No one disputes that coal fired plants kill far more people than nuclear power, even taking into account casualties from uranium mining pollution.
Anyone who believes that global warming is real will certainly agree that nuclear power is safer even factoring the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents. I think alternative energy such as wind and solar would be more cost-effective and much safer. Unfortunately Japan does not have significant wind resources, and not much potential solar power either. Putting aside the long term perspective, nuclear power is uniquely disastrous from an economic and business point of view. No other source of energy could conceivably cause so much damage in a single accident, or cost even a small fraction as much money. As I said, this accident bankrupted the world's largest power company and effectively destroyed the houses, towns, bridges and livelihood of 90,000 to 150,000 people in 5,000 square miles of land. (It turns out 90,000 people were ordered out by the government but 60,000 others left on their own after they and their local governments detected radiation far above natural background. TEPCO and the government say they will not pay compensation to these 60,000 people, even though no one disputes their land now has lethal levels of radioactivity.) If TEPCO had known this might happen I seriously doubt they would've built any nuclear power reactors. No corporate executive would risk the destruction of the entire company in a single accident. It reminds me of Churchill's description of World War I Adm. Jellicoe as "the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon." People say that no one was killed. I expect many of the young workers will prematurely die of cancer in the next 20 or 30 years. But assuming for the sake of argument that no one was killed the situation is still unprecedented. Consider this: The U.S. commercial airline fleet consists of 7185 airplanes. That includes "3,739 mainline passenger aircraft (over 90 seats) . . . 879 mainline cargo aircraft (including those operated by FedEx and UPS) and 2,567 regional aircraft jets/turboprops." I believe the average replacement cost of the big mainline ones is around $150 million per aircraft. http://atwonline.com/aircraft-engines-components/news/faa-us-commercial-aircraft-fleet-shrank-2011-0312 http://www.boeing.com/commercial/prices/ Okay imagine that in the middle of one night, when these airplanes are parked with no one aboard, all 4,615 of the big passenger and freight airplanes suffer fuel leaks and are destroyed by fire. No one is hurt, but the entire fleet is destroyed. The replacement cost of the equipment would be ~$692 billion, which is roughly how much the Fukushima disaster will cost. Do you think that Boeing, Airbus or any airline would survive this? Do you think any insurance company would? I don't. As it happens, this incident did not destroy the Japanese insurance industry. That is because no nuclear power plant in the world is covered by private insurance. When nuclear power was invented, the insurance companies took a close look and decided it was too risky and they would never cover it. From the very beginning of nuclear power this risk has been assumed by national governments only. So the Japanese government and TEPCO customers are on the hook for this. Obviously, no power company can pay for an accident that costs ten times their entire annual revenue! TEPCO's earnings are here: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/corpinfo/ir/tool/annual/pdf/2011/ar201101-e.pdf 5065 billion yen = $62 billion Jones Beene and others have correctly pointed out that coal-fired plants generally spew far more radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power plants do. This is common knowledge. No one disputes it. However, the Fukushima plant probably put out more radioactive materials than all coal fired plants in history have, and I am sure the Chernobyl reactor did. Here is one description of the radioactive material at a location 40 km from the Fukushima reactors, a year after the accident, long after short lived isotopes were gone: "Outside the Iitate community hall, the radiation dosimeter carried by one of my travelling companions to measure external radiation reads 13.26 microsieverts per hour -- a level around one hundred times natural background radiation. When he holds his dosimeter over the drainage culvert in front of the hall, it stops working altogether -- the radiation level has gone off the scale. One of the things that you quickly learn in a place like Iitate is that levels of radiation can vary enormously within a relatively small area. Iitate has the misfortune to lie in a spot where the winds from the coast meet the mountains, and quickly became a radiation hotspot due to precipitation. Its inhabitants are among the 150,000 people who evacuated from the area affected by the nuclear accident, and have no idea when they will be able to return home." http://www.greenpeace.org/switzerland/Global/switzerland/de/publication/Nuclear/Lessons%20Learned%20from%20Fukushima%20final%20text.pdf You know darn well that such high levels of radioactivity spread over such a large area are bound to cause health problems in the years to come. Look at what happened to U.S. communities exposed to aboveground bomb tests. As I mentioned, the government sent Mizuno a soil sample taken many kilometers from the plant. He found it was so radioactive he was afraid to work with it and did not know where to store it. Mizuno is usually blasé about radioactivity. - Jed
