is to drastically overstate the negative effects of nuclear power while completely ignoring the costs of renewables.

The problem is that the real world alternative to nuclear isn't solar and wind, it's coal and natural gas. The most pro-renewable countries in Europe struggle to get 20% of their electricity from renewables. The most ambitious state-level programs in the US think 25% is a wildly ambitious target. And these are the richest countries in the world. So how do you fill the gap? Does the nuclear risk -- and I'm not denying that there are risks -- outweigh the global warming risk? Would you rather live in Tokyo, or Tuvalu?

(Relative contributions to the US energy supply, by fuel source and end use: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/..._EFC_20071.png)

Katherine

David Orange wrote: And we can do that here, too. Despite Katherine's claims, in the US, some states have a system called "net metering" by which unused solar electric production feeds back into the energy grid and the homeowner's electric meter runs backward! If we re-prioritized and put these units on every house and public building, along with steady implementation of energy efficiency standards, in a decade or two, we could transform this nation.

Which claims were those? As I said, I earn my living in the solar industry, and am well aware of both the advantages and the limitations of net metering.

Sure, the meter runs backward during the day when the owner isn't home and the sun is shining. Then it runs forward at night, which is when residential energy consumption peaks. Over the course of a year, the owner is in most cases still going to be a net consumer of energy. (Especially if he's got an electric car charging in the garage.)

Katherine

Uranium mining:

Tenyu Hamaki wrote: Uranium mining:

Looks very close to the limestone mines near where I grew up.

It looks a lot like tar sands in Alberta too.

h2 from the oildrum:

zurisee, any discussion by a pro nuke person MUST avoid the core issues of future stewardship, it is precisely because this issue must be avoided that they raise a non-stop stream of straw men, each more ludicrous from a logical point of view than the last, and each almost trivially easy to see through with just beginner level logic, and the facts you can find at TOD.

However, consider this benefit: by for example trying to say coal makes CO2 which is worse, you have in fact gotten them to admit that coal power generation is also unsafe and bad, and it's actually quite difficult to get corporations or entrenched government bureaucracies to admit that anything is bad in their sphere, so that's actually substantial, but it points to how weak their arguments are, if they had stronger arguments, they wouldn't need to admit all the negatives of the options. I take some comfort in noting this fact.

Cars are of course major CO2 emitters as well, and are very new, we do not 'need' cars at all to thrive and have a great life, yet the example is tossed out of all the car deaths. I totally agree with this concern, dump all the cars now, that would be a great way to start fixing the problem. Cars are toxic on every level, including the disposal of their toxic wastes, which we tend to send offshore, or to Mexico. So I'm glad to see pro nuke people agreeing that our society is filled with dangerous, toxic things, which we need to also correct and eliminate.

The end of oil is of course the solution, since mankind decided to ignore the real solutions, now man has to wait for the solution to be imposed top down, non-negotiably.

I am glad to see this mention of the discounting of the future, which takes on a nearly pathological character in such discussions. No, strike that, it's not nearly pathological, it's fully pathological.

The growth based system we have generated has no answers, so of course it will flail desperately and pollute, destroy, and devastate to its maximum potential before it loses its ability to do so.

When you consider that we maintain that we 'need' nuclear power only to generate a small fraction of the energy we waste daily it is painfully obvious that we do not in fact need it at all, though it is possible that the system it depends on needs it, I'm not sure what the breaking points are when the growth fuel of energy the industrial system depends on is reduced on absolute terms, not raised. My guess is they are unable to even conceptualize this reality, and so are frantically trying to negotiate the non-negotiable, at each step of the process making the long term outcome that much worse. I am impressed however by how weak the arguments are, it leads me to believe that their actual political situation may be correspondingly weak.

I am not really interested in watching such types flounder around trying to paint themselves a picture where growth and ecosystem destruction are the price of progress, so called (perversely), to be honest, what interests me more is seeing how the actual people who will solve these issues begin to evolve the understandings and world views that will help take us out of this pit we have dug ourselves.

