Japan

Yes, safest, as opposed to completely safe. Very little we do is completely safe, and every method of power generation we can possibly use carries certain risks and actual impacts to human health and the environment. The trick is objectively measuring those impacts and risks and determining which method creates the most net benefit with the least net harm.The Fukushima reactors have suffered a significant natural disaster. The plant was designed to withstand a 7.8 quake, because historically the area could be expected to experience quakes in the 7.2-7.3 range. This quake was an 8.9, and to anyone familiar with the Richter scale, relative earthquake strength is not linear, it's exponential. In other words, this earthquake wasn't just a little worse, wasn't even 20% worse, but was more like orders of magnitude worse than what the plant was designed to withstand.Still, the plant survived the quake without too much damage. The problem was the ensuing tsunami, which damaged the plant's cooling systems.So, to be clear, we aren't talking about a normal circumstance, not even close.But let's dismiss that - planning for the best possible scenario would be simply falling victim to the planning fallacy. So we'll disregard things like how poorly designed the Chernobyl plant was compared to modern reactors; we'll ignore that Fukushima was hit by two severe natural disasters followed by aftershocks, and so on.To determine relative safety, we need to look at how many people actually die or are injured by different power generation methods, regardless of what caused the accidents, and regardless of what causes the harm (ie, a death due to radiation exposure is no different from a death in a fire or explosion, a casualty is a casualty).It's premature to do such a calculation while this crisis is ongoing - we do not yet know how this is all going to play out. Right now we're detecting elevated but still not harmful levels of radiation in the area (2x normal is the number I've heard, and double the normal daily amount of radiation is virtually nothing). Fuel rods may have burned, which carries the risk of sending radioactive particulate matter into the air - ie, fallout. Instead of speculating with regards to the current disaster, let's look at the history of nuclear power.The first commercial US nuclear power plant was completed in 1958. The first nuclear Navy vessel was launched in 1955. Either way, we have between 50-60 years of nuclear power generation. Wiki has a nice, useful list of all nuclear or radiation accidents as defined by the Atomic Energy Commission, along with casualty figures.Over the course of those 5-6 decades, we have had a total of 18 incidents, 19 if we count Fukushima (please note that the Chernobyl disaster was filed under Pripyat, Ukraine), that involved either multiple fatalities or damages over $100 million. These incidents range from explosions at power plants to radiation leaks to close-call meltdown aversions to simply getting caught violating safety protocols and being forced to shut down.4 incidents involved deaths.Only one killed more than 5 people.The total death toll from all global nuclear accidents from 1952 to today (excluding only Fukushima because we don't have numbers yet) was 63. The overwhelming majority were caused by Chernobyl. As late as the late 90s, several Chernobyl workers and rescue personnel were being studied, and an additional 216 deaths were attributed to the disaster over the ensuing decade (long-term deaths due to radiation exposure). That bumps the total of nuclear reactor-related deaths to 279.Outside of actual power plant accidents, there have been other radiological crises associated with nuclear power (waste storage problems, nuclear submarine disasters, etc). These cumulatively resulted in roughly 262 additional fatalities. At least one of the incidents is believed to have an overly conservative casualty estimate due to Soviet secrecy surrounding the event, so let's triple the number to try to account for that known inaccuracy; that gives us a total of 786 deaths.So, between actual reactor crises and other radiological disasters related to nuclear power, we have a total of 1065 people who have been killed by a nuclear accident since the beginning of nuclear power generation.In comparison, over 6000 coal miners died in China alone in 2004. The US tracks their own coal mining deaths pretty well. Since 1952, the same period as our nuclear data for comparison, there have been 9367 coal mining deaths in the United States.That's just coal, and it's only for the mining, not the power plants. I'm not even counting things like underground coal fires that have been burning since the 60s, or coal plant explosions and fires, etc. And I didn't even use global numbers like I did for nuclear plants. Yet the death toll is still roughly nine times that caused by nuclear accidents.So yes - I'm still a strong supporter of nuclear power. The death toll in Fukushima would have to reach pretty high to make nuclear power more dangerous than coal - even another Chernobyl wouldn't be enough.People aren't afraid of nuclear power because it's more dangerous. They're afraid because it's more scary. Nobody thinks about the natural gas line that exploded in the San Francisco Bay area last year and killed a few people and burned down homes, but they sure do think about radiation levels detected at double the background rate (normal exposure over a year from radiation is .05sv; at 1-2sv only 5% of those exposed will actually die, so double the normal amount isn't worth mentioning). For some reason, people are far more terrified of cancer and radiation sickness than they are of burning to death, or drinking water contaminated by hydraulic fracturing.I'd rather live a few miles from a nuclear power plant than an oil refinery or a coal power plant.Saying "oh look, there's a disaster happening, that means this is really dangerous! We should keep using other power generation methods instead of nuclear!" is like pointing at a recent plane crash and claiming that flying is more dangerous than driving. The statistics don't lie. We might be more frightened of one than the other; we might feel a nervousness when we board a plane that we don;t feel when we hop on the freeway. But we're irrational animals by nature, and our fears have little to do with real risk. It's safer to fly than it is to drive, even though terrorists hijacked planed on 9/11 and flew them into buildings, even though planes sometimes crash due to pilot or mechanical failure. Nuclear power is safer than fossil fuels, even if radiation is more scary than fire.I don't include so-called "renewable" energy in the discussion because wind, solar, wave, hydro, and geothermal are all supplemental methods of power generation, not primary. They're great in locations where they're cost-effective, but they can only ever supplement the power grid, not run it.

