The events at the now world famous Fukushima nuclear facility are still unfolding. So far, there has been a large excision zone to limit peoples exposure to the radiation, and people are trying to evacuate Tokyo and other cities.
Sadly, 5 people have been killed in the explosions at the plant. This drove Greenpeace, and other anti-nuclear groups to jump up and down, and proclaim that this was yet more proof of why nuclear power was a horrible, dangerous form of energy.
But is it really that bad? Let’s look at the facts, not the sensationalist views of biased, paranoid environmentalists.
Firstly, the big danger. Death. How many people have been killed in these nuclear accidents worldwide? In total, 68. not 68 million, not 68 thousand, 68. While any loss of life is a tragic thing, 260 times more people die each year in slips and falls, just in America. So of all the accidents that have occurred at nuclear plants (around 100), only 68 people have died. Over 80% of those happening at one site, Chernobyl.
Now, I'm not naive, I'm not saying nuclear power is totally safe, I know that there is big dangers from nuclear accidents, high doses of radiation is a very dangerous thing for biological organisms such as plants. But the amount of spin and paranoia in the public and media borders on the ridiculous. One example being people thousands of miles away in America buying iodine tablets to counteract any I'll effects of radiation poisoning, when people only a hundred miles away are reporting only mild increases in radiation levels. The dangers of nuclear plant disasters have been exaggerated over the years in films, TV and the sensationalist media.
It also carries the stigma of the word "nuclear". A word that when people hear it, they don’t think of carbon-free energy production (yes, it’s that clean). They instead think of this:
Let me be very clear, the word "nuclear" is a reference to the nucleus of an atom. and in turn, anything else that happens to atoms, such as radiation, decay, fusion, fission etc.
A nuclear bomb is a massive explosive device, where inside the matter of the atoms is converted to energy (E=Mc^2), either by splitting an atom apart, or from the much more destructive method, fusing two together (basically what happens inside the sun).
This has absolutely nothing in common with nuclear reactors, In which they use non-explosive nuclear reactions, a process called nuclear fission, to heat water and produce steam. This is why the idiotic suggestion of seeing a "mushroom cloud" over the Fukushima plant, as quoted by one Adrian Chiles, will never happen. Its two very separate methods of producing energy, from within a very large and incredibly complicated field of science.
Yes, there are dangers with nuclear power, as there are with every form of energy production. When things go bad at a nuclear plant, which is very rarely, they can have the potential to go very bad, such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now Fukushima. However, in the approximately 100 nuclear plant accidents, there is a very low death rate, so fears of everyone close dying of radiation sickness is a long way off. To start with, radiation sickness takes a long time to begin to effect you, there is more than enough time to move far away from the source.
The biggest problem with nuclear accidents is that it often renders the surrounding area uninhabitable, because everything is contaminated with radiation, which usually decays slowly and therefore doesn't dissipate for decades, even hundreds of years. This is the bigger problem with nuclear energy, not danger to people’s lives.
Nuclear power is far from perfect, but it isn't the big bad wolf that environmentalists portray. So before you panic about them building more nuclear power plants here in the UK, read up about it and you will find that aside from a few, very rare incidents, nuclear power is a very clean, cheap and surprisingly safe form of generating power.
"The discovery of nuclear chain reactions need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than did the discovery of matches. We only must do everything in our power to safeguard against its abuse." - Albert Einstein
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