The nuclear power industry seeks to exploit concerns for the environment to promote its products. For mine, nuclear technology is a different set of problems, not any part of a solution.
The problem, as I see it, is the human element. Nuclear fuel and byproducts are so toxic that we can't afford anything to go wrong. Experience teaches that nothing ever goes perfectly right. Human fallibility increases the probability of mishap and error. The consequences are far too familiar: death, illness and vast tracts of land rendered uninhabitable for (conservatively) decades.
Another factor is so-called
"black swans" - things that we don't realise can go wrong until the first time it happens.
What follows is from
Barnard on Wind. The focus is wind energy, but practically any renewable technology can be safely substituted for wind in the piece.
2013/06/16 · by Mike Barnard
Many nuclear energy advocates have devoted a considerable amount of time in the past few years to bashing wind energy, making a remarkable number of claims against it, some of which contain grains of truth, many of which don’t.
The arguments for nuclear are good: it has very low full lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions per MWh, nuclear plants can last for decades, they provide stable baseload power, they have a very low mortality rate per TWh, and once they are operational their operating costs are relatively low. So why isn’t this a blog debunking the myths about nuclear energy instead of a blog that dominantly focuses on wind energy?
Pickering nuclear plant and wind turbine in Ontario courtesy
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pickering-nuclear-generating-station-001....Dispassionate, big picture thinking, research and analysis make it clear that wind energy is the more pragmatic choice for the majority of jurisdictions around the world. It’s obvious most utilities and strategists are thinking clearly, because wind energy is on track to exceed world wide nuclear generation capacity in the next few years, while nuclear capacity is being taken offline and not being replaced with more nuclear generation.
The reasons why wind is the pragmatic choice are straightforward and obvious, once they are pointed out. They don’t require sophisticated models or assessments, although those have been created and assessed as well. All it takes is to stop thinking like an engineer and consider the full spectrum of requirements for building out a generation source in large increments.
Social licenseSocial license is acceptance by the community, stakeholders and society at large that the development under consideration has the right to be built and operate. There is no social license for nuclear in the very large majority of jurisdictions world wide, and there is overwhelming majority support in poll after poll for wind in both rural and urban areas, so wind energy can actually be built, and nuclear can’t.This is frustrating for people who understand that the fears related to nuclear energy are for the most part baseless, especially when the statistics are assessed with open eyes. Nuclear’s deaths per TWh are much, much lower than fossil fuel generation by any analysis, and are in the same ballpark as wind, solar and other renewables. It’s benign, but it is tightly coupled to radiation and nuclear weapons in people’s minds. Accidents such as Fukushima and Three Mile Island receive enormous world wide press, but don’t kill anyone.
Wind energy has a minority of very vocal antagonists, but every poll that is phrased neutrally finds overwhelming majority support for wind energy and usually for wind energy near to people as well. From a broader societal perspective, wind energy is understood to be a benign good with very few and very manageable downsides.
It may not be fair to nuclear, but it’s true. Attempting to change the world’s mind about the dangers of nuclear energy in the face of 70 years of dramatization by Hollywood and the enormous negative press that the small handful of major accidents received is a mug’s game. That’s why jurisdictions such as Japan and Germany are getting out of nuclear. Their citizens just don’t accept it anymore.
Human resourcesThe skills required to massively expand wind energy are basic skilled trades — electricians, concrete workers, truck drivers, crane operators — and the world has a lot of them already, often underemployed or unemployed. Cross-training existing trades to build, erect and maintain wind turbines instead of houses, vehicles or malls is relatively trivial, requiring at most a few months. And wind energy can be built with massive parallelization; due to the distributed nature of the form factor, many, many wind farms can have many, many people working on them simultaneously.
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