Well, the real problems here seem to be terrorism and natural disasters, not nuclear power. Should we stop building anything that OMG TERRORISTS could fly a plane into? Which power plants, I wonder, are immune to damage from an 8.9 quake + tsunami?What would happen to the Hoover Dam if there were an 8.9 quake nearby? Or if OMG TERRORISTS flew a plane into it? Does that mean hydro power is unsafe, of that quakes and plane crashes stress any design beyond normal operating parameters, and that sometimes we can't forsee all the shit that might happen?(btw - those giant cooling towers on nuke plants? They were actually designed to take the impact of an airliner. We don't use them in newer designs anyway, but it's a fun fact).

I wonder - what do people here believe is the worst case scenario for a nuclear disaster?Chernobyl? That was far and away the worst so far. Is that as bad as you think it gets? Do you think it could be worse? What do you think would actually happen if a RAR TERRORIST flew a plane into a nuclear power plant? What specifically do you think would happen?

But what specifically do you think is a worst-case scenario for a nuclear meltdown? Some people like to throw out numbers like "hundreds of thousands of people with radiation sickness." They don't typically explain the mechanism by which so many people would be exposed to actually-dangerous levels of radiation. They don't really know what a meltdown is, or the specific results of a meltdown that cause radioactive material to escape or how and where it spreads.In a nuclear meltdown, the reaction loses control for one of a few reasons. The carbon rods used to absorb neutrons and slow the reaction could fail, causing the reactor to heat up beyond cooling capacity. The cooling system itself could be faulty or damaged. Those are two that come immediately to mind, but the end result is the same - a self-sustaining nuclear reaction that exceeds the tolerance of the reactor core.In the vast majority of nuclear accidents, we don't see widespread radiation exposure. Why? Because of the construction of the reactors and the mechanism that would carry radioactive material outside. Even in a full-blown meltdown scenario, we aren't looking at a Chernobyl event. Chernobyl was the result of a huge explosion (the overwhelmed coolant boils and expands, creating too much pressure and eventually resulting in an explosion) that managed to breach the concrete reactor ceiling - it literally blew the roof off. This ejected the coolant material, which contained radioactive material, into the air in the form of a steam plume. As I recal, the Uranium fuel rods also ignited, causing radioactive smoke and ash to be ejected. Eventually the reaction wears itself out - today, the heart of Chernobyl is essentially a pile of radioactive slag (cooled and hardened, now, into a messy solid lump) contained in a concrete sarcophagus built around the core for containment. The area remains radioactive primarily because of the material that escaped in the plume of smoke and steam and coated the surrounding environment. It's actually safe to visit the city, now, even if radiation levels are high enough that you wouldnt want to live there, and other life has actually thrived in the absence of man. This isn't a Captain Planet episode, Chernobyl is not a barren lifeless desert - at this point there's simply enough residual radiation that long-lived species like humans will gradually suffer sufficient genetic damage to drastically increase the likelihood of cancer or birth defects. Short-lived and hardy insects and plants and rodents and the like don't particularly care and are doing quite well.Still, we aren't cockroaches or trees. So how do we avoid that?There are multiple failsafes built into modern reactors. One of the best is simply that we use a lot more concrete than we did in Chernobyl, and we do it in layers. Observe: This is a cutaway of the Fukushima reactor.As of right now, the concrete torus at the bottom has been breached. Look above that, and you'll notice multiple additional concrete layers. Remember how Chernobyl's plume escaped? An explosion blew right through the primary containment...but in the Fukushima reactors, there are secondary containment walls. All of this is still going on in the basement of the above-ground facility, below the concrete floor.Even in our wildest nightmares, we are not looking at another Chernobyl. Not even close. Even in the case of a full meltdown, we're not going to have a fallout plume in this reactor. The steam being currently vented doesn't actually come into direct contact with the core, and only contains residual radiation, nothing dangerous long or even short term (steam dissipates very quickly, and you have to raise radiation levels pretty far above background before you run into trouble, as in a few orders of magnitude). You can go right ahead and crash planes into these buildings, destroy the above-ground structures, and still not breach any cores. Even if you actually cause a meltdown, we're still not looking at a Chernobyl repeat.The worst case scenario is that the entire site is made unusable by a core that melted itself into radioactive slag. We wouldnt be able to move it because that would require breaching all of the containment that keeps us safe. The whole compelx would be a loss, and you wouldn't even be able to bulldoze it and start from scratch, it would be a permanent fixture with a "No Trespassing" sign and radiation warning notices. Casualties due to radiation exposure would be minimal, limited primarily to technicians who stay behind to continue efforts to stop the meltdown - and again, that's worst-case.Most people seem to think that "meltdown" means "a nuclear bomb goes off, it's Hiroshima and Nagasaki all over again, and then radiation from I-don't-know-where gives hundreds of thousands of people cancer I-don't-know-how." That's not at all what it means. It's bad, we want to avoid it, some people could die, but we're not talking about thousands or even hundreds of corpses here.As for the actual cause of the Fukushima disaster - I'm hearing reports that it was run by a company that had been caught multiple times bypassing safety protocols, even going so far as to falsify reports, and was still allowed to keep running the plant. I also understand that a turbine used to pump coolant was unable to keep up with what was required - essentially the water was boiling in the pipes because it couldn't be pumped through quickly enough, and the steam eventually caused sufficient back-pressure that further pumping was made impossible and the pipes exploded. More than that...I'm sure details will continue to come out, but we'll need the results of a full investigation to do more than hypothesize.

Much like nuclear plants, not all hydro dams are alike. An earthquake like the one that struck Japan would certainly destroy any dam, and depending on the location, could create more destruction and death than a nuclear disaster.However, yes, hydro power can be extremely safe. But as I did state earlier, I don't consider hydro/solar/wave/geothermal/wind in this discussion simply because they are only supplemental power generation. No combination of those types of generators can take a primary role in modern power grids. Wind and solar and wave are both far too dependent on weather. Hydro and geothermal can only be built in specific areas.Considering hydro/solar/wind/wave/geothermal power when discussing which method of power generation is safest is like pointing out that bicycles are cleaner than cars - of course they are, but bicycles cannot take any primary role in transportation, and so can't even reasonably be considered as an option amongst electric cars, hybrids, hydrogen fuel cells, etc.

