Death Rates per TWh (terra watt hour) by energy source

[txlibdem]

------------------------------------------------------------------
Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the chart that the anti-nuke crowd wants to make sure you *never* see.

My position has been stated many times: we need either 30/70 or 40/60 nuclear to renewable energy mix, 0% coal, 0% oil, 0% natural gas. And once we have achieved 70% renewable energy we'll start shutting down the nuclear power plants.

[msongs]

1. Nuclear is an obsolete technology whose time has passed. Billions to greedy corporations will not

change that.

[Nederland]

2. Obsolete by what measure? (nt)

[txlibdem]

6. It is the Nuclear Construction Industry that has to be reigned in, not the technology

The costs of building nuclear power plants have gone from less than $500,000 in 1970 to $12 Billion ($12,000,000,000). That's not inflation, that's greed. Workers make less now than they did in 1970 so you can't tell me it's labor costs. And raw materials don't make up more than 30% to half the final cost, and they haven't gone up more than double or triple since 1970 anyway.

It's the greed of the construction companies that has to be dealt with.

My preference is to push for mass produced Thorium cycle nuclear power plants and also SMRs (which by their very nature are mass produced in the factory). Try to gouge us on that, you greedy construction companies!

... refer to http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/005198.html

The stupid thing is that they are shooting themselves in the foot by jacking up prices so high. Orders are being canceled all over the place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nuclear power generates approximately 20 percent of all U.S. electricity. And because it is a low-carbon source of around-the-clock power, it has received renewed interest as concern grows over the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on our climate.

Yet nuclear power’s own myriad limitations will constrain its growth, especially in the near term. These include:

* Prohibitively high, and escalating, capital costs ƒ
* Production bottlenecks in key components needed to build plants ƒ
* Very long construction times ƒ
* Concerns about uranium supplies and importation issues ƒ
* Unresolved problems with the availability and security of waste storage ƒ
* Large-scale water use amid shortages ƒ
* High electricity prices from new plants ƒ

Nuclear power is therefore unlikely to play a dominant–greater than 10 percent–role in the national or global effort to prevent the global temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above preindustrial levels.

http://climateprogress.org/2008/06/02/the-self-limiting-future-of-nuclear-power-part-1/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Confusious]

13. Would that be GE who got tax rebates on wind?

oops, I shouldn't mentioned that...

[kristopher]

3. That data is known by you to be false.

1) The number of fatalities associated strictly with the nuclear fuel chain (excludes major accidents) is 0.69/TWh (The Meaning Of Results: Comparative Risk Assessments OF Energy Options). http://www.informaworld.com/index/02X48X98DVPW7U96.pdf The 0.69 deaths/TWh represents 0.04/TWh in OCCUPATIONAL fatalities AND 0.65/TWh in PUBLIC fatalities.

2)Gipe, (2006, 2009) finds that the number derived from considering ALL KNOWN FATALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH WIND (including incidents that strain credulity to attribute them to the technology) as of 2009 is 0.07/TWh. . Also, there is a very strong case to be made for the position that this already low number hugely exaggerates the actual risks associated with the wind industry.
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html

One of the most significant issues, however, is the glossing over of what deaths are attributable to nuclear. This omission is typical of the way data trimming is widely used by nuclear proponents.

[txlibdem]

7. Data trimming by fossil fuels proponents

Even if I believe your imfornaworld.com link (which I don't) -- at 0.69/TWh, it still makes nuclear many times safer than:
Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12

What? Mr. Fossil Fuels brings out a link that proves that his favorites (coal, oil and natural gas) are more deadly?!? What are you thinking?

[kristopher]

8. You knowingly posted false data about wind, solar and nuclear

The false information is specifically designed to enhance nuclear against its real competition - renewables.

[txlibdem]

10. Please, oh expert in all things, enlighten us as to what is incorrect

I just can't wait for your answer...

[wtmusic]

15. .

:spray:

[Tesha]

4. This works because cancer deaths occur far away from the nuclear plants...

...in space and time, so the nukes evade
all responsibility.

No uranium miner ever dies of cancer from
radon exposure, right? And Fukushima and
Chernobyl never killed anyone either, right?

