Indeed. Each exposed human being must be able to decide. As long-lived (/'hot') waste may be a matter of concern for future generations we have a problem.

There are at least a few major differences with a nuke reactor:

1. Jetliners rarely kill non-passengers and everyone can chose to avoid them (be a non-passenger)
2. They kill locally (in space and time) and 'patently' while every bystander, and even anti-nuke and distant people, in space and time, may be more than slightly annoyed by a nuclear reactor, and may be unable to know that they are at risk (exposed to ionizing radiation). Even without any disaster, because part of the waste is highly dangerous!
3. Jetliners are very difficult to replace in their mission. Civilian nuke, used for gridpower generation, is not.

Same answers, adaptation (as for non-passengers victims, who now can only dismiss the risk by leaving cities) left as an exercise for the reader :-)

That's the whole point.

Indeed. BTW a jetliner killed my brother in 1998 (flight SR-111, he was a passenger), I had to give a thought about those matters.

Answering is difficult, for example (again!) because we have to take waste into account. Moreover one cannot neglect lies published by some people advocating it, which is not precisely a good factor in my book.

Sorry. Wish I had the wisdom to avoid writing while in a hurry.

The original poster wrote: "Chernobyl, but that one was a combination of bad reactor design even for its age, human error, but most importantly, deliberate shutdown of safety mechanisms while running in experimental mode".

My intent was to say that not a single one of those risks are now solved. "Bad reactor design" is not out of question (recent bugs were discovered in modern designs, and with time others may appear, maybe by hitting hard), human error is always a factor (Three Mile Island...), deliberate (or miscalculated risk-taking) did not suddenly became impossible.

The Soviets masters also used to tout their reactors as "sure to the point of enabling us to build them on the Red Square". When Cherno blasted stuff away they were nowhere to be found, and poor suckers (civilians and liquidators) enjoyed the ride.

Even the modern EPR was also touted as absolutely sure, then experts mandated by the first customer (the Finns) discovered that the classic "sump clogging" problem may cause a major accident, as explained in "Nucleonics Week" (Volume 45, Number 11 - March 11, 2004). It was at least partially fixed, but for one discovered bug how many remain hidden?

As for your pebble thingie don't neglect criticism (page 41). Published by anti-nukers, yep, but please read the authors' pedigrees (page 4).

For informed people anyone claiming that a complex technical thingie (for example a nuclear powerplant or a piece of software) is "fully debugged and sure" is either a naive enthusiast or a liar.

No one knows for sure why the meltdown was avoided. Moreover the very probable causes (regulatory failure and industry cost-cutting) are not forever gone.

All thoses causes were then possible, most (if not all) for sure are and probably will.

A civilian nuclear reactor produces gridpower. "There are currently 104 commercial nuclear reactors ((...)) the share of the Nationâ(TM)s total electricity supply provided by nuclear power generation has averaged about 20%". Source:EIA.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions were (2007): 2,433 million metric tons emitted to produce gridpower, and 3,557 for other uses, mainly transportation (no car/plane runs on nuclear fuel!). Source: EIA

In other words building 400 new nuclear reactors, a major ordeal, only reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40% and there is no further potential gain without an even much more major retrofit: only using gridpower-fed transportation means. Is it an "effective" approach?

Nuclear: 8.5 percent of the total primary energy used. Renewable (7.3%) are not ridiculous, especially given their long history of lack of founding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps_sinensis , albeit multicellular, is also somewhat astonishing

The Bose Institute ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Institute ) exhibited approximatively 90 years ago that plants do "feel" pain. A. Huxley visited the lab and wrote about this in his "Jesting Pilate" book (1926), in very similar terms (more or less "upon discovering those studies, vegans will be tempted to only eat minerals") Nothing new under the Sun...