the Author simply fails to compare the health effects of burning coal and demystified nuclear fission.

iIgnored, the much higher death toll/environmental damage from coal fired power!

Which includes most of the polluting heavy metals(lead mercury, cadmium, arsenic and uranium) emanating from the smoke stacks; which permanently pollutes the natural environment with even more disastrous cumulative health consequences for many more!

Or that over half the solar panels adorning over a million australian roofs are made using this power?

Ignores recent advances, like waterless helium cooled pebble reactors able to be sited almost anywhere; that make a meltdown almost impossible or history.

Also ignored are thorium reactors or the fact that the latest advances in solar thermal energy, rely on radioactive liquid lithium and thorium salts to facilitate the heat retention required to make these alternatives, base load capable!

He needs to wake up in the morning and smell the unprecedented levels of Co2 that threaten us with a real, not hyperventilated E.L.E!

He probably prefers unreliable wind and solar voltaic power, because it costs a proverbial granny killing arm and a leg.

And entirely unaffordable for more than half the world's population; encourage the felling of more trees and or the substitution of world polluting fossil fuels.

We who export so much coal should instead be exporting fully functional truckable thorium reactors, and renting them out where they can't otherwise afford them; and in so doing, ensuring they are fueled with our thorium.

Thankfully the break even price per ton for new coal projects is around $100.00 a ton, and the current market is around $50.00 a ton.

Let me conclude by saying, I have a coal fired power station in my backyard.

I have just very recently just survived Multiple pulmonary embolisms. And I am downstream from the smoke stacks!

P.E"s cause of most sudden deaths in the elderly! Just one is usually enough!

Would that that power station could be a nuclear one, and that we had the brains to build a nuclear powered shipping fleet/connecting rapid rail!
Rhrosty.

The writer seems to assume non-natural radioactive material will get into the environment as a matter of course. Given that nobody has gotten a clearly sickening dose at Fukushima and that proveable deaths from Chernobyl are fewer than 60 I'd say that makes it relatively safe. Look how many coal miners are killed each year or how much respiratory distress is caused eg by the Morwell coal fires.

Fortunately the writer is not insisting that wind and solar can substantially replace coal as the evidence for such a claim is tenuous. In Australia our coal use is increasing despite over a decade of generous subsidies for wind and solar. There is no perfect energy source but nuclear is one that works at scale with statistically low harm rates.

Sorry Rhrosty and Taswegian

But the fact that coal mining is bad for health does not prove that ionising radiation is safe.

Oh Noel

Reckon you are somewhat hard on Doc Muller.

Right at the end of the final episode he said - along the lines - he doesn't think nuclear is ready and that renewables (wind and solar) are a better choice.

Such was the complexity and ambiguous nature of Doc Muller's statements over three long episodes - that we extract what meanings that are in accord with our leanings.

I am scrupulously neutral mar-self.

Peter-kin

from Noel Wauchope

Oh Plantagenet
How good to have the luxury of being scrupulously neutral. I can't manage that, in a world with so much pain and suffering.

Dr Muller makes sure to make numerous statements that sound like strong reservations about nuclear power, and that statement about "feeling" that renewables are an alternative, and that we're not ready for new nuclear. That's exactly what the nuclear lobby is saying - particularly people like Leslie Dewan - as her new nuclear reactor exists only on paper.

These statements are a sort of letout for him. They do not inform his whole account.

Muller and Thomas are perfect choices for the new sophisticated style nuclear spin. Either they are both shills, or Muller is strangely ignorant on biology. Check out his videos on radiation at Veritasium on Youtube. Check out Prof Thomas at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7sGESRhpqg or http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/26/obesity-smoking-more-dangerous-radiation

Christina: Logically, the fact that some people die from gas poisoning does not make electricity safe!

Nor does a higher death rate from coal suddenly make nuclear perfectly safe!

Recent advances have made it considerably safer and cheaper!

See helium cooled pebble reactors. Cheaper than coal thorium!

As far as I'm concerned I've not claimed that nuclear was completely safe! Show where I've claimed that!? Typical anti nuclear obfuscation?

Make no mistake, coal fired power probably leaches more uranium and other even more dangerous heavy metals into our environment, via smoke stack emission, than any still operational nuclear plant?

Naturally, nobody with a still functioning brain is advocating building a conventional oxide reactor on a known fault line!

That said, improving battery technology may make some of the "renewables" more reliable? Just not cheaper?

At the end of the day those alternatives we take up, will literally walk out the door!

Money talks!

However, if there's a market for the renewables, without taxpayer subsidies, let them stand or fall on merit; in a completely free energy market!

I have shown some carbon free technologies, that we could roll out to provide power at half the cost of that available today from the coal fired power market!

To among other things, resuscitate our slowly sinking in the sunset, manufacturing base.

If the services are so good? See how much we make from them, having to compete with emerging economies for a market share, large enough to guarantee a viable future for our kids and their Kids!?

Read me on earlier energy articles.
Rhrosty.