Tesha

[wtmusic]

16. Cancer deaths from coal also occur far away in space and time

If the World Health Organization is correct, deaths from fossil fuel pollutants every year are 1000x as much as the entire casualty list from Chernobyl.

Nukes don't evade all responsibility, there's just a lot less of it.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html

[Tesha]

19. Ahh! The ever-popular "But *THEY* do it too!" excuse.

Made popular by children everywhere.

Does it work as well for Wind, Solar, and Hydro power?

Tesha

[txlibdem]

20. Please read the OP. You're just being argumentative for no reason

The chart in the OP clearly shows that solar, wind, hydro have a very, very low death rate per TWh.

[Tesha]

22. I knew that; I was wondering if the other poster did.

As I said, the "but COAL IS WORSE!" argument is
the sort of argument a child would make and is
no defense of nuclear power.

Tesha

[txlibdem]

28. At the risk of sounding snippy, please read the OP, including the linked article in its entirety

You will see that it's nothing like a "but coal is worse" situation. The author is a proponent of wind power, as am I (but I also like all the other zero carbon energy sources as well). DU limits how much of an article you can (legally) quote in your posts; I'm not trying to trick you or hide anything from you. Please read the article.

[Tesha]

31. My reply was to reply #4 and *NOT* to the original article. (NT)

[SpoonFed]

54. so... I presume that wind...

is how you're going to power your floating cities initiative?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=290357&mesg_id=290428
I mean, your questionable OP aside, you're not working with much cred, in my eyes.

[kristopher]

24. Which you falsely inflated while falsely lowering that of nuclear

1) The number of fatalities associated strictly with the nuclear fuel chain (excludes major accidents) is 0.69/TWh (The Meaning Of Results: Comparative Risk Assessments OF Energy Options). http://www.informaworld.com/index/02X48X98DVPW7U96.pdf The 0.69 deaths/TWh represents 0.04/TWh in OCCUPATIONAL fatalities AND 0.65/TWh in PUBLIC fatalities.

2)Gipe, (2006, 2009) finds that the number derived from considering ALL KNOWN FATALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH WIND (including incidents that strain credulity to attribute them to the technology) as of 2009 is 0.07/TWh. . Also, there is a very strong case to be made for the position that this already low number hugely exaggerates the actual risks associated with the wind industry.
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html

One of the most significant issues, however, is the glossing over of what deaths are attributable to nuclear. This omission is typical of the way data trimming is widely used by nuclear proponents.

[txlibdem]

27. Your concerns are answered in the link which is in the OP

Falsely accusing someone of "falsely inflating one thing and falsely lowering another" is pretty lame when you can click on the link right there in the OP and see that the numbers are there. You can also see that Gipe is a proponent of wind power. You can also see that there is another study for Europe only linked to in that article which seems to be right in line with Gipe's figures, generally (I didn't study it intently because I know you're just throwing monkey wrenches and I'm not wasting my time for you).

Just another case of "Kris disagrees with it so it's a lie/conspiracy/aliens/black helicopters/I love the smell of Napalm in the morning/etc."

[wtmusic]

21. Wind and squirrel cages can both boast a very low death rate

and are both completely inadequate to provide a significant source of the world's power.

From the OP, you can see that solar's death rate is higher than nuclear's (due to people falling off roofs putting up panels) and hydro's is 35x as high as nuclear's.

The WHO also has a very thorough accounting of the deaths from Chernobyl - a maximum of 4,000, or 1/43 as many as one dam disaster in China.

[kristopher]

25. That blog pulled the number for solar out of thin air.

And the numbers for wind are inflated while the number for nuclear is a cherry picked subset of the actual number, which itself excludes at a minimum tens of thousands (more likely hundreds of thousands) of deaths related to Chernobyl.

[txlibdem]

30. Wrong. Please read the linked article in its entirety

The numbers were pulled from government accident reports. Solar deaths happen most often to someone putting up solar on a roof. Just read the article...

[Tesha]

32. And governments with vested interests in maintaining a robust nuclear industry...

...to help sustain nuclear weapons programs would
*NEVER* lie with statistics, right?

It's also amusing that they try to conflate "solar
deaths" (which are, by definition, very isolated
events) with "nuclear deaths" which tend to be
massive but delayed from the precipitating event(s).

