Skyrocket said:
phrenzy said:
If you added up all the radiation leaks from western nuclear power plants it wouldn't add up to anything statistically significant enough to garuntee a single death.
Maybe not yet.
Fukushima?
Nuclear radiation is still spreading from there and has already contaminated the enviroment and food chain on other side of the world. This radiation contamination is only going to get worse/spread and it affects will out live us all.
28 Signs That The West Coast Is Being Absolutely Fried With Nuclear Radiation From Fukushima
The map below comes from the Nuclear Emergency Tracking Center. It shows that radiation levels at radiation monitoring stations all over the country are elevated. As you will notice, this is particularly true along the west coast of the United States. Every single day, 300 tons of radioactive water from Fukushima enters the Pacific Ocean. That means that the total amount of radioactive material released from Fukushima is constantly increasing, and it is steadily building up in our food chain.
Ultimately, all of this nuclear radiation will outlive all of us by a very wide margin. They are saying that it could take up to 40 years to clean up the Fukushima disaster, and meanwhile countless innocent people will develop cancer and other health problems as a result of exposure to high levels of nuclear radiation. We are talking about a nuclear disaster that is absolutely unprecedented, and it is constantly getting worse. The following are 28 signs that the west coast of North America is being absolutely fried with nuclear radiation from Fukushima
http://thetruthwins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Fukushima-Radiation-450x270.jpg
http://www.globalresearch.ca/28-sig...with-nuclear-radiation-from-fukushima/5355280
phrenzy said:
Meanwhile new generation plants are orders of magnitude safer than those in use all over the USA right now and are fail-safe meaning they can't melt down.
Are these new nuclear plants still "fail-safe" if they were hit by a massive earthquake or by human error like Chernobel?
Personally I think no nuclear power plant could be fail-safe. Imo, they should be banned. Why risk the planet.
Because it isn't that risky, we've had one western accident of note that was on an old design in a place it never should have been built in a once in 100 year earthquake and the amount of radiation released was not as great as that from the carbon 14 release from coal plants from that year alone, but it's NUUuuuUuuUcleeeeaaaarrr so is scaaaAAaaAry! Meanwhile there are dozens of towns over thousands and thousands of acres that have had to be abandoned due to coal mine fires that will burn for centuries, have killed and poisoned many many people and are causing cancer and high carbon fueled power plants kill thousands each year through many routes including cancers. I wouldn't recommend building a nuclear plant in a geologically unstable area but why not build next generation plants in places that only get earthquakes 1/100th as strong as happens recent ones every few decades? The impact in the worst western nuclear accident under all those poor management conditions doesn't add up to the effects of heavy metal poisoning or nitrogen run off in Japan but it's effects are localized and easy to see as well as good news material. I would have no problem eating japenese food or living there. I'd live next door to a nuclear plant, if they let me I'd swim laps in the heavy water pool, it's just not that dangerous when you look at the actual impact from other energy alternatives instead of looking the other way because the impact heron those is diffuse. They estimate that the total radiation deaths from fukashima over the whole lives of those affected will be about 130, this includes people who die at 60 instead of 70 and is tiny compared to the nearly 20,000 who died in the earthquakes/tsunami.
Fail safe means that you can not get a meltdown. That means in a fukashima like situation you would not have gotten an explosion and would not have to keep pumping coolant in to keep the pile calm. It would absolutely have stopped Chernobyl So yes, it would have made the impact negligible. If you don't like uranium then go LFTR.
I agree it's not perfect, but the nuclear boogey man makes no sense when our current energy options kill people every day. Are you going to frack our farmland as a "clean" alternative? Build the nuclear plants to power solar cell factories and then close them down when you've built enough to meet our needs if you like.
All that before you mention climate change.
*edit* regarding skyrockets post about the the US being blasted by radiation, this is from April 2011 from the Washington state department of health:
"As of 28 April, the Washington State Department of Health, located in the U.S state closest to Japan, reported that levels of radioactive material from the Fukushima plant had dropped significantly, and were now often below levels that could be detected with standard tests."