The simple fact, dronester, despite your red herrings about evacuation orders and "increased radiation" being detected, I have provided solid numbers regarding the casualties caused by nuclear power.Those numbers objectively refute the idea that nuclear power is unsafe when compared to other main-line power generators. Again, hydro is NOT a primary form of generation, it can only ever be supplementary. There just are not enough geographical locations to build enough plants, end of story. It doesn't matter how far you transmit the power (though power transmission is limited as well), you just cannot build enough plants. Again, hydro is supplementary power only, like wind/solar/wave/geothermal. You're telling me how clean bicycles are in a discussion on the cleanest replacement for gas-powered automobiles as primary transportation.There's a decommissioned nuclear reactor at a former Air Force base near where I live. I used to actually work at a company leasing one of the buildings there. Not 200 meters away from the parking lot stands a large tent. The tent covers a location of the base where the military dumped radioactive material, including plutonium, and simply buried it in dirt (oddly enough, another, separate company I used to work for performed the cleanup). The tent is not lead-lined - it's just canvass. Yet despite the remaining presence of radiological particulate matter (stuff too small to dig up, that's why they left the tent there), I don't have cancer or radiation poisoning."Increased radiation" doesn't mean you're going to die, or get cancer, any more than "increased water" means you're about to drown.Chernobyl stands as the single, solitary true nuclear disaster in history until today with Fukushima. It's regarded as a nightmare scenario, one of the most frightening cautionary tales in history.63 people died, with another ~200 over the next decade (the World Heath Organization actually lists only 50 fatalities due to Chernobyl, but I can be generous).More people die in a single day from car accidents.112 people died during the construction of the Hoover Dam (just 2 years ago, 47 people died at a Russian hydroelectric plant, which would already be the second-worst disaster ever if it were a nuclear plant...and nobody noticed or cared. If it had been a nuclear plant, it would have been the headline story on CNN for weeks).Nuclear power seems to scare your pants off, dronester, for absolutely no rational reason. You should be more frightened of your car. Or your cholesterol. Or the natural gas pipeline running under the street. You're orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by one of those than by any event relating to a nuclear power plant, even if you live just down the street from one. What is it? Radiation poisoning and cancer seem like worse ways to die than being burned alive or blown up or crushed or dismembered? Is it because it's slower? As far as I can tell, dead is dead, and risk involves how likely you are to die, disregarding the emotional impact of the specific manner of death.You asked what it would take for me to drop my support of nuclear power as the safest currently available feasible method of large-scale power generation. I already answered, though you seem to have overlooked it: Fukushima would have to be worse than Chernobyl, by far.from here:

quote:

---

per terawatt of energy produced, hydroelectric power kills 885, coal kills 342, natural gas kills 85, but nuclear kills only 8.

---

Make that "8" number an order of magnitude higher, and we'll talk. Make it two orders of magnitude higher, and it's still safer than hydroelectric power.Now either provide numbers proving my assertions wrong, or concede that you haven't looked at a single goddamned fatality statistic to back up your emotionally-spawned irrational fearmongering.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Nobody died. TMI was a near disaster, not a real disaster. Additionally, TMI taught us a great deal and has significantly influenced designs since then. It was definitely a big scare, but with no casualties, I can;t call it a disaster.The list I used earlier was a compilation of nuclear power plant accidents totally greater than $100 million in property damage and/or multiple fatalities. There are likely several "incidents" that didn;t qualify under those terms.

