Reason for and a critical question about 2012's 6.9% decline in nuclear production

[kristopher]

34. Seriously? You are disputing the fact that prevailing winds saved Tokyo?

That is one of the most absurd statements I've seen here. Tally the amount of fallout that blew out to sea and then aim it at Tokyo and let me know what the response would have been. Thyroid cancer has absolutely nothing to do with the abandonment of an area because it is hit with heavy fallout.

"A sample size of 2" is what you need to reconsider. You can dispute it all you want but the fact remains that the observed failure rate for nuclear reactors is far higher than you are suggesting. You are engaging in a form of data trimming that is explicitly designed to suggest a higher level of performance than the history of nuclear power has delivered. The fact that reactor designs vary widely is true, but so is the fact that the 26 relevant failures are spread across the range of designs with one common element - human imperfection.

This discussion shreds the premise you are trying to deploy: http://www.democraticunderground.com/112759049#post23

This snip benefits from the context provided at the link, but it catches the meat of the matter:

Even universities erroneously use subjective probabilities (iii), not frequencies (ii), to assess nuclear-core-melt likelihood, particularly when pro-nuclear-government agencies fund their studies. For instance, although the classic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-authored, government-funded, reactor-safety study had frequency data for various nuclear accidents that already had occurred after decades of US-operating experience, it did not use them; instead the MIT authors used subjective, pro-nuclear assumptions and conjectures about these accident probabilities (Rasmussen, 1975). When independent, university mathematicians compared US nuclear-accident-frequency data, reported from operating experience, with MIT guesses (iii), they discovered that all ‘guesses’ were far too low, by several orders of magnitude. None of the nuclear-accident-frequency data, based on reactor-operating experience, was within the theoretical, 90% confidence interval of the MIT ‘guesses.’Yet there is only a subjective probability of 10% that any of these true (frequency-based) probability values (for different types of reactor accidents) should fall outside this 90% interval. The conclusion? University mathematicians said that MIT assessors were guilty of a massive ‘overconfidence’ bias toward nuclear safety, a typical flaw in most industry-government-funded, nuclear-risk analyses (Cooke, 1982).

The love professed by nuclear supporters for adherence to the data seems to suffer from a certain failure of objectivity.

Seriously, the OP was perfectly clear, but you needed it restated just to pretend you weren't hiding. Now you come back with this litany of irrelevant objections that are clearly masking a fear of addressing the perfectly legitimate question posed.

If you can't engage in a sincere discussion about such an obvious and profound aspect of the use of nuclear power, then why would you think anyone should listen to you about anything related to the topic?