Nice try, but you are trolling, Mr. Daws
The story out of Fukushima is constantly being revised; first we heard that the reactor core containments were intact... then we heard they were compromised... then we heard of radioactive water being dumped into the sea. Now it seems the evacuation zone has been widened-- but this is all merely needless overreaction in your and Mr. Page's book. We can be certain more unpleasant facts will continue to leak out about the Fukushima crisis and the contamination there is real, not imaginary.
On the subject of coal, I am afraid you have completely missed my point... and inadvertently proved it at the same time. My point is that energy from sources other than nuclear may or may not be safe... but that safety is largely dependent upon how well-constructed and well-run the energy plants are. You can dump fly ash into the atmosphere or recycle it into concrete. You can build a gasoline engine with high or low emissions. There is a degree of control over the pollution involved.
There is no cleaning up nuclear waste. It only accumulates. And the risk associated with exposure is enormous. You can't make nuclear waste less hazardous, or recycle it into bricks, or anything else. You're stuck with it.
There is simply no getting around the fact that nuclear power creates nuclear waste, which is highly toxic and has to be kept contained and isolated from the environment for thousands of years.
On a side note, your statistics are rather slapdash and spurious. Burning coal is not a nuclear reaction and produces no radioactive isotopes beyond what existed in the coal to begin with. So saying a coal plant will put tons of uranium into the environment is false... sort of overlooks the fact that the uranium contained within the coal was already in the environment in the first place. Coal burning does not create uranium. It does not create nuclear waste. More importantly, if a coal-fired power plant blows up, there is no risk of widespread radiation poisoning.
Your claim of experiencing more (negligible) radiation exposure from a coal-fired plant than from a nuclear one is a red herring. Radiation exposure from fly ash produced by a coal-fired plant is negligible nearby the plant (on the order of 2 millirems a year) because there is no nuclear reaction going on.
Radiation exposure from a nuclear power plant is only negligible so long as containment procedures are in place and do not fail. If they fail (see Chernobyl), they failure is by definition catastrophic and extremely dangerous.
For an objective report on Chernobyl, see:
http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary
Of course, if you worked at a nuclear power plant, you doubtless would have heard of the TORCH report... interesting you fail to mention it as a credible source. Apparently you would rather make false claims that the UNSCEAR reports found no health impact.
Here are some quotes from the UNSCEAR reports:
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html#Health
"For the last two decades, attention has been focused on investigating the association between exposure caused by radionuclides released in the Chernobyl accident and late effects, in particular thyroid cancer in children. Doses to the thyroid received in the first few months after the accident were particularly high in those who were children and adolescents at the time in Belarus, Ukraine and the most affected Russian regions and drank milk with high levels of radioactive iodine. By 2005, more than 6,000 thyroid cancer cases had been diagnosed in this group, and it is most likely that a large fraction of these thyroid cancers is attributable to radioiodine intake. It is expected that the increase in thyroid cancer incidence due to the Chernobyl accident will continue for many more years, although the long-term increase is difficult to quantify precisely."
And:
"The present understanding of the late effects of protracted exposure to ionizing radiation is limited, since the dose-response assessments rely heavily on studies of exposure to high doses and animal experiments. Studies of the Chernobyl accident exposure might shed light on the late effects of protracted exposure, but given the low doses received by the majority of exposed individuals, any increase in cancer incidence or mortality will be difficult to detect in epidemiological studies."
My point remains: nuclear power is extremely risky, with no way to minimize that risk. No one engineered Fukushima to fail-- on the contrary, it was built with multiple failsafes and it was built to survive a major earthquake by people living in one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. And yet, it failed. Reactor buildings blew up, radiation leaked and continues to leak into the air and water and ground, and with widespread effect.
Saying "well it only leaked a little, the tap water in Tokyo is fine for babies so long as the contamination doesn't last for a year" etc. etc. misses the point. A petroleum processing facility caught fire in Chiba after the earthquake-- we aren't reading of efforts to continue to get the plant under control weeks and weeks later, and we aren't hearing reports of petroleum showing up in small quantities in the water in Osaka as a result, or seeing people evacuated for miles around. And this is the difference between nuclear accidents and accidents with other forms of power.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
