Are our fears about nuclear power irrational?

I reproduce here, part of this article and highlight the parts I find the most compelling.

THE CONSULTANT BEN HEARD

Until recently I was a vocal opponent of nuclear power. Understanding the scale of the climate crisis led me - reluctantly, I'll admit - to investigate nuclear power as a solution. To my surprise, I found my fears of nuclear power were overwhelmingly irrational.

I had three main concerns. First, that nuclear power is not safe. The Energy Related Severe Accident Database set that straight. In the past 40 years, the energy chain for coal killed more than 32,000 people worldwide in severe accidents, more than 2000 of them in OECD nations. The comparative figures for nuclear? Zero in the OECD, and 43 worldwide. This includes cancer deaths from Chernobyl, a reactor with no containment building, a horrible and unique design flaw.

Advertisement: Story continues below

Meanwhile, 440 reactors provide 15 per cent of global electricity, including to the world's 16 largest economies (leaving out Australia at number 13). A tsunami hitting 40-year-old reactors has caused injuries and major issues, but not one fatality.

Nuclear power is more than safe enough, and getting safer all the time.

Second, I feared high-level nuclear waste was impossible to manage safely. Cutting a long story short, it isn't. It's predictable to the point of being boring: cool, encase, contain, contain again, and monitor. And the coming generation of nuclear technology will consume it as fuel. Cross that from my list.

Third, I feared proliferation. While nuclear power and weapons programs were once joined at the hip, this is no longer true. Twenty-one nations deploy nuclear power with no weapons capability. If it's a weapon you want, there is no slower, more expensive way of creating substandard material than by using a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power is not a threat to peace.

So my concerns were not rational. But they were understandable, given we are fed a diet of fear by opponents of nuclear power, mainly comprising selective facts that have been stripped of meaningful context. This finds fertile ground among well-meaning people who trust the sources.

Rationally, we should all fear climate change. It threatens our occupation of this planet within a century. This, rather than nuclear power, is what keeps me awake at night.

The biggest contributor to climate change is coal. Renewables alone cannot displace coal quickly enough. But nuclear power plus renewables can, with minuscule risk. The only rational response is to be open to the further deployment of nuclear power, in partnership with growth in renewables.

Ben Heard is the director of ThinkClimate Consulting.

Latest news on Japanese nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi

Latest information on the Japanese nuclear crisis at Fukushima Daiichi.

This is the presentation made by Areva on the chronological event leading to the crisis under control today.
fukushima-areva


Other source of information:
Up to date information from GRS (Society for Plant and Reactor Safety) in Germany.

http://jaif.or.jp/english/
Report No. 40: 18:00, April 2

Latest press releases from TepCO, the operator of the nuclear power stations.

Good News on Sea-Level Rise

This study concludes:

Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in U.S. tide gauge records during the 20th century. Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records. The decelerations that we obtain are opposite in sign and one to two orders of magnitude less than the +0.07 to +0.28 mm/y2 accelerations that are required to reach sea levels predicted for 2100 by Vermeer and Rahmsdorf (2009), Jevrejeva, Moore, and Grinsted (2010), and Grinsted, Moore, and Jevrejeva (2010). Bindoff et al. (2007) note an increase in worldwide temperature from 1906 to 2005 of 0.74uC. It is essential that investigations continue to address why this worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years, and indeed why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.

Maybe the climates models are wrong, maybe we don't fully understand how the relation between CO2, temperature and the climate works?

Some comments from "Global Warming.org" and "CO2 science.org"

The scariest part of the global warming scare is the prediction of rapidly accelerating sea-level rise. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warns that if half the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and half the Greenland Ice Sheet melted or broke off and slid into the sea, sea levels could rise as much as 20 feet. Gore implies this could happen within our lifetimes or those of our children, stating, in the book version of AIT (pp. 204-206), that some 100 million people living in Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Bangladesh would  “be displaced,” “forced to move,” or “have to be evacuated.”

I debunk Gore’s sci-fi doomsday scenario in earlier posts.  Suffice it to say here that the UN IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report projects 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) of sea-level rise by 2100. To be sure, some scientists, such as Scripps Institute of Oceanography researcher Dr. Richard Somerville, who testified recently before the House Energy and Power Subcommittee, claim the IPCC estimate is too low and that sea levels will rise by 1-2 meters.

