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[scriver]

Anti-nuclear people always focus on the fact that it failed. Never mind the fact that even despite the stupid problem of backup generators being forced offline, nor that the plant withstood 45 times the safety standards it was supposed to withstand...

But not even 1 time the safety standard it needed

I think this is less of 'nuclear power is inherently bad' and more of 'under funding your infrastructure to the point where it becomes susceptible to disasters is inherently bad'
Plan and pay carefully for your worst case situation, and these things become a lot less of an issue.

No, it's "nuclear power isn't inherently bad" but "the human element makes nuclear plants and inherently bad idea". Because things will always go wrong.

Personally I'm much more against the continuation of using half-century old reactors with outdated safety standards, engineering and archi-tech-ture than I am against nuclear power in itself.

[Skyrunner]

Kinda ironic that anti-nuclear people actually help cause nuclear problems. Eg, due to protests newer, stronger reactors cannot be built, and old reactors are kept running because we still need to substantial energy provided by said old reactors to fuel our civilization.

[10ebbor10]

Besides, which energy corporation is going to invest in updating a reactor, when there not certain whether it'll still run tomorrow.

Second gen reactors are designed to survive for 80 years, provided they get a midlife update, and proper maintenance.

[Sheb]

Things don't always go wrong. We only had two nuclear catastrophe in the history of nuclear power. On of them hasn't killed anyone yet except for that old worker that died of heatstroke in his combination, and the other has a death toll of a few thousands at most (The official death toll being a whooping 41).

The thing is, a nuclear catastrophe kill less people that a normally operating oil or coal plant.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Chernobyl's true effects are beyond our ability to measure. Radiation signatures from the plant showed up as far away as Alabama, if I recall correctly. And people get cancer all the time. It might have been the catalyst for many more deaths than we measured, or it might not have gone beyond the official count. There's just no telling.

[Skyrunner]

Besides, which energy corporation is going to invest in updating a reactor, when there not certain whether it'll still run tomorrow.

Second gen reactors are designed to survive for 80 years, provided they get a midlife update, and proper maintenance.

Energy is state-ran here. The gov't has expressed regrets multiple times that protests from residents have prevented it from building more new reactors and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Korea's stable granite structures are probably perfect for building nuclear waste facilities.

[Sheb]

MSH: Detecting a signature is as easy as finding some isotopes from the right period. As long as some radionucleotides found their way into the stratosphere, you'll be able to detect the event all over the planet. You can detect the nuclear test in the same way. It just prove the quality of current analysis technique.

Now, as I said, the current official body count is 41: 26 of the clean-up crew that died through direc radiation exposure, and 15 thyroid cancer. It's estimated a total of 4000 people will die eventually. Now, even if that count is off by a factor of ten, that's still less than a normal year for coal.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm not exactly defending coal over here. It's even worse than oil.

All I'm saying is that we should keep in mind the possibility of a heretofore unrealized nightmare scenario that Chernobyl came closest to. The track record of nuclear plants are great, but if private industries operating them were not watched and regulated as closely as they are the risk of such a scenario occurring would increase drastically. We are going to more or less have to employ a greater number of nuclear plants in the future, which will in turn strengthen the industry's political pull, which in turn will put us at risk of creating an iron triangle like that which exists with fossil fuels today.

[10ebbor10]

Chernobyl's true effects are beyond our ability to measure. Radiation signatures from the plant showed up as far away as Alabama, if I recall correctly. And people get cancer all the time. It might have been the catalyst for many more deaths than we measured, or it might not have gone beyond the official count. There's just no telling.

Statistics, and comparable events and dosises. If Tsernobyl had the effects that greenpeace claims it has, then television would've killed just as many. Radiation levels are comparable after all. The dosages from the incident were pretty low, mostly because they were spread out so much. Only dangerous if you happened to ingest large amounts of radiation, which is rather unlikely to occur away from the place of the incident.

Besides, researchers are capable of determining the reactor and source of the material by the composition and state of the various isotopes. Nuclear science is quite advanced.

Edit: Btw, the reason that greenpeace and the like get million death numbers is because they intentionally (ab)use a calculation method intended for high dosages and short times, as opposed to small dosages over long time.

[ChairmanPoo]

AFAIK Chernobyl (surprisingly enough) has not led to a leukemia peak, so things are a bit optimistic in that regard.

[Sheb]

It did cause a lot of thyroid cancer that would have been easily preventable (Hand out iodine tablets to everyone), but thyroid cancer got like a 95% survival rate.

[Owlbread]

There's all the kids that are being born with mutations in Belarus just over the border too. There's an orphanage full of them, suffering from cerebral palsy and stuff.

[10ebbor10]

I'd like a source for that actually...

All I'm saying is that we should keep in mind the possibility of a heretofore unrealized nightmare scenario that Chernobyl came closest to. The track record of nuclear plants are great, but if private industries operating them were not watched and regulated as closely as they are the risk of such a scenario occurring would increase drastically. We are going to more or less have to employ a greater number of nuclear plants in the future, which will in turn strengthen the industry's political pull, which in turn will put us at risk of creating an iron triangle like that which exists with fossil fuels today.

Then again, third gen reactors can't meltdown by design. Or should be unable too, anyway.

[Owlbread]

I'll try and find it, it was a Journeyman Pictures documentary I think.

EDIT:

The best ones are from a documentary called "Chernobyl Heart" from HBO:

Here's a few clips.

[ChairmanPoo]

I've googled it a bit and the studies and reviews I've seen don't appear to show any significant increase in congenital defects either

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/5/941.short

http://my-co2.net/documents/documents_in_english/abort-castro-99.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534706000292

I'm going to check the last one more throughly later, if I can access it through my old uni account.