The issues with nuclear energy are above all cultural, not technical.
This is true also in the mind of the public and the opponents. For instance, when we hear that no insurance will take the liability for nukes, it has nothing to do with rational evaluation of worst-case or averaged liability. There are some 400 reactors worldwide. We have centuries of cumulated operation for various designs. We know the statistics. We know the worst that can happen (Tchernobyl) and we know that counting by loss of life and damage to property, it is bad, but not worst than your average hurricane season over Florida + road fatalities.
Yet insurers won't take it, because they know that in court, a defendant will have a biased audience and will get exhorbitant indemnities, just because a damage was incurred by "the ugly nuclear lobby", when the coal lobby is doing more damage to miners every year and gets away with it. One death by radiation gets a harder punishment than one death by most other means, be they guns, knifes, bombs, mines...
Also think about that: do we hear about the dreadful accidents and release in all the commercial reactors of smaller nations ? Just from the wikipedia list, we have pwoer reactors in Korea, Armenia, Argentina, you name it... And virtually every country in the world has had a toy reactor <10 MW in some research institute. How many have melted and sprayed the world with iodine ? The simple answer is that they have their incidents of course, they have their lot of cover-ups, but the view that nuke is bound for disaster is simply doomsday mythology, and this is popular only in the affluent western nations. Pierre
Unfortunately for your argument, both the statistics and the magnitude of the Chernobyl disaster are hotly contested, with opinions differing in orders of magnitude; I dealt with the Chernobyl numbers game in a rather long diary on the 20th anniversary here on ET. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Of course, you can call me a big nuke puppet (which I'm not) and a despiseful elitist technocrat (which I am) if you wish. Pierre
Is there an obvious summary of the range of estimates available?
What I'd love to see is a range of estimates of the dangers of including nuclear power in the energy generation mix vs. the dangers of not including it, neglecting the bizarro land belief that we will choose to kill technological civilisation and move to some bucolic utopia rather than kill tens of millions of people through global warming and coal fired electrical generation, because we won't - and the transition to that utopia would kill hundreds of millions.
However, there is a danger on the long term, in phasing out the plants (and henceforth, the operating expertise), and stopping development of new generations. It is a technology with very long lead times. We cannot predict with certainty that we won't need it in 20-30 years. Renewables are on a fast growth curve and can go on like that for 30 years, but we cannot be sure about minimal demand.
What I mean is: even with conservation (and certainly demand destruction), total electricity demand may increase due to a crash switch to PHEV, heat pump heating (now installed in 6% of new houses build in France, so it is really taking off)... And demand for non-fossil heat could come from seawater desalination if we have dramatic changes in rainfall patterns.
We have no guarantee that renewables alone can cope with both nuclear/fossil phase-out, and those new demands. Quite the contrary I think for the 20-30 yrs term. Pierre
I also try to keep my points more limited, e.g. I cast doubt at is your claim that we know the risks well, rather than settle down for a figure or a comparison with the risks of a rival technology. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
That makes it very hard to quantify risks accurately.
If the Windscale fire problem hadn't been solved, it's likely that much of the Midlands would now be uninhabitable. You can more or less get a way with an accident like that in Russia. In Europe, population densities are somewhat higher and the prospect of losing large sections of a country aren't appealing.
So it's not just imputed fatalities, clearly. The overall risk has to include the extremely small - but not quite zero - prospect of a more serious accident.
As everyone else has been saying, the sanest way to assess the risks is to look at governmental competence and corporate culture.
From that point of view, nukes are politically demanding. If insurers don't want to insure them, it could be as much because they know that the political stability and oversight required to minimise risks isn't there, as because they're worried that any trial will be railroaded by hordes of angry chanting hippies wearing sunflowers.