Drs. Shirwood, Craig, and Keith Idso, our colleagues at the Center for Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, have posted an editorial on sea-level rise that reviews a new study based on global tide gauge data.

The study, Houston and Dean (2011), finds that the rate of sea-level rise over the past 80 years has not accelerated and, in fact, has slightly decelerated. If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on sea level rise ending up near the low-end of the IPCC projection — about 7 inches, roughly the same amount as occurred in the 20th century. Clearly, now is not the time to sell the beach house!

The Idsos’s editorial follows in full:

How High Will the Sea Level Rise by the End of the 21st Century? 
Volume 14, Number 13: 30 March 2011

In the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bindoff et al. (2007) projected a mean global sea level rise somewhere in the range of 18-59 cm relative to mean global sea level in 1990. Subsequently, however, based on statistical models that employ semi-empirical relationships between past and predicted future increases in global temperature, Vermeer and Rahmsdorf (2009), Jevrejeva et al. (2010) and Grinsted et al. (2010) derived much greater increases on the order of 60 to 190 cm over the same time interval. And now — based on sea level behavior between 1930 and 2010, as derived from United States tide gauge data, plus extensions of previous global-gauge analyses — a new empirical study, which does not rely on a relationship between sea level and temperature, casts doubt upon both sets of projections.

Houston and Dean (2011) began their analysis of the subject by noting that global sea level increases of 60-190 cm between 1990 and 2100 would require mean global sea level rate-of-rise accelerations of 0.07-0.28 mm/year/year above the mean global rate-of-rise of the past several decades, which latter rate has typically been calculated to fall somewhere between 1.7 and 1.8 mm/year. Working with the complete monthly-averaged records of 57 U.S. tide gauges archived in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level data base that had lengths of 60-156 years (with a mean time span of 82 years), however, they determined that there had not been any acceleration in the rate-of-rise of the sea level along the shorelines of the United States over that period of time, during which interval the world’s climate alarmists claim the planet had warmed at a rate and to a level that were unprecedented over the past one to two millennia. Quite to the contrary, in fact, they detected a slight deceleration of -0.0014 mm/year/year. And working with 25 of the tide gauge records that contained data for the period 1930-2010, they calculated an even larger deceleration of -0.0130 mm/year/year.

The two researchers also report that they “obtained similar decelerations using worldwide-gauge records in the original data set of Church and White (2006) and a 2009 revision (for the periods of 1930-2001 and 1930-2007) and by extending Douglas’s (1992) analyses of worldwide gauges by 25 years.” Consequently, they rhetorically ask why the concomitant worldwide-temperature increase “has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years,” and, indeed, “why global sea level has possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.”
Clearly, the reality of the world is vastly different from what is portrayed by the IPCC and the world’s climate alarmists, based on simulations produced by state-of-the-art climate models. And the empirical facts of this particular “detective case” suggest something much less ominous than what they are predicting for earth’s future with regard to the magnitude of sea level change over the remainder of the 21st century.
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
References
Bindoff, N.L., Willebrand, J., Artale, V., Cazenave, A., Gregory, J., Gulev, S., Hanawa, K., Le Quere, C., Levitus, S., Noijiri, Y., Shum, C.K., Talley, L.D. and Unnikrishnan, A. 2007. Observations: oceanic climate change and sea level. In: Solomon, S. et al. (Eds.), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, New York, New York, USA.
Church, J.A. and White, N.J. 2006. 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise. Geophysical Research Letters 33: 10.1029/2005GL024826.
Douglas, B.C. 1992. Global sea level acceleration. Journal of Geophysical Research 97: 12,699-12,706.
Grinsted, A., Moore, J.C. and Jevrejeva, S. 2010. Reconstructing sea level from paleo and projected temperatures 200 to 2100 AD. Climate Dynamics 34: 461-472.
Houston, J.R. and Dean, R.G. 2011. Sea-level acceleration based on U.S. tide gauges and extensions of previous global-gauge analyses. Journal of Coastal Research (in press).
Jevrejeva, S., Moore, J.C. and Grinsted, A. 2010. How will sea level respond to changes in natural and anthropogenic forcings by 2100? Geophysical Research Letters 37: 10.1029/2010GL042947.
Vermeer, M. and Rahmsdorf, S. 2009. Global sea level linked to global temperature. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106: 21,527-21,532.

