http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv civilians instructed on radiation protection procedures - seal buildings, do not consume food or water, emergency situation now exists
A micro Sievert is equivalent to .1 millirem, according to wikipedia. So we're looking at about 100 millirem.
According to the book Physics for Future Presidents, you can calculate the odds of getting cancer from radiation by dividing the exposure by 2500 rems. 100 millirem gives you a 1 in 25,000 chance of developing cancer. Or to put it another way, your chance of getting cancer has gone from 20 percent to 20.004 percent.
The average American is exposed to 200 millirems of radiation each year from natural sources.
I was trying to post up material as soon as I heard it, which is why I didn't take time to add context. I was finding the US media coverage largely useless and many hours out of date, while the Japanese media/agencies were also slow at getting English versions up on the net (for obvious reasons).
Fukushima Daiichi #1 is a couple weeks shy of 40 years old (from first criticality, 26 March 1971) at this point. There are a number of prototype, and production, reactor designs that are in principle "meltdown"-proof. That a reactor that old didn't survive one of the most massive earthquakes ever recorded is no basis for abandoning nuclear power.
Unfortunately, that's all we're going to hear from some corners of the nuclear debate, regardless of the facts.
German politicians voted runtime extensions for many nuclear plants. Many plants in the world are just old, because regularly rebuilding plants would make real green energies much more interesting. I think such a disaster on the environment justifies stopping using nuclear energy, even if it means more constraints on energy price and availability. If I look at the German nuclear energy discussion, there is a lot of greed involved. That is not something we can afford.
A situation like the one in Fukushima can occur whenever the power supply to a nuclear power plant is cut off. A similar situation occured in Sweden's Forsmark plant in 2006:
At this point of history we NEED power and there are only two power sources with high enough availability and low enough cost. It's either thermo plants or nuclear plants. Everything else wont cut it. And turning off the lights won't do a shit to alleviate possible lack of energy if we stop using nuclear.
Your PC ain't consuming that much power, we need power for industry. So if nuclear power was to be turned off immediately we'd have some shit on our hands. People without food, work,...
I may have reacted too emotionally, but one of the point am I questioning is whether keeping old nuclear reactors is safe (I should probably have given more background on the German discussion). We may come to the conclusion that replacing them by new reactors could improve the overall safety. Of course that is going to cost money, and then we might find out that we are building us a debt that is not paying in the long term.
The fact is that some countries use nuclear power a lot, some other almost not, and that nuclear power only produces a minor part of the world electricity and energy. Probably a part we could gain back by investing in efficiency.
If you see this is practically a list of major industrialized countries.
Two of the biggest (China and India) countries that will grow their energy needs tremendously are going to rely on nuclear power massively in the future.
On the same site :D
"The IAEA projections would give nuclear power a 13.5 to 14.6% share in electricity production in 2020, and 12.6 to 15.9% in 2030."
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf17.html
BTW there is currently around as much renewable energy than nuclear worldwide.
To your edit... No problem :) My karma is getting slammed on this discussion anyway :D
To your precedent point about computers and home electricity consumption: most energy actually goes into heating/cooling, that's where passive improvements can do most - better isolation, passive air cooling etc. They are huge possible gains with that. And implementing these improvements makes local small companies thrive, rather than multinational energy companies.
I'm pretty certain that heavy industry is helluva big consumer.
Regarding home cooling and heating - I would expect that at least heating is primarily done via other means not electricity. Cooling may be a bigger problem, especially in the most developed countries.
In any case I agree with you that we need to make our housing more energy efficient. And there are a lot of ways to do it, once we realize that concrete bricks might be fast and cheap to produce but beyond that not quite the best option.
I like to have heated discussions... Helps getting to the deepness of the topic :)
I think I provided more link that most of the people contradicting me here. You are one the few providing links.
Yes you're right: note than electricity is a subset of energy, so the part of nuclear in the total energy produced is even smaller. Think of transport. Electricity heating is strong where nuclear is strong, take France. So I think both are related, but your point is still valid.
This is kind of like saying, "I really believe that commercial airlines are the safest way to travel, but if they can't keep them from crashing sometimes I won't ever fly again."
