San Onofre nuclear plant in southern California
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
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Ever since Japan’s battered Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex began emitting radiation in March, calls to abandon nuclear power have risen in the U.S. and Germany, among other countries. If only it were so simple. Nuclear contributes 20 percent of the U.S. power supply and a significant share in other developed countries. If we gave it up, what would replace it? Pollution from fossil-fueled power plants shortens the life span of as many as 30,000 Americans a year. Coal companies lop off mountaintops, hydraulic fracturing for natural gas threatens water supplies, and oil dependence undermines the nation’s energy security. Then there is the small matter of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean renewable technologies will take years to reach the scale needed to replace the power we get from splitting atoms.
Nuclear power’s benefits for climate and security are clear. But still the public worries about safety—and no wonder. The industry and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) claim that nuclear power is safe, but their lack of transparency does not inspire confidence. For example, an Associated Press investigation in March revealed 24 cases from December 2009 to September 2010 in which plant operators did not report equipment defects to the NRC. The industry and regulators must regain the public’s trust.
That does not necessarily mean more regulations. Plenty of safety rules have been put in place since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. The trouble is that regulations are not being enforced rigorously. The NRC has to mete out stiff penalties for violations and make every action transparent to us all. It will have a chance to demonstrate its resolve when it submits its review of all 104 commercial reactors to the White House, due this month. A crucial test will be what the review says about several plants that are already on the agency’s watch list for safety issues.
Evacuation plans are a sore point for many citizens. The agency advised Americans in Japan to stay 50 miles away from Fukushima, yet within the U.S. the emergency evacuation radius is only 10 miles. What is the proper limit? Are evacuation plans subjected to serious tests? If exercises showed that residents around a plant could not leave quickly enough, the NRC should consider shutting it down. A good test case is the Indian Point plant 38 miles north of New York City. Evacuating the 20 million people who live within 50 miles staggers belief. To its credit, the NRC will work with New York governor Andrew Cuomo to review the plant’s safety ahead of the scheduled relicensing review in 2013.
The NRC must also be scrupulous about licensing new plants. If an operator proposes a site that is too close to an earthquake fault, or too close to oceanfront that is vulnerable to a tsunami or hurricane storm surge, or downriver from a huge dam that could burst, then the NRC should reject the bid. Similarly, if the utility could not protect spent fuel pools or casks from being breached during a severe accident, which happened in Japan, the NRC should not license it. Saying no to a suspect plant would do more than anything else to restore public confidence.
The industry argues that advanced technology will ensure safety. The 22 new reactors proposed in the U.S. use so-called Gen III+ designs that are safer than today’s reactors, which date to the 1970s or earlier. Building them could displace new coal plants or relieve the pressure to extend the life of old reactors that should instead be retired. Yet, as the article “Planning for the Black Swan,” by Adam Piore, on page 48 notes, the new plants may have weaknesses. Manufacturers should pursue even safer, meltdown-proof designs that they have experimented with but shelved, such as liquid fluoride thorium reactors and pebble bed reactors. China is developing both. In the end, however, no technology is 100 percent safe, and better designs cannot eliminate the need for careful siting and emergency planning.
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32 Comments
Add CommentExcellent article on the safety of nuclear power! However, I have had one question for some time now and I wonder if anyone can give me an even handed answer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf it is even moderately safe to store used fuel rods in small pools on the site of a nuclear power plant, why not drop all spent fuel rods into the several five mile deep subduction zone ocean trenches?
Certainly, a 5 mile depth of cold seawater would provide a much safer repository for radioactive used fuel rods than relatively small pools on the roofs of containment buildings?