Finally, "solar deaths" are very understandable by
people and largely preventable by careful action by
the (potentially-)affected individuals. There is no
way that millions of "downwinders" can say the same
about nuclear power: we have no control over what
happens, we are merely victims.

*THAT* is the big difference between "solar deaths"
and "nuclear deaths".

Tesha

[txlibdem]

33. I wasn't responding to any mention of government reports

I was responding to the causes of deaths among solar industry workers.

[Tesha]

34. Funny; when you said "The numbers were pulled from government accident reports. "...

...I assumed you were talking about government accident
reports.

But I also spoke to your point about "solar deaths".

Tesha

[txlibdem]

39. Sorry, I wasn't responding to that. I was responding to Post #28

"I assumed you were talking about government accident reports"

[wtmusic]

47. What on earth are you talking about?

Please explain how "maintaining a robust nuclear industry" has anything to do with sustaining nuclear weapons programs.

Thanks. :crazy:

[Tesha]

60. Perhaps you need to read a few issues of "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists".

The connection between government support of commercial
nuclear power and government support of nuclear weapons
programs (among the nuclear weapons states) is blatantly
clear and well-documented. And I don't need to do your
research for you.

Tesha

[wtmusic]

62. My research?

If you indeed knew anything about research, you would know that anyone making a claim is responsible for backing it up.

Waiting.

[Tesha]

65. Keep waiting; I won't do your homework for you. (NT)

[wtmusic]

69. Ergo, your claims are worthless because you can't support them.

Fail.

[Tesha]

70. No, I just won't waste my time trying to convice you.

You're not convincible and ergo, not worth my time.

Tesha

[HereSince1628]

5. I don't really trust those numbers, numbers which don't include Fukushima

and for which we cannot yet have estimates of lost years of life or even reasonable estimates on property damage.

The insidious problem with nuclear accidents is that the damage done by a reactor failure will be seen over many decades. Consequently it gets spoken of as a contributing risk, rather than as a cause.

Unlike deaths in a mining accident, or as a coal-train collision/derailment, or an accident while cleaning soot out of a coal fired boiler, the proximate causes of individual cases of illness and death after a nuclear accident will be very difficult to assign to exposure to radioactivity. The effect will only be seen across demographic measures of the exposed population.

If we look at it in another way, the differences in scale of the damage done, I think we get a more common sensical picture. The total dollar value of property losses within the exclusion zone in Japan is likely to make the property losses of a coal-related accident look very trivial by comparison. The follow-on dollar losses do to collapsed confidence in food sources coming from exposed downwind areas is going to be even greater. Coal accidents, even horrific accidents, don't have this sort of fall-out effect over tens of thousands of square kilometers.

The worst case coal mine accidents--which to date have to do sludge pit damn failures and mine-fires such as Centralia Pennsylvania only laid waste to the value of property for several thousand residents. The Fukushima accident looks to have directly destroyed the habitability of property for residents numbering at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than than the mine fire in Centralia. Fukushima, and Chernobyl also harmed the value of livestock and property of many tens of thousands of people's property downwind.

The risk of nuclear accidents that release large amounts of radiation is low. But when there have been large releases--Chernobyl and Fukushima--the scale of the impact is huge. There is risk, and there is conditioned risk, and it's common sense to consider BOTH when thinking about nuclear disasters. In an industry about 60 years old, with relatively few nuclear plants compared to fossil fuel generation plants, we now can expect a Chernobyl sized event every 30 years. That's truly rare if we measure safety by an hours of operation scale, but the danger is large if we consider the known impacts of Chernobyl/Fuskshima sized events.

On edit: If we do honest risk assessment it must include immediate damage and an assessment of reversibility/mitigation once an event happens--the ability to recover from a threatened event being actualized. The destruction of a coal accident is over relatively quickly and recover/mitigation proceeds quickly...usually in the scale of days weeks or months, very rarely years or decades. The damage from a nuclear event, depending upon the fuel mix involved is often measured in multiple decades.

[txlibdem]

9. The author updated the figures, states it didn't change any of the standings

The author's statement on Fukushima:
--------------------------------------------------------
I wrote this back in 2008 and with one new death that is somewhat nuclear energy related (a death at one of the japanese nuclear plants following the 8.9 earthquake) the statistics are not changed. Japan should have had sealed backup diesel generators or updated some of their designs. However, nuclear still compares very, very well to the other energy sources. The air pollution data is mainly from the World Health Organization and the european study Externe. The World Health Organization compiled peer reviewed health studies on air pollution from many institutions. Occupational health and safety statistics track the deaths of workers in the different industries.

