Do Good Nukes Necessarily Mean No Nukes?

Today's ZGBlog offers a counterpoint to Glen Allport's recent Blog. Enjoy No Nukes Please, We're British.

Comments

Glen Allport's picture

Hi Jim,
It's good to see you back at STR, even if just in the blog. I agree with your position on the market, of course, but I think you underestimate the risks, the size of the potential harm, and thus overestimate the willingness of insurance companies to insure nuclear power plants. The overall costs, both for insurance and for all the other things that taxpayers have been forced to pick up the tab for since the beginning, including safe disposal of the waste, are high enough that I cannot imagine nuclear power being cost-effective in the market place. If it IS, of course, so be it -- but it is not. You mention a few dangers of other methods of power generation in your generally terrific No Nukes Please, We're British, but none compares to the million-plus deaths (so far) from Chernobyl or to the vast area contaminated not only in Japan (a Japanese physician recently wrote that Tokyo is not fit for habitation, and that much of the city is far more contaminated than even much of the Chernobyl exclusion zone -- "The levels of contamination were up to 7 000 Bq/kg; in the US, anything registering these levels would be considered nuclear waste") and at lower but still dangerous levels around the entire Northern Hemisphere. Yes, there are widespread symptoms of this contamination among the population already. Tokyo is the largest metro area on the planet at about 35 million inhabitants; no "solar power disaster" or disaster from any other type of power generation, for that matter, would approach what Fukushima has already done -- and the destroyed reactors and their many tons of on-site waste will keep contaminating the air, the ocean, the local water table, and more for our lifetimes and beyond. I understand the allure of high technology; I was a science geek as a kid and still love learning about science and technology. But nuclear power exists ONLY because those running large coercive governments WANT nuclear weapons; without them pushing for nuclear power in order to generate weapons-grade material, there would be no business case to be made for using uranium or other radioactive metals to boil water to spin generators.  
See my Reaping the Whirlwind of State Aggression: Nuclear Consequences from last year for a bit more detail. 

Jim Davies's picture

Glen, I think we're in agreement - and am not surprised!  We agree that the key is, whether or not the cost of power generated from nukes is competitive, after all production costs have been properly counted, including those of insurance against possible disasters. My contribution perhaps was to stress that that question can and must be determined by the market alone, not by force. It may well be that no insurer would assume the risk, but I'll not pre-judge that.
 
Is Tokyo really uninhabitable? Surprising, to those still living there! I was impressed by a read, some years ago, of Ed Hiserodt's Under-Exposed. I recall he reported how the Hiroshima bomb survivors were outliving their unexposed peers (p. 114.) That is, those living several miles from Ground Zero received a modest dose of radiation, which actually did them good. Not, of course, that this happy and surprising outcome in any degree justifies the FedGov's incineration of the city.
 
Thanks for your opening remark; my entries in this STR Blog point readers to my own, Zero Government Blog; which is where I'm mostly writing these days. Today, as it happens, I posted the 50th such article since I left the STR stable in April. The archive is indexed here.