You won't be able to count. There will be a slight increase in the cancer rate for the next several decades until radiation levels subside to normal. It's like cigarettes. Nobody ever died from smoking a cigarette, but cigarettes have still killed a lot of people.
The result: estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.
Or how about eating tuna every day and ingesting the mercury that primarily comes from coal burning for power generation?
No one in this thread has suggested that coal is safer. What I pointed out are the mistakes of the rabid defenders. They should pause, and think more carefully about the things they say. They'll do nuclear power much more good that way.
> No one in this thread has suggested that coal is safer.
But many are more eager to abandon nuclear than coal. I will be fair, however, in saying that at least some of them hope to abandon both.
And I will also say that if they can make wind & solar (or whatever else) work, I'm all for it. I believe that nuclear is a good engineering choice, but you can change that opinion by providing better technology.
The problem is that I am not one of them, but if I say anything critical of nuclear power, or the fukushima disaster, I'm immediately put in that bucket and the fangs come out. The rabid pro nuclear people sound completely unhinged. I think we should use more nuclear power, over coal, but I'm there enemy because I dared to say that something bad might happen at fukushima. I become one of "them" even though I'm not.
I apologize if my original replay came off a bit snarky.
I agree with you that it's really a shades of grey issue. I certainly don't think nuclear is the end all be all of solving our long term energy problems, but it's also not the boogeyman so many people try to make it out to be.
As far as pollution goes, my opinion is that modern nuclear is the best thing we have right now to bridge the gap to true clean energy (fusion, thermal, whatever). To connect this with your original comment, burning coal is like smoking cigarettes. 1 certainly will not kill you, but the aggregate effects of many plants (China was building 1/week at some point!) over many years is the real problem.
The biggest advantage of nuclear that I see is that it mostly concentrates and contains the waste. If we fully reprocess (something the US can't do now b/c of laws) there will still be some nasty stuff to deal with. Even then, I would much rather have it that way instead of just spewing the nasty all into the environment the way many coal plants do now.
Energy-producing fusion will require a neutron flux. That leads to nuclear activation and is significantly less clean than one might wish, but I certainly hope that the engineers find some way of making it work.
Define significant. How can they estimate them now when we still don't know how bad it is? What we do know is that it's been consistently worse than the official line, until they eventually admit otherwise, then it gets worse again.
The rabid defenders on HN have a worse track record than the Japanese officials.
