Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick

I'm all for renewable energy. In fact, I own/operate a 200kWp solar plant. I put my money where my mouth is.

Having said that, in the mid-term I'm also pro-nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is one of the greenest, least polluting energy sources right now. It's the only technology that emits zero CO2 and can be used as baseload. All other technologies, be it CCGT/natural gas, fuel cells using natural or bio gas, coal powered plants, etc. produce CO2 and other GHG. As much as I wish the world run entirely on wind, water and sunlight, we are very far from this happening. Nonetheless I think it will be possible.

The main issue with renewable energy right now is its production volatility: the wind blowing, the sun shinning, dams to 100% capacity, etc. The need for a stable, non-CO2 emitting, energy production is nuclear. No doubt doubt about it.

When you negatively say > billions spent decommissioning nuclear reactors around the planet

implying that the cost of decommissioning is a big downside, let me clarify a few things:

1. decommissioning (from cleaning to storage) costs are priced in the energy cost, still making it far cheaper than oil and gas sources even without CCS technologies.

2. the cost of decommissioning is provisioned by the company running the plant, meaning that decommissioning is no extraordinary cost to the operator/consumer/citizen.

3. today's nuclear technology is nowhere as archaic as it was in the 70's/80's, when many errors were made trying out different technologies. Many people make the mistake of brining up the case of Chernobyl, but people are unaware that this plant was an R&D plant, built for the production of nuclear weapons, and not built for energy production.

4. the environmental impact of running nuclear plants today is extremely small (if not insignificant) compared to running the same energy capacity and production on fossil fuels, where CO2 and other harmful gasses are causing increase in temperatures, melting of icecaps, decimating thousands of species, and the list goes on.

I do agree that with you on

>The reason the world continues to pollute more than necessary for the energy we desire has much more to do with the irrationality of people than the physics of energy production.

There is plenty of educating still to be done on energy, its consumption and user behaviour, and I hope the anti-nuclear sentiment focuses more on the bigger picture, rather than blaming nuclear for the sake of sounding environmentally friendly.

Sure. When calculating the CO2 output, it happens too often that not the real numbers are used. Nuclear energy shines in that regard when focussing only on the power generation itself. But if you count it all together: Mining uranium, building the power plant, transporting to the uranium to the plant, operating the powerplant (from workers who drive to that plant) and in the end, shipping the nuclear waste to an endlager which needs to be build as well (which germany doesn't have, so that one is open ended), the costs as well as the CO2-output of nuclear energy are very high.

Add the CO2 used for disaster prevention and management and from decomissioning the power plants.

I have a personal theory, that I haven't really been able to confirm or deny. Here it is.

After Hiroshima and during the cold war nuclear energy was associated with death and destruction. Hiroshima for obvious reasons, and the cold war because the population of the western world was constantly reminded how The Soviet Union had thousands of missiles with nuclear bombs pointing at us, ready to go. Western governments used nuclear weapons to picture the threat and to terrify populations into spending more on defense against the Soviets. There were scary videos of mushroom clouds, scary instructions on how to survive a nuclear blast, and scary stories of how a nuclear winter would pan out.

This, obviously, made people scared of nuclear bombs, and nuclear energy in general. Through decades the population was told by the government that nuclear radiation was the evil silent killer.

The byproduct of all this cold war propoganda was that people are now irrationally scared of nuclear radiation from power plants.

If you look at the numbers you'll see that nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest scalable energy source we've got. It's the energy source that has the fewest deaths per MWH produced, it doesn't produce CO2, etc. etc. Yet we think of it as getting power from the devil.

I blame the cold war propoganda for our irrational fear of nuclear energy.

Here's one of the old propaganda videos from the US, "Duck and cover" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MVJIU0gFk

"Decommissioning is a general term for a formal process to remove something from active status."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decommissioning