Generic wrote:Define severity.
There are many ways to do this. Most risk analysis describes extreme or very severe consequences in terms of breakdown of a system or loss of human life. For the purposes here I will provide the definition of a severe consequence use by one of the world's largest uranium producers:
Very serious long term environmental impairment of eco-system
http://www.bhpbilliton.com/bbContentRep ... sTable.pdf
By any definition - the current events in Japan have resulted in severe consequences
Generic wrote:
I will not say that nuclear fission reactors are the safest way to generate electricity. But compared with the dominant means of generating power in today's environment (fossil fuels and coal burning), they're MUCH MUCH MUCH safer.
Given that continued use of fossil fuel carries a very high likelihood of extreme consequences - yes, that is generally correct
Generic wrote:
The numbers still aren't out on the ongoing Fukushima reactor incident, but before last week, there had been two deaths from nuclear reactor incidents, EVER. Both due to human error in Chernobyl a quarter-century ago
No - there have been far more than that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_an ... death_toll
And this does not include uranium mining incidents or the long-term chronic health impacts.
Generic wrote:
(Worth noting: the Fukushima Nuclear plants were actually comissioned six years BEFORE Chernobyl was. if people would get over this nuclear phobia, we'd be able to apply lessons learned from mistakes like this, and build some TRULY safe and efficient plants with TODAY'S technology - at the risk of understatement, Russia's 1977 state-of-the-art and Japan's 1971 state-of-the-art both lag significantly behind the global 2011 standards). It really amazes me that people point to this Fukushima crisis - in which 4 out of 55 reactors built with 1970s technology had cooling issues (one of which has had containment difficulty) after an 8.7-Richter earthquake and resultant tsunami - as evidence that nuclear reactors aren't safe. If it takes an 8.7-Richter earthquake to disrupt your standard operations, it sounds to me like you're pretty well set already.
The key lesson to be learned here is that risk can never be eliminated. The engineers there certainly did a good job in designing a plant to withstand the impact of a massive earthquake - as they should, since they were building a plant exactly where a massive earthquake was a very high likelihood of occurring. But they didn't think of everything. The main failure came from the failure of a simple diesel backup generator - not the fancy nuclear stuff. Risk cannot be eliminated
Generic wrote:solar is unreliable
That's funny. For the past 40 or so years - I am pretty certain that the sun came up, right on time, every single day! And I have it on good authority that it has done this for considerably longer than that. That seems fairly reliable to me.
Generic wrote:
What are the alternatives? The status quo kills more people weekly than nuclear power EVER has. Solar and wind are nice, but solar is unreliable and a lot of people object to having wind turbines built in their areas. Hyrdoelectric dams are also a good alternative, but can only really supply power to their neighboring municipalities, and even then not even enough, as it merely supplements the energy pulled in from non-renewable resources. Let's face it, if we as a society are going to keep consuming power at current rates (or even after a significant cutback in consumption), we're going to need to find a contingency plan for when the dinosaur bones run out.
None of the alternatives are capable of generating the necessary power load on demand - except for nuclear plants.
Not sure where you get that last idea from. It is simply untrue. There are a lot of ways to create electricity. The idea that it can only be created by using the stuff dug up out of the ground is an idea put about by the people that make money by selling stuff they did up out of the ground. It has no actual basis in reality.
To make electricity - all you need to do is turn a loop of wire. You can do this either directly by wind or water movement, or by heating water to make steam turn a turbine. All uranium based nuclear power is is a particularly inefficient way of heating water.
To give just one example of a far simpler and far more efficient way of doing it - solar thermal. You use the sun to heat water to create steam to turn a turbine. You use the sun to make something hot (eg. a block of graphite or salt etc), that things cools slowly and heats water. Next day, it warms up again. Cheap, reliable baseload power. Extremely simple and using existing technology. All of my domestic hot water and the heating for my swimming pool is done in exactly this way. The sun warms them up. The only difference between this and wider implementation is a matter of economies of scale
Generic wrote:
I agree with Caravan Ray about one thing, though: this is probably the last nail in the coffin for nuclear power. Which is a shame, because it basically means that every first world country is stuck on fossil fuels until they run out. I wish there were somewhere else I could be when that happens.
No - it is not a shame to see the end of uranium. It is an extremely expensive, inefficient and polluting way of generating electricity.
There is not a single nuclear plant in the world that has ever been built without massive government subsidy. It is simply far too expensive. You would have no nuclear industry in the USA at all if it had not been an offshoot of the arms industry. And most of the cost has not yet been realised. Every single plant on this planet will be decommissioned one day. That means that thousands of tonnes of contaminated concrete must be disposed of safely, and this disposal will need to be monitored. The electricity companies will not pay for this. You will. Just as you (and your grandchildren etc) will be paying for the upkeep and monitoring of the disposal of spent fuel for thousands of years to come. Just as me (and my grandchildren etc) will be paying for the upkeep and monitoring of the disposal of heavy metal tailings at Mary Kathleen and Ranger etc for years to come.
And this does not even take into account the fact that uranium is an extremely rare element in the concentrations which make it an economic resource. The more gets used - the more it will cost in future. Fossil fuels certainly need to be replaced. But replacing them with just another polluting finite power source is not a very good idea.