Less than a year ago, a drilling rig exploded off the coast of the United States, killing 11 workers and pouring 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. No natural disaster caused this tragedy. It was entirely man-made. President Obama halted deep-water drilling but lifted the moratorium less than six months later.... Contrast this with the panic over Japan's reactors. For 40 years, they've quietly done their work. Three days ago, they were hit almost simultaneously by Japan's worst earthquake and one of its worst tsunamis. Not one reactor container has failed. The only employee who has died at a Japanese nuclear facility since the quake was killed by a crane. Despite this, voices are rising in Europe and the United States to abandon nuclear power. Industry analysts predict that the Japan scare, like Chernobyl, will freeze plant construction.That's how we deal with tragedies in the oil business. Accidents happen. People die. Pollution spreads. We don't abandon oil. We study what went wrong, try to fix it, and move on.
Saletan goes on to explain that everything that could possibly go wrong with the nuclear plants in Japan did go wrong, and there is STILL no nuclear disaster. He also gives statistics for how many people are killed each year from coal pollution and oil and gas production, and the numbers, while vague, are by all accounts much, much larger than the number of people killed from nuclear energy problems - ever.
I'm a fan of nuclear energy. It's a cleaner, safter alternative to coal and oil that provides 24/7 power, something that can't be guaranteed by current renewable energy sources.
Nuclear energy is scary because most people don't know much about it. I didn't really understand how nuclear energy was controlled before doing some research in relation to Japan's crisis. Now that I have a better understanding of how it works, I'm even more in favor of building MANY more nuclear power plants in the U.S. The prospect of broken plants and radioactive fallout is frightening, and if Congress wants to temporarily pause nuclear power plant construction while we learn from Japan's problems, fine. But let's finish those plants soon, and build new ones too.
All energy sources have risks - I've written before on why wind energy is not that great either. But nuclear energy's benefits outweigh the risks - don't let the media fear-mongering ("OMG NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE IN JAPAN...... will not happen, sources say") influence accurate weighing of the facts.
I see and grant a lot of your points. However, relying on nuclear power to the extent the Japanese did, on an island that lies on top of three shifting tectonic plates may prove to be less than wise. The potential consequences of broken nuclear plants are far greater than those posed by broken oil or coal plants.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I've wondered about the wisdom of nuclear power plants in "seismically-active" areas.
ReplyDeleteBut as a small, densely populated island nation, what other choices does Japan have? Nuclear energy provides the large amounts of energy from relatively few natural resources that a technologically advanced society requires.
And unless a worst-case scenario actually does happen, what we're seeing in Japan is that even a giant earthquake PLUS a tsunami are not sufficient to create a nuclear power disaster.