I know, its not an exact paraphrasing but the intent it still there. For one thing, the Japanese are not the super awesome technology supergiants that the common wisdom from the 1980's in the US makes them out to be. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. are all technologically equivalent. Its more of a matter of how much certain tech is spread out. When it comes to stuff like nuclear plants, we're all basically the same.
Gotta give 'em a break. Japan, as far as I know, has not had many accidents. We've had a number of them including Three Mile. When something the size of a continental plate snaps with enough power to shift the speed of the planet and a country's position on the globe by over 10 feet, there's not a lot of blame that can be put if it happens near a nuclear reactor.
This is kind of like saying, "I really believe that commercial airlines are the safest way to travel..."
Except nuclear power is not the safest form of energy. Not by a long shot.
What's the worst that could happen if an earthquake or a terrorist strike devastated a solar array or a wind farm?
Apart from cutting off the power supply, nothing much.
Compare that to a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Or the nuclear proliferation risk caused by the theft of fissile material. Not to mention the hazards posed by nuclear waste.
This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.
Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry.
Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable.
More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting large human structures, and they both happened within a few minutes of each other in New York.
To your other point, OF COURSE ENGINEERS THOUGHT ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. They're freaking NUCLEAR PLANTS. They don't build these things on fucking fault lines and then say "oops". They aren't franchise McDonald's that take 3 weeks to build and then ask if you want fries with your uranium.
Any plant takes years, if not a decade in some cases, of zoning and study before they move a bull dozer onto a site. This earthquake SHIFTED THE ENTIRE PLANET. Its quite within the realm of being ok that a 40+ year old nuclear plant isn't handling being shaken by that kind of force very well.
the sum of my knowledge on nuclear energy and human flight is nearly nothing, so forgive me if i'm wrong... but comparatively, isn't the potential aftermath of a nuclear meltdown a bit more concerning than a plane crashing?
Planes crash far more often than reactors "melt down", so -- and I'm admittedly guessing here -- it's probably a wash, at least in terms of property damage.
In terms of human cost (lives lost, injury, &c), plane crashes are far, far worse. All but the most egregious damage from radiation can be mitigated, if not prevented outright. If you're on a plane that's going down, or in the thing it's going to hit when it does, there's precisely fuck-all you can do about it.
Apologies catshirt. I just re-read my comment and I realize in retrospect my comment was WAY too aggressive and snarky. You might consider adding some contact info to your profile, as I was unable to email you with my apology directly.
Please note that I have not said that earthquakes are not something they took into account, I've said beside earthquakes, terrorist attacks and anything, there is also an additional risk that no one can calculate. Every engineer knows that prevision has its limit. So it's all about inner danger. In case of an earthquake, a barrage could also break and make huge damages. What such an accident would not do, though, and what an airliner accident would also not do, is damaging big areas during decades in unknown ways.
Of course they are risks, but if you look at the Rasmussen report, it tells a meltdown is likely happen all 20000 years per reactor. We have around 430 reactors over the world, so this event should happen every 46 years. It seems that this calculation is optimistic at best (if you don't take all the partial meltdowns into account) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltd.... So I think we might need to reconsider nuclear energy - at least have a public debate on that topic.
And what is a "melt down", but an accident at a reactor that causes damage to the reactor core. Nothing more. If a reactor core is damaged every 40-odd years, that's a pretty small price to pay for the terawatts it supplied during that span.
Yes, sometimes other things happen, and the damage goes beyond the core. That's deeply unfortunate, and I feel for the people affected. But "melt down" is one of those loaded terms like "death tax" -- it serves more to create an image of unimaginable dire consequence in the lay mind than support informed debate.
No form of energy is entirely clean or risk free. To say that any risk of a relatively large accident is unacceptable is unrealistic. Look at what the use of oil caused in the Gulf of Mexico, let alone the environmental damage caused by the normal use of oil as a power source.
Short of a breakthrough on fusion or something else exotic, nuclear power with modern designs is by far the best hope for decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, and only with reprocessing (also unpopular) could it bear the burden for very long while being economical. It's a tragedy that this will be used as an example for why it should be locked away in a closet in the coming years. Believing that efficiency and saving can solve our energy problems is pretty naive, and taking away from the debate of the matter at hand.
