Rise of the Nuclear Greens - Some environmentalists see atomic energy as the answer to global...

City Journal ^ | Winter 2013 | Robert Bryce

[neverdem]

Some environmentalists see atomic energy as the answer to global warming.

In theory, the March 11, 2011, disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant should have bolstered environmentalists’ opposition to new nuclear-energy projects. But in the wake of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, some of the world’s leading Greens have done just the opposite: they have come out in favor of nuclear power. Perhaps the most prominent convert is British activist and journalist George Monbiot, who even cites the disaster as one reason for his change of heart. Just ten days after Fukushima, in a column for the Guardian, Monbiot called the use of solar energy in the United Kingdom “a spectacular waste of scarce resources” and declared that wind energy was “hopelessly inefficient” and “largely worthless.” Moreover, he wrote, “on every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power.” He concluded: “Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”

Illustration by Arnold Roth

A number of prominent British and American environmentalists were pronuclear before Fukushima. Among the Americans are longtime environmental activist and publisher Stewart Brand, as well as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, founders of the Oakland-based Breakthrough Institute, a center-left think tank. The Brits include environmentalist Mark Lynas, former British prime minister Tony Blair, and scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock. There’s also a Canadian in the group: Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore.

The emergence of the pronuclear Greens represents an important schism in modern environmentalism. For decades, groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace have pushed an antinuclear agenda and contended that the only energy path for the future is the widespread deployment of wind turbines and solar panels. But fear of carbon emissions and climate change has catalyzed a major rethinking. As Brand puts it in a new documentary, Pandora’s Promise, which explores the conversion of antinuclear activists to the pronuclear side: “The question is often asked, ‘Can you be an environmentalist and be pronuclear?’ I would turn that around and say, ‘In light of climate change, can you be an environmentalist and not be pronuclear?’ ”

Newfound support can only help the nuclear-energy sector, but it remains to be seen whether nuclear will play a major role in the burgeoning global electricity market, which has grown by about 3 percent per year since 1985. It’s already clear that the Greens’ pronuclear stance won’t have a significant impact on the American electricity market over the next decade or so, for a simple reason: the shale-gas revolution here has produced abundant supplies of low-cost natural gas. In 2010, one of the largest electric utilities in the country, Exelon, said that for new nuclear projects to be economically viable, natural gas would have to cost at least $8 per million Btu. Today, the price is about $3.50, and the shale-gas boom means that a price anywhere near $8 is exceedingly unlikely for years to come. Four nuclear reactors are now being built in the United States—the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Georgia and the Summer 2 and 3 reactors in South Carolina—but the projects are going forward only because regulators in those states have allowed the utilities that own them to recover costs from ratepayers before the projects are finished.

Nuclear advocates may have more influence in Asia and Europe, where natural gas remains relatively expensive. For instance, in Japan, where the nuclear industry is fighting to stay alive after Fukushima, natural gas must be imported in liquefied form, and it currently costs about $17 per million Btu. In Western Europe, imported, liquefied natural gas costs nearly $12 per million Btu. When natural gas is that expensive, nuclear reactors can make economic sense. According to the World Nuclear Association, a trade group, some 62,000 megawatts’ worth of new reactors are now being built—58,000 in Europe and Asia and the remainder in South America and the Middle East. (The WNA figures don’t count all 4,400 megawatts of capacity under construction in the United States.)

The biggest obstacle to a rapid expansion of the global nuclear fleet isn’t natural gas, however; it’s coal, the leading source of carbon-dioxide emissions. In China, for example, about 500,000 megawatts of new coal-fired electric generation capacity came online between 2000 and 2011. Between 2013 and 2016, China will probably build another 315,000 megawatts of new coal-fired capacity. Electricity producers are building new coal-fired power plants because coal is relatively cheap and abundant and because no OPEC-like cartel controls the global market (see “Coal Comfort,” Summer 2012). Those factors help explain why, over the past decade, the global consumption of energy from coal grew by about the same amount as the consumption of energy from oil, natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear power combined. In just one year, 2011, global coal use increased by the equivalent of about 3.9 million barrels of oil per day. That daily increase was nearly as much energy as the total amount provided each day by all global non-hydro renewables.

