There’s nothing you can do to coal-fired plants to make them less dangerous and less environmentally unfriendly than nuclear plants.
Given the choice between living next to a nuclear plant or a coal plant, choose the nuclear plant. It’ll be better for your health, less risk of dying, less radiation, no lung disease, and free hot water as a bonus.
Irrational fear has nothing to do with this. I think of my descendants, that’s all. Producing nuclear power is of course relatively save over here. That doesn’t mean we are going to find a save spot to store radioactive waste.
Thanks, we know about this for over 30 years however. Living near nuclear reactors is saver than living near coal plants. This has nothing to do with our inability to find solutions for storing nuclear waste though.
Not if you are an optimist.
Exactly. That’s not a disadvantage though. We can’t do this with nuclear waste.
Where’s fly ash stored? (Hint - all over the flipping place).
Vitrified high-level waste from nuclear reactors is in the order of tens of square meters per plant per year. And that’s without considering breeder reactors.
And 100,000 years? 1000 is massively optimistic right now.
We were talking about electricity and not about total power consumption or ressources.
The USA emits twice as much co2 per capita than Germany. So please spare me holier-than-thou statements.
Well, if you live in a country with as much space as the US you get a different perspective, I guess. But a nuclear plant is only better as long as nothing goes wrong. An exploding coal plant means bad news for the people in the immediate vicinity. If you live 30 miles away it´s just a piece of news on tv. An accident at a nuclear plant is a national disaster with unforseeable consequences.
Fukushima cost less in the way of life-hours lost when it failed than a coal plant does in a month of operations.
Even if every nuclear plant failed on the level that the Fukushima reactors failed, they would still be far better choices than coal plants, by orders of magnitude.
Wow. Just wow.
They’re perfectly foreseeable. Moreover, there are accidents on a regular basis, although a small fraction of those at coal-fired power stations. Again, there has never been a major accident at a plant designed more recently than the 1960’s!
In terms of deaths per TWh of generation, coal causes 161, oil 36, gas 4 and nuclear 0.04.
Coal-fired power stations are massive, massive polluters. As well as the radioactivity of fly ash, it contains massive amounts of lead, arsenic and mercury - it’s the single major cause of the last, for instance, and makes a significant proportion of river fish around the world inedible on health and safety grounds! It’s completely inaccurate to look at nuclear plants as the only long-term toxic source we’re discussing.
I doubt that someone can already asses the cost of life hours due to Fukushima…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/13/us-nuclear-evacuees-idUSTRE81C0I520120213
Doesn´t sound so good. I take my chances with the coal plant…
Let´s see…
deaths per TWh
Coal – world average = 161
Coal – China = 278
Coal – USA = 15
Oil = 36
Natural Gas = 4
Biofuel/Biomass = 12
Peat = 12
Solar (rooftop) = 0.44
Wind = 0.15
Nuclear = 0.04
So if you choose to believe that statistic (and i´m quite sceptical) it shows that coal plants in china are dangerous (news at eleven).
But the situation in the US doesn´t look that dire, does it? I wonder why you didn´t link the source and quoted the whole thing…
The USA emits twice as much co2 per capita than Germany. So please spare me holier-than-thou statements.
How is this even remotely relevant? You are getting rid of zero carbon solutions, and replacing them with carbon releasing solutions.
Again, the environment thanks you.
(Frankly, I am totally in favor of the US converting as fast as possible to nuclear power)
Doesn´t sound so good. I take my chances with the coal plant…
Do you anticipate being hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, followed by a massive Tsunami? This seems somewhat unlikely for Germany.
But the situation in the US doesn´t look that dire, does it?
Ya, it’s pretty dire compared to the 0.4 deaths per TWh related to nuclear power. It’s 3750% higher.
We fairly recently had an ash pond fail in the US, and it basically permanently contaminated the surrounding area. Heavy metals, toxins like Arsenic… It’s not a good scene. And, as others have pointed out, this doesn’t even get into the issues with actually mining the coal.
The cleanest coal plant in the world is going to be many orders of magnitude more damaging to the environment than any modern nuclear plant.
Maybe you don’t care about the environment, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s your call. But if you actually care about the environment, then nuclear is cleaner, hands down.
I think that 37,500% more deadly looks pretty dire, just not as bad as 402,500% worldwide or 700,000% more deadly in China. What level of death trips your particular “dire” threshold?
As someone above noted, the US is quite large and the population relatively sparse. His core point is about overall (meaning worldwide) impact, not about the US. If you wanted to get specific, it would be interesting to see what the numbers are for German coal, given the fairly dense population.