... from same source as the OP
--------------------------------------------------------

As for your pro-coal message:
---------------------------------------------------------
"The World Health Organization and other sources attribute about 1 million deaths/year to coal air pollution."

... from same source as the OP http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
---------------------------------------------------------

Let's play Devil's advocate (and slimy pundit with no conscience) for a bit: let's take the highest figure I've heard for Chernobyl in 1986 and the worst case scenario for Japan in 2011 for comparison.

Chernobyl, anti-nukes claim 2 million deaths, 1986
Fukushima, "The worst case, Allen said, would be if winds pushed a radioactive cloud south toward Tokyo and Japan's highly populated cities. If that were to happen, he said, the consequences would likely be greater than the 1986 accident at Chernobyl, where an entire area of Ukraine had to be evacuated because of the radioactive conditions that increased the risk of developing cancer." So I say 3 million deaths.

That's a total of 5 million deaths. A completely fabricated number but I've never heard even the most rabid anti-nuke claim anything higher. If true, it would be a gruesome loss of hard working, decent people, human beings and I would feel sick over that high a death toll.

But let's compare to Coal: 1 million deaths per year. That means that since 1986, 25 years... that comes out to 25 MILLION DEATHS due to coal.

I can't imagine making a choice to kill 25 million people by keeping coal power plants or using any of the fossil fuels at all.

/edited to correct date of Chernobyl and number of people killed by coal power plants since then.

[HereSince1628]

11. But the comparisons are clearly incomprable due to the disparity

of the sample sizes.

The comparisons must be normalized so comparisons can be made. That seems on my first read to be what is missing. Deaths and property losses from coal are related to hundreds of pollution days per thousands of power plants each year.

Deaths and property losses from nuclear power represent only hundreds of pollution days per power plant per year.

Chernobyl gets to leave it's radioactive contamination only 365 days per year, times one power plant. The entire coal burning power industry generates pollutants 365 days a year times thousands of coal burning plants.

The denominators used in an incidence calculation are several magnitudes of order different. A common sense approach demands that comparisons not be made on a per industry basis but on a per accident basis.

The numbers I've seen seem to be comparisons across industries. I don't think coal would come away looking clean on this basis, but I think that the per incident basis would better represent the conditioned risk (risk of dying in a plane if it is actually crashing rather than the risk of dying in a airplane crash divided by all airplane flights). The conditioned risk gives a much better estimate of the magnitude that must be mitigated against per accident/event.

[txlibdem]

12. Cherry picking the numbers?

Wouldn't it be nice if we could separate each of the thousands of coal plants and attribute only that tiny fraction of the deaths coal causes each year. Maybe we should only count one of the thousand nuclear power plants that has never resulted in a death, ever? Or maybe we could count the number of people who die by bee sting and compare that with deaths by lightning strikes...

What a novel idea, using some small subset of data to prove your point while simultaneously making it a worthless comparison.

[HereSince1628]

14. No NOT cherry-picking, standardizing the values

of incidence rates so that they ARE comparable in an unbiased manner.

Think about it this way, if you want to compare live births in two very different sized populations you can't simply compare them based on the number of births. Other things being equal, the bigger population would very likely have more births just because it is bigger. So a comparison is based on per capita births (births per woman) or a percentage, or births per 1000 or such. The pools of data can be standardized and made to yield two values which can be fairly compared so that the different sizes of the populations don't distort the result.

Another problem with the disparate sample sizes is that the variance (as in the dispersion or range) in damage surrounding events at nuclear plants is going to be very large owing to the small sample size. Some events...such as 3 mile island, cause much less damage than others...like Chernobyl. There aren't enough events to really know what an average plus or minus typical variation is going to be for these events. At the same time the variance around the many coal fired plants is going to be small due to large sample size and events that are typically much smaller in scale than a Fukushima event. Homogeneity of variance is a criterion for making meaningful statistical comparisons.

The conditioned risk rather than the ordinary risk is typically a better comparison for understanding the costs and type of mitigation required to recover from an event that actually happens.