For nuclear energy to gain significant momentum in the global marketplace, then, it has to get much cheaper. In a September essay published in Foreign Policy, Nordhaus and Shellenberger, with coauthor Jessica Levering, provided a road map for revitalizing the nuclear sector. They called for a “new national commitment” to the development and commercialization of next-generation nuclear technologies, including small modular reactors. The goal, they said, should be reactors that can be built at “a significantly lower cost than current designs,” as well as a new, more nimble regulatory framework that can review and approve the new designs.

While that plan is sensible enough, it’s not clear whether groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace can be persuaded to abandon their antinuclear zealotry. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to see that some influential environmentalists are realizing that we have no choice but to embrace the astonishing power of the atom. We do have to get better at nuclear power, and that will take time. But we’re only at the beginning of the Nuclear Age.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Manhattan Institute.

[ransomnote]

You posted so many outright lies and I have so little time to reply...where to start?
_______________________________
Liar says: Let’s look at reality: How many were hurt or killed by radioactive attributes of the Fukushima meltdowns? Answer; none.

Reply: the..uh...”radioactive attributes”? Why word it like that? Because you are attemption to limit the count to ARS again (only those receiving such massive doss they die within days) and not counting those who will lose their health in slow, agonizing steps?

Liar: Chernobyl wasn’t a commercial reactor.....

Reply: Yeah I see that dodge alot - like somehow it matters that it wasn’t a COMMERCIAL reactor. Watch the video titled “The Battle for Chernobyl” and once again discover that mismanagement lead to the Chernobyl melt down, not the non-commercial status. Don’t believe me? Well then why didn’t the others of the same noncommercial design go too? WATER washed away Fukushima’s capacity for containment - it really doesn’t matter whether these are commercial or not.

Liar:Still it killed only three men outright. The range of excess leukemia deaths ranged from 20 to 60 deaths over five years

Reply: Still going for ‘outirght kills’ only, eh? Cancer and lifetimes robbed of health from the day of birth don’t count. WHy? Your numbers of 20-60 deaths over 5 years are more than just an offensive joke. The Soviet government made it illegal for physicians to report deaths from radiation exposure but those who lived through the disaster discovered the truth much later - then they held tribunals exposing the horror denied so many years. Oh and then researches have followed along afterwards and pooled medical information coming out of the region - yes you really have no conscinece if you can dismiss the hell those poeople have gone through and will continue to go through for countless geneartions.

Liar: The epidemiology remains in doubt because the average death rates in Chernobyl were lower than the average in most of Ukraine, and much lower than those in major cities.

Reply: Your commentary is nasuatingly fact-free and meant to decieve...wait...you MUST be a nuclear professional! I spoke with a woman whose famly lived in the region where large amounts of Chernobyl waste fell directly on the populace...everyone was ‘down’ and family members were not allowed into the region to collect the dead...nor will they ever be because it will be radioactive for thousands of years. Even the IEAE, those who were first to distort the truth by under reporting levels of radiation released by a factor of 10 (again - watch the video called the Battle For Chernobyl, Hans Blix admits they only ‘accepted’ and reported 10% of the radiation releases initially reported by the Soviets) has over the years admitted to something liek 4thousand deaths and they are known to low ball. The numbers vary because of the way the Soviets supprssed the data but even a modest figure would be 10’s of thousands in the first years and this stuff will continue to contaminate and kill for thousands of years.

Liar: In other words Chernobyl was saving 967 lives over the five years of measuring the injuries resulting from the meltdown

Reply, Read the accounts coming out of the region, those who survived, made videos, wrote diaries. What you say is grossly untrue and is at the core of why the nuclear industry has the gall to demand more resources - outright denial of catastrophe...

Liar says: When nuclear fuel is consumed by fission the radioactive atoms give up some of their energy as heat, are concentrated, shielded, and later, chemically bound for storage or, if we ever get back to it, reprocessing.

Reply - unless of course you blow it all sky high (fukushima, Chernobyl) See the containment dome was blown off of two reactors in Fukushima. TEPCO claims it was hydrogen buildup but an engineer demonstrated mathmatically that the second exploding containment dome heaved a chunk of fuel and a speed and trajectory that was only obtainable through the force generated by nuclear reaction.
Or you could wash so much radiation into the ocean that the some offshore fish caught within the past 2 months have 500x the safety limit of nuclear contamination, and have 3 nuclear corse which have melted through containmnet and now emit radioactive waste without containment. The Fukushima cores are believed to be under the basement of the buildings and there is some indication of sporadic criticality. I know, that’s not supposed to happen but then, neither are core melts...

