I have much more to fear from government than I do from radioactivity. No one in my family ever died from radioactivity.
ML/NJ
No one in my family died either ml/nj, and I have spent days in the target room of several nuclear accelerators, and fifteen or so years in a building where isotopes were regularly spilled.
But we are in good company since no one has ever died from the nuclear attributes of commercial nuclear power. Even the famous Karen Silkwood drank plutonium in solution and was not harmed by it. Workers have fallen down stairs and off platforms in reactor buildings and generator rooms, but their numbers are dwarfed by the number of people who have died maintaining wind generators, and those numbers dwarfed by those who have fallen off of roofs repairing or installing solar collectors. Dead is dead!Numbers is numbers! Hysteria is effective when numbers don't count.
Until our nation is bankrupted by the luddites, the real price we are paying for our ignorance about both money and energy won't be appreciated.
Chernoble, not a commercial nuclear reactor, is always included in discussions about nuclear safety by our brilliant pundits, including those who are usually more careful like Roger Hedgecock. The sadly foolish Glen Beck and Sean Hannity, don't understand the difference between commercial, as in “Commercial Nuclear Power” and the associated safety concerns of communists for the proletariat.
Chernoble was built with no containment other than the warehouse-like building housing it. It was the three major levels of containment which made the complete core melt at Three Mile Island harmless. To enter Chernoble's reactor building one walked through swinging doors. Still, though I have seen widely ranging numbers, two people died as a direct result of high levels of radiation at the Chernoble reactor which failed (there were four, three of which are still operating); between 16 and and 160 died later (the range tells you data are suspicious) from a variety of causes, including alchohol poisoning of several who were apparently depressed at losing their jobs, and being forced to leave Chernoble to satisfy political more than toxicity concerns. Even 160 deaths are fewer than the number who died from the respiratory effects of burning coal burned to replace the thousand megawatts lost to Ukrainian society.
Nuclear power, for those who value quantitative truths more than ill-informed fears, has by far the best safety record of any source of energy, both in terms of total health affects, and in health effects per unit of energy per person. That is largely due to its energy flux density - lots of energy coming from a small physical source is easier to isolate. Nuclear radiation is ubiquitous.
Standing next to a cloud chamber, which is a washtub-sized drum, filled with supersaturated methyl alcohol with a transparent cover, it is fascinating to see the tracks of particles, many of which have entered the chamber through your body. Radioactivity is normal, probably essential to our health. The only places where radiation is really low are deep underground, away from granite or rock formations with natural uranium or radium.
Fear pays. Thousands of lawyers and hundreds of law firms are built around the asbestos scare, even when the health effects were largely manufactured. All those people in Nevada who sued because they or a relative contracted cancer, while Nevada had significantly lower incidence of cancer than most cities or states, made money for lawyers. How many don't know the excess exposure they get from the prostate cancer patient with radiation implants on the bus or in the car, or the man or woman who recently had a thyroid assessment with radioactive iodine?
The most danger by far is to the citizens of Japan from the loss of power they need to return to productivity. Japan will replace the old GE reactors with new Japanese reactors, or Chinese reactors, with the knowledge gained from seeing the weaknesses in the old designs. They won't kill anyone either, but they might survive one of the worst earthquakes in history, and its tsunami, and return quickly to full operation.
Japan won't buy GE reactors because GE sold its nuclear division years ago, to a Japanese company (perhaps Toshiba?), which in turn provided the most recent reactors to China, which is proceeding on an aggressive pace to build one hundred twenty four reactors in about fifteen years. The U.S. has not the steel manufacturing capability to build a containment vessel, and our progressives will push for a return to subsistence farming with wind mills and oxen for plowing.
That really was the vision of John Holdren's colleague, Amory Lovins, now living well as a recipient of government grants for energy studies, and probably, like Holdren, generous subsidies from the left, Theresa Kerry's Tides Foundation, Soros' OSI, Ford, MacArthur. Our citizens, if we continue as Luddites, will become subjects of a society which is moving forward, because North America has too many valuable humans and too many natural resources to waste. Our current soft dictatorship will be as dangerous to our new rulers because their expertise is as parasites in a society which flourished by freeing citizens to be entrepreneurs.
The Ruling Class produces nothing, and its security comes from taxing entrepreneurs; producers struggling to survive are not expert at creating stifling bureaucratic regulations, and most would be disgusted with the waste of their talents and time. Cap and Trade is the perfect example of taxing productivity, cleverly taxing a normal byproduct of all human activity. The left, like the scorpian which, riding across the river on the turtle, kills its host and drowns, will starve itself as it destroys our productivity. Another nation will learn from our self destruction and protect the freedom which enables the potential of individuals from government. Government, regulatory by definition, producing nothing, will naturally try to regulate as much as it can so that the class of regulators survives. Our framers did their best to protect the republic, and did so for about two hundred twenty years, but the class of regulators has become too powerful. That was the wisdom Ayn Rand (Alicia Rosenblum (?), who learned living through Bolschevik Revolution) passed to us in her seminal works.