I'm trying to cobble together some statistics on the safety of nuclear power, but unfortunately, the IAEA site is slammed presently (wonder why...), so I'm left with assembling them by hand, from Wikipedia. If anyone out there can point me at a better source for this data, I'd be most grateful.
As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer operational) for the 12 reactors in countries that start with "A", yielding some 322 reactor-years of operation. If 12 of the 500-ish civilian, non-experimental reactors, including decommissioned, in the world have a combined 322 reactor-years of criticality, let's guesstimate that there's been something on the order of 12000 reactor-years of criticality globally, across all non-experimental, non-military reactors.
In that time, there have been 27 civilian nuclear "accidents" (defined as damage to persons or property directly attributable to something Going Wrong at a reactor), and 8 -- count them, eight -- "incidents" (defined as something Going Wrong at a reactor, but not causing damage to persons or property outside the plant, itself). (Again, this data is from Wikipedia, so its accuracy is open to debate.)
Given the choice between one "accident" every 500-odd reactor-years (again, take that number with a cup of salt), and continually pumping ten gigatons of just CO2 into the atmosphere every year -- and that just from coal-burning power plants -- I know which I'd prefer.
That said, I agree with you on one point: we damn well should be investing massively more than we are into "green" energy technology. Much of that is unproven, and often has its own set of ecological consequences. Even leaving that aside, the best estimates say it will be decades, at least, before any of it can even start to supplant current energy sources.
You can have a look at another (rough) estimate I did on my answer to geuis. I agree with you, and as I stated in my other answer, things like barrage breakings (due to an equivalent earthquake) can be also devastating for civilization. What I think would be useful is to have a public look at the track record of nuclear and compare it's impact with other energies. Nuclear power is going to stay for now, and that's probably necessary with the current state of the technology, but do we really want to invest so many billion in it for the next 100 year? Is really nuclear our safest bet against climate change?
Realistically, we need an alternative that is as cheap as or nearly as cheap as the dirty energy production methods if we want it to take off. Nuclear is the only clean energy source that comes close, and it's likely to remain that way partly because of fundamental reasons. Things like solar, wind, etc. simply don't have the energy density to be viable replacements, with the possible exception of large scale solar deployments if one could reduce the material cost of panels, increase the efficiency, and find a way to store excess energy for the dark periods.
For a very readable analysis with a good amount of rigor, I highly recommend the book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, available free here: http://www.withouthotair.com/
This is where your argument falls apart. What other energy sources are there?
Let's see... burning fossil fuels is not only environmentally unsustainable but also, as part of its regular operation, releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants.
Solar? Workable on small scale, physically impossible to provide the majority of humanity's energy needs. Same goes for tidal, wind, and hydro.
Geothermal? Ditto - only possible in very selective environments, zero chance of being able to provide significant power generation outside of very limited circumstances.
There simply isn't a better technology out there right now. Until fusion comes along, nuclear is the best we've got. Nobody here is claiming it isn't without its risks, but it sure beats the pants off of what we're doing right now.
Even if we completely ignore the environmental angle, the social angle, and the economic angle, and consider these choices purely on how much radiation exposure they will subject people to, nuclear still wins. That's how far apart these options are. You are choosing between an extremely low chance of being exposed to a potentially damaging dose of radiation... or a guarantee of breathing down radiogenic material for your entire lifetime.
Anti-nuclear paranoia has been one of the most insidious and evil things to infect our collective consciousness in the past decades. It has enforced a continued and growing reliance on depleting fossil fuels, which has not only damaged the environment via greenhouse gas emissions, but pumped gigatons of radioactive material into the atmosphere to be inhaled by everyone. It has caused wars and famine and anti-science paranoia (did you know that the MRI was first called the NMRI? Guess why they had to rename it?).
First, I am not against nuclear and hope the fallout from this incident isn't used as fuel for damaging propaganda.
But this >Solar? Workable on small scale, physically impossible to provide the majority of humanity's energy needs. is wrong. Efficient use of all sustainable earth's solar input is a hard engineering problem (how best to stick satellites in space and then efficiently radiate back to base stations) but not impossible and would compete with anything Fusion (yes fusion) could produce. The world's current usage is estimated at 1.6 x 10^13/yr watts while 5.2 x 10^16 watts (30% of the sun's constant input to us) is completely reflected and never used by Earth.
