Humans will then be responsible for not maintaining the integrity of the fail-safes or some idiot will decide to test the all, or some lunatic will sabotage them etc etc etc.
You don't blame nuclear power for bad politics.
You can most certainly see this as a reason not to have nuclear power though - corrupt politicians and greedy corporations are not in short supply.
There are techniques like phytoremediation and bioremediation which can potentially remove the Cesium using plants and have the land safe again in relatively short time.
Yeah, there's people living at Chernobyl now.
There's no way that is end-to-end costs, a substantial portion of the nuclear costs are in the decommissioning.
A British Wind Energy Association report gives an average generation cost of onshore wind power of around 3.2 pence (between US 5 and 6 cents) per kWÂh (2005).
Between 5 and 6 cents, not 40 cents (very old tech?), your figures are from where?
Source: BWEA report on onshore wind costs (PDF).
http://www.bwea.com/pdf/briefings/target-2005-small.pdf
Close by? Denmark sells some of it's excess wind generated electricity to Sweden, who use hydro to store the energy and re-sell later, that's hardly 'close by'.
I never said it was feasible everywhere, but often alternatives like solar, tidal, wave, thermal, hydro are feasible.
Just found an article re solar - 99% storage efficiency!!
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tonyseba/2011/06/21/the-worlds-first-baseload-247-solar-power-plant/
Denmark is currently 20% wind and is going for 50%.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/03/05/how-denmark-will-integrate-50-wind-power-by-2025/
Funny your post describes how the accidents all have nothing in common and then points out that they are all due to human error.
Tell me, how do you propose to choose these amazing infallible humans who don't have human error?
In the UK afaik it's cheaper.
Overall, onshore wind is cheaper / same as nuclear:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Where are you going to put all the waste?
What about terrorism, rogue govts, revolutions, natural disasters, incompetent politicians and greedy negligent subcontractors.
These problems have not been solved yet and never will be, when politicians stop being corrupt greedy fuckers in cahoots with negligent cost cutting corporations who don't give a shit about anything other than lining their own pockets, then and only then will nuclear be safe.
The only feasible way we have of converting electricity to stored energy and back again for more than an hour with anything like 90% efficiency is pumped hydro
No, it's not the only way, there are several ways.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Energy_storage#Storage_methods
Including pumping air into dis-used mines, molten salts/oil, Fly-wheel (V'large ones).. I'm sure there are plenty more.
It's expensive nasty crap with a whole host of other problems, see my other posts, it's not just about how many people die or get cancer.
And quite frankly the figures on that blog are complete and utter bullshit, 0.04 deaths per TWH - that's the kind of figure the nuclear industry would come up with by fudging the figures and ignoring some factors.
What about 500 million+ Europeans+former USSR people and 100 million+ Japanese don't like being poisoned with any amount of radiation - how much is THAT worth? These radioactive accidents are a nasty nightmare and are just not worth it.
Plane crashes.... So why do we keep having nuclear accidents then - because the engineers work out the risk and then the PHBs make the decisions to take slight risks and then the shit hits the fan, again and again and again.
And since we can run our world several times over with renewables, why shouldn't we - and we'd most likely be creating a few jobs along the way.
Renewables = good quality sustainable living, nuclear = dystopian fucking nightmare which we should end asap.
http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/hazmat/articles/chernobyl1.html
Have YOU lived with a nuclear cloud dropping radioactive shit on you?
I don't like coal power one bit, the small increase to our cost of living is a price worth paying for renewables. Measuring everything in terms of money is the wrong way to go about this (renewables would most likely end up cheaper with ongoing investment anyway).
In the UK nuclear only survives because of subsidies, large subsidies.
I also would like to see your 90% efficiency electricity storage system that can store 1MWh, let alone few dozens 1GWh. You've got yourself a Nobel prise in physics right there!
- Physics can't be scaled up!! Wow, that's news to me, I award you the Nobel prize for stupidity.
And by the way, you can get electricity in the UK from 100% renewables and the cost is very similar to the competition (I just checked and it was cheaper).
All this report is talking about is that more things can be done to address big bang type stuff,
Oh well, that's ok then, thanks for the re-assurance.
http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/hazmat/articles/chernobyl1.html
I remember when 'big bang type stuff' poisoned half of Europe with nuclear fallout, we had to drink powdered milk for a while and some livestock were quarantined for many years because they were concentrating radioactive isotopes in their meat and milk.
Humans are greedy and stupid and fuck-up regularly, when the problem of humans fucking up regularly has been solved then and only then will I accept nuclear power.
My previous comment covers the replies:
So many slashdot nuclear apologists in denial about the dangers of nuclear power that they marked your post interesting instead of informative.
This one is going to be interesting to watch, nuclear can't be dangerous, no-one could of predicted Fukushima. Chernobyl, one-mile island and Windscale were a one-off (count them, 1-2-3.... ONE) and will never happen again because the modern safety systems are too good.
Nuclear power stations never leak and it wouldn't matter anyway because radioactive waste is not really all that harmful.
Terrorists could never get hold of nuclear waste, gov'ts never support terrorists and gov'ts never fall. There is no such thing as corruption, and nothing ever gets lost.
It beggars belief the mindset you need to support nuclear, ignoring all of the above.
Wind-power, there are technologies to store energy with 90% efficiency. It doesn't create deadly waste that no-one knows what to do with. The price of the energy input is free and unchanging. IT'S CHEAPER THAN NUCLEAR.
So many slashdot nuclear apologists in denial about the dangers of nuclear power that they marked your post interesting instead of informative.
This one is going to be interesting to watch, nuclear can't be dangerous, no-one could of predicted Fukushima. Chernobyl, one-mile island and Windscale were a one-off (count them, 1-2-3.... ONE) and will never happen again because the modern safety systems are too good.
Nuclear power stations never leak and it wouldn't matter anyway because radioactive waste is not really all that harmful.
Terrorists could never get hold of nuclear waste, gov'ts never support terrorists and gov'ts never fall. There is no such thing as corruption, and nothing ever gets lost.
It beggars belief the mindset you need to support nuclear, ignoring all of the above.
Wind-power, there are technologies to store energy with 90% efficiency. It doesn't create deadly waste that no-one knows what to do with. The price of the energy input is free and unchanging. IT'S CHEAPER THAN NUCLEAR.
Friction is a drag.
