Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,


You will note that Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited today.

And also that wildlife is flourishing in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
It's only humans that aren't there.

Well, most animals don't live long enough to die of thyroid cancer :-)

Chernobyl was pretty bad and a lot of stuff go carried a long way. Wild
boar that eat truffles and other fungi, that collect and concentrate
heavy meals like plutonium..are in Germany, under scrutiny...cant
remember where I read that.

Chernobyl was bad. very bad. In fact its about as bad as it can get for
a nuclear power station, sort of blowing one up deliberately.

HOWEVER So was Bhopal. So was Macondo. So was 911. More people died in
911, arguably casualties of the oil industry, as all the money that
funds all the Islamic fundamentalists comes out of oil rich
countries..than have EVER died as a result of nuclear power.

Ok the oil industry is perhaps 20 times more energy wise than the
nuclear industry is.

Japan right now is about as bad as it gets for a generation II reactor
(Chernobyl being generation I). It's bad, but not AS bad. Gen II
reactors are even better.

And we haven't even moved on to Gen IV technology.

Unlike oil coal and gas, which have vile safety records, and are running
out, and are deeply polluting, or renewables that are plagued by
insoluble *in principle* problems of scale and intermittency, nuclear
power is only plagued by SOLUBLE problems of safety and pollution.


Nuclear reactors don't make the world a more radioactive place overall:
They take long term low level radioactive elements and make short lived
but highly radioactive ones instead. Arguably just scatter them thinly
enough, and no one will know the difference:-)

Or construct different reactors that can burn those down to inert junk.

You have more chance of lung cancer from living near a road with a lot
of diesel traffic spewing carbon and benzene particles into the air,
than from a well controlled nuclear power station up the coast somewhere.