Good article. I would like to add that transparency is secondary to competence. They have rule makers, rule followers and researchers who do not have the experience in the nuclear energy industry. That is one of the reasons decisions are made so slowly with the NRC. The country needs to encourage more engineers and science students. The NRC should not need to do in depth research every time they face a new problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSubduction zones and their nutrient-rich waters are where marine life flourishes--so therefore the wrong place to drop toxic waste of any kind. However, virtually lifeless ocean deserts that are located in the middle of tectonic plates and that have viscous red clay formations in the seabed have been studied by an international group of scientists as a place to deposit high-level nuclear waste. More info on this: "Burial of Radioactive Waste under the Seabed"; January 1998; Scientific American Magazine". But used nuclear fuel is to valuable to bury at sea. It contains 96% of its energy and can be recycled. The final residue is tiny. France, 80% nuclear, recycles. After decades of providing low-carbon nuclear electricity, the ultimate fuel waste is stored at La Hague under the floors of three rooms the size of basketball courts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe editorial's pointing out of the problems with other energy sources is appreciated, but does not go far enough. The public health and environmental problems associated with fossil fuels are orders of magnitude larger than those of nuclear.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFossil power plants cause ~25,000 deaths every single year in the US alone (EPA) and hundreds of thousands every year worldwide every year (i.e., ~1000 every single day), according to the WHO. And this is before global warming is even considered. Few if any deaths are expected to result from Fukishima (i.e., its impact is smaller than the DAILY impacts of fossil fuel use).
Given the above, I have mixed feelings about the editorial's call for even more strict (impeccible) regulation for nuclear, with new and existing plants being rejected/closed, etc., while fossil fuels continue to get away with extraordinarily lax regulations, and killing millions of people (and heating the planet) as a result.
Examples include coal ash not even being classified as a hazardous material, and the blanket exemption from Clean Water Act requirements for shale gas drilling. They won't even tell the govt. what the chemicals are that they're putting into the ground; something that would be unthinkable in the nuclear industry. In terms of groundwater risk, shale gas drilling puts nuclear waste (e.g., Yucca Mountain) to shame. And of course there are the lax air pollution requirements (that allow tens of thousands to go on dying every year) and the fact that they refuse to do anything about global warming.
As for the suggesion that we retire older nuclear plants (perhaps replacing them with new nukes), that would only be justified after every last coal plant in the country was gone. After all, one should close the plants that pose the greatest environmental and public health risks first, and every single coal plant in the US is far worse than even the oldest, worst nuclear plant in that regard.
Nuclear energy is not in competition with a perfect energy source that operates without pollution and without imposing any risk. That unobtainium does not exist except in the minds of dreamers and a few science fiction writers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNuclear energy competes head to head with flammable, explosive, dirty hydrocarbons (coal, oil, natural gas, wood, and other biomass). Those fuels are the products that are found, extracted, processed, transported and sold for enormous piles of cash by some of the world's largest, oldest, and most politically astute multinational corporations.
Petroleum pushers are also some of the world's most active advertisers, providing a substantial source of revenue for the most influential portions of the established news media.
Though some multinational oil&gas corporations dabbled in the fuel cycle side of the nuclear energy business in the early years, they have little to no involvement in the technology today. Some of their early involvement included uranium market manipulation that helped tie Westinghouse up in court for a decade.
My assertion is that nuclear energy scares people whose wealth and power derives from the fact that the world's industrial economy rests on the back of hydrocarbons that can be burned to produce reliable heat. We use that heat to control our local environments, to provide useful domestic and industrial power to do work, and to be converted in thermodynamic energy for motion (transportation).
Because uranium and thorium both contain at least 2 million times as much potential energy as oil, the most energy-dense hydrocarbon, and because they release energy in the same form (heat) while producing a tiny quantity of waste material that can be readily and safely stored, they pose a massive competitive threat. Uranium and thorium cannot completely replace fossil fuels, but allowing their use with fewer artificial constraints can increase the world's energy supply enough to drive fossil fuel consumption and prices WAY down.
