I'll step in and defend nuclear power. This crisis looks horrible and might even lead to multiple core melts with containment breach. But let's not forget this was a horrible natural disaster first. We engineers never said a meltdown could never happen but that we have done everything possible to minimize the risk. I can predict that the amount of lives lost and property damaged due to this accident will pale when compared to other forms of energy including coal, gas or oil when things go wrong -- a price we pay every single day and is so common it hardly registers as news. What was cost of the BP oil spill? Read your local news for local gas explosions, oil spills, injured workers, etc. People are killed in the coal industry every single year. These are such every day occurrences they don't even register unless many people are killed or it involves barrels of oil. This accident is like a plane crash that draws attention to the horrors of flight when things go wrong -- but we still fly and flying is orders of magnitude safer then getting in your car.
All energy sources have risks and I believe that nuclear can be safe and reliable and better than any of the alternatives. In the end we will build nuclear power plants because there is no other large scale source of energy that can power an industrial civilization. (If you think so-called green energy and solar power can save us you need to learn some math. You are an environmentalist dupe). Need I remind all the ambitious hackers on HN that computers and the internet do not run on pixie dust -- it is running on oil, gas, coal and, yes, nuclear power right now. We know that at some point the oil will run out or become too expensive to mine. At that point its nuclear or turn off the lights and the drastic drop in living standards that implies.
This accident will teach us a lot about how to design and build reactors and nuclear power stations and maybe will delay the construction of those new plants which would be the real tragedy of this accident. We need to start building them now.
It's instructive that we've already engineered ways of preventing the problems TEPCO is experiencing at their Fukushima. Many newer reactor designs have a passive residual heat removal system that removes decay heat even without electrical power to run cooling pumps.
Good answer. I actually don't know the figures, but I know what sort of argument it would take to convince me: some numbers showing that nuclear power production takes a substantially higher toll on life and health than other forms of energy production, measured by kWh. This number determines whether producing the same amount of power by other means is going to save people, or kill people. (Yes, it's not out of the question that environmentalist activism kills people. Good intentions don't protect from bad consequences.) Maybe the people who advocate stopping nuclear power should cite their acceptable figures of death toll per kWh produced, and then we can compare with oil and coal. Emotional arguments only get us so far.
As regarding sustainable energy, here's my favorite book on the subject: http://withouthotair.com . It takes the approach I like: "let's just sit down and calculate".
All energy sources have risks and I believe that nuclear can be safe and reliable and better than any of the alternatives. In the end we will build nuclear power plants because there is no other large scale source of energy that can power an industrial civilization. (If you think so-called green energy and solar power can save us you need to learn some math. You are an environmentalist dupe). Need I remind all the ambitious hackers on HN that computers and the internet do not run on pixie dust -- it is running on oil, gas, coal and, yes, nuclear power right now. We know that at some point the oil will run out or become too expensive to mine. At that point its nuclear or turn off the lights and the drastic drop in living standards that implies.
This accident will teach us a lot about how to design and build reactors and nuclear power stations and maybe will delay the construction of those new plants which would be the real tragedy of this accident. We need to start building them now.