And the end game in some far flung future would be solar taken straight from the sun. The Kardashev scale is a probably not useful but nonetheless interesting take on this.
You are just demonstrating your ignorance. The reality is that the only choice to power industrial civilization is fossil fuels or nuclear power. Even if this accident results in a core melt, in the large sweep of history, it will hardly slow down the transition from oil to nuclear power.
The alternatives are even more dangerous, just not quite so visibly. For example:
Coal ash produced by coal power plants actually release more radioactive waste than the equivalent power generated via nuclear. Not only that, nuclear waste is highly controlled and the general population has no contact with it save extremely rare catastrophes - compare with pumping this ash into the atmosphere. Not to mention that inhaling radioactive material is orders of magnitude more dangerous than physical contact.
Pollution from coal is estimated to kill 24,000 people every year in the U.S. alone. Nuclear is way safer than that, and probably the only power source that can replace coal anytime soon.
There are actually whole websites and news channels dedicated to this sort of news. We don't need to turn HN into a sort of live streaming play-by-play about what's happening in Japan.
I can't downvote your comment, nor did I want to. I'm only posting this here because the English language media has been slow with their coverage and this is an exceptional situation.
Add to that the chance of one or more of the commenters here actually knowing something something about nuclear plants seems far greater than on one of the mainstream news channels. Thanks for posting.
The official line from the press conference being given by the Secretary General of Japan is "We don't know and we are investigating further, however radiation is still within acceptable levels." This means the only real update from this press conference is that the evacuation perimeter for Fukushima 2 (the second power plant) has been increased to 10km (from 3km).
To the contrary, however, somebody was quoted that the explosion was the containment building for reactor vessel 1. If that is the case it would pretty much be the worst case scenario for both Japan and the future of nuclear power.
NISA press conference:
3:36 pm (2.5 hours ago) explosion was reported to them as containment breach, exact situation unknown at present. Further evacuations will be necessary, people should not travel alone. Official says radiation level data 'unavailable at present'. 'We are not sure if the station is devastated or not.'
Japanese Govt. will supply radiation medicine, 'may quarantine area' - spokesperson. Sorry, didn't catch agency affiliation. There is some confusion over whether the reactor containment or the cooling system itself has exploded.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 84.0 ms ] threadhttp://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_38.html venting halted
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv civilians instructed on radiation protection procedures - seal buildings, do not consume food or water, emergency situation now exists
- govt. press conference, next update in 20-30 minutes. Local time in Japan is 5:37pm / 1735.
Most recent reports from power company - several hours out of date right now but still informative:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031219-e....
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031220-e....
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/index-e.htm...
Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency - English, also out of date
http://www.nisa.meti.go.jp/english/
According to the book Physics for Future Presidents, you can calculate the odds of getting cancer from radiation by dividing the exposure by 2500 rems. 100 millirem gives you a 1 in 25,000 chance of developing cancer. Or to put it another way, your chance of getting cancer has gone from 20 percent to 20.004 percent.
The average American is exposed to 200 millirems of radiation each year from natural sources.
Of course it's not over yet and could get worse.
Unfortunately, that's all we're going to hear from some corners of the nuclear debate, regardless of the facts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant
At this point of history we NEED power and there are only two power sources with high enough availability and low enough cost. It's either thermo plants or nuclear plants. Everything else wont cut it. And turning off the lights won't do a shit to alleviate possible lack of energy if we stop using nuclear.
Your PC ain't consuming that much power, we need power for industry. So if nuclear power was to be turned off immediately we'd have some shit on our hands. People without food, work,...
Don't talk silly.
The fact is that some countries use nuclear power a lot, some other almost not, and that nuclear power only produces a minor part of the world electricity and energy. Probably a part we could gain back by investing in efficiency.
See this table: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nshare.html
If you see this is practically a list of major industrialized countries.
Two of the biggest (China and India) countries that will grow their energy needs tremendously are going to rely on nuclear power massively in the future.
EDIT: Darn, I apologize :).
BTW there is currently around as much renewable energy than nuclear worldwide.
To your precedent point about computers and home electricity consumption: most energy actually goes into heating/cooling, that's where passive improvements can do most - better isolation, passive air cooling etc. They are huge possible gains with that. And implementing these improvements makes local small companies thrive, rather than multinational energy companies.
I'm pretty certain that heavy industry is helluva big consumer.
Regarding home cooling and heating - I would expect that at least heating is primarily done via other means not electricity. Cooling may be a bigger problem, especially in the most developed countries.
In any case I agree with you that we need to make our housing more energy efficient. And there are a lot of ways to do it, once we realize that concrete bricks might be fast and cheap to produce but beyond that not quite the best option.
I think I provided more link that most of the people contradicting me here. You are one the few providing links.
Yes you're right: note than electricity is a subset of energy, so the part of nuclear in the total energy produced is even smaller. Think of transport. Electricity heating is strong where nuclear is strong, take France. So I think both are related, but your point is still valid.
I know, its not an exact paraphrasing but the intent it still there. For one thing, the Japanese are not the super awesome technology supergiants that the common wisdom from the 1980's in the US makes them out to be. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the U.S. are all technologically equivalent. Its more of a matter of how much certain tech is spread out. When it comes to stuff like nuclear plants, we're all basically the same.
Gotta give 'em a break. Japan, as far as I know, has not had many accidents. We've had a number of them including Three Mile. When something the size of a continental plate snaps with enough power to shift the speed of the planet and a country's position on the globe by over 10 feet, there's not a lot of blame that can be put if it happens near a nuclear reactor.
Except nuclear power is not the safest form of energy. Not by a long shot.
What's the worst that could happen if an earthquake or a terrorist strike devastated a solar array or a wind farm?
Apart from cutting off the power supply, nothing much.
Compare that to a meltdown at a nuclear power plant. Or the nuclear proliferation risk caused by the theft of fissile material. Not to mention the hazards posed by nuclear waste.
Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable.
More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting large human structures, and they both happened within a few minutes of each other in New York.
To your other point, OF COURSE ENGINEERS THOUGHT ABOUT EARTHQUAKES. They're freaking NUCLEAR PLANTS. They don't build these things on fucking fault lines and then say "oops". They aren't franchise McDonald's that take 3 weeks to build and then ask if you want fries with your uranium.
Any plant takes years, if not a decade in some cases, of zoning and study before they move a bull dozer onto a site. This earthquake SHIFTED THE ENTIRE PLANET. Its quite within the realm of being ok that a 40+ year old nuclear plant isn't handling being shaken by that kind of force very well.
In terms of human cost (lives lost, injury, &c), plane crashes are far, far worse. All but the most egregious damage from radiation can be mitigated, if not prevented outright. If you're on a plane that's going down, or in the thing it's going to hit when it does, there's precisely fuck-all you can do about it.
Of course they are risks, but if you look at the Rasmussen report, it tells a meltdown is likely happen all 20000 years per reactor. We have around 430 reactors over the world, so this event should happen every 46 years. It seems that this calculation is optimistic at best (if you don't take all the partial meltdowns into account) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltd.... So I think we might need to reconsider nuclear energy - at least have a public debate on that topic.
Also, using capitals don't serve your argument.
Yes, sometimes other things happen, and the damage goes beyond the core. That's deeply unfortunate, and I feel for the people affected. But "melt down" is one of those loaded terms like "death tax" -- it serves more to create an image of unimaginable dire consequence in the lay mind than support informed debate.
Short of a breakthrough on fusion or something else exotic, nuclear power with modern designs is by far the best hope for decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, and only with reprocessing (also unpopular) could it bear the burden for very long while being economical. It's a tragedy that this will be used as an example for why it should be locked away in a closet in the coming years. Believing that efficiency and saving can solve our energy problems is pretty naive, and taking away from the debate of the matter at hand.
As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer operational) for the 12 reactors in countries that start with "A", yielding some 322 reactor-years of operation. If 12 of the 500-ish civilian, non-experimental reactors, including decommissioned, in the world have a combined 322 reactor-years of criticality, let's guesstimate that there's been something on the order of 12000 reactor-years of criticality globally, across all non-experimental, non-military reactors.
