The author has written "The real trouble starts when radioactive particles get out into the environment. Then, they very quickly end up in living creatures where they wreak their damage directly. Once they've escaped and been scattered by wind, water and rain, the deed is done, much of it irrevocable."

Well perhaps it has already happened.

This is sober reading: http://rt.com/news/fukushima-apocalypse-fuel-removal-598/

and additionally, the so called easy removal of spent fuel rods now sounds somewhat more difficult than purported in the original article.

Worth thinking about, especially noting the current progress to date and the continued evasive nature of reporting the truth from TEPCO.

Geoff

Foyle,

As I said in the article, this is mostly new to me so whatever thoughts I offer come from careful (but nonetheless potentially misinterpreted) recent research.

So, with that caveat.

I don't think you're taking sufficient account of the difference between the amount of radioactive fission products created at Hiroshima and Nagasaki compared to nuclear plant accidents.

Taking caesium-137, the amount released at Fukushima was apparently about 160 times that released at Hiroshima, and at Chernobyl it was over 800 times as great. If a plant accident got out of hand, the potential release could be many multiples larger again.

There's also a difference between these fission products getting inside living creatures and concentrating the radiation in a small area as opposed to general background radiation. I don't think the effects are all that comparable.

Geoff,

It's a truly scary article, isn't it.

I read it before doing the post and in the end decided not to refer to it, solely because Christina Consolo seemed such a radical voice. Doesn't mean she isn't right in part or in whole, of course.

plantagenet,

Yes, the known costs are high enough, but with all the unknowns it doesn't seem to make much sense at all, even ignoring safety issues.

Fukushima is the worst environmental disaster in our history and they are covering it up.300 tonnes of radioactive water is being released into the ocean every day and they have not a clue on how to stop it. This have been happening for 2.5 yrs.

It is not the background radiation that is the danger but the hot particles that mimic elements in our bodies that are the real danger.

There is no need for the great human cull via war and disease. Fukushima will probably do it silently.

Plantagenet wrote;

"Coal, oil and gas are far less dangerous and also cheaper".
You should look up the studies before you make such a statement.
The OLO system will not accept a typed chart but in his book "Thorium, Energy Cheaper than Coal" PhD physicist, Robert Hargraves, lists the number of major accident in each fuel supply chain, the number of fatalities in each chain and the fatalities per GW Year. Below I quote the figure in the sequenced above.

Coal - 185 - 8,100 - 0.35

Oil - 330 - 14,000 - 0.38

Nat. Gas - 85 - 1,500 - 0.08

LPG - 75 - 2,500 - 2.9

Hydro - 10 - 5,100 - 0.9

Nuclear - 1 -28 - 0.0085

Nuclear is by far the safest fuel industry in the world of the order of one order of magnitude better than any other.

Foyle, the pollution from fossil fuels is temporary. These new elements from nuclear fission never existed before and have half lives of millions of years.

The technology goes back to the 1970's and they have failed to update it. Perhaps Nuclear Fusion of the Sun is the answer,but Nuclear Fission with our low technology, will exterminate much of the life on this planet if plants like Fukushima are allowed to propagate.

Thank you Foyle.

Don't coal fired power plants release quite high radiation?

Not that I'm against coal fired power. It really does make the most sense in Oz. From all the latest evidence we are descending into a Little Ice Age, as we speak, that or the full glaciation now somewhat overdue.

That quiet sun is a bit of a worry, at least for my grandkids.

We are likely to be hoping that CO2 does actually have some of the warming the IPCC has been touting, & we may need every bit of ash produced from coal, to spread around to try to keep the advancing ice at bay.