Liar says:
The economics of nuclear generated electricity are massively skewed by regulatory overhead.

Reply: Oh but the government is the insurer of the plants so they save so many billions in claims by refusing to admit to damages they cause and therefore denying repsonibility to pay for it. They claim exclusive right to report how much radiation is released and what harm was done and that’s where the problem lies...

Liar says: The importance of having no air pollutants emitted while generating electricity is more obvious to the Chinese than to our bureaucrats and our naïve environmental elite.

Reply: ok your whole section is just bizarre but I’ll take a swing at the easy stuff. Don’t you think radioactive plumes as “air pollution”? The japanese have made it legal to burn heavily contaminated debris...sending it into the air again. Oh the air quality in Japan is shot anyway because three nuclear cores are exposed...well come to think of it, high levels of radioactive Xenon was detected all over the planet, even south of the equator, shortly after Fukushima went...the heavier stuff like Cesium and Plutonium were much slower moving but WHAT is your defnition of air pollution?

Liar: If you live in Minnesota, or on granite, as I do, you probably have more background radiation coming from your basement than you would from a house built over nuclear waste storage tanks

Reply: Seriously? You want to compare naturally occuring radiation to nuclear waste mismanged by the nuke industry? Man is that pathetic angle thread bare!

Liar says: But long half lives are associated with low radiation power. Grandpa’s wristwatch with the radium dial was much more radioactive. Don’t learn your physics from the Sierra Club, which, by the way, was a major supporter of nuclear power in the 60s, before some wealthy New Yorkers learned that the power lines from a new plant would be visible from their estates on the Hudson).

Reply - man you really finished off with a splat, didn’t you? Face down in your very own cesspool.
Grandpa’s radium watch is a sad tale...factory workers used to get a fine point on their radium brushes by tocching it to their lips, and then they suffered horrible types of mouth cancer and that’s why radium watches died with granpa...
Low energy radiation is more damaging to human health than high energy radiation. Want proof? Radioactive potassium in bananas is a higher energy isotope than nuclear fuel. According to the EPA, the human body is almost transparent to higher radiation emitions but incurs more damage at lower radiation levels. My professer in college conceded that this is counter intuitive - we comapre the terms ‘high level’ and ‘low level’ mentally with electricity - but the comparison is false. He said at the time (this was awhile ago) scientists believed that high energy radiation like that found in bananas (potassium 80) was believed to have enough velocity to make one trajectory as it passed through human tissue (like a high powered rifle bullet) whereas low energy radiation (like nuclear waste) did not have the same velocity and was therefore believed to richoceht around the body making multiple passes through tissue and therefore causing more damage. Oh there are many reasons why different radioactive materials damage the body at different rates etc. but low eenrgy radiation should not keep you warm at night.

Liar: Don’t learn your physics from the Sierra Club, which, by the way, was a major supporter of nuclear power in the 60s, before some wealthy New Yorkers learned that the power lines from a new plant would be visible from their estates on the Hudson).

Reply: I wish you’d bother to learn about the medical ramifications of radiation instead of just making it up. Or bother to find out the true, horrific scope of damage caused by Chernobyl, Fukushima etc. But...that’s not your job is it? Your job is to SELL.

[neverdem]

Who wrote this article, an energy company heavily invested in nuke plants?

"In 2010, one of the largest electric utilities in the country, Exelon, said that for new nuclear projects to be economically viable, natural gas would have to cost at least $8 per million Btu. Today, the price is about $3.50, and the shale-gas boom means that a price anywhere near $8 is exceedingly unlikely for years to come."

That looks like a shill for nukes?

[neverdem]

Don’t believe this article. Enviros do not support nuclear power plants.

Read the first two paragraphs again.

[gunsequalfreedom]

Read the first two paragraphs again

I just read the headline again and it says "some" so okay, as the first two paragraphs note, some have taken a position in favor of nukes.

Those some do not represent the sum total or anything close to it. Now I don't know everybody but I touch base with conservation and environmental groups and I have not heard in any conversation anyone (or even some) advocating a rush to nuclear power.