Every single solitary thing you have posted regarding evacuations and such has been a red herring, because it has nothing to do with the actual dangers of nuclear power. Over a hundred thousand people were evacuated at Chernobyl, yet only 63 people died with ~200 following over the next decade! Evacuations are a precaution, a safety measure to prevent unnecessary casualties. If I knew a coal plant was about to explode, I'd evacuate the area too!Per terawatt generated, roughly 8 people die due to nuclear power. Coal, oil, and even hydroelectric cause hundreds of deaths per terawatt generated. If you dispute those numbers, give me different numbers and your source. If you cannot, you have no evidence to support your argument. Are you mentally challenged?!. Those were bombs, they have nothing whatsoever to do with nuclear power, that's like comparing the gas in your car as a fuel source to a MOAB fuel-air explosive bomb in a risk assessment!I gave the actual recorded casualty numbers for every incident involving nuclear power from the 50s to the present. I also gave casualty numbers for other nuclear incidents, things that involved handling, storage, and processing of nuclear material not at a power plant. If you want to dispute those numbers, provide your own source. Until and unless you can give an independently-sourced casualty number that records a higher death toll than what I found, you have no evidence to support your argument. End of fucking story.You cannot argue with supported evidence unless you can either point out a logical fallacy in my argument or provide new evidence of your own that shows my data to be suspect. You have not done so. It's time to put up or shut up. Do you have data that shows that nuclear power causes more death than other primary means of power generation? If so, present it. If not, concede. The news I hear is continually worse and worse. I think it goes withotu saying that we all hope for a minimal loss of life.Even so, to make up for the difference in the numbers I was able to research, Fukushima would have to go up like a nuclear warhead...and that's just not how they work, even when they break.ABE: The type of reactor in the Fukushima plant was banned from new construction in the US in the early 70s because it's frankly not very good. There are far better designs in use, and any new construction would obviously involve a design newer than a plant that should have been decommissioned long ago. In fact, as I recall, Fukushima was scheduled to be shut down until it got an extension...just months ago.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.

Because deaths caused by major nuclear disasters are, on the whole, not immediate (even acute radiation sickness can take hours or days depending on exposure, and by the time you actually feel the effects it's already too late), at least some of those working to contain the problem are already doomed, and know it. Just as in the Chernobyl disaster, they continue to work and do their jobs, knowing their lives are already forfeit, because by continuing to do their duty they will save the lives of others.If that's not a hero, I don't know what is.Still, I'd rather not need the heroes in the first place. This reactor should have been retired and replaced with a far more modern design...or at least retrofitted with the safety upgrades that everyone else performed post-TMI.

I can agree with that. Learning from our mistakes is worthless without additional spending to update infrastructure with the lessons learned...and private industry has a rather large disincentive to spend money as it is.

