Hi Rahvin, I want to say I am indeed learning a great deal from your post. But I did have a few questions.
1.Is it possible the reason for the lesser deaths/TWh of power from nuclear plants is because when compared to other forms of power generation there are less nuclear plants? If some day nuclear plants equal or exceed coal /water and oil then is it safe to assume, we will see a increase in nuclear power production deaths to equal or exceed other forms of power production?
That's why the units are deaths per TWh of generation, not deaths per power plant. If plant A kills 100 people but generates 10 TWh of power (absurd numbers, jsut demonstration), and plant B kills 10 people but only generates 1 TWh, we'd need 10 of plant B to generate the same power as plant A, and so we'd wind up with 100 deaths. Both would have the same average deaths/TWh.
This means that these numbers scale regardless of the number of plants of whatever type. They'll stay the same whether you have a thousand coal plants or twenty, a hundred nuclear plants or five.
Does your gas mileage depend on the total distance you drive? No - just whether you're on the freeway or in the city, and what type of car you drive. The same is true of the numbers I presented - the total amount of generating capacity and the number of plants is irrelevant. For each given unit of electrical power generated, we can see the relative risk of fatalities from each type, and the clear winner is nuclear.
Your mention of the Hydroelectric dam in China was the grandslam though. Simply looking at that one example shows how tame in comparison nuclear power is.
It's a great example that just because we're
used to something, just because we don't often hear about disasters, just because we aren't as
frightened of a thing, doesn't mean its really less dangerous.
Honestly, I thought hydro was safer than that as well. This is why we need to look at the numbers instead of trusting our initial reactions - we don't have enough information as individuals in teh lay public to make anything resembling an accurate estimate on our own.
2. Your mention of coal seam fires: It seems to me this is caused by both man made and by natural means of ignition. So to say it is man made is not completely accurate is it? A forrest fire can ignite a coal seam.
I brought them up to show that nuclear incidents aren't the only power-related disasters that can lead to permanently evacuating an area. Centralia, Pennsylvania was an actual coal mine, and its thought it was ignited due to some trash burning at a landfill near the mine. Yes, natural causes can start coal seam fires (Burning Mountain in Australia has been burning for an estimated 6,000 years), but the mining itself creates conditions that make the ignition more likely, by exposing the coal seam to the air, and by leaving behind highly flammable coal dust.
There are other disasters as well. Hydrofraking is a process by which a rather nasty mix of chemicals is pumped into the ground to fracture oil shale and make it available for pumping. Unfortunately, this also gets into the groundwater - there have been recent cases in the US where, literally,
tap water was flammable because the groundwater was so contaminated. No, that's really not safe to drink. Yes, Id rather drink water from the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
3. Death pre TWh of power is one way to assess safety, but what about long term effects on the environment. We all know the ravages of coal mining and the destruction of natural forest. But we still do not know the future implications of storing radioactive waste in the Earth indefinitley. Is the possiblility of radiation poison not something that should also be evaluated in terms of safety? Is the fact that radioactive material has the potential to cause the ground water and food chain contamination not another safety concern? I understand about your example of acid rain, however if those means of power production are reduced or halted wont acid rain be a thing of the past. But yet a massive release of radioactive material would potentially last for decades if not longer?
The storage of radioactive materials is actually not so difficult as you would imagine. The casks they pack the stuff in are designed (and tested) to withstand, not kidding here, the impact of a freight train while doused in burning jet fuel, without releasing any radiation. Penn and Teller even did an amusing little bit on their show about it, complete with video.
But the largest issue with radiological waste is the issue of reprocessing. There are two simplified types of radioactive waste - high-level waste and low-level. High-level is extremely radioactive and dangerous, but has a relatively short half-life and decays rapidly. Low-level waste is comparatively tame in terms of radiation intensity, but lasts for millions of years or more. Reprocessing involves the recovery of still-usable fissile material from "spent" fuel rods. Fukushima provides a great (though unfortunate) example - the disaster right now is largely in the
spent fuel containment pools, which are right now generating a few megawatts of waste heat just from the products of decay and some small remaining nuclear reactions (not enough to go critical at this point and start a self-sustaining reaction like would happen in the actual core, but enough to make it really hot). That spent fuel can be reprocessed, reducing waste by up to
95% and recovering an absolute ton of usable fissile fuel that can be reused.
The US does not reprocess spent fuel because of multiple concerns, though the most commonly touted is the fear of terrorists gaining enriched reprocessed Uranium and Plutonium (some of the products of reprocessing) for use in a dirty bomb or even a nuclear weapon. Those concerns seem pretty baseless, though, in the face of the fact that other nations, including France and Japan (at least one of the reactors at Fukushima I know was using reprocessed fuel) manage to use reprocessing without any terrorists getting their hands on teh stuff.
What's more, the high-level radioisotopes are what we
want in a nuclear power plant. What's left after reprocessing is mostly low-level waste - not nearly as much radiation, much easier to store (nuclear decay generates heat, less radiation and slower decay means less heat and so easier storage), and
much less quantity.
France uses a single reprocessing facility, and since the beginning of its operation it has processed over 23,000 tons of spent fuel, recycling enough to power the entire country for another 14 years.
This is what nuclear fearmongering has done - the US wants to bury fuel rods,
most of which could be recycled into even more fuel, leaving us with more power and less waste.
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