“this topic requires caution.”

…even from journalists, who sometimes (albeit only once in a blue moon) make claims before they understand the issues.

No, the rumble & wave is what happens when the dam fails, perhaps because it was built near a major fault, and you live downstream. (Folks in Portland, Oregon might take note.) So with a hydro dam, you have the possibility of disastrous failure at some time in the dam’s life (and how do you decomission a dam, eh?), plus the certainty that some amount of land (an area comparable to the Chernobyl exclusion zone) will be rendered uninhabitable – and unlike with a nuclear accident, unusable even as a wildlife refuge.

So let’s reverse the process. Instead of having nuclear accidents create wildlife refuges, let’s put nuclear plants in areas set aside as refuges.

Furthermore, nuclear power depends on a stable grid, supply chain, economy, and environment far more than it can help to create these things. It’s the most complex and least resilient way we could possibly contrive to bring us our basic power needs. It’s not just a scientific problem, it’s a societal problem.

No, this will not occur, and the reasons are best summarized by Richard Heinberg, one of the world’s top experts in resource supply, particularly of non-renewable fuel sources. See, for example, pages 36-38 of the following report: “Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society.”

http://www.postcarbon.org/new-site-files/Reports/Searching_for_a_Miracle_web10nov09.pdf

Heinberg recently contrasted two possible future energy scenarios, one based on a low-carbon energy path and the other based on a high-carbon energy path:

http://richardheinberg.com/227-our-economic-black-hole

The result of this thought experiment was essentially the same. The future will involve much less total energy one way or the other. Nothing will “save us” in the traditional sense of continuing business as usual. Give up? Well, that’s not what I would advocate, although it is something that I would recommend to anyone that would think that life is not worth living with anything less than the current level of energy consumption.

What a great interview Chris could have with Richard Heinberg, probably the world’s leading journalist and educator on issues of resource availability and depletion, particularly on the occasion of the publication of his new book, which address The Intersection between economics, energy, and the environment.

At some point you have to accept additional deaths as the cost of civilization. We certainly do for coal miners. In the USA, at least, and I suspect worldwide, the GREATEST number of deaths we accept as a “cost of civilization” are traffic accident deaths. If we really put those numbers up, we should be screaming out loud about banning the automobile. But, somehow, we as a society can accept these deaths as a background cost. Unless we want a whole lot more deaths from the collapse of civilization due either to massive climate change or runaway energy costs, we’re going to have to accept whatever background radiation deaths happen from nuclear accidents…. Barring an amazing breakthrough in fusion or in the cost of manufacturing solar panels, our choice is going to be nuclear power or … well, or giving up, really.

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/JWGcv.html Curriculum Vitae

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/BioMedUnknow.html Chernobyl Faulty Database Assessment – Short Version

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/RIC/chp24.txt Long Version

Chris Mooney – Perhaps if you had had this information before you interviewed David Brenner, you could have asked him some tough questions.

Sure. Include them. But have the decency to emperically calculate the range of increased risk of cancer from those small doses. Then go out and try to independently validate your calculation by looking at the data. Do you see the increased deaths and cancers you thought you’d see?

OK, but why is this worse than the forced abandonment of land because your government has e.g. decided to build a massive hydroelectric dam downstream?

If you somehow evade the authorities and stay after a nuclear accident (as some people did after Chernobyl) you MAYBE* have an increased cancer risk. If you stay after the dam’s built, you’d better grow gills.

*And there’s still no answer to the question of whether there’s really any increased risk at all from low exposures. It’s simply an assumption, which seems to be contradicted by studies of e.g. places where there’s a higher than average natural background, or the wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Never mind smoking and obesity – how does it compare to the death rate due to poverty? Or lack of energy security? When faced with a choice between alternatives that will all result in statistical deaths, how should we set our priorities?