Links: Top-level Nuclear Power page Power Generation - What are the alternatives? Nuclear Q&A - Answers to common questions: What about radiation? What about waste? Why couldn't Chernobyl happen in the U.S.? Electric Cars - The personal transportation of the future. Reducing Impact - Are you concerned about the inherent dangers in any power generation technology? Try consuming less! The Evils of Coal - If you want to get steamin' mad about a power generation technology, try coal. Coal Power kills more people each year than Nuclear power ever has, worldwide, including Chernobyl.

Nuclear Q&A Q: What are the radiation dangers of nuclear power? A: Small compared to ordinary daily dosages. Depending on specific locale, the average person receives 150 - 300 milliram of radiation annually (from the sun, cosmic sources, and natural radioactive sources). A dental x-ray delivers about 25 millirem of radiation, flying a daytime commercial airline flight can as well (due to the lesser amount of atmosphere between the airplane and the Sun to absorb the radiation). An average year's worth of watching TV can deliver about 5 millirem. A person living next door to a nuclear power plant can expect to receive an additional half-millirem of radiation annually. It's statistically insignificant.   Q: How is the annual mortality rate due to Coal Power calculated? A: It is impossible to calculate exactly. But, 40,000 people die in the U.S. annually due to fine particulates in the air, and the U.S. Electric Industry produces about 2/3 of the total. So - if 3/4 of these 40,000 people don't smoke, and the death of 2/3 of them is attributable to coal, we get a net 20,000 people per year - the figure used throughout the remainder of this site.   Q: So what is the comparable statistic for nuclear power? A: Impossible to determine statistically - the relavent statistics are not visibly affected. That is, while the number is certainly not zero, it is low enough that we cannot quantify it. In fact, it is almost certainly less than a few hundred per year - which is the annual mortality rate of coal miners.   Q: What about Chernobyl? A: A terrible event. A total of 31 people died immediately and about 140 others suffered varying degrees of radiation sickness. For longer-term effects, 1791 carcinomas of the thyroid have been diagnosed among children living in the area. This latter number is most likely significantly under-reported [see http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/chernobyl/chernobyl-update.pdf for more]. In the Western World, today's reactors cannot fail in the same way - the worst we can do is a Three-Mile-Island type of event. There is some evidence that TMI has increased cancer rates in its vincinity - but of course, these numbers pale in comparison to the 20,000 deaths/year that coal provides. Again, the point is not that Nuclear Power is perfectly safe - it's not, nothing is. The point is that it is far safer than Coal. Even if a Chernobyl event could happen in the U.S. (and it can't), we'd "need" several per year in order for nuclear and coal to be even!   Q: What about nuclear waste? A: Nuclear waste is concentrated. That is, although it is very dangerous, there is also relatively little of it. If we (the USA) were smart enough to reprocess our spent nuclear waste (like every other country that uses nuclear power does), the high-level waste would be tiny. The net waste produced by a 1000 Megawatt nuclear plant, with the waste reprocessed via a breeder reactor, is on the order of 1 cubic meter per year. Now, this is a cubic meter of some really nasty stuff - but it is only a cubic meter. The waste can be vitrified (that is, made into a glass-like material), and a small 10x10x10 meter underground chamber would hold a thousand years of waste. Even the stupid non-reprocessed technique used in the U. S. today generates thousands of times less waste - and again, because it is non-gaseous, it is waste that can be intelligently dealt with. If the waste is not reprocessed, the 1000-Megawatt example given above would generate about 20 cubic meters of waste. Let's compare this to coal: A year's worth of running a 1000 Megawatt coal plant creates about 1.5 million tons of ash, which contains a variety of known carcinogens and can be strongly acidic or alkaline, depending on the original content of the coal. And that's just the solid waste - there's also about 600 pounds of CO2 produced every second, along with a significant amound of sulphur dioxide and various kinds of nitrogen oxides (to be fair, great progress is being made at reducing gaseous release of these latter two). This is way too much waste to store, so it is placed in the environment. Again, an energy generation technology that allows its wastes to be stored is superior to one that doesn't.   Q: But couldn't we just consume less power? A: Regardless how much power we consume, we would always be best-served to generate it in the optimal manner. So - yes, we could consume less power, and the power we do consume should be generated in the large-scale manner that has been shown to impact the environment the least: nuclear power.   Q: If it is so obvious that nuclear power is superior, why don't we use it? A: Good question. The American public has a irrational fear of the word "nuclear". This is why MRIs aren't called NMRIs (as they should be), this is why we get ridiculous protests over space probes like Cassini. Mediots seem to be very harsh on the subject of nuclear power, and silent on the much larger dangers of coal. The tide may be starting to turn... hopefully it will turn in time   Got a question I didn't address above? Cool, I'd love to hear it, send me some email here. If you have questions, comments, praise, or criticism for these pages, I'd love to hear it. Send mail here.