thoughts on nuclear relativism from an ignorant layperson

Much to my surprise, I just learned that rooftop solar is much more dangerous than Chernobyl. Here are the stats:

Comparing deaths/TWh for all energy sources

Coal – China                       278
Coal – USA                         15
Oil                                36  (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas                         4  (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass                    12
Peat                               12
Solar (rooftop)                     0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind                                0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro                               0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro – world including Banqiao)    1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear                             0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

As to how well rooftop solar holds up in a strong earthquake, I’ll leave that up to readers’ imaginations. Not that I am opposed to rooftop solar, but I don’t especially like the way the environmentalists have taken advantage of awful tragedy to breathe new life into their longstanding war against nuclear power.  

For those who are interested in more, Dean Esmay has compared the track record of nukes with other sources of power and concludes that we need a nuclear future. In a later post updating the news about the Fukushima reactor, he made a prediction:

Watch for this: over the next few years, any and every proposal to responsibly deal with nuclear waste or upgrade our aging nuclear plant infrastructure will be responded to by pointing to Fukushima as the unacceptable disaster “like Chernobyl” that makes nuclear power something we should eliminate forever; it’s certainly been the pattern for the last several decades, no matter how much more damage is done by other technologies we take for granted.

M. Simon says better designs are needed and left some critical comments to Dean’s post. He has extensive knowleddge in this field has posted extensively extensively about the Fukushima reactor damage (see this post). Basically, he says it is worse than we have been told, and that it’s a wake-up call.

I am sure that reactor safety can be improved, but from what I have read, this one survived a gigantic earthquake of the sort of magnitude that only rarely happens, but it wasn’t ready for the tsunami. I am no engineer but common sense suggests that reactors similar to Fukushima would be quite safe in most parts of the United States.

If they wanted to build one here in Ann Arbor, I would have no objection.

MORE: Speaking of ignorant laypeople, evil demagogue Ann Coulter expresses a very mean opinion — that radiation is good:

With the terrible earthquake and resulting tsunami that have devastated Japan, the only good news is that anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer.

This only seems counterintuitive because of media hysteria for the past 20 years trying to convince Americans that radiation at any dose is bad. There is, however, burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine.

She cites examples:

In 1983, a series of apartment buildings in Taiwan were accidentally constructed with massive amounts of cobalt 60, a radioactive substance. After 16 years, the buildings’ 10,000 occupants developed only five cases of cancer. The cancer rate for the same age group in the general Taiwanese population over that time period predicted 170 cancers.

The people in those buildings had been exposed to radiation nearly five times the maximum “safe” level according to the U.S. government. But they ended up with a cancer rate 96 percent lower than the general population.

Bernard L. Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, compared radon exposure and lung cancer rates in 1,729 counties covering 90 percent of the U.S. population. His study in the 1990s found far fewer cases of lung cancer in those counties with the highest amounts of radon — a correlation that could not be explained by smoking rates.

And concludes that we may have been sold a phony bill of goods:

in the case of radiation, the media have Americans convinced that the minutest amount is always deadly.

Although reporters love to issue sensationalized reports about the danger from Japan’s nuclear reactors, remember that, so far, thousands have died only because of Mother Nature. And the survivors may outlive all of us over here in hermetically sealed, radiation-free America.

I admit that citing her is a cheap shot, as it really doesn’t matter whether she is right or wrong. 

That’s because to either her friends or her enemies, she is Ann Coulter, which means, simply, End. Of. Discussion.