But Germany and Japan have stopped doing ... wonder why? Perhaps it has to do with waste disposal and public safety issues.
The politics of fear, Germany and Japan both faced huge public pressure after a second gen power station failed and a whole 600-1,000 people theoretically received lethal exposure and have or will die younger (about 20,000 died near immediately as a result of the actual natural disaster). It wasn't science that made the determination. Increasing your risk of radiation caused death from 0.75% to 1.25% is not good, but it's not so catastrophic that we should decide not to build Generation III plants - from a scientific point of view. That doesn't win votes, though.
Compare with the Generation III Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant which was at the epicentre of an earthquake at the same magnitude as the Fukushima one.
Do you know what the hazards of nuclear generation are?
100,000 people die globally per trillion kWh of coal generation (10,000 in the US)
440 people die globally per trillion kWh of solar generation.
150 people die globally per trillion kWh of wind generation
90 people die globally per trillion kWh of nuclear generation - including Chernobyl and Fukushima. (in the US it is 0.01)
Similar numbers have been derived by others.
Are you under the impression you know more than you actually do?
Do you know more than the scientists in Germany and Japan?
Are you saying that scientists in Germany and Japan set energy policy, based on science rather than politicians based on votes?
That sounds like you think you know more about German and Japanese politics than you actually do.
Or we could put as much money into solar and wind power and eliminate the need for oil all together, growing hemp to make biofuel for portable energy.
Well there is a supply issue, right? There are lots more dead things that became fossil oil than living things that could become, with further processing, useable oil. I'm fine it - the UK has the top 3 largest biomass-electricity plants in the world. In fact Drax is the largest plant in Europe, and provides us with 5-10% of our power.
Of course, we have to import all that biomass (it's wood, incidentally) from other countries - and if those other countries followed our lead, we might not be able to do that....
My solar panels generate more electricity than I use and I haven't paid an electric bill since august 2015.
Did you ever investigate what happened to all the silicon tetrachloride that was produced to make your solar panels? In 2015, it was probably recycled, but it may still have been dumped. Even if you try other materials you still end having to use things like cadmium.
Still, it's difficult to get away from the dangers of hydrofluoric acid of which a LOT is used. It's possible to use other chemicals (which are themselves also toxic, but easier to handle) but business is business and low regulation nations are going to be able to sell their products cheaper.
It should be pointed out that it can take about 2 years of continuous operation to pay back the energy needed to make solar panels. So assuming you installed them January 1st 2015, you're still several weeks from having saved the planet from anything.
Then there is amount of carbon pollution that occurs as a result of making them. Depending on where they were made you might not get a net carbon emission benefit until 2019.
Then you might consider possible damage caused by wind, rain and snow on your home; If a toxic chemical plant is hit by a natural disaster, that's an ecological disaster. If a toxic chemical transport ship has a spillage, it's an ecological disaster.
This is all simplified, and it's certainly better than Coal and oil, but it's easy to think you know more than you do when the environmental costs are moved from the point of generation to point of manufacturing and maintenance.
So what about Nuclear Waste? It's incredibly compact and well contained, as opposed to just about all other toxic waste from all other methods. If we want to argue something like 'we can recycle waste products in solar power' then we can say the same for nuclear power only the improvements within our technological grasp are orders of magnitude greater.
Because of THE FEAR, nuclear waste is more heavily regulated and monitored than other waste. Unfortunately, that same fear means there is a lot of political stalemate over moving it around.
quote:Colorado, where much of the uranium is obtained, is a geologically active region, full of faults and fissures and mountains rising out of the prairie, and there are about a billion tons of uranium in its surface rock. (This number is based on the fact that granite typically contains 4 parts per million of uranium. I take the area of the Colorado Rockies to be about 300 by 400 kilometers, and consider only rock from the surface to 1,000 meters depth.) The radioactivity in this uranium is 20 times greater than the legal limit for Yucca Mountain, and will take more than 13 billion years-not just a few hundred-for the radioactivity to drop by a factor of ten. Yet water that runs through, around, and over this radioactive rock is the source of the Colorado River, and is used for drinking water in much of the west, including Los Angeles and San Diego. And unlike the glass pellets that store the waste in Yucca Mountain, most of the uranium in the Colorado ground is water-soluble. Here is the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the Yucca Mountain facility was at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach ground water, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River.
quote:But when ingested (e.g. from ground water) it isn’t. According to the linear hypothesis, when consumed by a group of people, we expect about one extra cancer for each half-gram of plutonium swallowed. That is bad, but not a record-setter. Botulism toxin (found in poorly prepared mayonnaise) is a thousand times worse.
(embed starts 51 minutes in at the pertinent part)
Do you know more than most scientists? Is your competence high enough to assess the facts correctly, or is your confidence a function of relative ignorance?
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Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix first link. There had been an extra space at the end of the url.
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