I'd ask but would probably get laughed out of the room.

[gunsequalfreedom]

I guess I was just laughing so hard at a story about environmentalists being in favor of nuclear power that I must have missed that paragraph.

Generally speaking, the notion put forward by this article that there is some mass acceptance of nukes in the conservation and environmental community is just not credible.

[gunsequalfreedom]

George Monbiot probably got tire of going hungry as an environmental writer and took a job with a utility company.

Now that may be unfair to Mr. Monbiot since I did not look it up but he is an idiot just the same for thinking we need nuclear power. We don’t.

[Little Pig]

As you no doubt already know, the San Onofre stuff is not doing well. However, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the problems are due to non-reviewed design changes to the steam turbines, and have nothing to do with the actual reactor designs (which nevertheless are “old” designs). I don’t think anyone is saying it’s ok to adopt a wild-west attitude to reactor/generation equipment design; these are still precision systems requiring staggering amounts of engineering and manufacturing. However, new designs such as the thorium systems are more safe than older designs like the vessels used at San Onofre. As the OP article points out, part of the problem, the reason so many older reactors are still in use, is that it is extremely laborious to get new reactors approved, and doubly so for reactors that aren’t using already-approved (and coincidentally 50-years-old) designs. If the approval process, and especially the ability to file frivolous lawsuits to stop approval and/or construction, are cleaned up, new safer reactors could be put in to replace older less-safe designs much more rapidly.

[gunsequalfreedom]

I very much appreciate your reply. You are obviously up to speed on these issues. And I did not miss your point regarding new reactor designs.

What happened at San Onofre is an indictment on the industry in my view, so does speak to some of the points you make. That I suppose is a good reason for interjecting it the discussion.

I do agree with you that it is possible to build and operate safe plants. I just don’t have faith in the industry.

Most of all I don’t believe nuclear reactors are necessary. We can do without them. We don’t shut them down instantly. But we should be phasing them out - quickly and in an orderly process.

San Onofre does not need to be fired back up, even at the requested 70%, to meet the electrical power needs of Southern California. That’s one old technology reactor gone. If Edison wants to make application for a new safer reactor to be put in to replace its older less-safe design, that would be another issue. Edison of course won’t propose that so they don’t agree with either you or me.

[WHBates]

Saw your two post on this thread. You are truly an idiot. I would reply, but why bother. In the above post you have zero respect for those your responding to so you likewise deserve no respect. You don't want a discussion you want to rant, and have not researched the subject beyond sound bites, however you engage in fear mongering projection with no factual basis.

[mvpel]

Most of all I don’t believe nuclear reactors are necessary. We can do without them. We don’t shut them down instantly. But we should be phasing them out - quickly and in an orderly process.

What evidence do you have that we can do without them? How do you propose to replace 800 terawatt-hours of electrical generation, 20% of the nation's entire electricity consumption?

Remember, electricity is so vital to human existence that people are infuriated when they have to go a few hours without it, and people can die when they go without it for days: eighty-seven people died of causes connected directly to the Hurricane Sandy power outages. So no hand-waving, no BS answers here, this is a life-or-death question. HOW? How will you replace 800 terawatt-hours per year of generating capacity?

[gunsequalfreedom]

What evidence do you have that we can do without them? How do you propose to replace 800 terawatt-hours of electrical generation, 20% of the nation's entire electricity consumption?

You don't believe we have the ability to replace 20 percent of our electrical generation? Seriously? You don't believe that in a phased in effort that we could not reduce our reliance on nuclear by 5%, then 10% and eventually eliminate the need for nuclear completely?

With that kind of thinking we might just as well give up. I don't know if you were alive at the time, but when Kennedy announced our goal to put a man on the moon did you say no way.

[mvpel]

Hand-waving, just as I expected.

You say "phased," but what does that even mean? When you take one power plant offline, you have to replace that power with something. People die without electricity, remember. What are you going to replace it with?

Electricity is not magic, it's the output of machines which convert fuel into power. And all such machines have tradeoffs, have risk-to-reward ratios, advantages and drawbacks.

But you seem to be engaged in magical thinking here, that if we just think long and hard enough about it before this decade is out, some sort of solution will appear.