Demanding "perfect" transparency is a red herring. There are legitimate security needs AND there are fanciful security threats that can be posed to tie nuclear facility operators and system designers up in logical knots. Companies are damned if they release information and damned if they work to keep it secure. Security provisions add substantial cost. Binding up the competition is EXACTLY what the hydrocarbon hawkers want - that lets them keep earning TRILLIONS of dollars every year selling fuels to "their" markets.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Not to doubt the Scientific American editorial staff's ability to thoroughly research the issues it editorializes or to express concerns over its own transparency (I see no listing of the specific editors who contributed this opinion piece) but:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Associated Press didn't investigate the industry's failure to report defects, it simply reported on the investigation conducted by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of Inspector General. The OIG report put the blame on the NRC for creating confusing and conflicting guidance for what is supposed to be reported by the industry.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does mete out stiff penalties in the form of fines and expensive inspections (nuclear licensees, not the public, pay for these supplemental inspections that can run into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars). The NRC maintains a reactor oversight matrix for every nuclear plant on its website that is even color-coded to give people like the SCIAM editorial staff a visual indication of the level of trust the NRC has in a plant's ability to operate safely. What more do you want?
The issue of evacuation zones is an area that will no doubt be evaluated over the years. The 50 mile evacuation zone recommendation in Fukushima was not based on science so much as a (mis)application of the Precautionary Principle. Information is still sketchy but it doesn't appear any real threats to the public extend nearly that far.
The NRC indeed must be scrupulous about licensing new nuclear plants. Who says they don't take seismic and tsunami threats and threats from dam failures (and threats from nearby refineries and chemical factories)? Power plants can be designed to deal with earthquakes. Indeed, it wasn't the strongest seismic events in Japan's recorded history that caused problems at Fukushima's nuclear plants. It was the resulting tsunami whose size was many multiples what scientists thought was likely for the area. Nuclear plants are designed to deal with credible threats. They are not expected to withstand direct hits from large meteors or alien attacks.
The lack of information (and it is clear SCIAM's editorial staff is lacking plenty) leads to fear, anxiety, speculation and cynicism. I would ask that the transparently nameless OPED editors (yes I am aware that I am signing with a pseudonym myself) conduct a bit of research and try again from an analytical angle.
We have a potential for nearly unlimited clean power. We can power ships, hospitals and pump water into the desert to make it bloom. We can transport ourselves on the wings of electricity. But, according to the fine editors here, we must be careful, cautious, tread lightly. They tell us that danger awaits in the wings and that a current record of safety is no assurance we will not all die quickly in the future. Is this science? Are the recommendations here forwarded really science? Or is this a knee jerk reaction that preserves the status quo and prevents any real movement forward?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. How many have died from the amazing disaster at Fukushima?
2. Why did they die and why have more not died?
3. When compared to the safety of any other thing affected by the Tsunami were these reactors safer or more dangerous in terms of people actually killed?
4. If 40 year old designs can withstand the most amazing earthquake and Tsunami known to humanity up to this point, why are we so afraid?
To put it bluntly, I call your bluff. You have not given any reasons, evidence or backing for your call for increased regulatory oversight, but a mish-mash of fear. Even the newer designs (LFTR, Hyperion uranium nitride) are not "safe-enough" to have anywhere they can actually replace the dying coal plants scattered around. No, the mere word "radiation" trumps all science and is allowed to be the sum of all fears.
Over the past few years I have learned that radiation is no where near as dangerous as it has been characterized as. That radiation goes away.... That the I131 is nearly gone already. That many people live with natural background radiation much higher than the "safety" limits in the USA. Will Scientific American be scientific or fear mongering?
