Not using Nuclear Power dooms millions to horrible deaths...

[cbelt3]

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es30...source=cen

"“I was very disturbed by all the negative and in many cases unfounded hysteria regarding nuclear power after the Fukushima accident,” says report coauthor Pushker A. Kharecha, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York.

Working with Goddard’s James E. Hansen, Kharecha set out to explore the benefits of nuclear power. The pair specifically wanted to look at nuclear power’s advantages over fossil fuels in terms of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Kharecha was surprised to find no broad studies on preventable deaths that could be attributed to nuclear power’s pollution savings. But he did find data from a 2007 study on the average number of deaths per unit of energy generated with fossil fuels and nuclear power (Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7). These estimates include deaths related to all aspects of each energy source from mining the necessary natural resources to power generation. For example, the data took into account chronic bronchitis among coal miners and air pollution-related conditions among the public, including lung cancer.

"

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Yup. I will also point out the obvious... this compares nuclear power operating normally with other power sources, also operating normally.

[mattkime]

i think we could make it work (safely too!) if we cared to. but there isn't the political will.

[Ca Bob]

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.

[OWC Jamie]

I don;t think it's very fair to condemn Obama's War on Nuclear Power without also mentioning a Bush failure or two.
Invent something if you have to.

[RgrF]

How does Obama's War on Nuclear Power compare with his other wars like his:

War on Guns

War on Christmas

War on Republicans

or his

War on Gitmo?

[mick e]

A perfectly viable, productive nuke plant just closed in mick e's area because they can't compete with the cheap power generated by the new reserves of natural gas.

THANKS OBAMA!

[Gutenberg]

Jeez, Roger, you forgot the War on Benghazi. Pay attention, will you.