[13years]

No, I do get it. I will restate my point again. "My point is about the disregard of the significance of the Fukishima accident".

Why is that important. Because nuclear is not a panacea of risk free energy. The public should demand technology and safety to be continually improved and outdated reactors to be revamped or decommissioned.

If Chernobyl possibly killed 100k, then Fukishima will likely in the end kill far more. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/features/che...

This is not a plea to abandon nuclear, it is that in order to prevent future disasters there has to be an honest assessment of potential risk impact so that there is incentive to make better designs.

Otherwise, all of these counter arguments could be interpreted as saying "Coal kills 1 million, so what if nuclear only kills 100k every once and a while".

[tedunangst]

"Coal kills 1 million, so what if nuclear only kills 100k every once and a while".

That sounds like a pretty compelling argument for nuclear to me.

[saulrh]

> Otherwise, all of these counter arguments could be interpreted as saying "Coal kills 1 million, so what if nuclear only kills 100k every once and a while".

Well, yes. We are, unfortunately, stuck in a pretty awful region of the configuration space of possible existences. We can't be perfect. And that, unfortunately, means that perfect is the enemy of good enough. Right now we only have a few choices either we stick with coal or oil and kill a lot of people and maybe everybody, or we switch to nuclear/solar/whatever and only kill a few people. I acknowledge that nuclear kills people. I fully understand that Chernobyl and Fukushima were catastrophes. And I'm not going to disregard them. I've thought about them carefullyh, and considered the options, and even if I accept the most pessimistic evaluations I come to a single conclusion: We need to switch. Now.

I can give you credit for wanting to be sure. But there's a point where you have to stop wanting to be sure and start making choices. And it's well past the point where we needed to make that choice, and as a result the conversation needs to be different. Right now our biggest obstacle is the public, and that means we need to present a united front. We can't tolerate dissenting opinions on a topic where the decision is so critical and the public is so pathetic. When you say "don't disregard Fukushima", people hear "radioactive scientist-men will eat your babies". So stop fearmongering.

Also, stop bullshitting about Chernobyl. "The total global collective dose from Chernobyl was earlier estimated by UNSCEAR in 1988 to be "600,000 man Sv, equivalent on average to 21 additional days of world exposure to natural background radiation."". And that's an early, pessimistic estimate that's since been revised to half that. Maybe half a million people total were exposed in any measurable way. The few thousand people who worked on the reactor itself lost maybe ten years each. Everybody else lost... a few hours? Fukushima, similarly, is estimated based on data from Chernobyl (which, remember, happened thirty years ago! we have data from it! lots of data!) to kill a few hundred people. Pessimistically, a few thousand. Indirectly, ten years before they'd have died of old age anyway, and with a relatively treatable cancer. Seriously, thyroid cancer? Five-year survival rate 98%, and that's if you aren't watching for it already and you catch it late.

And, really, greenpeace? They haven't been reasonable about nuclear since ever. If they ever realized how radioactive their bananas were their heads would explode.