257 comments on DrumBeat: January 30, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
257 comments on DrumBeat: January 30, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- Thanksgiving Open Campfire Thread
- How Relocalization Worked
- How to Set Up and Run a Bicycle Repair Company
TOD:Europe
- Unique Times -- and the Future
- Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? - Part I
- Carbon Capture and Storage
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Friday 27th November 2009
- International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
- Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“The infrastructure of suburbia can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”
—JH Kunstler
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
It's interesting how marketing affects peoples' perceptions and the resulting NIMBY/PIMBY attitudes.
So, local people are PIMBY (Please in my back yard) on a project that will inject millions of tonnes of extremely dangerous suffocating gas right there below their feet. A first of kind project, involving technology that has never been demonstrated or proven it will work properly.
Then they would vigorously protest a nuclear reactor at the same place - even though for all 50 years of existence nuclear plants in the developed world have practically hurt noone. Even though for the same investment such a plant will be producing more then 3 times the energy of the "clean coal" plant... Talk about rationality.
What I'd really like to start seeing is RIMBY - Renewables In My Back Yard
Two things, LevinK
1) False Dichotomy. You make it sound as if the people who oppose Nuke are therefore Pro 'CleanCoal' .. Survey the Green Nimbys and convince me that they are really Pro either one.. both are dirty, and are tearing up all sorts of land and fouling waterways to access their fuels.
2) No Injuries... Keep Repeating it. In a hundred thousand years, you won't have made it true. 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.. Of course, we're still effecting some 'Waste Disposal' by packaging our high explosives in DU and giving it as a gift to the future generations of Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan. But that doesn't count as a peripheral effect of Nuclear Power, does it?
Bob
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:
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.
Joule;
I don't doubt that coal's death toll is far worse. So Far. My objection is that this makes nuclear appear safe, while it's only been in operation for a sliver of the time that it's materials will remain concentrated and harmful, and add to that the fact that this very unique period of time has seen most of the countries that could sustain a Nuclear Reactor industry able to be kept stable enough to maintain the level of security required to keep the systems going, the fences guarded, the guards paid.
When a Windturbine stops turning, decades after anyone cares, and it sits up there rusting and tottering, at least you can see it, and should have the good sense not to stand underneath. Nuclear is one of the countless unperceivable and concentrated poisons that we've drawn from the earth and brought into the biosphere where it can and does disrupt living systems. I'm not that worried about getting radiation poisoning myself, aside from the cumulative effects of living in an environment where we have also inundated our bodies with Mercury, Dioxin, Phthalated Polymers, Bromates, etc etc.. but no, my greater worry is what I'm doing to my neighbors, our kids and to the biosphere over the foreseeable future if I advocate such a selfish and reckless form of Technocopian energy, heedless of the likelihood that I won't be able to assure it is safely kept for as long as it is a danger to others.
As far as that Nuclear Exchange goes, does your scenario preclude the likelihood that Nuclear Energy can also play a role with inspiring such a development? It seems that the See-saw of Iran's 'Peaceful Atom' program vs their 'Desire for Doomsday Weapons' is as close a link for a WarStarter as you could ask for. This source is Trouble. It's overpowered, lending itself to Monopolistic Business Practises, Political Gamesmanship, and AntiDemocratic Infrastructure. It's complex and requires a Big, Stable system to be operated safely.
Best,
Bob