I'm interested in the person who has already scoped out the sides of the pit, has found some possible trails, and has assembled what they need to try to make their way out, which will have to be a group effort, since humans are social animals, that's a strength. Not loner survivalist types, who just seem set on building a compound at the pits floor, stocking it with provisions, then trying to hold against the earthquakes and landslides that are bound to come and bury them in the end.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...24/2907304.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...15/2516584.htm

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: A few puffs of exploding hydrogen simply aren't going to cause that kind of large scale, long term contamination. Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl because they "both had explosions" is profoundly ignorant at best, and deliberately misleading fear mongering at worst.

Right. What does Tokyo need with tap water?

Let them drink beer?

They've just pushed the evacuation zone further out from the plant.

This is not over by a long shot and neither you nor Don nor I know what will come of it.

The biggest point of concern, however, is that they said it can't happen, yet, it did.

We won't know how bad it was until it's all wrapped up, which is a long way off. It could still get worse.

All we know for sure is that it wasn't supposed to get this bad, but it did, and apparently it's getting worse every day.

"Don't speak too soon, for the wheel's still in spin..."

David

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: I don't think anyone has actually confirmed that the core containment has been breached. Or do you have better access to the site than Tepco does?

I'm going by what Tepco said.

David Orange wrote:
Quote:
But I do know that they all result from nuclear industry lies and underestimations of the dangers of building a nuclear plant anywhere--but especially in an earthquake prone area and dismissing the very real likelihood of a massive tsunami. We can certainly expect something at least this bad in California. end quote

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: Really? The tsunami was more than double the Japanese design estimate. The quake was larger than any that have hit California (or Japan, for that matter) since seismic measurements began. 9.0 earthquakes simply are not that common anywhere in the world.

They're still too common to build a nuclear plant on the fault. And geologists warned Tepco that bigger quakes than Tepco's design mimimization "expected" have hit Japan in the past. If this were a cotton candy factory, sure, build it on an ancient earthquake and tsunami zone. But this is uranium and plutonium. Stupid idea at best: criminal at worst.

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: Actually, Greenpeace has been doing independent measurements. I'm not a fan, but they certainly can't be accused of being pro-nuke. Their map is here: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UT...,1.468048&z=10 It should be read in conjunction with this helpful table, showing just how much radiation a microsievert is: http://xkcd.com/radiation/

So you wouldn't mind going over and living in the "nuclear exclusion zone," huh? It's really not that bad at all, from what you're saying.

While you're over there, you can drink my (and my relatives') share of the tap water.

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: Yes, it is worse than Three Mile Island, and therefore is the second worst (of three total) nuclear events.

Three? You seem to forget some Russian naval accidents, a certain submarine smoking along the surface, a number of people killed, the reactor simply sunk to the ocean floor, IIRC. And we really don't know, since we're talking about the Soviets now, if those were all the accidents and all the deaths. You still don't know how large the final "nuclear exclusion zone" around Fukushima will be or how long people will be prevented from returning to their homes or eating the food from that region.

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: That's somewhat like comparing salmonella to the Black Death. They're both caused by bacteria, after all.

Except that all these nuclear incidents were caused by stupidity, disregard for scientific warnings, cover-up of the facts and profit motives--a combination that always proves deadly.

Katherine[/quote]

David Orange wrote: What I see as your big mistake is to drastically overstate the pollution of photovoltaic manufacture and to drastically minimize the toxicity and scale of the nuclear waste problem.

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: And yours is to drastically overstate the negative effects of nuclear power while completely ignoring the costs of renewables.

No, I haven't "completely ignored" the costs or the pollution from renewables, but there's just no comparison to the negative effects of nuclear power. There are about 150,000 people around Fukushima right now who can't go back to their own homes strictly because of the nuclear carelessness and underestimation of the dangers.

Katherine Derbyshire wrote: The problem is that the real world alternative to nuclear isn't solar and wind, it's coal and natural gas.

Well, that's strictly because there has been no subsidy of solar on the scale we've seen for nuclear. If solar had received 10% of the subsidies given to nuclear over the past 50 years, solar would be far more advanced than it is now.

And the only reason this hasn't been done is, again, the fat cats can control the access to nuclear-generated power and they cannot monopolize the sun. So they tell us that solar is impractical and beat that drum so hard that people vote against their own best interests, again and again, and we have a nuclear-dominated world instead of solar-dominated.