Going to the moon was just a problem of shoving a large enough mass fast and hard enough to get there. There was nothing in the laws of physics obstructing it.

But the laws of physics are the solid bedrock of the problem of creating electricity. There's only so much energy you can extract from breaking carbon bonds or shuffling photons. There's only so much mass in a gallon of water behind a dam, only so many joules in a gust of wind. It's all right there in the fundamental laws of nature that describe electricity, magnetism, and atoms.

The real magical solution to this problem was invented just over 70 years ago, when the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction began, turning rocks into mind-bogglingly vast quantities of energy by leveraging Einstein's E=mc² equation to convert matter itself directly into energy.

How else can you describe power so vast that it can propel a 100,000 ton aircraft carrier at 30 knots for 20 years on a single load of fuel that would fit under your desk, with zero emissions? Could anyone in 1940 have imagined such a thing? Such vast abundance just waiting for us to tap into it to better the lives of every last human being on the planet? And on other planets!!

Humans were not meant to scrape by, to scratch out a bleak and limited existence constrained on every side by the their lack of power. The fact that so many still do is frankly obscene. There was a man who spent TWENTY-TWO freaking years digging a road through a mountain - some people see that as inspiring and worthy of acclaim, but I see it as sick and sad that this man wasted 22 years of his life doing something that could be done in 22 weeks if only he'd had enough power at his disposal.

Thanks to the minds and imaginations of truly great people, we have a way to turn rocks - rocks!! - into virtually unlimited amounts of power; enough power to supply everyone in the world with American standards of electricity for as long as the sun will survive, without dumping waste products into the air or onto the ground like fossil fuels do on a daily basis.

That's how humans were meant to live - comfortable, prosperous, empowered. And uranium and thorium can bring that comfort, prosperity, and empowerment to every person on the planet.

[mvpel]

Japan idled even their undamaged, fully operational nuclear reactors because of Fukushima hysteria, and their imports of oil doubled. How is that good for the environment? How is that better or safer or cheaper for the Japanese people?

Did you ever hear about the oil refinery that burned for a week after the tsunami? Yet that's the kind of energy they're doubling their use of, creating Japan's first trade deficit in 30 years to the tune of $32 billion, while Russia laughs all the way to the bank and keeps building nuclear power plants.

[gunsequalfreedom]

I did not say we convert to oil. Why are you limiting our options.

[gunsequalfreedom]

We have a nuke plant that has been offline for 18 months. Its power was thought to be necessary before it went offline. I’m talking about San Onofre. cal ISO has just issued a position that for the second summer peak season it will not be needed.

That is one nuke plant. Not every nuke plant can go offline at once. But I never said they could or should. You on the other hand seem to be arguing against any movement to replace nuclear as if that goal is impossible. Do you believe it to be impossible?

[mvpel]

I have personal experience with California electricity - I lived in what’s now described as one of the most generation-deficient areas of the state - San Jose - during the blackouts and the brownouts. I personally measured 107 volts coming from my wall socket. I also witnessed the pitched but futile battle against the construction of Calpine’s Metcalf 600MW gas-turbine power plant, across the way from the county shooting range I frequented, which now spews three tons of emissions per day into the atmosphere.

In 2008 to 2009 California shed 1.3 million non-farm jobs, don’t you think that might have had an effect on electricity demand?

You point out that the San Onofre capacity is not needed right now, but with its nearly 2.5 gigawatts offline, the power instead has to come - in the best possible case - from four plants like Metcalf running at 100% capacity 24x7x365, spewing twelve tons of emissions per day. Does California’s air need twelve tons per day that could be completely eliminated by SONGS?

And what happens if California through some miracle turns its abusive and job-killing government around and starts to grow again like it did in the old days, instead of turning into Northern Mexico as they seem determined to do? Converting everyone to LED lightbulbs will only get you so far - eventually, somewhere, someone has to build and use a machine to turn fuel into electricity, because people die without electricity.

I certainly don’t believe it’s “impossible” to shut down all nuclear power plants. Japan did it, Germany’s doing it. But what I do believe is that the costs of doing so - in fuel, in pollution, in a life-or-death addiction to an uninterrupted supply of fuel sucking away our wealth and our freedom - would be far more staggering than you seem to realize. I’m not interested in seeing nations cut their own throats - even Germany.

