India and NukesFollow

Only if you take humans out of the equation.

Feel free to have one in your backyard tho'.

To put things into a little perspective.I'm sure Nobby could supply us with the approximate figures for the number who would have developed the same thyroid cancers without the Chernobyl incident. But 200 cases per year in an area that large doesn't seem unreasonable.

There where 1400 cases of thyroid cancer in the Uk in 2005 for example.

Oh and just so you know "survival rate" was, according to the Report, 98,8%

So realisticly less than 100 people died as a result of Chernobyl in over 20 years.

The day we start designing automated systems without a manual override switch is the day Skynet takes over the world.

I stand by what I said.

Clearly you failed maths.

4000 devided by 20 is 200.

4000 cases in 20 years is 200 cases per year on average.

Correct me if i'm wrong. there is the potential that someone could fly a very large plane into a very large building, killing upto i dunno 3000 or so people in the process.

Do you want to ban flying aswell? I mean Chernobyl has killed Approx 100 and 9/11 has killed over 3000 not to mention the conservatively 30,000 people in the actions of the Nato responce as a direct result of those attacks.

To me the risk as a result of flying is clearly far higher than that of nuclear power in terms of human cost.

Just to add that since chernobyl there has been 10 incidents involving nuclear plants, none have involved risk to people outside the plant.

In the period 1999-2007 there where 1500+ accidents involving planes resulting in over 11,000 deaths, and remember statisticly it's the safest form of travel.

Edited, Sep 23rd 2008 5:59pm by tarv

As weapons I assume you mean?

Bob no.

I don't see how you can realisticly prevent it though.

I've been living near ten for almost my entire life you blathering idiot. UK nuclear power stations. and i've worked within 1 mile of upto 10 nuclear reactors for 12 years.

If Nuclear power stations are run by reputable companies under the umberella of a worldwide independant authority i have no problem with other countries building nuclear plants.

blathering is routinely used in the north.

I'm not a fan of nucular powah, and want to see investment in renewables ramped up, but I'm not a 'ban nuclear power' merchant either. Chernobyl is precisely why we need huge checks on proliferation, so I'm troubled by the short-termism of our administration on this subject.

In the end it's about relative risk.

And yeah, who pissed in your weetabix tarv?

Blathering is what people do when they start talking and keep on talking and forget about why they're talking or what they're even talking about and eventually say something stupid that contradicts something they said immediately beforehand. I do it all the time. I have a mate whose job it is to tap me on the head when I'm running rampant.

On topic: Nuclear weapons be bad, yo. Nuclear power not so much. I mean, I don't like guns and bombs, the world would much better if we had a lot less of them, but I'm fine with a combustion engine.

It's a myth perpetuated by competitors of solar energy that solar can't deliver overnight, or baseload energy. Solar power stations (no batteries needed!) dump daylight power into heating water. The water heated is in such volume that it keeps it's heat overnight, and runs steam-generated turbines to generate electricity while the sun is down.

We don't need nuclear power to save the Earth from Greenhouse gasses. The city of London has already made the legal and practical changes it needs to drop everyone's utilities bills there by 10% while at the same time dropping greenhouse emissions from their utilities by 50% by 2050, while at the same time not impeding the growth of energy use. It's doing this via decentralised CHP, which the city of Woking used to drop their greenhouse emissions by 70% since the 1980s, with no-one else knowing or understanding what was going on, vis-a-vis carbon emissions, apart from the city engineer.

Details here.

Edited, Sep 24th 2008 7:29am by Aripyanfar

The problem is that a conventional fossil fuel powered plant, generating an equal amount of power, is a vastly larger health risk due to air pollution. Since it is not accident generated, people tend to forget about it. This is totally independent of global warming. There is an old article in Physics Today which collects risk estimates from various activities: smoking, drinking, living near power plants, driving a car, etc. As I recall the data, 50 years living next to a nuclear power plant is roughly equivalent to one year living next to a conventional fossil fuel powered one.

Edit: following my grand tradition of posting what I vaguely recall reading, then looking for it, and not being able to find it I will add the following link, which basically comes to the same conclusion.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/49/

"It is probably surprising to many (not least the affected populations themselves) that people still living unofficially in the abandoned lands around Chernobyl may actually have a lower health risk from radiation than they would have if they were exposed to the air pollution health risk in a large city such as nearby Kiev."

I'm not saying anyone should live in either Chernobyl or Kiev (I don't know the air pollution there) for their health, it is interesting, however, that our best science on the issue shows the risks are comparable.

Since there are many, many more Kievs then Chernobyls, and vastly more people living in them, the total human cost (in lives) is vastly greater due to conventional power plants then nuclear.

This article is dealing with the bad end of both. The Physics Today article I read was dealing with the risks to health due in modern American cities. Not that we need to put nuclear power plants in cities but if we did.

Edited, Sep 24th 2008 9:34am by yossarian

Tarv, I wasn't arguing for or against nuclear power. I did want to point out though, that catastrophic accidents of the nuclear type are possible. Yoyo makes another good point, fossil fuel powered plants have their own health hazards. Heck I'm sure if we put some sort of large-scale solar power plant on line it would have hazards too.

This post was about selling nuclear technology to India, but folks wanted to talk about alternative energy. Yet no one had mentioned wind power. It's BIG in my local news right now because of the governor/premier summit etc.

Nuclear power is just as viable as any other, but it's not risk free.

Edit to add, I wouldn't consider nuclear plants as a 'tide over'. They are either part of the big energy plan or they aren't. Tide-me-over policies are rarely efficient, economical, or successful.

Edited, Sep 24th 2008 6:50pm by Elinda

You could ask Spain...the only hazard I can see is if you accidentally walk in front of one of those parabolic mirrors.

As for nucular, I must admit I'm not entirely comfortable living near a plant with such spotty a safety record as Indian Point. Eventually it's gonna go and boil away the entire Hudson River.