Relative dangers of nuclear power

[moot]

Off shoot from the Japanese quakes/nuke trouble thread.

I'll start with this :  Nuke has a bad rap as being "not worth the risk". As E.G. GhostFT argues:

warhed you sound to have a good knowledge about nuclear power (i like to read it btw.)
but in all respect for me the risk is not worth, thats why i dont support nuclear power.
A demonstartion startet earlier at a german nuclear power plant, maybe this event will
show the danger, because there is no 100% guarantee.  Me & my family dont need that.

But can GhostFT and others anti-nuke quantify this comparison between nuclear and other power sources like coal? 

A study by Harvard University found about 100,000 cases of premature death annually due to exposure to pollution, and tens of millions of cases of asthma attacks, chronic bronchitis, casualty ward admissions and various other ills.

Health problems linked to aging coal-fired power plants shorten nearly 24,000 lives a year, including 2,800 from lung cancer, and nearly all those early deaths could be prevented if the U.S. government adopted stricter rules, according to a study released Wednesday.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/

... Chernobyl: about 50 dead and a few thousand badly affected.

Nuclear could take coal's place faster than solar or wind.  Waiting for solar/wind would mean .. something like millions of deaths more due to coal.

[Gh0stFT]

i just dont want Tschernobyl or Fukushima at my door. Everything else is natural and
we do have to live with it, like the natural radiation.
I have no problem to live beside a coal or gas or wind power plant.
Sorry, but the debate is over for me

[moot]

You never do debate.
You'd rather have millions insidiously slowly dead than orders of magnitude less quickly killed casualties. 
More radiation from coal than nukes

Former ORNL researchers J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, and R. E. Blanco made this point in their article "Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants" in the December 8, 1978, issue of Science magazine. They concluded that Americans living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to higher radiation doses than those living near nuclear power plants that meet government regulations. This ironic situation remains true today and is addressed in this article.

Also there are alternatives to classic nuclear, e.g. Thorium. 

Also completely ignores secondaries like global warming.  What is the ecological cost of coal versus nuclear?  All because no one takes the time to actually dig up the facts & figures.

[Gh0stFT]

sorry moot, you know what happened today, and you post numbers about how save all is,
its sickens me, sorry.

[warhed]

I'll kick this off by saying, I believe our future would be better off with a strong dependence on wind, water, and solar power.

At least in this country however, our grid is not capable of supporting that.

Currently in the USA, we are very near approaching the point of demand overcoming supply of energy.

This leaves us with some major issues, are costly nuclear plants, with their safe and green operation, worth the price to build and run?  As opposed to cheaper and more harmful Coal and Gas operations.

My opinion is yes.  The designs of modern plants waiting to be built are smaller and more cost efficient.  

I'll explain the USA's current nuclear waste situation if anyone has any questions on that worrisome subject.

[moot]

sorry moot, you know what happened today, and you post numbers about how save all is,
its sickens me, sorry.

No idea what this means other than possibly an appeal to emotion.  The facts are facts. If today's Japanese tragedy is sickening then.... What do you say about the millions dead by coal?  Where's the outrage there?  How about some consistency instead of finger pointing?

[Strip]

Amen moot, I have seen the effects of a coal or gas plant on the surrounding population. Even if
you include Chernobyl I would imagine nuclear is magnitudes less harmful to the environment. If you
don't included it there isn't even a conversation about it.

Strip

[warhed]

There seems to be a worry that being close to a nuclear power plant will expose you to harmful radiation doses.  This just is not true.  I know people who've worked inside plants for 40 and 50 years.  I've worked in one for close to 8 years. We're all fine and probably even at a lower risk for cancer.

Living close to a coal plant however does expose you to harmful pollutants.

How can you argue this?

[moot]

I've got a ton of documents saved up over the years on this topic.  I never took the time to read deep into it, but it's always been clear to me that nuclear is nowhere near as dangerous as it's made out in general public.  Just one pic and a link..

http://manhaz.cyf.gov.pl/manhaz/strona_konferencja_EAE-2001/15%20-%20Polenp~1.pdf

This is in Europe Ghost, right around your family's area.