What news are you watching? All I keep seeing is "nuclear power BAD!" and "ZOMG RADIOACTIVE!" There's no careful analysis of facts going on, just pandering to public hysteria. We have media outlets in some countries suggesting that California and even places as far away as Poland are at risk of radiation sickness from the Fukushima plant, and saying that all of Tokyo will become a depopulated ghost town!I'd like to read some downplayed news at this point. It will likely be closer to the truth than the hyperventilating pinheads who think nuclear power plants are like nuclear warheads. And neither am I, but there is a lot of information readily available if you take some time and look. I was easily able to find information about radiation sickness and fatality rates for given amounts of exposure, as well as details on reactor design. The Fukushima plant is a pretty old model whose new construction was banned in the US in the early 70s. It was popular around the time ot Three Mile Island, and after that near-miss, multiple safety upgrades were retrofitted to reactors of that type - but apparently not the Fukushima plant. The turbines used to pump coolant water were too weak, the tsunami took out most of their external diesel power generators (used for running the coolant and other emergency systems in an emergency)...as time goes on the picture of what went wrong is becoming more and more clear. More than that, it means that nuclear power is safer than other methods. When 9/11 happened, lots of people avoided flying and drove instead. Did 9/11, an individual disaster with the added emotional impact of being a terrorist act rather than a mechanical failure, actually mean that flying was suddenly more dangerous than driving? Of course not - but fear is stronger right after a disaster, and human beings are frankly terrible at estimating real risk. Why? France alone has 59 nuclear power plants, none of which have ever experienced a meltdown or other major disaster. In fact, the accidents France has experienced have been no worse than accidents experienced at fossil fuel plants - a few employees hospitalized in the worst cases, some extended reactor shutdowns in others.They even reprocess their spent fuel - pundits and political idiots in the US are terrified of following suit due to the fear that terrorists will somehow steal the processed fuel and make a weapon, yet this has not happened in France.I have to argue very, very strongly that, even though plenty of mistakes were made with the Fukushima plant, the problem here is not human irresponsibility, but rather the 1-2 punch of one of the worst earthquakes on record (it's been upgraded to a 9.0), something nobody could have predicted or prepared for, followed by a massive tsunami. The plant actually held up pretty well to the earthquake; it was the wall of water disabling their backup diesel generators and hindered emergency response that really caused problems. I don't think this example demonstrates at all the lack of sufficient responsibility to manage nuclear power. I think this incident rather demonstrates that it takes a major disaster to cause a nuclear power plant to damage it sufficiently to cause a nuclear incident, even with major safety oversights.I'm curious - what do you think wouldn't break down in a 9.0 earthquake followed up by a tsunami and strong aftershocks? Do you think disasters on that scale are something that can be prepared for? If so, how? If not, then how can this be the result of human irresponsibility?Chernobyl was an example of human irresponsibility and stupidity, as they simultaneously tried to test how long the reactor could hold up if all of the safety measures failed, while seeing how hot they could take the core. The heat from the uncontrolled reaction distorted the tubes through which the control rods would lower such that they got stuck, disabling their ability to lower the rods and regain control.Fukushima is an example of how mother nature can fuck up your plans. I don;t think it's reasonable to expect anyone to have prepared for a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami, not when all the other quakes recorded in the area have been in the low-7's range. Yes, granted, in the case of a major nuclear disaster like Chernobyl, the presence of the radioactive core creates an exclusion zone where it is dangerous for humans to venture for long (depending on how close; you can cross the line into the exclusion zone at Chernobyl and be just fine if you don't stick around for days, but if you actually approach the plant itself...well, just don't do that).Fukushima may wind up that bad (it depends on whether the fuel rods go critical and start an uncontrolled reaction, an actual meltdown. If that doesn't happen, we might still be able to clean up the site and remove the damaged fuel rods and reactors). In that case, this would be the second such exclusion zone in the history of nuclear power. Pointing out the