Richard Muller global warming point of view.

Here is an excellent 5 minute explanation of Climategate by Richard Muller, a UC Berkley physicist who is leading a larger project attempting to reconstruct temperature records. Muller believes that global warming is a potentially big problem. So this is someone who mostly supports the IPCC, yet refuses to compromise his ethics on what appeared in those e-mails.

Muller holds no punches for those involved in the Climategate e-mails. The whole presentation is worth watching, he takes a number of swipes at Al Gore and the IPCC, but if you’re in a hurry the explanation of Climategate only lasts 5 minutes (begins at 29m50s). A takeaway quote, “Quite frankly, as a scientist, I know have a list of people whose papers I won’t read anymore. You’re not allowed to do this in science.”

Nuclear notes related to Japan earthquake, tsunami accident

Here's some QA, documents and articles related to the Japan nuclear accident.  Talking to friends, I see that there is a lot of information to digest and article to read to get a good understanding of this event.

This graph from the globe and mail show how the radiation spiked in Japan.  Note the level compared to a full body CT scan.  Those level where recorded very close to the plant, where not one lives and where only worker where exposed to high level radiation. 

First a look at some articles I found interesting:

Putting some perspective on the nuclear question

• Japanese Earthquake Implications Quick Q and A
• Good starting point on how a nuclear power plant operates, radiation level and type and much more.
  
• Banana equivalent dose: A banana equivalent dose (BED) is a measure of the radiation exposure caused by eating one banana. It is a concept that was intended to explain the relative danger of radiation by comparison with everyday life activities. BED is a radiation dose equivalent unit; the corresponding SI unit is the sievert (and rem is also commonly used).
• The dose equivalent of eating a banana is about 0.01 mrem (or 0.1 µSv).

• Less cancer or congenital heart malformations after being exposed to low dose radiation a must read, real life data: http://bit.ly/gbUu2I

• An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan.Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 (half-life:5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv-a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv.

• Low-dose radiation is documented to be beneficial for human health but, for political reasons, radiation is assumed to be harmful at any dose. Detail of the study
• Journalist Wall of Shame covering the #Japan #nuclear and #earthquake crisis http://bit.ly/fbyxvg sensationalist, speculation, bad reporting
• Best read so far; William Tucker: Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl - http://t.co/S2mzc2D a must read
• Used #nuclear fuel is an energy opportunity, not a threat or a burden to future generations.  
• http://bit.ly/dLa7c9 
• #Nuclear engineer explains why milk poses a greater radioactive threat than groundwater tritium from Vermont Yankee http://bit.ly/hZWHQe

• Nuclear Overreactors: Let's cool the political meltdown over Japan's damaged nuclear power plants.
  http://www.slate.com/id/2288212/
•  Viewpoint: We should stop running away from radiation
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842
• You need to drink 5000 liters of contaminated milk before you reach recommended limit set by the EPA: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576233221749626458.html
• Talk About a Meltdown:  The hysteria over Japan’s nuclear reactors is ridiculous.
  http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/262182/talk-about-meltdown-jonah-goldberg 
 

Now for some good  interviews on the subject of nuclear in general and Japan in particular.

Let start with an interview on Blogginheads.tv between John Horgan Stevens Center for Science Writings, Cross-check and Rod Adams Atomic Insights Blog, The Atomic Show



This one is a bit older and is more a debate on nuclear power in Alberta, but the discussion is interesting. This is from http://skepticallyspeaking.ca/episodes/11-nuclear-power-round-2

Fascinating discussion on nuclear power with Dr. Jeremy Whitlock, reactor physicist and author of the website The Canadian Nuclear FAQ, and Elena Schacherl, founder and Co-chair of Citizens Advocating the Use of Sustainable Energy (CAUSE), which is a member of the Coalition for a Nuclear Free Alberta.




There is not perfect solution like any human endeavors, so having the perfect energy solution does not exist yet.  When you compare different energy source and related deaths, nuclear is one of the best in that regards.
This web site as a good compilation of information on that subject.

Energy Source              Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average               161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China                       278
Coal – USA                         15
Oil                                36  (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas                         4  (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass                    12
Peat                               12
Solar (rooftop)                     0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind                                0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro                               0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao)    1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear                             0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

 
To be continued...