The Oil Drum

1) False Dichotomy. You make it sound as if the people who oppose Nuke are therefore Pro 'CleanCoal' ..

No, I'm not and I'm not talking about that here. The same people are likely to object wind mills if they clog their view. I'm simply pointing out that people choose which dangers to fear from, based on mere preconceptions and irrelevant of rational argumentation.

I've linked to Native villages in the American west that have been inundated with cancers from their Uranium Mining, testimonies to the Cancers birth defects in the Ukraine, underreported reactor accidents..

I am well aware that in the early days of the US nuclear program the safety and environmental standards were much lower than today. This almost exclusively applies to the military nuclear program, which you conveniently lump together with the civilian program. Which is pretty much the same as lumping together the Chemical Industry and the Nazi gas chambers.

I do not stand corrected - Nuclear Power Plants in the developed world have not caused even a single death or injury among the public. If you include employees in the public, nuclear is still the safest among all major energy sources:

6. A 2001 study by the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland (quoted in “The Revenge of Gaia”) found that, beteween 1970 and 1992, nuclear power had the best safety record of all major energy sources, both in terms of total deaths and deaths per terawatt of energy produced each year. The results for the top four sources were coal: 6,400 total deaths, 342 deaths per terawatt per year; hydro power: 4,000 total deaths, 884 deaths per terawatt per year; natural gas: 1,200 total deaths, 85 deaths per terawatt per year; nuclear power: 31 total deaths, 8 deaths per terawatt per year.

http://planetsave.com/category/climate-science-research/page/2/

Unfortunately wind or solar power were not included here because of their minuscule contribution but it is delusional to think they do not present any dangers on their own. There is nothing perfectly safe.

jokuhl -

To be fair, I think you would need to compare the deaths from exposure to radiation from the mining and processing of uranium, plus exposure from nuclear powe plant accidents to the deaths resulting from the mining, transport, and burning of coal.

If you do that, I think you will see that coal has caused far more death and disease than nuclear power.

As I have said several times before on TOD, if you are really worried about dying from radiation poisoning, your worries would be far better directed toward the possibility of a nuclear exchange resulting from an energy resource war that got out of control.

Orders of magnitude more people died of radiation during that shameful day at Hiroshima than have died from the following 50 years of worldwide nuclear power plant operation.