It is unfortunate that a once-respected publication like SA has chosen to take the path it has on this issue. More regulations would have done nothing to prevent the Fukushima Daiichi events. It is not even an "accident" in the common usage of the term. What happened there did not result from operator error, or a design flaw, or incompetence. It was a consequence of a natural event that no reasonable person could have anticipated or planned for. All you can do in those cases is mitigate the consequences as best you can. Ratcheting regulations neither helps the current situation nor does much to address the issues going forward.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRemember, no one has died as a consequence of anything that happened to the Fukushima reactors. There were four fatalities on the site, one from the earthquake, two from the tsunami, and one from a heart attack. The reactors themselves have harmed no one. Contrast that with the renewable energy disaster that happened in Japan as a result of the earthquake. The Okura dam in Sendai province collapsed during the earthquake and washed away an entire village of 1800 people. That didn't make the papers or periodicals, at least in any significant coverage. Where are the calls for ratcheting the regulations regarding dam construction?
Over 20 years ago I patented the Subductive Waste Disposal Method, which has been described as the state-of-the-art and most viable means to eliminating nuclear waste. Even Yevgeny Velikhov of Russia's Kurchatov Institute noted that placing waste in the Earth's crust at great depth so that it can melt into the plasma later is only one of three options that should be examined seriously.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHis other choices were shipment to the sun and placement in Antarctic ice sheets.
The DOE's all or nothing approach to Yucca Mountain however insured this solution died on the vine.
The best explanation for how this came about was published in Steven Nadis' Atlantic Monthly article, The Sub-Seabed back in October of 96, which is available on the internet.
As Charles Hollister pointed out in the article, the sub-seabed researchers never really fit in with mainstream DOE culture. "It was a clear case of 'not invented here,'"
To insure all the research funding stayed in-house they killed off all alternatives to Yucca Mountain so here we sit.
Freshthinker and Wayne have it right. SA is simply wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSA recommends actions that have been standards at the NRC for decades:
* consider seismic risk in plant siting
* rigor in licensing
* enforcement
* transparency
* emergency planning
Fukushima experienced a once in a millenium geologic event that caused 25,000 and wiped whole towns off the map. No member of the public has been harmed by radiation from the plant. If people don't trust nuclear after Fukushima, they never will. More NRC penalty actions will not make the public more trusting, and it won't make plant owners be more careful with billion dollar assets.
This is just pro-nuclear whitewash. While we cannot immediately shutdown existing nuclear plants, we should be able to manage to do so over a ten year period.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNuclear power is shockingly expensive and deleterious to the environment from mining all of the way to the plants so poorly regulated by the industry-captured NRC. Nuclear isn't even remotely carbon-neutral, as the massive infrastructure of a nuclear plant, the mining and processing of the nuclear fuel is largely done with fossil energy. The energy payback after all of this mining and degradation is not anywhere as good as the better renewable technologies we already have.
After 3-mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima have resulted in devastating, expensive and deadly disasters, the public is absolutely correct in not believing the hype about nuclear power.
There are better, safer, cheaper ways to make power. If renewable energy had even 10% of the huge subsidies nuclear power has received over the years, we would have had some better choices than we do now.
Nuclear power is too expensive, too dangerous to be considered as a solution to global warming.
In the fifties when the first nuclear plants were being designed, there was a choice of Uranium or Thorium as nuclear fuel. As it was the height of the Cold War, that decision was made by circumstance. Today that decision needs to be revisited.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThorium fueled reactors would be safer, cleaner and cheaper. They scale easily and the wastes are a fraction of Uranium fueled reactors.
I have to wonder why we are hearing so little about Thorium based reactors. New plants are being built in in India and China and there is a test reactor in Texas.
It's time to move to a new technology that does not contribute to nuclear weapons proliferation.
-James Savik
For those who claim these plants are so safe...let's put them in the middle of LA or Chicago. Why not?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat's that? It would be foolish 'in case' somethihng happened? Why, if they are so safe?
Nuclear energy is expensive and not going anywhere. the redundancy needed in safety will make any new plants white elephants.
