Nuclear Power Is Extremely Safe -- That's the Truth About What We Learned From Japan

In the midst of a still struggling and fragile global economy, Germany has announced that it will shut down seven nuclear plants by the end of the year - which means that Germans will be left to run their factories, heat their homes, and power their economy with 10% less electrical generating capacity. Nine more plants will be shut down over the next decade and tens of billions of dollars in investment will be lost.

The grounds for this move, and similar proposals in Switzerland, Italy, and other countries, is safety. As the Swiss energy minister put it, "Fukushima showed that the risk of nuclear power is too high."

In fact, Fukushima showed just the opposite. How's that? Well for starters, ask yourself what the death toll was at Fukushima. 100? 200? 10? Not true. Try zero.

To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context. As the late, great energy thinker Petr Beckmann argued three decades ago in his contrarian classic "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear," every means of generating power has dangers and risks, but nuclear power "is far safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented."

To date, there have been devised only five practical means of producing large-scale, affordable, reliable energy: coal, natural gas, oil, hydroelectric, and nuclear. (Although widely hyped and frequently subsidized, solar and wind power - which generate energy from highly diffuse and intermittent sources - have failed for forty years to deliver.) Whether you're concerned about a dangerous accident or harmful emissions, a nuclear power plant is the safest way to generate power.

The key to nuclear power's safety, Beckmann explains, is that it uses a radioactive energy source - such as uranium. In addition to having the advantage of storing millions of times more energy per unit of volume than coal, gas, or water, the radioactive material used in power plants literally cannot explode. Ridiculing the scare tactics that a nuclear power plant poses the same dangers as a nuclear bomb, Beckmann observes: "An explosive nuclear chain reaction is no more feasible in the type of uranium used as power plant fuel than it is in chewing gum or pickled cucumbers."

The one danger of running a nuclear plant is a large release of radiation. This is extremely unlikely, because nuclear plants contain numerous shielding and containment mechanisms (universal in the civilized world but callously foregone by the Soviets in their Chernobyl plant).

But in the most adverse circumstances, as Fukushima illustrated, the cooling system designed to moderate the uranium's heat can fail, the backups can fail, the radioactive material can overheat to the point that the plant cannot handle the pressure, and a radiation release is necessary.

Yet, even then, it is extremely unlikely that the radiation levels will be high enough to cause radiation sickness or cancer - and radiation in modest quantities is a normal, perfectly healthy feature of life (your blood is radioactive, as is the sun). And even the worst nuclear accident gives neighbors a luxury that broken dams and exploding refineries do not: time.
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While many, many things went wrong at Fukushima, as might be expected in an unprecedented natural disaster, what is more remarkable is that thanks to the fundamental integrity of the nuclear vessel and the containment building, none of the power plant's neighbors have died, nor have any apparently been exposed to harmful levels of radiation. (The Japanese government has announced that eight of 2,400 workers have been exposed to higher-than-allowed amounts of radiation, but these amounts are often hundreds of times less than is necessary to do actual damage.)

Now imagine if a 9.0 earthquake and 40 foot tsunami had hit a hydroelectric dam; thousands of people could have died in the ensuing flood.
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The Fukushima nuclear plants, with their incredible resilience, almost certainly saved many, many lives.

Nuclear power also saves lives that would otherwise be lost to pollution. A nuclear power plant has effectively zero harmful emissions. (It generates a small amount of waste, which France, among other countries, has demonstrated can be both re-used economically and stored safely.) By contrast, fossil fuel plants generate various forms of particulate matter that strongly correlate with higher cancer rates. We should not "knock coal," Beckmann stressed, as fossil fuel plants are vital for human survival for decades to come, but we should recognize that new nuclear power plants are far safer than the status quo.
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As a consequence of the anti-nuclear hysteria in Beckmann's time, the U.S. government made it either impossible or economically prohibitive to build new plants, in the name of "safety." Fukushima has affirmed that nuclear is the safest form of power in existence. Any government that fails to recognize this is endangering its citizens' health.

By Alex Epstein Published July 23, 2011, FoxNews.com

Alex Epstein is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, specializing in energy issues. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute.

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ThoriumPower is what fusion wanted to be and way safer, cheaper and way more scalable.  Using the power of thorium is nothing new, has been tested in small scale 7 MW from 1964 to 1969 by Alvin Weinberg and only needs production maturation and the development of a few safety items.

It is due to political issues by the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) that this green, clean and endless power generation never gained the same popularity as classic nuclear power generators.  One political issue, that might have changed slightly, is that thorium power stations cannot supply plutonium for weapon, which was in strong demand in the 50's, 60's and 70's USA.

LFTR (ThoriumPower) advantages

• Fuel is diluted in liquid to make it easy to pump and treat chemically.  The liquid is molted fluoride salt - very stable concept.
• Reactivity is naturally stable because heat expands the salt beyond the critical level.
• High temperature (800C) provides for 50% effective Brayton power conversion turbine-generator.
• High temperature provides for electrolysis of hydrogen, a fuel raw material.
• Longterm radioactive waste is < 1% of that of a classic reactor.
• Waste from the classic reactor can be burned in the LFT reactor.
• 1 ton of fuel (0.5m ball) can provide 1GW continuously for one year.  One ton costs about 600,000Kr - 1/6th of Denmark's electricity/year.
• There is enough thorium on Earth to supply the whole world with energy for a thousand years - and endless supplies on the Moon's surface.
• Thorium reactors cannot suffer from china-syndrome or explode they are naturally stable.
• Thorium power plants can be fabricated in various size and delivered on trucks - 100KW to many GW.
• The very small quantities of waste need only a few hundred years of safe storage - 87% of waste 10years and 13% 300years storage.
• Dismantling a power plant can be executed almost immediately.
• The power plants impose hardly any environmental impact.
• The power plants produces no plutonium or other materials for mass destruction or weapon.
• Thorium fuel need not to be enriched in expensive facilities.
• Due to very high efficiency much less cooling is needed.
• Construction cost is very low, which enables the poor countries to participate.
• The footprint is the smallest for all currently known energy production facilities.
• The power plants can freely be build underground or build in conventional square buildings.
• Terror attack is futile; nothing to steal; nothing to blow up.
• Very limited use of building material (steel and concrete).
• Produces a series of rare ingredients needed in electronics and medicine.
• Estimated production price $0.01/KWh or 6øre/KWh.

LFTR (ThoriumPower) disadvantages

• Relatively unknown - even in universities.
• The process is difficult to follow.
• Deviate from existing nuclear power infrastructure and way of thinking.
• Cannot deliver material for manufacturing of weapons grade plutonium.
• Consists of a chemical process system.
• Needs a dose of U233 in order to startup it's own production.