I'm not an actuary but I do have some appreciation for some of the sophistication required for good comparisons of risk between coal-fired plants and nuclear plants.

[txlibdem]

17. Per capita is good for you, but per TerraWatt Hour (TWh) is not?

"Mmmmm. Delicious cherries. Let me just pick some more"

[HereSince1628]

18. Because TWH doesn't consider conditioned risk.

Because it's the magnitude of conditioned risk that makes people anxious.

[wtmusic]

23. A typical coal plant kills more people than Fukushima has every year.

About twenty. That's comparing in an unbiased manner.

[kristopher]

26. A typical nuclear supporter kills more truth in one day than

your typical nuke plant kills fish in a year.

[txlibdem]

29. Some of your posts challenge me, some infuriate me

But then I get to a gem like this one and I just have to laugh. Thanks for making an old man (feel old anyway) chuckle!

You are funny.

[madokie]

36. Actually it wasn't funny, it was dead on

Thats why that chuckle you're having is really a nervous laugh.

Add: really

[txlibdem]

37. Now I get to chuckle at your silliness

This thread is a two-fer!

:rofl:

[madokie]

35. I find it hard to believe the numbers of deaths attributed to coal

if it was true where is all these people dying? Are all the people around here dying two or three times, over and over because of coal, how about the ones who died of a heart attack? Where is all these dead bodies that WHO and you keep throwing around? The numbers that WHO uses I suspect is the whole of deaths from pollution. Most deaths from pollution is in third world countries where they have unsafe or no cooking or heating stoves at all. Most of those deaths are because of indoor air pollution, not from the power plant out east of here or the one down south or the one up north. Not enough people dying from pollution around here to cover for those numbers of dead.
I'm thinking I'm smelling texas doo doo :hi:

[txlibdem]

38. So you live just a few miles from a coal power plant, no reason to take this personally

I'm not attacking everything you hold sacred. I just posted an analysis by a proponent of wind power. So take it with a grain of salt if you feel like you have to.

If you don't like the analysis in the OP then you are welcome to find studies that show that living downwind from a coal power plant is not harmful. Good luck finding one.

[madokie]

42. Show me a study made upwind of a coal plant and a nuclear plant

[wtmusic]

49. US coal generation pollution deaths 15,000 - 25,000 annually.

"In a separate but related study, University of Maryland scientists reported Wednesday that the skies became dramatically cleaner when power plants had to shut down during the August 2003 blackout that hit the Northeast.

Measurements found a 90 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide, a gas that leads to haze and acid rain, and a 50 percent reduction in smog, or ground-level ozone. The amount of light-scattering particles in the air dropped by 70 percent and visibility increased by some 20 miles.

"In addition, skies cleared up far from some power plants. "The improvement in air quality provides evidence that transported emission from power plants hundreds of kilometers upwind play a dominant role in regional haze" and smog, the scientists write in a paper appearing in the next issue of Geophysical Research Letters."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/ns/us_news-environment/

[NickB79]

51. Wow, I never thought E/E would come to this

Long-time posters standing up for the coal industry. This has got to be a new low.

[madokie]

53. No one is standing up for the coal industry

especially me. I'm simply questioning the numbers thrown out there when in fact most of those deaths are from indoor air pollution as I stated not coal plants.
Now lets see how low you can actually go

[wtmusic]

63. Study after study madokie

Do you disagree with #49 too? How much evidence is required to convince you?

Two possibilities:

1) This is all a conspiracy by the supposedly-unprofitable nuclear industry, with thousands of participants and nary one whistleblower.

2) The numbers are accurate and you're in more than a bit of denial.

[madokie]

66. I can see where there might be 15 to 20 thousand deaths from pollution

I'm not so sure they all can be contributed to coal plants is what I'm saying. How many of the cancer deaths can be contributed to the nuclear plants? You see both of these is a hard question to answer. How many of the cancer deaths contributed to coal now really is because of radiation that we're not knowing anything about, after all it is invisible to the naked eye. How many people have a way of monitoring the air around them for radiation? What I'm saying is at best these numbers are guesstimates and guesstimates only. Nothing for either you or I to take to the bank

[tinrobot]

40. What about square miles of land made uninhabitable by energy source?

[Systematic Chaos]

41. For starters, try adding up all the square miles taken up by...

...oil refineries, wells, pipelines, reserve tanks, mountains of coal ash and so on.

