Nuclear power.

Con has provided some great info about alternative energy. I will address each concern, starting with the most direct and concerning problem with Nuclear energy, danger from waste. It is the ONLY of the concerns that is not external to the technology, and deserves the most attention. IV GODZILLA!!! Well, there we have it. In about 50 years since the first nuclear plants were constructed, nuclear accidents have been the direct caused of roughly 4,000 and 200,000 deaths. There is no reason to not disclose this number, and while outrageous, I am more inclined to take something closer to the Greenpeace number than the low estimate. It may seem comical, but before even talking about the staggering death tolls of coal and other fossil fuels, I think it's fair to see what the impact from the daddy of nuclear reactors is. Annually around 1.5 million DALYs (Disability-adjusted life years) are lost through excessive UV exposure[4.2][4.3]. In the UK alone, more than 2,000 die annually from the effects of the sun. My comparison seems unfair, and it is a little. We can't shut off the sun, and we sure don't want to. What I am illustrating, however, is that there is risk that we understand and accept. We work to mitigate the risk. We no longer go out sunbathing covered in baby oil hoping to look like Zonker Harris's idol - George Hamilton. We use skin protection, wear sun glasses " as we understand the risk better, we work to mitigate the risk more. This is the overriding message for nuclear. Assess what went wrong, and work to make sure it doesn't happen again. The story is not only about direct deaths per year at the hands of various power generation physicality, right? If that was the only metric, I could just point to the staggering direct death toll of coal, and be done with this. No, assessing the year-over-year death rate is intellectual dishonesty within this debate. It"s dishonest because it doesn"t address Godzilla in any real way, and I promised that I would not skirt that issue. Nope, we are going to have to talk about... Blinky! (don"t get worked up, I am getting to Godzilla! Right, and those fossil fuel death tolls.) Blinky is a three-eyed irradiated fish who, do to vagary of "place" of the writers of The Simpsons, could be living in a lake nearby you right now. However, I have looked and looked, and I can"t find blinky. What I can find is the Pacific Bluefin tuna.The Bluefin have made the news as a deadly dangerous "fallout" from the Fukushima disaster. In fact, I have seen Blinky morphed into a pacific Bluefin tuna in political cartoons. No one is doubting that the Bluefin population has been effected, but we need to look at the effect in our real world. For example, when a person eats an average 200g serving of Bluefin tuna, they may ingest about 7.7 nanosievert of radiation. That sounds... not so good. However, when a person ingests a typical uncontaminated banana, they are getting 20 times the radiation. I don"t like fish much, so I don"t have much to worry about. My 4 year-old son eats bananas like a monkey, and I don"t freak-out when he is going on his third on a Sunday morning - my son only glows in my eyes. A common notion is that we have about the Godzilla effect (he is coming) is that we are irradiating our land. Our worst nuclear power disaster in total land wasted is by far Chernobyl. Over 63,000 square miles of land have been affected by this disaster[4.6]. It"s always helpful to put numbers like that in some frame. Florida is about 59,000 square miles. That is a good chunk of land effected for a lifetime" Wait one. Who"s lifetime?Some smart folk are working on growing biofuels on the affected land of Chernobyl. The plan is to use the crops to suck up the radioactive strontium and caesium and make the soil fit to grow food again within decades rather than hundreds of years[4.5]. It"s a good chance that I will have been alive to see the disaster happen, and to see the disaster cleaned-up. And while I really want to get to Godzilla, he isn"t in Japan, and he is not in Russa. Let"s take a look at where we (the US) are stuffing all our waste. According to the Congressional Research Service (using NEI data), there were 62,683 metric tons of commercial spent fuel accumulated in the United States as of the end of 2009. Most of that waste, about 78% is actually stored in pools, 22% is stored in dry casks and we are adding 2,400 tons per year[4.7].Doing a little math, going for some outside numbers, and average lifespans, what percentage of this junk is mine? Roughly 2 pounds. Two pounds of some really nasty stuff, but still just 2 pounds. Later in the cool new technology section, we get to see fun stuff we can do with my 2 pounds of nasty stuff, but for now let"s deal with it how I would deal with it NOW! Well, I don't really want the stuff. I could bury it in the back yard, truth is, it could be made safeish. I wife wouldn't like it, but none the less, I wouldn't panic for one second, dry casks are incredibly safe[4.7]. I don't panic easy, so I may not be a great example. My wife, well, she would tell me to take that crap as far away as possible!Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. Located about 80 miles outside Las Vegas - right next to the Nevada Test Site we had been irradiated for years with nuclear bombs " is our latest scheme for what is called "deep geological repository storage facility" for spent nuclear fuel and other high level radioactive waste. That sounds positively sinister, at least it does to a good number of people who have wife's like mine who want the stuff as far away from them and their families as possible. Sometimes there is no arguing with people, and if the good folk of Nevada (about 78%) don't want me tossing my 2 pounds worth of radioactive waste material in their barren wasteland, who am I to complain. What then. I have this 2 pound container of crazy waste to deal with, my wife won't let me keep it in the back yard until its worth something, and Nevada is behaving like it's a dam democracy or something. Breathe everyone. Should the voters of Nevada get their way (and I hope they do) we will do the really logical thing. Keep the stuff right where it was made. Not forever, not even for generations. Just till the future, and to understand that future you will have to read the next round. So where is our Godzilla? Godzilla is fiction. Godzilla looks to us like the first picture below. Look just a little closer, and Godzilla is not as frightening as we though when watching the movie. Finally, what we should be looking at is what Godzilla will look like in the near future, like the last photo in the scare chain. Hold one! I didn't get to the deaths from coal! How carless of me. I can tell you about the total weight of CO2, or the mercury, or the direct deaths mining, or that fly ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste (that's right, MORE radioactive), but it's all insignificant. The truth is, coal for power production is killing everyone and everything. The death toll from coal could be EVERYONE! [4.1] http://www.smashinglists.com... [4.2] http://www.who.int... [4.3] http://en.wikipedia.org... [4.4] http://www.forbes.com... [4.5] http://www.newscientist.com... [4.6] http://www.friendsofchernobylcenters.org... [4.7] http://www.nrc.gov... [4.8] http://en.wikipedia.org... [99] http://www.coal-is-dirty.com... I would love to have the space to address the other concerns in this round, but felt it critical to give proper respect to this concern.