Deaths per Terawatt-hour

Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

source

With all the left wing trash wanting to stop nuclear and going back to government studies on energy, algae weeeee; and all the jerkoffs on the right wanting to generate all the electricity with coal and oil.

The table above shows the obvious, nuclear is the safest form of energy. I would say go 100% nuclear but that would be too easy. We could have photovoltaics, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass, and even natural gas to conserve uranium. We need to end the department of energy there is no more research needed to be done. The money saved can be used to build actual plants. What about the nuclear waste? In about 50 years the nuclear waste is less radioactive than the uranium taken out of the ground.

should we go nuclear?

Too bad Japan was on the path to have 50% of energy supplied by nuclear, hope they don't follow the fools and trolls and decide to win.

Externalize costs and have bureaucrats make decisions on this stuff, and thats why you get what we have.

Japan's death per terawatt hour may not be so favorably titled towards nuclear soon though. With low probability/high catastrophe failures, looking at a small sample size may be misleading. I don't say that to be cute, but I mean we might want to wait a couple of weeks before using the death/terrawatt hour ratio to go ahead and start firing up construction on the reactors.

The biggest threat from nuclear is not the waste or the safety, it is someone stealing material and making a bomb or terrorist plot. But, we will see what will happen in Japan as a test of a 8.9 within short distance of a plant. Coal trains alone kill 100 in this country a year.

Should we differentiate between ****ty old designs such as at the Japanese plant and newer designs that should have fewer failures and fail less catastrophically when they do?

Also, is there a reason* there are so many reactors crammed into one small area? It seems like if you're worried about tsunamis/earthquakes (which are basically localized events) it would be better to spread reactors out more, so any particular event only disrupts one or maybe two reactors instead of having to wrestle with six reactors at once.

Newer reactors are, from what I'm reading, designed to be smaller, more distributed, how much difference would that have made in a scenario like the current japanese situation?

* there is a reason reactors are clustered, I'm sure, DUCY?

Gosh, where's the uranium going to come from?

Also, from a policy standpoint, safety isn't the only concern, and the cleanup costs/property damage in Japan won't be trivial. Of course, burning coal and oil isn't a cost free exercise either, but if it's like "lolololol politicians don't love nuclear enough, TERRIBLE", I hope you guys are all happy to contribute to the taxpayer nuclear disaster relief lockbox savings accounts so that when stuff like this happens in our bankrupt countries and the nuclear industry dutifully closes up shop, washes their hands of their mess, and socializes the clean up costs in our wonderful LLC paradigms, we can afford to clean up and compensate the victims.

And yes I know the Japanese plants are publically owned.

PEEAAAAK URANIUM

Jiggs, get with it, thorium is the nuclear fuel of the future.

^this

what scares me most is the nuclear waste
one day it's gonna blow up
and it's gonna be ugly
anyone knows what happens to the waste? i heard it's buried under yellowstone or something like that, not really sure
isn't this the biggest issue of all?

Why can't we just put it on a rocket, point it up and send it off through the stars? The only downside I can see to this is the alien invasion once some far off solar system thinks they are under attack from earth...

While this is true you are talking about a risk factor for an outdated technology. New reactors are much, much different.

... and always will be.

lol icwudt

sort of like wind and solar

I was reading around the net, it is interesting to note about 90% of the electricity used in France comes from nuclear, however they sell what amounts to another 10% to other countries. They get their uranium from Canada and Niger.

Germany has had a massive renewable energy push and generated 94 Terawatt-Hrs (TWH) in 2009 from renewables, up from 37 TWH in 2000. That is 16.1% of their total electricity use. As of December 21, 2010 they are now up to 102.3 TWH. If they gain 1% a year, they can be 100% renewable before the century is out. Gains in heat pumps and led lighting will make it easier.

Solar and wind and the electric car are not some freak shows as the right makes them out to be they are real and or make lots of energy.

No one disputes this. The problem is they aren't reliable and often the best places for wind and solar are quite some distance from where the power is actually needed.

No, it won't blow up.

No, it isn't stored under Yellowstone. Yellowstone is a very seismically active place.

Too much content for a SH thread

The part about chernobyl was pretty funny. Who reads that crap and takes it serious?

The entire energy debate is much much more complicated than what you guys are suggesting.

It's not as simple as "lets build wind farms lol". I wrote up a pretty big post about renewables months ago.. I don't feel like typing it all out again, but pretty much don't think it can replace coal/natural gas. It just can't.

