Those are such great pictures. So surreal.

And newer reactor designs are even safer. Unfortunately they aren't getting built because of the bad rap nuclear as a whole has gotten from 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Neat designs where the safety systems to shut down in case of a runaway reaction only depend on gravity, which as yet hasn't been known to fail :-)

But will the anti-nuke lobby even listen? Hell no!

Those photographs are amazing. They remind me of the short story, "By the Waters of Babylon."

A great site indeed. One thing that slightly worries me is her estimate of deaths : a look at these two sites seems to show a different story .
http://www.niauk.org/article_36.shtml
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Chernobyl/
One is a nucelar industry site, so perhaps to be ataken with a pinch of salt.
The other is the International Atomic Energy Authority....these are the same people looking into the yellowcake found at Rotterdam last week, and into the Iranian and Iraqi weapons programmes. So a group that we can trust to be impartial at least on the death / injury numbers.
Not the 300,000 to 400,000 sometimes claimed. More like 50 - 300 so far with another thousand or so to come.
One number I came across : radiation release from Chernobyl ( and yes, I know it was more concentrated but just to get it into proportion )was 20 times less than that of the atmospheric bomb tests between 1945 and 1963. We didn't see 6 million deaths from those, so perhaps the Chernobyl number is a little over the top ?

If you take into account how bi-products of nuclear power generation are used, I don't think you can make the claim that nuclear power is the most environmentally friendly and safe form of power generation.

USA has fired depleted uranium ammunitions in Iraq, Kuwait, Afganistan and Kosovo. Depleted uranium is a bi-product of the uranium enrichment process used to produce fuel for nuclear power plants.

Depleted uranium ammunitions release chemically toxic and radioactive contaminants while burning after impact. US soldiers coming home sick are claiming that they have been contaminated by their own uranium weapons:
http://news.google.com/news?q=us%20soldiers%20contaminated%20uranium

Incidents of cancer and birth defects have risen in Iraq since USA used depleted uranium in the first Gulf war in 1991:
http://www.benjaminforiraq.org/contaminazioneitaly.htm

We should consider this when we debate the safety of nuclear power generation. We should also be debating whether the USA is justified in using depleted uranium weapons.

"USA has fired depleted uranium ammunitions in Iraq, Kuwait, Afganistan and Kosovo. Depleted uranium is a bi-product of the uranium enrichment process used to produce fuel for nuclear power plants."

Yeah, it's the stuff left over after the radioactive uranium has been extracted and shipped off to the nuke plants. It's called "depleted" for a reason; the radioactive stuff is gone and all that's left is a run-of-the-mill heavy metal.

Of course it's still dangerous - if it pokes a hole in your tank and comes inside at a high speed and high temperature. But that's kind of the point.

"We should consider this when we debate the safety of nuclear power generation."

Since depleted uranium never comes anywhere near a nuclear power plant, it's kind of irrelevant to the safety of nuclear power generation. And I suspect we'd use it to make ammo whether or not we had a use for the radioactive stuff we're depleting out of it.

Depleted uranium is less radioactive per unit mass than a piece of charcoal. Or your body.

If you take into account how bi-products of nuclear power generation are used, I don't think you can make the claim that nuclear power is the most environmentally friendly and safe form of power generation.

Yeah I can. Because it is.

The chemical wastes produced by all the other forms of power generation--include solar power, by the way--far exceed the environmental hazards caused by nuclear waste. It's unfortunate that the general public is so afraid of anything involving the words "nuclear" or "radiation" that they're not able to understand that.

As for depleted uranium being toxic: all heavy metals are toxic.

The toxicity and other chemical charactaristics of depleted uranium most resemble (drumroll!) lead. But denser. Why the heck do people think they use it for, in effect, really big bullets to kill tanks and such? You are exposed to a lot more mutagenic radiation, for instance, by watching a TV!!

The most advanced nuclear industry is in (gasp!) France, which is part of what has let them get away with having one of the most intense welfare states in the world (it is responsible for a not small percentage of the higher productivity numbers for France).

Spent nuclear fuel can currently be reprocessed with any scale or economic efficiency in France or (distant second) the US. Newer Japanese, French and American reactor designs can easily burn second-generation reprocessed fuel and associated by-products; but no such nifty and safe reactors have been built here in the US. That's what you do with the 'hot waste', you use it for fuel!