I guaran-fucking-tee you it's a much bigger land area than that affected by Fukushima plus Chernobyl.

I love these ill-thought-out anti-nuke arguments. I really do. They show just how badly misplaced the energy hysteria really is.

[Tesha]

43. You're falling victim to the same fallacy as some posts above.

It *ISN'T* a question of Nuclear versus Fossil Fuels.

Nowadays, renewables *COMBINED WITH ENERGY CONSERVATION*
could supplant much (or perhaps even most) of our need
for *EITHER* nuclear or fossil fuels. Both industries
are (quite literally in one case) dinosaurs, dead men
walking.

Tesha

[Massacure]

45. Indeed it COULD supplant much of our need.

If you don't mind paying 20-25 cents a kilowatt hour for your electricity and god knows how much for energy storage.

[Tesha]

46. Curious; I've been reading numbers that suggest that renewable energy is cheaper...

...than the fully-burdened cost of Nuclear. Of course,
we never really talk about the fully-burdened cost of
nuclear, we just sling around the bullshit numbers
provided to us by the industry (who would still
peddle "too cheap to meter" if they could get away
with it).

And conservation is *CERTAINLY* cheaper.

Tesha

[wtmusic]

48. Let me guess: you've been reading Mark Z. Jacobson's numbers.

The guy who says we should add in one nuclear explosion every thirty years to the calculation of nuclear energy's carbon footprint.

Am I right?

[NickB79]

52. Do any of them include costs for energy storage systems? nt

[Tesha]

57. Some do, yes. Conservation, of course, has no "energy storage requirement". (NT)

[tinrobot]

44. So oil and gas also makes land uninhabitable....

Let's get rid of that, too...

[txlibdem]

50. Let's get rid of that... first.

Global climate change is accepted as fact by all but a few scientists (many of whom receive funding from the fossil fuel industry). The entire ecosystem of the planet is at risk. The scale of it is just mind boggling. Those who've spent decades spreading the lie that humans could never impact the entire planet have now been proven wrong.

So, what do we do? I say we ramp up nuclear power plants based on the newest and safest designs until we get 30% of the world's energy from nuclear. At the same time, we construct solar, wind, geothermal, tidal and wave power plants as fast as we can and as many as we can. We will soon reach a point where coal plants can begin to be shut down and once all of the coal plants are shut down we will then begin shutting down the natural gas generating plants as well.

We can do this if we make it a priority, and that means political leadership with backbone. THAT is the resource that is truly in short supply.

[SpoonFed]

55. ah, the real agenda comes out...

but it was self-evident from the start. "Let's increase nuclear fission power investment and deployment."

How about you just cut that out of your proposition and I'll agree with you?

Or perhaps we build all these new reactors on floating cities. Then, when this idiotic plan goes all ape shit, we can just sink the reactors with all the inhabitants and their belongings into the ocean directly and the government and power company officials can ride away from said floating cities on zeppelins, that would look so cool. Maybe use nukes to bomb the floating reactor cities into the sea.

Why haven't they used that tera-ton shaped-charge nuke to sink Fukushima into the ocean, yet?

[txlibdem]

58. Let's get rid of the most dangerous energy sources first

And that means coal and oil. There should be no question about that in your mind if you've been paying attention for the past decade.

Once we get rid of all the fossil fuel use then we should, I agree, start closing down the nuclear fission power plants.

I'm ignoring your quip about nuking the floating cities as too crass to deserve a response, especially since I mentioned them in the context of Japan.

[SpoonFed]

68. I appologize...

I'm ignoring your quip about nuking the floating cities as too crass to deserve a response, especially since I mentioned them in the context of Japan.

You're right. It was insensitive of me to nuke your floating cities idea out of the water. It was very realistic and worth discussing seriously. The power plants at Fukushima Daiichi are doing a good job of nuking your dream of a fission power plant renaissance out of existence, in real life.

Re: "the most dangerous energy sources first", your opinion that nuclear isn't the most dangerous, like your understanding of superior Japanese-floating-city-building robot technology, is also faulty.

You forgot plutonium is plutonium in your copypasta dissertation.