Nukes have safety concerns exactly because of what is happening right now in Japan. Sure, it's relatively safe when presented like the OP, but it's not THAT that concerns everyone. It's when something unexpected happens, like a meltdown, and the cleanup is a nightmare.

That, and its' damn hard to build this generation just anywhere. NO one wants to live near transmission lines, much less a power plant.

how do you know it wont blow up? not that i'm saying it will
i don't think i can be convinced easily on this one though

ok, say it wont (ever) blow up
will it never contaminate earth and water around it?

Wrong type of nuclear material to explode.

It wont. He's right.

It just has to be stored correctly and packed away.

Edit : I work for the largest Nuclear Generation company in the united states. One of our facilities houses a Nuke that had a meltdown/bad reaction. The containment unit did it's job. The radiation is contained, the containers sealed and locked away forever.

If you unsealed it and came near it you'd probably be dead within a month. There is no radiation leakage around the actual container, though. Inside it's a death sentence, outside you could let your kids play on top of it.

It's surrounded by something like 16 inches of steel and feet and feet of concrete. These units were built differently than the ones in Japan. That's why they are scrambling over there because the containers weren't built as sturdy as the ones (mostly) here.

Why aren't they reliable? Figures show solar and wind are much more reliable than nuclear.

Also you can transport electricity in high voltage lines the length of the UK and only lose 10% of the power, so distance isn't really that much of a factor in terms of energy loss.


We'd better crack on with those Thorium plants as there's only 100 years left of Uranium left at current usage rates. Add on the added cost of more refining as Uranium supplies dwindle and a minimum 10 year building time for new plants and we might have a problem.


Its not quite as simple as 'lol build wind farms' but building them as part of a renewable mix is the solution. Its been shown that the UK can have up to 40% of its baseload electricity generated from wind power alone. Add on the planned supergrid connecting it to Europe so you have hydro from Scandinavia and add the solar plants in Southern Europe, biomass from Eastern Europe and you have yourself a very robust system over a large area able to cope with regional fluctuations in wind/sunlight.

Whether nuclear is in the mix or not depends on the individual governments but its likely to still feature. There's over twenty different scenarios proposed for 2050, most of which feature some nuclear, some with no nuclear.

Its not you don't think it can replace coal/gas, its it will have to replace coal and gas eventually as the coal and gas will run out.

Don't be insulted. You have no idea what you are talking about. Like I said, I work for the largest Nuclear Generation company in the United States. Our nukes have a 97% capacity factor. We're also the #1 or #2 efficient nuclear company. 97%. Wind/Solar/Hydro have no where near this capacity factor, not even remotely close. Where are you getting this statement from?


True, you get marginal loss over long distances. Distance is a factor, though. Also remember transmission lines are needed for every generation unit that is built. Typically you build wind farms in remote areas. This means very very expensive transmission needs to be built.


This is just not all that feasible. You have to build an enormous amount of wind generation for a much smaller % of that capacity to be "reliable". Wind is usually generated when we need it the least and not generated when we need it the most.

Also I'm not familiar with this European supergrid. I know the grids here in the US are broken up regionally. The way they work is : imagine a bunch of islands, each one creates it's own energy and provides for its area. These are then all tied together. One can only "lean" on the tie for so long before that tie is automatically disabled.

This is why when in 2003 NY and Canada lost so much power on the east coast that Pennsylvania and New Jersey did NOT lose power. The tie was leaned on, the frequency decay was horrific and the tie was automatically severed, thereby saving the "mid atlantic" region. This setup is probably much different than the european setup, but if it's simliar it means that there are huge stresses between neighboring authorities if one area gets hit hard. You tie these areas in too closely and the whole thing can collapse. This is why it's broken up.

We've done numerous studies on Wind Generation. In all honesty the wind generation fluctuates so wildly that it causes more volatility in the energy markets. The reason is to run an electricity grid reliably you need to have a certain amount of reserve in place in case a unit comes offline. An electricity grid is actually MORE stable without wind generation. You know what you're getting, in general, when nukes and coal plants and oil/nat gas plants are online and can plan accordingly. Wind is a huge x factor and fluctuates all day.

Texas has huge amounts of wind capacity installed. Last month they had rolling blackouts due to the record low temps and the record high electricity usage. All regulations about air quality and environmental restrictions were thrown out of the window when the power grid started going down.



Not really.