Lower-level radioactive by-products of reprocessing and enrichment can be encased in glass and sent down into oceanic subduction zones, where they safely enter the mantle/lower subsurface layers that are geologically active, and disposed of safely.

ALL of these practical difficulties have been solved, political will and education are what is lacking to implement them (well, and much higher fossil fuel prices will eventually drive us to it).

When you take into account that they lost a piece of land the size of Kentucky for a period of 300 to 600 years, one has to admit there is a certain amount of risk/reward involved. There was an old program about Three Mile Island on the National Geographic channel last night. Some of those scientists panicked. Panicked scientists and extremely powerful technology are a dangerous mix.

It is unfortunate that TMI basically s-canned the entire industry. I have no doubt that if R&D would have continued, we would have something far more safer and efficient. The question now stands, can it be resurrected?

"Depleted uranium is a bi-product of the uranium enrichment process used to produce fuel for nuclear power plants."

After we can't use it for fuel, we can use it for ammo? Sounds to me like a feature, not a bug :)

"Stati(s)tically speaking nuclear power is still the most environmentally friendly and safe form of power generation mankind has yet created." Excuse me? Which statistics would those be, exactly? How many tens of thousands of square kilometers of habitable and crop lands have had to be condemned and permanently evacuated because of solar or wind energy production? After losing much of their finest farmland, 7% of the Ukraine's money continually goes to the Chernobyl cleanup, though 20% would likely still be inadequate. NO country can afford energy at this price. (There are lots of other nuclear money-sinks like TMI, Fermi-1, and ticking bombs like Kola, Kozloduy, Indian Point, Davis-Besse, etc., etc.) Nuclear plants all over the world are breaking down, internally, far ahead of expectations, leaving engineers scrambling to patch cracks in fuel-rod assemblies, and other unforseen break-downs, with both damage and repairs changing all operational parameters. You may remember your vaunted French friends resorting to cooling their reactor containment vessels with Water Cannons(!?!) during last summer's heat wave.

A wind-generator is pollution-FREE, requires NO evacuation plan, produces more energy (and $$) than required to create it, in under two years, and goes on producing free energy indefinitely. Jacobs units installed in the 1920's are still online, still producing reliable current. Vitrifying low-level nuclear waste and sinking it into the ocean? Hmmm. There's a great SAFE, THRIFTY, NEW idea - - turning valuable, reusable resources into hazardous waste and throwing it in the ocean. Unfortunately, the other brainless twits ahead of you are already taking these ever-increasing stocks of contaminated metals, etc. - - two million TONS of metal, 400 thousand tons of rubbleized concrete, last I heard from the US, according to the Dept Of Energy - - and "recycling" them by mixing them in with materials bound for the consumer product stream, so your bedsprings, braces, silverware, pots & pans, surgical-implants, etc, are increasingly likely to be radioactive.

Uranium-238, (aka, "non-fissionable uranium," "Depelted uranium," "DU") with its 4.5 billion year half-life as safe as charcoal & lead? I've never heard of anyone getting 200 millirads/hour from charcoal, like you can from a DU Penetrator round. Vets ill from Gulf War I are still secreting DU in their urine, more than a decade later. Charcoal & lead haven't been problems for them. Major Doug Rokke, PhD, US Army, retired, was the Army's leading expert on DU. He was in charge of the first DU decontamination project in Iraq. Now, with 5000x the permissable dose, he's dying and much of his team is already dead. The Army sent him in armed with misinformation. He has since "written the book" on the subject at the cost of his life, and those of most of his team. (US troops are NOT told about Dr. Rokke's findings, his condition, his team's fate, or his current views on the subject.) Lots of folks thought nuclear reactors were 'neat,' when we first started to learn about them. I did, when I was doing gamma experiments on living tissue at age 16. The results of those experiments, and a lifetime of watching the issue leave NO DOUBT that nuclear energy is an imbecile's errand. There is a reason it has been shrouded in secrecy throughout its history. If you knew the whole story, you'd be a real danger to those who profit from it. You'll notice none of the people, groups, or businesses who advocate nucleaer energy are taking advantage of the great deals on real estate & low property taxes in the Chernobyl area to prove how safe their products are... Wouldn't it be fitting if they were forced to live there, as long as they sell this poison? "Once a bright hope shared by all mankind, including myself, the rash proliferation of nuclear power plants is now one of the ugliest clouds hanging over America."
--David Lilienthal, first Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission