To read such pro-nuclear drivel from the SF Chronicle is a disgrace to the City's reputation as the birthplace of the 60's flower power revolution. If it was up to the SF Chronicle, the editors would probably plow under Haight Ashbury and put up a parking lot.

Nuclear waste contains lots of depleted uranium which has a half life of 4.5 billion years, meaning after this time one half of the original amount will have decayed spewing radiation as it decays and one half will be left to continue the decay process wherein during the next 4.5 billion years half of this amount will have decayed. Since the earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years this means that nuclear waste has to be isolated for the rest of the time man is on the earth. This is an unacceptable responsibility to lay on all following generations. Nuclear energy is not the answer.

Chernobyl may have only killed 65 immediately, but after 25 years, it is still killing humans and contines to cause genetic mutations of ALL living organisms in a very large area. The fallout in Alaska from Chernobyl was in high concentrations pf caribou and eskimo peoples. Many eskimo people have cancer.from nuclear testing and nuclear accidents. Real reductions in greenhouse gases can be made in energy efficiency and less consumption. The authors of this article are thinking in the nuclear energy industry box. The security risks of nuclear energy waste over hundreds of years for nuclear weapons manufacturing is being ignored by the authors. Production of nuclear energy leads to black market nuclear weapons sales.

I think this blog that is misguided. And listening to the wrong people.Giving up coal and taking up nuclear is like giving up cigarettes and taking up crack. Because radiation is not directly traceable in the horrors it visits on humans, its effects are downplayed, underestimated, covered up and lied about. Study after study has shown even low level radiation causes cancers and birth defects. A new Russian study estimates a million will die from the radiation released by Chernobyl, and no one knows about Fukushima. We don't have to chose between saving the climate and saving the gene pool. We CAN and must do both.

First, Graham Nash, by all accounts, is a gentleman and a fine musician. He is not a scientist nor an economist, but obviously cares deeply for humanity. Quoting him on energy policy is silly, like quoting me about harmony and chord structure.
If the authors care to read the literature (MIT, 2006), they will learn that not enough nukes can be built fast enough to provide the significant carbon mitigation many experts tell us is necessary to avert continuing climate chaos. They would also realize that the global economy cannot afford to finance the hundreds of new nukes necessary to meet this goal.
Furthermore, they would also learn (see www.stormsmith.nl) that as demand for uranium increases, the quality of ores being mined from known reserves will be lower and lower, meaning that the carbon cost of mining, milling, and enrichment of nuclear fuel will go up and up, negating much of the alleged carbon savings of nuclear.
Reprocessing? Still a pipe dream, and like the first generation of leaky nukes, it looks real good on paper but in practice has been a global technological, fiscal and environmental failure.
Finally, every dollar spent on a nuke is a dollar that can't be spent on renewables and lower-carbon energy options, including investment in efficiency and conservation. THAT is the morally untenable position - spending our social capital on failed technologies.
The best the authors can do is grudgingly admitting that renewables have come along way since 1979. The nuclear power industry hasn't even gotten a new reactor design approved since then, despite lotsa moola, plenty of hoolpa, and even hoops to jump through then now removed by regulators.
And we didn't even get to the nonproliferation arguments against nuclear power. The NPT called for promoting nuclear power as a way to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Think about Pakistan, Israel, & North Korea, and ask yourself how THAT worked out...

This absolute propaganda - the Chronicle should be ashamed to print such inane bullsh*t. Read Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy by Arjun Makhijani to see how biased this post is. Who wrote the talking points? Areva, GE, Toshiba or Babcock & Wilcox?

I sure hope that Sara & Jesse can make it out to the MUSE event. There they would find well documented materials which run counter to their ill informed pro nuke rant.

To learn about the 985,000 deaths from Chernobyl between 1986 and 2004 please visit the webpage below. Google Dr. Janette Sherman and you'll learn that she is a world class epidemiologist.

Yes global warming is a real threat. Sending hundreds of billions down the nuclear rathole will keep us from getting to a real solution.

http://www.amazon.com/Chernobyl-Consequences-Catastrophe-Environment-ebook/dp/B004X8DOQC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1303313547&sr=1-1

Nesterenko, Alexey, Vassily Nesterenko, Alexey Yablokov. Janette Sherman-Nevinger, ed. Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol.1181, Blackwell Pub., Boston, Mass, 2009.