The other thing that’s getting lost here is that these numbers are just for direct health effects. No numbers beyond sheer speculation exist for the global warming consequences.
I was amused to find that nuclear is actually safer than rooftop solar. Makes sense when you look at scale, I guess.
It’s 0.04… you gotta add another zero.
You’ve already made up your mind as to the cost of nuclear power, but at the same time you don’t think that we can assess the cost of Fukushima in life-hours?
Doesn´t sound so good. I take my chances with the coal plant…
Maybe you should do some reading on the human-life costs of coal. They’re staggering. From lung diseases in mining to radiation emanations to heavy metals toxicity, and that’s just when it’s working well. When a coal plant fucks up or an ash pond goes, it’s worse than Fukushima. By, oh, orders of magnitude.
That’s even more ridiculous then.
I’m not sure if that’s necessarily true. When that pond went recently, it pretty much destroyed the town, but if you actually had a full blown melt down of a nuclear plant, I think the potential area which would be contaminated would actually be larger.
However, the reality is that Fukushima is not by any stretch of the imagination something which should be used as a case by which to pass judgement on nuclear power. The situation which caused its failure was absolutely unprecedented. Honestly, in a similar situation with coal plants, you would have had coal waste spread all over the place by the tsunami. I tried to find some reference regarding this, since many coal fired plants in Japan were also damaged by the huge quake although they were perhaps not located near the coast and so didn’t suffer from the Tsunami effects.
Regardless, you can’t do risk assessment based solely on the worst possible case (and the great East Japan quake is pretty much the worst possible case). Even so, the fact that even when getting hit by two unprecedentedly massive natural disasters, the plants still pretty much kept things under control, is pretty damn impressive.
In Germany, how often is that kind of natural disaster going to hit a plant? Never. The answer is Never. It’s never, ever going to suffer an earthquake of that magnitude, followed by a huge Tsunami.
Quit feeding the troll, he’s ignoring every fact thrown at him and parroting the same points over and over. You’re not going to convince him of anything at this point.
H.
One thing that’s getting glossed over is the timeframe of ongoing contamination. I’m a nuclear proponent, but it would be informative to have numbers that correlate to estimated deaths per capita per 10, 100, 1000, 10000 years and estimated contamination area per Twh per 10,100,1000,10000 years. Part of the problem is the half life of nuclear byproducts does a great job of scaring people because it seems so permanent, while people tend to think of things like contamination of groundwater as fixable on a reasonable time scale. I think the latter assumption tends to be grossly untrue (with effective “half-lifes” of natural remediation of highly toxicified sites upwards of 1000 years or so due to heavy metal contamination and the like).
I did appreciate the dude upthread though who thought spewing heavy metals evenly over the entire world’s population was preferable to concentrating nuclear waste in a single, inhospitable location. Aside from the huge political outcry if you tried to do it, is there a reason why high-orbital nuclear dispersement of radioactive waste wouldn’t effectively be able to do something similar? Pack a few kilotons of waste onto a rocket body, strap a megaton bomb onto it, send it up past the ionosphere, detonate, and watch the pretty colors as the dispersed nuclear material rains down. (I’m serious here; I get the potential for catastrophe on rocket failure or the like, but the net effect of evenly redistributing nuclear power waste byproducts over the entire surface of the earth would be completely negligible, wouldn’t it?)
Sorry, importing from Austria who turned on a dirty old oil powered plant to help supply Germany, while in Germany we turned on five dirty old plants to cover the difference created by shutting down 8 nuclear plants in the summer.
There are a dozen other things which could happen to nuclear reactors. Think about the US most important topic: terrorists.
It’s also quite telling you didn’t even try to address my other point: nuclear waste.
Fukushima was not a full blown melt down, though; note that I said Fukushima, not Chernobyl.
It’s also quite telling you didn’t even try to address my other point: nuclear waste.
Did you actually have a point there?
Your most recent statement demonstrated a profound failure to understand what was going on… The other poster pointed out that fly ash is stored all over the place, and you suggested that this was somehow an advantage. It’s not an advantage at all. There are massive ponds of ash waste just sitting around and contaminating stuff, except when they break down and dump it all over a town.
Also, the “all over the place” comment also points to the fact that a ton of the waste from a coal plant is just ejected into the atmosphere. It’s not stored, because it just gets put into the air, and then dumped onto unsuspected people. The fact that you can’t easily see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.