As for Yucca mountain...store your waste in your own state..not ours.
what are you talking about? Sky scrapers are designed for natural disasters, places near the coast are designed for costal disasters. we design for the unknown all the time. it's not like we haven't studied these disasters before, they are not new to us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"No member of the public has been harmed by radiation from the plant." Wow, it's a little early to be saying that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Fukushima experienced a once in a millenium geologic event " Really, so there will not be one more of those events for 1000 years. Good to know. Let's build straw houses.
I have not lost faith in nuclear power. I have lost faith in the competence of the companies managing the plants and of the will of the private sector to put safety and security behind profits. Wait until the private sector takes over rocket launches and the space program, we'll have catastrophic failures every few years. Again, it's not the technology. It's the people.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow do you know that no one has been harmed?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe greatest problem that I see with the US government regulation of atomic energy is, American politics/governments are corrupt and incompetent. Every day we see new ways that the country is being sold out to big money interests as well as military, political and security interests. While America still has whistle blowers in solitary confinement with out charges, still holds secret files from fifty years ago that the military, FBI, CIA, federal and state governments and the NSA can still forbid anyone, including the Commander in Chief from accessing, still has over a million citizens on “Watch Lists”, secret prisons, etc; I don’t think asking people to trust a government agency, no matter how high minded, “transparent”, and effective it is, with the regulation of a system that has such a massive power for destruction and abuse, is possible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn short Americans don’t trust their government to behave honestly and ethically in the best interests of her citizens. I certainly can imagine the decision of a whistle blower in the nuclear industry if he/she is faced with considering a lifetime of solitary confinement versus keeping their mouthes closed and hoping that not too many people are irradiated.
The problem is that Americans cannot trust government, but neither can we trust the private sector. Science is falling victim to human truths (politics and greed), instead of solving problems based on universal truth. All sorts of discoveries go ignored because they don't generate profit. All sorts of bad science and engineering is implemented because of greed or regulatory failures. Just look at our healthcare industry as an example. Healthcare should be about science, but instead it's about politics, money, and patents (think drug companies pushing questionable yet expensive medicines and single MRI diagnostic machines that costs millions). Likewise, energy production should be about science and engineering too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI worked 5 years at coal fired powerplants, and 5 years at Hydroelectric powerplants, several years at Chemical Plants, and 15 years at Nuclear Powerplants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnyone that would say that attitudes about nuclear power can be changed through more/tighter regulation and more public oversight does not know what they are talking about.
Typical non-nuclear industry (including oil rigs, coal mines, etc.) may get a visit from a regulator a couple times a year. Nuclear Powerplants typically have more than one full time every day on-site regulators with open access to all reports meetings and activities.
In the 1990's the NRC has used that inside knowledge to force temporary closure and repair of many facilities. This did nothing to improve attitudes about nuclear power. In fact the anti-technology groups used the closures as indicators not that regulators were doing exceptional strict aggressive oversight, but instead to lie and claim it was an indicator that the nuclear powerplants were aging poorly and were a danger.
I don't know of anything that will convince irrational anti-technology people that nuclear power is needed/safe enough. This article does not help.
Wise technologists said during the worst of the Fukushima disaster that we should evacuate people within 10 miles of plant. Anti-technologists warned that people 5000 miles away on the west coast of USA should be worried. Unfotunately lay people tended to think the correct advise was some where in the middle (around Hawaii).
No electric production is cheap and environmentally safe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving worked for both Hydroelectric and Nuclear and Coal facilities I can state that what you claim is loaded with mis-leading info.
1. Nuclear power is expensive to build and start-up. Nuclear is quite cheap once it is built. It is quite expensive to shut them down and replace them.
2. What is better cheaper safer than Nuclear Power? Certainly not coal, oil, natural gas (or do you like fracking?).
3. Solar and wind require massive expensive increase in powerlines (that locals don't want) peaking units, and electric storage (pumped water or other) to handle the fluctuations in wind and solar. How will we run our factories and air conditioners on a windless night?