Japan was $32 billion in the hole after only one year because they shut down perfectly good power plants on the basis of irrational hysteria, and thus more than doubled their fossil fuel consumption. And that $32 billion is just the smallest beginning of their economic suicide. America should never, ever go down that road.

[mvpel]

Here's an article about San Onofre's steam generator.

According to information obtained several months later, the MAXIMUM potential dose of radiation to anyone was 5.2E-5 millirem (0.000000052 rem) which is one billion times lower than the annual limit for radiation workers at the time that I first became a nuclear energy professional.

For this vanishingly small amount of radiation, about 10 million times lower than you get from bananas every year, you're willing to spew, best case, 12 tons of emissions per day into the atmosphere. Shouldn't it tell you something when people like Feinstein and Markey are leading the charge? That maybe you should be on the opposite side?

[gunsequalfreedom]

You omit from your data the square miles of land lost in a nuclear plant accident. In an assessment of risks and benefits, especially in a densely populated urban or suburban area, the risk in the case of failure is great. That can’t be argued. You can argue the likely hood of failure. On that point, you can only be proved correct if no large scale accident occurs and I can only be proved correct if one does.

I have a few examples on my side of that argument, albeit in other countries, most notably Japan. We do have the example in this country of San Onofre only in the failure of a system that was caught in time, a failure that was known even before the system was installed.

You make a good point about the day to day impacts regarding emissions from alternative forms of electrical generation using natural gas or fossil fuels.

I admit my opposition to nuclear plants is based on an assessment of the larger risk. I view them as so catastrophic as not worth the risk.

The company I keep on this issue is irrelevant unless the standard is to be blindly partisan. I’m not.

[mvpel]

The thing is, fossil-fuel power plants are ongoing, daily catastrophes as they spew their waste products into the environment.

In the Kingston fly ash slurry spill, "1.1 billion US gallons (4,200,000 m3) of coal fly ash slurry was released. The coal-fired power plant, located across the Clinch River from the city of Kingston, uses ponds to dewater the fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion, which is then stored in wet form in dredge cells. The slurry (a mixture of fly ash and water) traveled across the Emory River and its Swan Pond embayment, on to the opposite shore, covering up to 300 acres (1.2 km2) of the surrounding land, damaging homes and flowing up and down stream in nearby waterways such as the Emory River and Clinch River (tributaries of the Tennessee River). It was the largest fly ash release in United States history."

It's been estimated that a million people die prematurely from coal emissions around the world every year.

Coal's €42 billion health toll

An oil refinery in Chiba Japan burned for ten days, spewing black toxic smoke the whole time, but everyone was apparently fixated on Fukushima, where there were zero radiaiton-related deaths.

Chernobyl was a nuclear weapons production facility with electricity as a side job, with a tin roof as "containment," and even though it blew its guts apart and scattered them across the landscape, only 64 people died due to acute radiation poisoning. Wildlife is flourishing in the exclusion zone. I wonder how many people were evacuated from Chernobyl only to be resettled in one of the Soviet Union's many chemically-toxic wastelands?

And the number of city blocks completely levelled by natural gas explosions continues to rise every year, but because it's not "nuclear," it doesn't get national press coverage.

And even at Fukushima, which was far and away the worst accident at a comparatively modern commercial reactor, nobody was killed by radiation, and nobody is expected to die early. The plant survived a literally earth-shattering quake and could have been restarted - but things only went south when the tsunami flooded their backup generators.

In early 2013, The World Health Organization (WHO) released a comprehensive health risk assessment report which concluded that, for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted health risks are small, and that no observable increases in cancer rates above background rates are expected.[7]

The thing about nuclear fuel is that the energy source is so compact, so dense, that you can afford to build layer after layer of protection around it and contain every last scrap of waste within those layers. An amount of fuel that would fit under a desk is enough to power an enormous submarine for 14 years, running inside an airtight vessel. That is to say, ZERO emissions.

Every power source comes with risks, but the fact is that you can count the list of serious nuclear powerplant accidents over the last fifty years on one hand should tell you something. The fact that Three Mile Island exposed someone at the fence of the plant to the equivalent radiation of a single cross-country airline flight is not "catastrophic."

You say that they're "so catastrophic," but actual recorded history of commercial electrical power doesn't support that assertion.