[Tesha]

56. And we'll solve the nuclear waste problem "later", same as we've been...

...solving it all along.

No, thanks!

Solve the waste problem now, before we go doubling or
trebling the waste volumes.

Tesha

[txlibdem]

59. Coal power plants put out many times the toxic and radioactive waste as nuclear plants

It's funny how people with an agenda can't see that facts are facts.

Radiation is radiation, Uranium is Uranium, Thorium is Thorium, Cesium is Cesium. They all come from coal power plants as well as nuclear plants. The only difference is that nuclear power plants are required to contain their waste while coal just spews it out into the environment. Why do anti-nuke types see no problem with this???

[Tesha]

64. And renewables? And conservation?

How much semi-forever waste do they spew out?

It's funny how many of the pro-nuke arguments devolve
down to "But coal does it tooooooo!". Coal doesn't create
new radionuclides, even if it is guilty of spreading existing
radionuclides. And when was the last time that coal
rendered an entire region more-or-less permanently
uninhabitable? Even around Centralia, PA, most forms
of life still go on. Not so much around Chernobyl or the
Japanese nukes...

Tesha

[txlibdem]

73. Nuclear fails due to devastating acts of nature, coal kills 1 million people a year by design

You would do well to learn the difference.

As I showed in a previous post, since Chernobyl in 1986 the most ridiculously high number of deaths I've ever seen is 2 million. Everyone who has studied Chernobyl says it's far, far less than that but let's go with it. There hasn't been a nuclear disaster between 1986 and 2011, 25 years.

Compare that to 25 years of normal operation of coal plants. The World Health Organization reports that coal pollution kills 1 million people a year. It's not a fair comparison because the Chernobyl deaths are computed from 1986 onward with no stopping point and we're only adding up 25 years for coal pollution deaths but let's go with that comparison even though it is heavily slanted IN FAVOR OF COAL.

Deaths:
Coal = 25 Million
Chernobyl = 2 million

Facts are facts. Coal kills as part of its very design, part of its normal operation because we haven't forced the coal industry to pay for nor account for all the "external" costs of using coal.

Do you want to have a fair comparison between the actual deaths from Chernobyl as calculated by experts in the medical, government, and scientists versus the deaths from coal? You've already lost, 12 times the death from coal even with wild eyed anti-nuke made up numbers for Chernobyl's death toll.

PS, The cause of Chernobyl was one idiot bureaucrat who ordered all of the safety systems to be shut down so he could perform a test. I doubt the Russians would do that again. But I don't expect you to change your mind. Anti-nukeism is like your religion and I know facts and truth will never change your mind.

[Tesha]

75. And *YOU* would do well to learn the difference between a modern American scrubber-equipped coal...

...plant and the relics that are responsible for most of
those "million deaths per year"; there is some difference.

But as I asked in the subject of the post to which you
just replied:

What about renewables? What about conservation?
(But they don't promote the sale of nukes, do they?)

Tesha

[txlibdem]

76. False coal-lobby talking points. Nice.

We both know that scrubbers remove only the particulates that would ordinarily go out the smoke stack. It does nothing for the CO2, the main reason to get rid of coal, that's why the coal lobby shills keep talking about "clean" coal (which does not exist -- they even closed the only "clean" coal test facility), when the light of truth is shined on the radioactive and deadly toxins that coal puts out as part of its normal operation the coal lobby has to snort a double line of coke just to keep going.

The EPA knows that the scrubbers simply mean the toxic chemicals from coal go into the open pits and unlined and unregulated open ponds that are responsible for contaminating the underground water supplies. And then there's the tiny little problem of the entire valley and town that were buried under toxic and radioactive coal slurry from one of those ponds where "the containment broke" and released millions of gallons of toxic coal filth.

Those people will never be moving back to that valley.

But, please continue to spew your emissions of coal lobby talking points. The truth will win the argument for me.

[Tesha]

77. You might contemplate where a good deal of the commercial gypsum comes from these days.

There's actually a market for at least some of the
waste from coal plants; there's not much of a broad
market for nuclear waste (although I'm sure the industry
is workin hard on developing some).