[Gh0stFT]

There seems to be a worry that being close to a nuclear power plant will expose you to harmful radiation doses.  This just is not true.

i dont meant that, i meant an event like an earthquake, like what happened in Japan AND living close to a Nuclear power.
But you Pro Nuclear people are free to live there. But not me.

[moot]

Thorium reactor meltdown is impossible IIRC.  How about that?  If we ignore for a moment the total incongruency of your preferring millions dead from coal to 50 dead + a few thousand gravely ill everytime we get a Chernobyl; keeping in mind Chernobyl is a worst case scenario.

No thorium meltdowns nor explosions, and less waste.   Also no proliferation issues.

[Gh0stFT]

sorry moot, but i'm not in the mood of copy/paste tons of links & diagrams about how dangerous nuclear power plants are.
I started posting today here because of what happened in japan and now i ended up surrounded by Pro nuclear fans
pointing at me and how all save is and everything else kills *lol*

[warhed]

i dont meant that, i meant an event like an earthquake, like what happened in Japan AND living close to a Nuclear power.
But you Pro Nuclear people are free to live there. But not me.

No one outside of the plant has been harmed due to radiation or contamination, they were safely evacuated before the explosion.  Which every plant on earth has detailed out in procedure.  Plants have an emergency control center, which includes their own weather forecasting to predict paths of radiation releases (which never happen).  The public is always the company's first concern when an event happens.

Us nuke workers also live nearby our plants, along with our families.  We are not shady people from far away working carefree.  A safely operated plant is in our interest not only for our community's safety, but for to guarantee we are allowed to operate and maintain our careers.

When accidents happen, we do everything we can to minimize exposure to the public.  Which is what happened in Japan as well.

There is no other source of energy capable of meeting demand without harming the public.

[moot]

sorry moot, but i'm not in the mood of copy/paste tons of links & diagrams about how dangerous nuclear power plants are.

You don't need to copy paste anything, so far your argument is not fact based but philosophical.  I'm copy pasting because I want to stay brief; and can you really pretend that overwhelming evidence makes something less credible?  No sense in writing up anything longer if you're not even going to debate.  As it is you only have some one liners about your family. And those already aren't accurate, or at least not consistent with their basis - the relative proportion of nuclear and other energies' net lethality.  If you want to instead argue that it's ok for "some other families" to suffer by the millions just so your family has less chance to live next door to a nuke plant, then say so explicitly.  At least it'll be clear that you're accepting a double standard - that many others dying slowly is better than a few dying mostly quickly.

I started posting today here because of what happened in japan and now i ended up surrounded by Pro nuclear fans
pointing at me

I'm not pointing at you but your arguments.  There's nothing to win or lose here, it's just an electronic argument to hash things out.  You've made some assertions and now you can't back them up.  It has nothing to do with who is right or wrong. Only what is true or false.  It's false that nuclear nets more death and suffering than coal.  Solar and wind will take more time to develop enough that they can substitute for coal, than nuclear would.  Waiting that long for solar and wind to develop would net more deaths than ramping up nuclear till solar and wind take over.   

And the pro nuclear gang bang quip is wrong too. See my question to Warhed below.

and how all save is and everything else kills *lol*

You keep saying that and I still don't know what it means. 

There is no other source of energy capable of meeting demand without harming the public.

Thorium?  Isn't it expected to be cleaner and safer to operate than current "classic" fission?

[Stoney]

If you guys want to have a meaningful discussion about this topic, you need to ratchet back the emotional stuff, IMO.

What's going on in Japan is not a problem with nuclear fission.  Its a problem with other infrastructure being damaged which in turn is affecting the plants ability to cool the reaction.  We don't know what or why, we just know there is a problem.  Why don't we wait until all the facts shake out until we start damning Nuclear power as being ultimately un-safe, especially considering this was pretty much a 500-year-type natural event.