And it's possible to build nuclear systems in such a way that they CANNOT fail catastrophically, bound by the fundamental laws of physics.

[ransomnote]

You said:
Chernobyl was a nuclear weapons production facility with electricity as a side job, with a tin roof as “containment,” and even though it blew its guts apart and scattered them across the landscape, only 64 people died due to acute radiation poisoning. Wildlife is flourishing in the exclusion zone. I wonder how many people were evacuated from Chernobyl only to be resettled in one of the Soviet Union’s many chemically-toxic wastelands?
_________________________________________________

“Only 64 people died due to acute radiation poisoning.”

Well - this is not true of course. The Soviets didn’t want people to panic so they allowed an outdoor parade and celebration to take place in the shadow of the smoldering ruins of Chernobyl. They didn’t evacuate the town until they did calculations on current dose and figured out everyone still in town would be dead in a week or so. The Soviets made it illegal to report people dying of radiation.
In the aftermath of the explosion - ambulance personnel transported firemen and other victims to nearby hospitals taking no precautionary measures at all. Highly radioactive ambulances would drive up and unload highly radioactive people who would be taken to treatment rooms and treated by medical staff there - not one person had any protection from the massive levels of radiation they were exposed to.
A woman wrote of her experience during this time - her husband was a fireman and when she visited him in the hospital, she was told that his body was emitting so much radiation she could not hug or approach him - they told her he was effectively a reactor himself (to get her to understand the gravity). She wrote of his grueling death. She visited him through the days of his suffering and would only realize much later that medical staff were dying all around her- dropping rapidly from their exposure. Basically she didn’t notice the turnover in staff and no one was permitted to speak of it. Large numbers of people went to hospitals in the first few days of CHernobyl. They were then forcibly ejected when declared ‘cured’ even though they were not.
I just spoke with someone whose family lived in the region during Chernobyl. Her relatives lived in outlying areas and as the heavily radioactive plume extended toward populous areas, the Soviets seeded the clouds to knock down the radiation. The effect was so toxic that the people living in those rural areas were killed outright and she and other family members were not allowed to go into the area and recover the bodies.
WHen the Soviet Union fell, the people held hearings and discovered that the claims that people weren’t harmed by Chernobyl were blatant lies. As always, the officials responsible for the deceit said they didn’t want to cause panic. Videos like “The Battle For Chernobyl” reveal a shockingly different picture than the rosey “only 64 people died” meme. And can someone tell me why it doesn’t matter if people die more slowly from radiation? The pro nuke position is to cite SARS only deaths (massive doses resulting in death within days) as if cancer and leukemia etc. don’t count. Being born and raised in regions contaminated with radioactive waste doesn’t count even with all the debility and birth defects?
Well the Soviets created an ‘exclusion zone’ (high contamination) where people still can’t live but officials couldn’t find enough space to move that many people so they were forced to live in contaminated zones. And this will be true of the region for many many generations.
Early on, the Japanese said that they had “Learned the lessons of Chernobyl.” This might be why the Japanese have refused to help people leave portions of Fukushima that are as contaminated as Soviet Union’s ‘exclusion zone’. This might explain why the Japanese diligently shipped radioactive produce throughout Japan (don’t want the Fukushima region to have more cases of cancer/leukemia than the rest of Japan now do we?) and burn radioactive waste etc. Oh and Hilary made a public statement welcoming Japanese exported fruits, vegetables etc.
It’s not just health that Fukushima is damaging for those exposed. It’s entire ways of life. There’s a Japanese video of a family who has for generations raised elite horses. The family had to leave for public safety (too radioactive) and the family patriarch stayed behind until their last prized horse gave birth to her foal. They look out over the beautiful landscape and marvel that it could harm them. THey must leave and not come back. Ever.
Farmers in Fukushmia are given the option of not selling their radioactive tea or wheat crops. Japan gives them this option so Japan will not have to compensate them which they would have to do if they prohibited them from selling their crops.
That’s the real cost saving behind nuclear power - use the government to underwrite the power plant and when disasters happen, deny legitimate claims.
There’s been Freepers who have come to threads like this and said something like “What about above ground testing? That never hurt anyone...” and then there’d be a post from another Freeper responding “My wife is a Downwinder. She is the only surviving member of her school that was downwind. Everyone else died of cancer etc.” So I looked into the term Downwinder and discovered that years of denial on the part of the US regarding any hazard above ground nuclear testing presented to people were of course false. People and their livelihoods suffered greatly (entire flocks of sheep or herds of cattle down and no compensation) but of course if it’s not ARS then the pro nuke lobby doesn’t care. But I read about the financial settlements taking place - the gov doesn’t have to pay as much if you wait for most people to die. And they never accepted responsibility for damaging quality of life. It’s not just death - what about quality of life? Would it be ok if radiation had only caused those kids downwind a medical suffering but they didn’t die?

