@dalehileman,
Interesting point. Two issues;
1. Fusion is a very long way off and very little progress in containing the high temperatures, pressures and local radiation levels required to sustain a controlled Fusion process has been attained in the last three decades. What was once a very hopeful and energetic research & development process is now dispirited and relatively passive.
2. Secondly your assertion that fission reactors are unsafe is contrary to the facts. It is significantly safer than coal, petroleum or gas fired powerplants. That's a very reliable assertion based on lots of data over the past 45 years during which the western world had generated a large fraction of its electrical power from fission reactors (20% in this country & Canada, up to 50% until recently in the UK and Germany; almost 80% in France; etc.
The problem is that nuclear power and the risks attendant to it are poorly understood by the public (something like the morbid fear of snakes), and the long term effects are routinely wildly exaggerated by the media. Consider the following facts;
1. The Japanese Government reported over 18,000 deaths from the Tusnami that struck their eastern coast last year. None of them occurred as a result of the reactor accident that involved the partial or complete meltdown of three of the four reactor cores at the Fukushima site. One wouldn't know that from the reporting of the accident. Based on Japanese Government reports, only one plant worker was exposed to radiation above the level at which any increased incidence od disease is indicated by clinical and public health data.
The same was true with our Three Mile Island accident. The NIH has reported that there is no evidence of an increase in disease or mortality after now over thirty years since the accident. Even Chernobyl caused fewer deaths than occur each year in China's coal mines.
2. We live our lives bathed in natural radioactivity from the sun and radioactive particles in the earth, and that dose increases with altitude and proximity to granite rosk formations. A person moving from (say) Richmond VA to Denver Colorado experience an increase in his natural dose of radioactivity that is about equal to the maximum legally allowed industrial dose by a radiation worker. If he moves to Aspen at a higher altitude and surrounded by granite mountains the increase is about 50% greater. Despite all this there is no statistically detectable difference in the incidence or mortality associated with related diseases. Indeed a survey of all the high altitude cities in the country reveals no differences with those who live near sea level (though there is ample data suggesting that it is healthier to be a teatotalling Mormon in Salt Lake than a cigar smoking boozer in Las Vegas).
3. The public radiation dose from burning coal is ten times that we get from pur fission reactors. Why? because there is detectable natural uranium in coal and it goes up the stack at the plant, and we use millions of tons of coal each year.
4. Managing the long lived nuclear waste from power reactors is a relatively simple engineering problem. Opponents cite the long half lives of some of the materials involved, but it is worth remembering that the ubiquitous and wide spread sources of mercury, cadmium, lead, arsenic and other like poisionous elements will be poisionous forever, and most are far morte damaging than external radiation sources..
5. There is a well established principle in biology that "the poision is in the dose". This means that most sources of biological damage become harmful only if a critical level of exposure is exceeded. We all have low levels of Arsenic in our bodies and there is evidence that without it we would suffer consequences. However a large dose is fatal. Similar situations arise with selenium, even calcium and many oteher minerals. There is ample evidence that such a threshold also exists with respect to external radiation.
Most of the scarte stories about radiation hazards come out of a miususe of a reliably conservative rule of thumb indicatin that the damage done by low levels of radioactivity varys linearly with the dose and can be estimated based on dats from measured exposures from Hiroshima. The problem is this violated the threshgold principle and also (iin the case of Chernobyl) forecasts incidences of disease higher many multiples of what was actually oserved.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace