Japan on gas, coal power building spree to fill nuclear void

[PamW]

19. Scientifically WRONG!!! again

Last edited Sat Oct 19, 2013, 08:54 PM - Edit history (1)

kristopher states:
That is a real, undeniable aspect of nuclear power - it has accidents that are hugely consequential to the social and economic fabric of their human environment.
- AND (unsurprisingly) those accidents are nowhere near as rare as they are portrayed by the people who profit from the risk faced by the public.

The frequency of accidents speaks for itself. In terms of large scale accidents with offsite consequences in commercial nuclear power plants worldwide for the past 50+ years; we've had three; Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Now compare the frequency of nuclear power accidents to accidents with other technologies that we readily accept. In the past 50+ years that we've had nuclear power, how many airliner crashes have there been? A LOT more than 3. How about automobile crashes and the death toll from those in the past 50 years? Every year, over 40,000 people in the USA alone die in automobile crashes. In the 50 years that we've had nuclear power, that's 2 million deaths in the USA alone. Nuclear power comes no where near that.

What we do have are accidents that anti-nukes like kristopher like to GROSSLY EXAGGERATE as being hugely consequential when they are not. For example, the Fukushima accident has been HYPED so that what it truly is, is a mere shadow of what it has been hyped to be. See:

The Panic Over Fukushima
by Professor Richard Muller, Dept of Physics, UC-Berkeley

Japan's nuclear accident was a great human tragedy, but its long-term health effects have been exaggerated—and the virtues of nuclear power remain.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444772404577589270444059332

Non-scientist kristopher makes a scientifically unsubstantiated assumption above that the Japanese would have to abandon Tokyo if the wind were different. Suppose we had 3 simultaneous Fukushima accidents, with 9 reactors total instead of 3 and the winds were such that Tokyo got 3 times the contamination as Fukushima. Tokyo need not be abandoned. As per the facts / logic presented by Professor Muller; Tokyo would have the same degree of "contamination" as Denver does naturally. We haven't abandoned Denver; and the Japanese need not abandon Tokyo.

Kristopher keeps claiming that I'm not a scientist, and I predict kristopher will probably claim that Professor Richard Muller of the Physics Department at University of California - Berkeley, and author of the book, "Physics for Future Presidents", and teacher of a highly regarded course for non-scientists at Berkeley; is somehow NOT a scientist, or a bad scientist, or whatever; simply because non-scientist kristopher doesn't like what he says.

Of course; that is an old tactic. That's EXACTLY what climate deniers do. If you don't like what the scientists say; you claim that they are wrong. Don't we excoriate climate deniers for such tactics?

Scientists like myself like to put things in proper perspective, and not EXAGGERATE like the anti-nukes do.

The good thing about science is that it is true, whether or not you believe in it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

PamW