Quote from futuman:
DC, the strenght of nuclear religion seems to pass that of all other religions. As with all other believers it makes you even immune to radiation, be it alpha, beta, gamma or whatever.
It's got nothing to do with religion - it's got to do with the science and a rational approach to risk. Nuclear power remains one of the safest forms of electricity generation - far safer than coal, safer than nat gas, safer than hydro.
Here is what I mean by rational approach to risk. According to the officially adopted LNT (Linear No Threshold) hypotheses, a radiation dose of 10 mSv will have 1% of the effect of a 1000 mSv dose. The latter is enough to cause acute radiation sickness and has an estimated effect of increasing the chance of fatal cancer by 5%. Therefore a 10 mSv dose increases it by 0.05%. Why should an individual worry about this - other factors such as obesity, diet, lack of exercise, alcohol, tobacco, other drugs, other pollutants and so on simply swamp any effect from a low radiation dose of say 10 mSv.
But there is no proof of LNT. There may well be a threshold below which there is no harm. But what is certain is that low dose does very little harm. There are places in the world where natural background radiation is ten times higher than the average and studies have not shown any measurable effect on public health. In the city of Ramsar in Iran, there are extremely high natural radiation levels. In some places in Ramsar, the yearly dose is approaching that received by the emergency workers at Fukushima. The place should be evacuated, but epidemiological studies have not managed to show adverse effects on public health.
A hysterical attitude to radiation risk serves no one's interest except that of the fossil fuel corporates. It does not help make rational decisions about low emission energy, and it does not help those exposed to some increased level of radiation at Fukushima who may be lead to a state of distress far out of proportion to the risk they face.
Why is Australia not solar powered? Because it's way too expensive. Most of Australia's electricity is generated by burning coal. It's practically shovelled out of the mine mouth into the boilers. In Victoria, brown coal is cheap as chips, and has even higher emissions than black coal.
Nuclear provides 14% of the worlds electricity and non-hydro renewables (wind, solar etc) less than 3%. In oh-so-green Germany, despite a huge amount of money spent on PV, it provides no more than 3% of electricity and Germany is building new coal fired power plants. Now why is that?