real relative risks involved is necessary to make an objective analysis. This is a time of fear, where people will irrationally assign a higher risk factor to nuclear power than is justified by any analysis of data. The objective facts state that nuclear power causes the fewest fatalities per terawatt of power generated among reasonable competing methods of power generation by far, meaning nuclear power is objectively the safest among those methods. It's no different than pointing out to people just after 9/11 that they're more likely to die of a heart attack or a car crash or a lightning strike than to be the victim of an airline hijacking. Dead is dead. Insidious invisible energy attacks our cells all the time - you're more likely to get skin cancer from solar UV exposure than to suffer a single negative effect from radiation from a nuclear power plant.Coal power plants release ash directly into the air that not only causes acid rain but also increases the natural concentration of Uranium and other radioactive elements in coal by several orders of magnitude, such that people living in the so-called "stack shadow" of a plant can ingest radioactive materials and have an increased risk of cancer.You're more likely to get radiation-induced cancer from a coal power plant than from a nuclear plant.These risk factors are all necessary to point out, because again, this is a time of extreme fear, during an ongoing nuclear crisis. When other forms of power plants have disasters, it's typically not a drawn-out horrific media event like a nuclear reactor disaster. We have a media feeding frenzy building up fear and outrage and nobody is stopping to a) remember that the real culprit here was an earthquake and tsunami that have killed over 11,000 people that we know of so far and b) remember that even after this disaster, unless it turns out to kill thousands of people, nuclear power still causes fewer fatalities per terawatt generated than any other major power generation method. Absolutely false. Have you ever heard of a coal seam fire? The most notable example occurred in Centralia, Pennsylvania in 1962. The entire town and surrounding area now have an exclusion zone much like Chernobyl, except instead of radiation, there is a literal fire burning underground that has been burning since 1962 and continues to burn today. This has contaminated the air, earth, and water in the region beyond repair.Nuclear incidents are not the only ways human beings can completely ruin an area. We should give proper pause and real concern regardless of the method of power generation we choose. Centralia, Pennsylvania is every much the cautionary tale of what can go wrong as Chernobyl, with the invisible killer of carbon monoxide gas instead of radiation. I have not in any way "glossed over" fatality numbers in this thread - I have been the only one, in fact, to attempt to accurately report them using actual reported statistics. That the death tolls do not justify a level of fear you may personally find appropriate is a problem with your own irrationality in analyzing the data, not a problem of discounting the deaths.If you value human life, you must then agree that the method of power generation that produces the fewest fatalities per unit of power is the safest, regardless of how frightened you are of the specific manner in which those fatalities are generated. A human life is a human life, and the loss of a life to radiation is no more or less important than a life lost to black lung, or a natural gas explosion.Only by accurately and objectively stating the fatality rates can we avoid understating any death and accurately choose the safest method of power generation going forward. If we let our emotions rule us in a time of crisis, if we choose a method that objectively causes more people to die per unit of power as a matter of simple fact, then we will cause more death, not less. New models of automobiles are safer than older models. We have seatbelts now, and airbags, and crumple zones.Nuclear power plant design has evolved significantly due to the analysis of what went wrong in such cases as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. I'm certain we'll learn more from Fukushima as well. The reactors being built today do not use even a similar design to the Fukushima plant, whose design was banned from new construction in the US four decades ago.The problem is that because of the large cost of building a nuclear power plant (as opposed to the relatively cheap cost of running it) makes private industry reluctant to decommission older models. That means that the older, less-safe and less-efficient designs are still in use today, long after their designed lifetimes. They've been largely retrofitted with upgrades to their containment and coolant systems, but their inherent design is still outdated and they should be decommissioned in favor of new designs that incorporate the lessons we've learned from the start.

