[Calling fears of nuclear accidents] irrational isn't justified, said Georgetown University law professor and former Environmental Protection Agency associate administrator Lisa Heinzerling. She said people's concerns have been unjustly trivialized.
People have been trained to think about and prepare for low-probability, catastrophic events like the earthquake and tsunami that caused the Japanese nuclear disaster, Heinzerling said. She pointed to homeowner's insurance. Most people won't have a fire that destroys their home, but “we worry about really big things even if they are improbable because we will be wiped out.”
Risk is about more than likelihood; it’s also about impact. If I tell you that your chances of being bitten by a mosquito as you cross my yard are one in a hundred, you’ll think of that risk differently than if I give you the same odds on a deadly pit viper.
And that's where a lot of us are coming from. It's not unreasonable to reject an energy source that can slowly poison not just you but your descendents through its operation, waste and failure, even if thus far it's “safer” than fossil fuels.
In the past 30 years we've had 3 major accidents at level 5 (Three Mile Island), 6 (Fukushima) and the maximum of 7 (Chernobyl) the international scale. The most recent one is at a plant that was designed to withstand a powerful earthquake (M7.9) and large tsunami (5.2m). Unfortunately, Nature can alwaysdial things up a notch or thirty, and in this case the worst-worst estimates weren't worst-worst enough, as Fukushima got nailed with a magnitude 9.0 quake generating a tsunami 14 meters high.
The casual dismissal of these severe accidents and people's concerns by governments, the media and alleged “experts” does a grave disservice to us all. Oh yeah, and much of the pro-nuke stuff is, you know, based on ignorance or outright deception.
Take, for example, this claim:
The people who manufacture the wind turbines insist they can handle high winds. But then there’s the example of that windmill in Oregon that collapsed in 25-mph winds back in 2007 and killed a guy who was working on it. That means wind power has already killed more Americans than have been killed by nuclear power in all our history.
51 people who died 33 years ago might beg to differ. What's that, the pro-nuke apologists say? You can't count deaths in building plants? Well, that's precisely what has been counted as deaths caused by (rooftop) solar, so we might as well compare renewable apples to radioactive apples.
Yup, you can slip from a roof when installing solar panels. A wind tubine might fall on you. Heck, you might die falling down the stairs. Life is not 100% safe. Nobody is claiming that energy alternatives are completely free of risk.
Compared to deaths related to sustainable energy, coal mining accidents seem particularly horrific. And yet, no individual mine collapse requires people to evacuate for many miles around the area, stop drinking water hundreds of miles away, and threaten the entire globe.
We don't find, say…radiation in New England and the southern US when a coal mine collapses in China. We don't see the mental development of our children impaired by coal seam fires.
We do see extreme conditions that prevent people from containing the problem (which may have just gotten even worse). Not unlike the BP disaster, except even wider in potential impact.
Anyway, I do accept at face value that nuke is “safer” than oil and coal. My conclusion is, however, that from a risk POV it's not worth keeping in our energy portfolio, even in the short term as a way to wean ourselves from our more immediately dangerous fossil fuel addiction. It doesn't make sense in terms of greenhouse gases, and it doesn't make sense economically. Heck, we even have a Peak Uraniumproblem that makes nuclear unsustainable.
While solar is currently more expensive than nuclear, it's also the case that wind, geothermal and hydro are cheaper. And much like we saw with hybrid vehicles–their costs have dropped and are expected tocontinue that trend–I'd wager a critical mass of uranium that solar technology will improve and become cheaper and more efficient. Vermont's largest solar farm, for example, saw their need for 5200 panels drop to 3800 in just the 10 months between proposal and operation.
We can also create more jobs by shutting down aging plants like Vermont Yankee and investing aggressively in sustainable energy. So there really is no argument to made from the employment angle.
Fortunately, the default for Vermont Yankee is to be decommissioned. Since Entergy agreed to follow Vermont law in 2002, we've had several elections that have returned Democrats to power in the Legislature and now also put a Democrat back into the Governor's seat–this after the Senate beat back an attempt to extend VY's life in 2010. As far as I'm concerned, it's a done deal (silly unscientific polls and continued FUD campaigns notwithstanding).
Unfortunately, our default for replacing our nuke plant is to do very little in building our sustainable energy portfolio. That has to change, lest we all find ourselves right back to choosing between the same old poisons.
ntodd