In that time, there have been 27 civilian nuclear "accidents" (defined as damage to persons or property directly attributable to something Going Wrong at a reactor), and 8 -- count them, eight -- "incidents" (defined as something Going Wrong at a reactor, but not causing damage to persons or property outside the plant, itself). (Again, this data is from Wikipedia, so its accuracy is open to debate.)
Given the choice between one "accident" every 500-odd reactor-years (again, take that number with a cup of salt), and continually pumping ten gigatons of just CO2 into the atmosphere every year -- and that just from coal-burning power plants -- I know which I'd prefer.
That said, I agree with you on one point: we damn well should be investing massively more than we are into "green" energy technology. Much of that is unproven, and often has its own set of ecological consequences. Even leaving that aside, the best estimates say it will be decades, at least, before any of it can even start to supplant current energy sources.
What, exactly, should we do in the interim?
(EDIT: math is hard past 0300.)
For a very readable analysis with a good amount of rigor, I highly recommend the book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, available free here: http://www.withouthotair.com/
This is where your argument falls apart. What other energy sources are there?
Let's see... burning fossil fuels is not only environmentally unsustainable but also, as part of its regular operation, releases more radioactive material into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants.
Solar? Workable on small scale, physically impossible to provide the majority of humanity's energy needs. Same goes for tidal, wind, and hydro.
Geothermal? Ditto - only possible in very selective environments, zero chance of being able to provide significant power generation outside of very limited circumstances.
There simply isn't a better technology out there right now. Until fusion comes along, nuclear is the best we've got. Nobody here is claiming it isn't without its risks, but it sure beats the pants off of what we're doing right now.
Even if we completely ignore the environmental angle, the social angle, and the economic angle, and consider these choices purely on how much radiation exposure they will subject people to, nuclear still wins. That's how far apart these options are. You are choosing between an extremely low chance of being exposed to a potentially damaging dose of radiation... or a guarantee of breathing down radiogenic material for your entire lifetime.
Anti-nuclear paranoia has been one of the most insidious and evil things to infect our collective consciousness in the past decades. It has enforced a continued and growing reliance on depleting fossil fuels, which has not only damaged the environment via greenhouse gas emissions, but pumped gigatons of radioactive material into the atmosphere to be inhaled by everyone. It has caused wars and famine and anti-science paranoia (did you know that the MRI was first called the NMRI? Guess why they had to rename it?).
You may also look at that http://energypriorities.com/entries/2010/12/renewables_nucle...
But this >Solar? Workable on small scale, physically impossible to provide the majority of humanity's energy needs. is wrong. Efficient use of all sustainable earth's solar input is a hard engineering problem (how best to stick satellites in space and then efficiently radiate back to base stations) but not impossible and would compete with anything Fusion (yes fusion) could produce. The world's current usage is estimated at 1.6 x 10^13/yr watts while 5.2 x 10^16 watts (30% of the sun's constant input to us) is completely reflected and never used by Earth.
And the end game in some far flung future would be solar taken straight from the sun. The Kardashev scale is a probably not useful but nonetheless interesting take on this.
Coal ash produced by coal power plants actually release more radioactive waste than the equivalent power generated via nuclear. Not only that, nuclear waste is highly controlled and the general population has no contact with it save extremely rare catastrophes - compare with pumping this ash into the atmosphere. Not to mention that inhaling radioactive material is orders of magnitude more dangerous than physical contact.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...
Nuclear energy isn't perfect - but it's a hell of a lot better than anything else we've got.
Helpful English translation feed, non-sensational: http://yokosonews.com/live
To the contrary, however, somebody was quoted that the explosion was the containment building for reactor vessel 1. If that is the case it would pretty much be the worst case scenario for both Japan and the future of nuclear power.
Authorities still investigating, stay calm, 'it depends on the circumstances', etc.
Several reporters asked if a 10km evacuation radius was sufficient, and the reply was '10km is what we decided'.
This looks like an unmitigated disaster in the making.
Not a panic situation yet, according to NISA.
It would take 1000 hours of exposure at this level to cause health effects. [2]
[1] http://twitter.com/martyn_williams/status/46490355461406720
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning
TEPCO updates - but pre-explosion
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031222-e....
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031221-e....