This argument is popular, but I don't find it compelling. The dangers of most other energy sources are front loaded (let's ignore global warming for a moment), while the risks from nuclear power are spread over many many many years.
The carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other diseases many years later?
Surface coal mining doesn't leave many square miles of more or less uninhabitable wasteland that remains uninhabitable for many years in the future? Underground coal mines don't catch fire and render entire towns completely uninhabitable?
Many other energy sources have risks which are spread over many years. They just don't have that "omfg, scary scientific stuff I don't understand" factor.
"The carcinogens and particulates emitted by coal do all their damage immediately? They don't build up in people's lungs and cause cancer and other diseases many years later?"
There are orders of magnitude differences between this time span and radioactive material, right? The same is true of all your points, right?
I'm not anti nuclear, it may be preferable to coal, but it doesn't make the logic of those stats any better.
The half life of some plutonium radionuclides is spectacularly long. But because of the nature of nuclear power (to wit: turning very big atoms into smaller ones), the stuff that actually contaminates the environment in the worst accidents is more boring. Cesium-137, one of the more obnoxious contaminants, has a half life of 30 years.
Coal will do more damage than nuclear on this metric, too.
So, your argument is that because it's harder to make judgements about the impact of fossil fuels, surely our judgement about nuclear power must be worse?
Isn't your analysis a victim of what Nassim Taleb calls the narrative fallacy? The fight is between "true" and "false", not "compelling" and "abstruse".
How exactly are you quantifying severity? The worst case for a reactor is vastly worse than anything that can happen at other types of plant. The financial bill for cleaning up nuclear accidents is already in the billions of dollars, not counting Fukushima.
The financial bill for mitigating the damages being caused to the environment (not to mention foreign policy) by fossil fuels is dwarfing that of nuclear power.
A "severe" accident results in loss of life, or in square kilometers of land unexpectedly rendered unusable for habitation or agriculture.
The worst case scenario for global warming involves a change in climate so devastating that the earth may be able to feed little more than 100 million humans and may take hundreds of thousands of years to return to the point we are at now. It makes the dangers posed by nuclear energy seem fairly trivial.
I have yet to read any worst case scenarios for nuclear energy accidents which are anywhere comparable to this.
Is it much worse than the Banqiao Dam disaster where an estimated 90-230k people died? What would happen if there was a catastrophic failure of the Hoover dam?
This is not to say nuclear failure isn't bad news, just that many large scale electricty generating schemes have a big downside and it's going to be a big ask to find 100% benign alternatives.
Of course, catastrophic failure of a coal or wind power plant kills plant workers and maybe a few unlucky bystanders.
The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers.
When you score risk, you multiply probability by impact. The power output and operational history of nuclear power indicates that the probability of failure is very low, but the impact is very high. (both in terms of severity and duration)
The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, is poisoning square miles of land, air, sea, most likely the groundwater and probably hundreds of workers.
Should I say "citation needed" or just call it as FUD?
I'd say that even with such a disaster at Fukushima, the impact has been very low. Even less so compared to the alternatives:
1) What are the levels of radiation that the workers were exposed to? Is that fatal or problematic for their health? How many people suffer from respiratory diseases related to fossil fuel burning?
2) What is more damaging to the environment: a nuclear plant or a coal mine? The amount of "poisoning" that happened will make the land inhabitable ever again? How much farm land would have to stop producing crops to give way to wind turbines?
I don't know how you can accuse me of making up FUD, while asserting that the impact is "very low".
Since the NY Times reported this morning that unprotected workers were burned by contaminated water suspected to be leaking from the #3 reactor, after ignoring warnings from personal radiation warning devices. I don't think its unreasonable to think that workers will suffer adverse health effects.
A safely operating nuclear power plant with an uninterrupted supply of fresh water and electricity has less impact to the surrounding area than your average coal mine. The problem is, as Fukushima aptly demonstrates, is that many of these facilities do not fail safe.
Again, think risk management. Probability vs. impact. You're letting your fondness for nuclear energy blind you from the obvious.
I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of damage coal power generation causes.
If nothing new and catastrophic happens in the near future (it looks like the worst is being contained, but if another earthquake and/or tsunami hits the plant right now, the damage will be massive), the most casualties caused by the Daichi nuclear plant will be in Germany.
This is because Angela Merkel caved to political pressure and ordered the seven oldest nuclear reactors in Germany shut down for at least 3 months. During those 3 months, the plants would have generated 17 TWh, which will now need to be supplied from other sources. The most likely candidate for most of it is coal, because there is currently plenty of underutilized capacity. Coal power releases lots of SO2 and NO2 to the atmosphere, which directly kills people. By current data, 1 TWh of coal power produced in the western world kills roughly 15 people -- so when Merkel signed that moratorium, she signed death warrants for 250 people. (This estimate is probably seriously low -- notably, the coal plants currently running are the newer and cleaner ones, and the capacity that will be brought up to replace them will be dirtier. Also, I have not counted CO2 emissions in any way.)
If every nuclear reactor in the world operated constantly at the level of leakage and operator casualties that are happening at Daichi, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. If there was a Chernobyl every year, nuclear would still be preferable to coal. The normal operation of a coal plant over it's lifetime is more costly in human lives than the worst case nuclear accident of a modern nuclear plant.
The problem is that people are not afraid of dying -- they are afraid of dying in disasters. Nuclear accidents are concentrated. The casualties and the environmental damage caused by coal are diffuse.
Didn't that same article suggest that what they were likely to end up with apart from an exposure to 180msv† was the equivalent of a bad sunburn?
It's not like we don't have any idea what radiation does, is it? It's among the better studied of the human industrial health hazards, right? A lot better understood than, say, endocrine disruptors?
Because coal kills 30-60 industry workers every year. (Down from ~1200/yr in the late '40s).
† (Which, while more carcinogenic than the air in Chicago, is far less carcinogenic than failing to eat enough leafy green vegetables or a 4-times-a-week habit of eating red meat)
The industry worker casualties are flatly insignificant compared to the deaths caused by release of SO2 and NO2.
In the whole world, roughly a million people die every year due to the direct effects of coal power production. Most of that is because of the very dirty plants in use outside of the western world -- but even here, more than 50,000 people die every year because of coal.
While I'm also actually a fan of nuclear power, I'd like to point out that the land use profile of wind turbines doesn't actually preclude the land still producing crops. You lose a couple of percent of the actual acreage where the turbine is actually standing, but the rest of the acreage needs to stay clear for obvious reasons, and is still every bit as fertile.
Longer-term, you'd also have to factor in the benefit of being able to use electric tractors. (I don't think anybody actually does yet, mind you, but there's a clear advantage.)