Supposed people who otherwise seem very interested in nuclear energy discussed this as the interesting puzzle it is. How many would die? Apparently, all of them. Hence my comment, though its point seems to have escaped you. My concern isn't primarily nuclear radiation, my concern is the weakness of people who weren't even exposed to a lot of it.
I’m not worried about how many people nuclear power kills every year. I’m worried about how many people it kills every hundred years. A major nuclear disaster, however unlikely, has the potential to kill millions of people and leave a big portion of the Earth uninhabitable for centuries. Just because we haven’t seen one on that scale yet, doesn’t mean we never will.
People have 99+% irrational fears about radiation.
There are actual challenges with nuclear as well (waste disposal being the primary), but those are distantly trailing the radiation fear (and not obviously-to-me worse on-balance than the fossil fuel alternatives at this point).
I think the concern with nuclear energy is around the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. The media portrayal of nuclear energy is that it's very dangerous, even if that's not really true.
The issue with the nuclear power is the nuclear warhead. Mankind would be perfectly fine with nuclear power but will always be at risk as long as it is weaponized. Some folks being fatally radiated does not impose risk to our kind.
Yes, exactly. And for a discussion about the pros and cons of Nuclear Energy the important factor is not, if it is less deadly than people generally think, but if it is safe enough that anyone (or at least a democratic majority) would accept the risks.
What is the point of a discussion with the topic "it is deadly, but not as deadly as people generally think, but still unacceptably deadly"? I don't get it.
i think the major risk for nuclear energy isn't about human death but rather economical consequences of having an entire region destroyed for 40 thousands years.
"Oil and coal and nitroglycerin have caused similar destruction, yet you don't see comments like yours about them.."
Well, perhaps because my comment did not concern the very real dangers of these things but rather concerned the very real and irrational fear evoked by nuclear power.
What does "honestly" mean in these circumstances???
---> However nuclear power acquired it's stigma, the question is whether any proponents of it has a plan for removing that stigma.
Radiation is a strange subject to get from the news. There's a quote I heard from a nuclear scientist "Those that know the most fear the least" (note, that he didn't say "don't fear"). A lot of this is reminiscent of cold war era and nuclear weapons (a VERY real fear). And because radiation is such a difficult to understand subject, and since scientists aren't the greatest communicators to the average person, things get fuzzy. And lastly, humans are bad at understanding risk. Like that more people die per year from coal production in the US than have ever (or ever will) from any (current) nuclear disaster (see linear no threshold models). That's a crazy stat to me.
We do need to do long term storage, but we (the US) stopped the long term plan of Yucca Mountain.
What worries me though is that we need nuclear more than ever. The IPCC agrees, it's the only current technology that we have to address (not solve) the issue.
"The public perception of the dangers of anything radioactive is quite exaggerated."
Not when you bring the timescales into account, recognize that you'd have to scale operations up massively from present levels (15,000 or so plants vs. the 436 presently operating in the world). This would mean commissioning and decommissioning about a plant per day.
Add to this questions over fuel availability (known reserves are good for about 80 years at present levels of use, 6 if used for all human energy needs), and the need to find some way for creating transport and storage fuels, and nuclear is at best a small part of a much larger energy solution.
The other problem is the public's unreasonable expectations about safety. Given the amount of radiation already emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuels, a nuclear power plant meltdown cannot be considered to be a remarkable addition to that balance.
>I'm not claiming to have the definite answer. I just don't understand where people like you are taking their confidence from.
I get my confidence from my understanding of nuclear energy. I'm not a nuclear scientist, but if your even remotely technically inclined(or just make an effort to understand) the basics are not hard to learn.
Most people think it's beyond their ability to understand how nuclear works so they don't even try, it might as well be black magic to them. It's then really easy to scare them with nuclear horror stories, and no amount of facts can undo that because they haven't got the fundamentals to understand those facts.
Did you know that in 1957 there was a fire in a military nuclear reactor in the UK burning for 2 days before it was shut down? Much of this burned nuclear material was passing almost freely into the atmosphere with not a single dangerous dose of radiation.
Or in another accident in 1961 three operators were killed(not by radiation), one of which was stuck to the ceiling with debris from the initial explosion. The rescue team used meat hooks on sticks to retrieve the body(in parts), being able to spend less than 57 seconds in the area. The bodies were so radioactive that they had to be berried in lead caskets.
People are somewhat irrational in nature and fear rare, but spectacular events more than the mundane. This is the number one problem with nuclear that I see it: no other power source has had anything on the scale of Chernobyl. The only thing that I think offhand could come close as far as potential deaths is a hydro dam collapse.
The reality is, we are all human, the world loves to throw unexpected surprises at us (such as the tsunami that helped cause Fukushima). So a Level 7 event is always a small probability. Even if it is much less of a probability than fossil electricity accidents and the issues from pollution overall are worse for fossil fuel, it's a hard sell because of the ways humans are wired.
It also doesn't help that the technology is mysterious to a lot of people as you mention. "Flammable material burns, makes energy" is somewhat intuitive to most people. Nuclear is not intuitive at all. Just think at how Hollywood tends to depict nuclear in the popular lore. :)
At any rate, my personal reason I think nuclear will never gain much traction in this modern world is that one of those "potential surprises" is terrorism. Nuclear plants are an acknowledged target. So at the very least, you have to add costs to safeguard the structure and really beef up the security around the plant these days. IMHO this would make any big central nuclear power solution quite a bit much less attractive.
The common conception is that nuclear waste stays for a long time and thus 50K immediate deaths would be translated into 500K+ deaths later.
Also, 50K deaths all at once for any given energy source would also freak people out. I think that most people would unconsciously consider a coal mine disaster or a broken dam as "death from occupation" or "death from random accident" rather than "death from energy source". The unknown-ness of nuclear power tends to make people credit it directly with the deaths around it.
And yes, people have a psychological fear of the unknown. Evolutionarily, this is rather clearly justified.
If the education level in all industrial countries was raised to the point that the average person felt they had a strong understanding of nuclear power, the fear of it quite possibly would subside. But the cost of this might be considerably greater than the cost of converting to an "alternative" energy source.
The risks are completely manageable. Aside from a couple of disasters, nuclear energy has not killed or poisoned very many people at all. There is a cost to all forms of energy production. But because nuclear involves weird stuff with atoms that most people don’t understand, they find it scarier.
reply