Nuclear Power Not Sustainable or Safe

I've lived most of my life within 20kms of a nuclear power station.  Doesn't mean I like it or chose to.  It just means this is where I was born and where my family lives.  And that is where I think the safety issue is really hitting home, so to speak.

Of course the concerns are being "rethunk" due to the catastrophe in Japan right now but to me that makes sense as the odds of failure just went up significantly.  There are 442 nuclear reactors (power stations) in the world and now 3 of them have had extremely serious accidents.  These odds aren't great considering everyone living within 20 kms of the stations lost their homes and can never move back.  To me that risk is just too high.   The probability is getting close to 1%, so consider this; if the odds of getting run over by a dump truck was 1% every time you crossed the road, how many times would you want to cross the road? or would you rather take another route? 

The fact is people make mistakes and there have been plenty of mistakes made at nuclear power plants.  The ones in Durham region are not perfect either.  I don't like to gamble with everything I love and care about, especially when someone else is making all the choices on how much risk we are willing to assume.  When coal, oil, gas, wind, solar go badly wrong at least you can just clean it up and get on with your life.

Nuclear isn't sustainable either.  There is only so much Uranium in the world, just like coal, oil and natural gas.  Why would we want to keep putting our money into systems that aren't sustainable and a lot of money it takes too...

Canada has 18 nuclear reactors (according the European Nuclear Society site http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm) generating 12,569 MW of electricity (net).  With a large wind generating putting out 1.5 MW, it sounds like we could replace all the nuclear plants with about 20,ooo wind generators (give or take a few thousand).  At 1.5 million dollars each we could have 26,666 wind generators (there are already more than 100,000 wind generators in use around the world) for 40 billion dollars which is probably a lot less then we paid for the 18 reactors (I believe they are quoting 26 billion for the two new ones proposed at Darlington). 

Sounds like a nice safe, sustainable and inexpensive way to generate electricity to me....  I'm sure I'm over simplifying and we would probably need more solar, hydro, bio-mass etc. to close down the reactors; but the sooner we get started the better I like the odds.

Comments

[duane]

30kms here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_alienation

[duane]

Yes, in fact I read that article.

How do the people who lived close to these three nuclear catastrophes feel about how safe nuclear is? How did it change their lives? Do they feel it's an acceptable risk? How are our descendents going to feel about living with the waste for thousands of years? I'd rather never have to answer these questions.

[Karen]

Was ANY research into the topic done before writing this article?? This is an embarrassingly uninformed rant against nuclear without knowing the facts or the realities of alternatives.

Try reading this article for a more accurate view of the actual risk involved:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

And here is a graphic to give you a better perspective on radiation doses:http://xkcd.com/radiation/