Ding! I second the motion. We are not monkeys. We learn from others and move forward. Timidity from ignorance is for mice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The industry argues that advanced technology will ensure safety."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuch a thing is impossible. If this is industry's argument, then they've lost.
As for nuclear being safer than other forms of energy. How many other forms of energy will leave an uninhabitable zone up to 50 miles from the plant? It's not all about numbers of deaths.
Remember that an increase in the numbers of nuclear installations will increase the number of accidents overall. That is simple mathematics. If people are OK with that then I don't think they've really thought it through.
There is one additional consideration that is never considered. Any reasonable level of safety requires a relatively stable society. Which society can guarantee stability these days, for the live of the installation and for the very long period of decommissioning?
Many hundreds of billions have been spent subsidizing nuclear power and it hasn't met any of the promises of "power to cheap to meter" or safety. The NRC is so captured by the industry that is currently issuing permits to Fukushima-style/era plants to continue operating way past their design lifetimes. Not only are these plants using outdated designs, many of them have already had a pattern of poor maintenance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut the regulators don't care, because if they make too many waves the nice cushy job with the power industry waiting for them after their regulatory stint won't be offered.
We have not spent anywhere near as much as Nuclear on many promising renewable technologies, yet the price of solar and wind power is beginning to approach that of fossil fuels. Sure, we need better infrastructure and technologies to send renewable power where it is needed and to store it, but if we would have looked there are many possible solutions that would most likely be technically feasible, cheaper, and far safer than nuclear power.
When dealing with something as hazardous or as expensive Nuclear power -- or offshore drilling -- you cannot expect transparency. What you will get are cover-ups, cost-cutting, all of which works just fine until the next accident wherever it occurs.
I vehemently disagree that the whole scope of the ongoing Fukushima disaster was caused by the earthquake ... TEPCO management ignored good science and engineering whenever it was convenient and cheaper for them. The plant SHOULD have been designed to shutdown safely in this situation. It was not.
There have been serious concerns about the integrity of this particular reactor design for decades but of course it was more important for TEPCO to make a profit than to replace the inadequate design with something safer. They chose to ignore science that indicated that their tsunami walls were inadequate, and on top of that, located their backup generators where they would get flooded.
I read the point of the article as an issue of trust and not just technology. There are three issues here; best technology, can you trust NRC to hold high standards and enforcement, and can you trust nuclear operators to go beyond just safe and make nuclear a community venture. We all know the technology arguments. Trust for the nuclear industry is about a cultural paradigm change from secrecy and control to open and shared operations. Charlene Li has a new book on Open Leadership as a model for business leadership in the new global and social age. Our world is becoming more open and social and the nuclear industry has to shift gears and join the new way of doing business. I agree with the sentiment that the NRC and industry becomes Open, or it will be closed!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, we need to come clean about nuclear power. Unfortunately, the three things we need to come clean about were not mentioned. One is that there is no fixing the light water reactor (LWR). The only reactor worth building is the failsafe molten thorium fluoride (MTFR) reactor. And did I mention a single MTFR the size of a conventional LWR could power the state of California! The second thing we need to come clean on is that non-acute exposures to radiation are NOT harmful! People may cry and deny, but the truth is the truth and we shouldn't be so gutless as to shy away from it. Lastly, the cost of wind and solar is at least three times greater than coal and can be shown to be 6-10 times more than an MTFR. Now of course, this may be harder to sell in light of the colossal failures of the nuclear industry to date. However, this too can be shown true through exacting cost accountability. These are the three things that we really need to come clean about!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost analyses of the energy prices doesn't include the unpaid costs of environmental degradation, which are largely passed on to the public and future generations. Even without that difficult calculation, renewable energy costs are continuing to come down as fossil fuels get more expensive, and the hazards and extreme expense of nuclear energy become better understood.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMeanwhile, we continue to pour billions into subsidizing technologies with a poor safety record, with abundant evidence of sloppy management by profit-obsessed corporations.