Michael J. Keegan
Michigan

Dear Robert,

You wrote, "nuclear waste has to be isolated for the rest of the time man is on the earth". Well, ironically, you increase the likelihood of that time frame shrinking drastically if you keep up with the NO NUKES. Don't want to be apocalyptic in my argumentation - that would be very un-Breakthrough- but it seems we have many people stuck in analysis from a movie by Jane Fonda in 1976. I love Jackslon Browne too, and I loved No Nukes back in 1979 (?), but, jeez, The TImes They have Changed.

@Michael Keegan:

The Yablakov et al. (2009) report you cite is precisely the report we refer to in our post, noting that it has been widely rejected by the public health community. Here is a review of the report published in a National Institutes of Health journal, Environmental Health Perspectives:

To document the negative impacts of the accident, the authors, objective, many of the articles present lists of excerpted facts, tables, and figures taken from the large number of referenced studies to support the stated conclusions. The inconsistent use of scientific units, the grouping of data collected with variable time and geographic scales, the lack of essential background information, and the consistent exclusion of scientific research that reported lesser or no negative impacts leave objective readers with very limited means for forming their own judgments without doing their own additional extensive research. In fact, many major technical studies and reports on the impacts of the Chernobyl accident have been excluded. (It is not known whether this is due to the time of publication or lack of access to English-language reporting.) That said, this volume provides a roadmap to non-English-language literature that can be considered as scientific research into this topic continues.

Two significant methodological biases underpin the conclusions that are drawn by the authors from the large amount of data presented: the application of a downward extrapolation of the linear radiation dose effect relationship with no lower threshold, and the distrust of the ability of epidemiologic methodologies to determine the existence of a statistical correlation between measured or calculated radiological dose and measured impacts.

The first issue has been around for decades and continues to be debated by the scientific community. However, by discounting the widely accepted scientific method for associating cause and effect (while taking into account the uncertainties of dose assessment and measurement of impacts), the authors leave us with only with their assertion that the data in this volume "document the true scale of the consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe."

Because of these clear flaws in the Yablakov et al. report you cite, not even the long-time anti-nuclear watchdog group the Union of Concerned Scientists will stand by those numbers publicly.

Now 50,000 eventual deaths -- the figure cited by UCS -- is a serious accident, and a serious tragedy. But air pollution from our fossil-fueled energy system kills 1.2 million people annually according to the World Health Organization. That means that in the 25 years since the Chernobyl accident, our fossil fueled pollution has already killed 600-times as many people. Air pollution has sickened countless more, caused permanent cases of asthma and respiratory illness in millions of Americans, strewn neuro-toxic mercury across virtually all of the country poisoning unborn children and infants, and creating smog, acid rain and more.

The public health and environmental devastation of fossil energy is our concern, not to mention fossil energy's role as the primary driver of potentially catastrophic climate change.

In a world still building new coal and gas-fired power plants ever day, the assertion that we are on the verge of a fossil AND nuclear free world powered by "soft" renewable energy sources is simply delusional. Moving away from nuclear power is a move towards more fossil energy, more sickness and death, and accelerated climate change, and that's not something I can support.

Jesse Jenkins
Breakthrough Institute

Reading these posts has me gritting my teeth. I can imagine source of these knee jerk anti-nuke reactions, however. They are the bad taste in our mouths left over from years living under the omnipresent terror of nuclear destruction during the cold war. The same wave of modernity that brought futurism to the masses in the 50-60's brought the IDEA of radiation to our living rooms. It is why we mostly think of radiation in the pop culture iconography of the time: cartoonishly green, oozing from a rusty drum and most always as a human creation. An existential threat. The truth is Earth and its inhabitants are constantly showered by radiation, like a steady drizzle of rain. Most of us receive a yearly dose of 350mrem from "natural" and "man-made" (quoted to emphasize that the distinction is pretty horrifying all and all). The U.S. National Nuclear Safety Administration released data projecting that those living closest to Fukashima (within 20 miles) will receive around 2000mrem "enough to cause roughly one extra cancer case in 500 young adults". Putting aside that the difficulties in connecting health outcomes from radiation exposure this is a tragedyn no doubt about it that this incident has driven headlines more than the 15,641 confirmed deaths from the actual "natural" disaster of the earthquakes tsunami is evidence of the way we conflate the nuclear danger. I would like us to power our economy with renewable energy sources as much as anyone, so much so in fact that I am willing to dedicate the rest of my life and career to forwarding that agenda. However, even when these sources become a viable alternative we are going to need a source of base load power to underpin the volatility of supply that comes from renewable sources. That's going to come from Nuclear or its going to come from gas/coal, END STOP. If we choose the latter I just hope we are willing to accept all the pollutants that extracting them spew into the environment, including the RADIOACTIVE ones. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste)