Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: *Putting aside the long term perspective, .. .* >
> You can’t dismiss the long term perspective. > No, you can't, but I just did. My sentence begins "putting aside the long term perspective" meaning "let's not talk about the future for a moment here; let's look only at the present." > What happens in the future is important. > Yes, it is. What happens in the present is also important. An accident that bankrupts the biggest power company on earth and costs the Japanese taxpayers several hundred billion dollars is important. Your value system is completely opposite to what it should be on this > issue; let me explain. > You don't need to. I made it quite clear that I agree that coal is a bigger threat in the long term. However, nuclear power is a gigantic economic threat in the short term. If 3 more Japanese reactors were to go out of control and explode, it would paralyze the entire economy, which is of the third largest in the world. It would be roughly the equivalent of the U.S. fighting the Iraq war again, 5 times in a row. Coal threatens global warming which in the worst scenario will destroy entire nations and kill millions of species and individual people. That's horrible. But a disaster that would impoverish an entire nation -- 4 reactors exploding -- is also horrible, albeit in a different way. Neither risk is acceptable. Both coal and nuclear have to go. We need something better. I hope that cold fusion can overcome the academic politics and replace them both, but if that is not to be, I am sure that solar and various other methods can replace them. This will be more expensive than coal per kilowatt hour (ignoring future costs). It will be far cheaper than nuclear however, now that we have seen the true dollar cost of nuclear power. After Fukushima it became the most expensive method of generating electricity in history. I believe it wiped out all of the profits ever made by TEPCO. Before Fukushima I supported nuclear power. I knew that nuclear accidents have occurred and that they might be severe. However, I never imagined that a reactor manufactured in the US and installed in Japan could malfunction to this extent and cost this much money. If you asked me before 2011 I would have said: "that that might happen in theory but in actual practice we should not worry about such extreme scenarios." Before 9/11 I would have dismissed the likelihood of fanatics crashing commercial airliners into buildings. Life is full of surprises. - Jed