Tesha

[txlibdem]

79. You're confused. Gypsum doesn't come from coal plants

http://www.geologicmining.com/gypsumfaqs.html

What DOES come from coal plants? Toxic metals and radioactive materials Uranium, Thorium and Radon:
http://www.ccag.org.au/images/stories/pdfs/coal%20is%20toxic.pdf


Table salt is also mined from the same geologic sources as gypsum and coal. Should I toss some over my shoulder twice before dining?
http://www.saltinstitute.org

[Tesha]

80. No, you're confused. The sulfur-scrubbing process at at least some plants produces calcium sulfate..

otherwise known as gypsum.

http://www.caer.uky.edu/kyasheducation/gypsum.shtml

Are you equally well-informed about the nuclear
power you promote so heartily?

Tesha

[txlibdem]

81. So you're claiming that coal is good for us???

Nice try. Good luck getting anyone with a triple digit IQ to agree with you.

Your post has positioned you soundly in the coal-lovers club, a dying breed. I hope the future sees more and more people realizing that you coal lovers are responsible for close to 100 million deaths since coal burning began. What a sterling track record!

[Systematic Chaos]

72. Or, let's keep railing on ad nauseam about all those renewables that are going to save us...

...any fucking day now.

Because they've just done so much for us after half a century of hype.

Of course, those renewables guarantee further dependence upon oil, coal and natural gas as backups. And the solar panel manufacturing process will turn plenty of land in China into white goop-covered cancer villages -- but who the fuck cares when you can have your very own solar pool heater?

[madokie]

67. You'd guarantee that huh n/t

[Systematic Chaos]

71. Yes, I would.

Of course, you're too busy riding your little solar miracle cart up and down the sidewalk to get your facts straight.

But thanks for playing.

[SpoonFed]

74. citation required

thanks for playing.

[meow mix]

61. is this suppose to convince anyone? hahahahah

pretty tough work in the midst of a multiple reactor meltdown huh?
talk about bad taste, you guys need to go back to marketing school :rofl:

[txlibdem]

78. Bad taste: using a tragedy in Japan to further your anti-nuke agenda

No. I take it back. That is not merely in bad taste, it is sub-human.

But please, you and your fellow anti-nuke zealots, continue to write up dozens of anti-nuke post each and every day. This is your sickening and inhuman record of using a natural disaster that has cost tens thousands of lives (the earthquake and tsunami) to further your political agenda just because there are nuclear reactors in the affected area. Just count all of those anti-nuke OPs each and every day. Sickening.

And, no, I do not expect to convince you or any other anti nuclear zealot. You are beyond help. I hope to convince enough intelligent people so that the human species may just have a chance to survive -- which we will not if we keep using coal, oil and natural gas in our societies.

[SpoonFed]

82. I used to stop by DU for the useful information, now...

I stop by for the daily dose of satire...

further your political agenda just because there are nuclear reactors in the affected area

Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and point out that these nuclear reactors in the affected area just happened to have suffered four or more catastrophic explosions, so yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and say that you're kinda full of it to suggest this is some sort of bandwagon of imagineering for political purposes dreamt up by the anti-nuke establishment. So, yeah. The natural disaster triggered a man made disaster, yeah.

But please, you and your fellow anti-nuke zealots, continue to write up dozens of anti-nuke post each and every day.

It's appreciated that you say please. You treat the zealots too nicely.

[txlibdem]

83. I never said dreamt up -- I said using a human tragedy to further your anti-nuke agenposda

And I stand by my opinion that it is despicable and one of the most inhuman things I've seen all year.

If you don't read my posts then please don't feel free to blather on.

[txlibdem]

84. I find it strange that the most vocal anti-nukes on DU never say a thing about fossil fuel deaths

Gee, what an interesting coincidence. Especially when you realize that nuclear power is taking a huge chunk of the market away from coal, and that it has the potential to work with electric vehicles to completely do away with oil, gasoline, diesel use forever. Nuclear also has the ability to work with all of the renewable energy sources to do away with coal and natural gas forever.

I wonder why these anti-nukers are so one sided in their arguments against nuclear. I have showed time and again that coal power plants put out far more radiation and cause far more deaths than nuclear (even counting the highest, most inflated and outrageous estimates for Chernobyl and Fukushima, coal still kills more people). So it can't be about radiation as they claim. It can't be about number of deaths as they claim.

There are some mysteries I guess I'll never solve.