Isn't it funny how nobody even knows that there are thousands of still-burning coal seam fires, hundreds in the US alone that make city-sized areas uninhabitable......but as soon as the word "nuclear" gets brought up, we have a media feeding frenzy, and everybody brings up Chernobyl as if the plant's surrounding area is now a glassed desert right out of a Captain Planet episode?

Pay my airfare and I'll provide the lunch. I hear the exclusion zone has some great scenery along some of the abandoned roads, great for a bike ride. A picnic would be just fine.

I note that you didnt actually respond to a single point of my arguments, and isntead resorted to a vapid "I, with absolutely no relevant personal knowledge or qualification to make any reasoned analysis, believe that trained experts in the field know less than I do." You make spurrious claims withpout backing them up with evidence, as if any engineer would actually claim their design was immune to any and all failure.I specifically noted earlier in this thread that the Fukushima plant was designed with 7.2-7.3 quakes in mind, not a 9.0, which is orders of magnitude more powerful than any quake experienced in the region historically. What precisely do you think would survive a quake of that magnitude?You further ignore the example of coal seam fires that cause exclusion zones similar to nuclear meltdowns - and where there is exactly one current (And likely to be two in the end at Fukushima) exclusion zone from a nuclear disaster, there are thousands of hazardous coal seam fires burning even now, the oldest of which has been burning continually for an estimated 6,000 years.You, sir or madam, have no substantive argument on this subject, and are speaking from a position of ignorance and fear to the absolute exclusion of any hard data.I'll take that as a concession on all points.

Would it hurt so badly to just do a little research before you start typing?Radioactive isotopes decay at varying rates. High-level radioactive matter decays relatively quickly, while lower-level actinides can last for millions or billions of years. Basically, the contamination of teh area outside the Chernobyl plant proper has reduced itself significantly through natural processes, including decay and the natural dispersion of the particulate matter.The reactor core still contains hazardous levels of radioactive material and I wouldn't go into the plant ruins proper even with all of the concrete between me and the reactor, but a picnic within the exclusion zone wouldn't be more than an exotic place for lunch.Edited by Rahvin, : No reason given.