This wasn't an accident. It was a gamble. Some people thought the risks too remote and rolled the dice...
Nailed the crux of the matter right there, Bill.
Mind you, just saying that something is a gamble shouldn't rule it out. Gambling with our future is something we humans often do, sometimes with good reason. But we should at least be clear on what we are doing.
Besides, the Tsunami has kill far more people than any of those reactors.
Almost certainly not. We really have no idea of the likely toll from this disaster, but we do know that the Chernobyl disaster has already killed a lot more people than the Tsunami - we can't say exactly how many, but possibly as much as an order of magnitude greater.
Even if this goes to a "7", and we have four a century, it will still be less harmful than coal as an energy source.
I am not convinced of that, but I certainly recognize the rolling disaster that we call the coal industry, and agree that it too has massive long-term costs. Whether those costs are greater than or less than the massive costs of the nuclear industry, who really knows? Right now, you'd have to say that coal has done a lot more damage. But on the other hand, we have used coal for a lot longer, we use a lot more of it, and many (not all) of its effects are quite short-term.
In any case, arguing whether coal is worse than nuclear merely begs the question. What we should be asking is "what are the best routes forward?" - not "wick of these bad routes is even worse than the other bad route?"
The pro nuclear people are all madly running around saying "oh, but we can do it better in future" (which is undoubtedly true), and many of them are still pretending that things are not as bad as they really are (they do this every single time - lying about disasters for as long as possible must be something they teach in Nuclear Engineering 101, 'cause they do it every single bloody time - and then, later, when they want something new, they complain about the "stupid" public not believing them!).
The anti-nuclear people are all running around saying "I told you so" and that the potential for more disasters is just too high, and that all the proposed new safeguards are still not good enough (which is true) - but they practically never look at the context. In particular, they don't look at the costs associated with non-nuclear alternatives.
Intelligent people sidestep all those arguments because we simply don't need them in order to make practical decisions. Intelligent people look at the total cost of generating electricity with nuclear power, applying all the appropriate safeguards, and run away from it at the speed of a farting butterfly, 'cause when you do the sums, nuclear ain't just expensive, it is
mega-expensive electricity, and we have much, much cheaper, cleaner ways to do it. We don't
need to work out if the disaster risks of nuclear power are bearable or not, because there is no economic case for it at present.
Nuclear people, come back and talk to us again if and when you have figured out a way to deliver a product that is not only safe, but also affordable and practical.And stop asking for bloody subsidies!