If you’re like me, you heard that 3 Mile Island was all blown out of proportion at the time, right?
Go back now and read how it was worse than admitted at the time. Read the accounts of people experience negative effects from 3 Mile that were denied by the power plant. Pools of iodine colored rainwater on the back porch and a brand new 50 year roof eaten through overnight? Not the power plant’s fault! (That kind of thing happens all the time, am I right?/s) The accounts of people being hit with a metallic tasting blast of air and then experiencing medical effects that can’t be explained. (No not even the popular ‘hysteria’ meme). For example, one women’s kidney simply resolved itself (disappeared). Her physician couldn’t explain why that would happen but noted that it was consistent with exposure to radiation.
The reason people point to cost savings re nuclear power is that those responsible never have to pay those they harm.
It isn’t superstition - it’s science. The harmful effects of radiation are well documented and medical studies extend back to the 50’s. Current, state of the art research continues to expand the documented evidence that ionizing radiation is harmful to human health.
You say:
“And it’s possible to build nuclear systems in such a way that they CANNOT fail catastrophically, bound by the fundamental laws of physics.”

That is true gall on your part. This very same meme was in effect for decades. Any concern the public had re radiation was batted back in their face with the assertion that the containment of nuke plants was by design impossible to breach. This was a statement made on countless NRC and other nuke publications. They treated it as law and cited it as often. I THOUGHT that when Fukushima had 3 catastrophic failures and now that molten fuel rests somewhere in the basement of the power plants, people like you would stop asserting that it’s possible to design a no fail system.
DId you see the flooding back east? How about that nuke plan immersed in water all the way to the roof. Yeah I am SURE that was all part of the plan, eh?

Nuclear waste cannot be removed from the large expanses of arable land now contaminated in Japan. In fact, scientists studying the Chernobyl region have been surprise to discover that the soil around the destroyed plant is actually now MORE contaminated than back in the 80’s. They have no explanation for that.
The evidence is there. Damage via radiation is not theoretical. If you don’t believe that I have some land to sell you in the Ukraine.
National Academy of Sciences publication is a good place to start: http://dels-old.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/beir_vii_final.pdf
The “BEIR VII develops the most up-to-date and comprehensive risk estimates for cancer and other
health effects from exposure to low-level ionizing radiation. “
According to the BEIR VII study “Very high doses can produce damaging effects in tissues that can be evident within
days after exposure. Late effects such as cancer, which can occur after more modest doses including the
lowdose exposures that are the subject of this report, may take many years to develop.”
There are people suffering the lasting effects of radioactive contamination in the Ukraine right now. No covering it up anymore. Even the duplicitous IAEA admits to more deaths than you do and their charter states they support nuclear power. (How honest is the IAEA? THey received information from Gorbachev regarding the amount of radiation released by CHernobyl and ‘accepted’ 10 percent of that value as official. Don’t believe me - watch Gorbachev and Hans Blix both say it on film in “The Battle For Chernobyl”) Check out the IAEA website - sure it low balls the damage done to life and limb but it does admit to at least 4000 deaths: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs.shtml
Here’s a quote from that page:
“For the majority of the five million people living in the contaminated areas, exposures are within the recommended dose limit for the general public, though about 100,000 residents still receive more. Remediation of those areas and application of some agricultural countermeasures continues. “
Yeah 100000 people living in zones that even the IAEA will admit is contaminated! That is saying something.

You say:I wonder how many people were evacuated from Chernobyl only to be resettled in one of the Soviet Union’s many chemically-toxic wastelands?

I say: Had it occurred to you that both situations are preventable? People shouldn’t be forced to live in toxic waste or radioactive waste?