Hi Rod,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGravity Control, the stuff used by a Flying Saucer, can compete with any other source of power and win.
These big spheres under a Saucer are the Propulsion Units.
(PUs). The technology allows for the lifting of a 10 or 100 ton vehicle to come off the ground with only a small amount of energy.
A PU can also be used to lift a weight in a Silo to maximum height.
When released it can be used to activate a generator.
A Power Station would have two Silos, working alternately.
The PUs would be LEASED only to pay the investors and the Tax man.
Power at 1 cent per Kilowatt (or lesss) is feasible.
Beat that.
I don't know why we should believe any more assertions by the nuclear advocates about costs given the poor track record of huge cost overruns in the past. And besides, how do you calculate the cost of a Chernobyl, or the cost of the public having to live under the potential threat of catastrophic radiation releases which so far have happened with a rather disturbing frequency?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was amused by the part about the government meting out stiff penalties for safety violations. Like the did when Exxon spilled oil all over the Alaskan coast. Or when BP blew up a bunch of their employees in the Gulf and spewed oil all over that coast. Or the recent coal mine explosion killing dozens of miners. Yep, when the nuclear power industry starts getting punished the way those other industries are, maybe then their safety record will improve.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am going to add one more point to this argument, which is to note the tendency for the nuclear proponents to dismiss their opposition as technophobes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't think this is fair. The nuclear advocates are comfortable in their doing their math about the safety. It doesn't bother them to live under a small chance of a horrific disaster. Other people are not at all willing to live under this threat no matter how good your numbers are. It doesn't make them technophobes. They just disagree with your conclusion.
Nuclear critics have reasons to believe that there are at least a few things that haven't been considered, including stupid or crazy human actions that will mess up all of this elegant math.
We already have a large number of toxic sites such as Hanford, Siberia, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima that already provide ample reason to distrust the cheerily optimistic bravado about safety.
There are plenty of other technologies that can provide us power in much safer ways. Why don't we try subsidizing them and see where it takes us rather than push something that is so inherently dangerous.
Nuclear Power 101
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I saw the statement: “The NRC has to mete out stiff penalties....” I saw an inherent flaw, mistake that I have made many times. That of thinking if the “right thing” is done everything will be fine. At this time with oil, gas, coal and nuclear industry engaging in willfully concealing their short comings from the public, I see a pattern of lying, justifying safety violations, concealing the collusion between government and industry, fineing companies an amount their insurance companies will pay (meaning no real penalty), and other devious methods and public relations campaigns to fool the public and divert any real discussions of what could actually be carried out to benefit us all. So, we get mediocre regulations, token plans to mollify citizens, many of whom, like me, are discouraged to the point of advocating a complete replacement of capitalism with a government that is relatively safe from the corrupting influences of corporations and their industries so we can finally realize a democratic society, not the enforced slavery of a managed, coerced society being led to programs, issues and jobs of capitalism in complete denial of the “We the people….”. I hope that citizen advocates would be put in place to promote programs for citizens to participate in a democracy with wealth and benefits shared by all. I do not believe I and citizens can allow nuclear energy to be produced, because historically it has concealed information, it has trivialized issues of major concern, sabotaged the ability to regulate, along with the manufacturing of outright lies. We know that the regulators have little difficulty turning a blind eye to the safety violations with apologies when people are killed. Of course they advocate changes that never come and continue to allow watered down regulations to stand by whatever means necessary listening to special interests of corporations and shutting out citizen advocates for consumers needs.Our system at the present time does not warrant any trust that our industry, especially coal, oil, mining and nuclear power, has any semblance of honesty and integrity; too many lapses have occurred through corporate greed, planned deception and sloth. I want our government leaders to assume that if an industry or company indulges in practices that are dangerous to its workers or the environment, it will assume that corporations cannot be trusted to continue to service our citizens and should be shut down, and this is the case with the Nuclear Power Industry.