04-02-2013, 10:45 PM
Several hundred nuclear plants have worked safely for quite a few decades. Building a plant without containment, as in Chernobyl, is obviously stupid. If you look at the famous reactor malfunctions such as 3-mile Island and Fukushima, what you find, after looking at the calculations carefully, is that not much happened in terms of the human population. There is a local issue in Japan, but the radioactivity that has been dispersed across the Pacific ocean and air mass does not extrapolate even to a blip in lifetime cancer mortality. * The rate of thyroid cancer does not seem to have been affected substantially due to 3 mile Island -- we would have had an unrelenting stream of stories about it if it had.
What's left is the day in, day out operation of hundreds of plants around the world that replace a lot of fossil fuel powered electricity.
Kevin Drum has a piece up that suggests that natural gas obtained through fracking will complement alternative energy sources such as solar, as we replace the coal powered economy. This has more to due with economics than with environmentalism, but it will be a plus in either case.
* There were some initial rather hysterical estimations that were based on fairly extreme assumptions and on a demonstrably false model which assumes that cancer mortality is a linear function of exposure, from the least amount to substantially high amounts. Half a century of observation shows that this model is not what happens in real life.
What's left is the day in, day out operation of hundreds of plants around the world that replace a lot of fossil fuel powered electricity.
Kevin Drum has a piece up that suggests that natural gas obtained through fracking will complement alternative energy sources such as solar, as we replace the coal powered economy. This has more to due with economics than with environmentalism, but it will be a plus in either case.
* There were some initial rather hysterical estimations that were based on fairly extreme assumptions and on a demonstrably false model which assumes that cancer mortality is a linear function of exposure, from the least amount to substantially high amounts. Half a century of observation shows that this model is not what happens in real life.