If only all countries going nuclear could be like Sweden, presuming what the author says about Sweden is correct.It is obvious that nuclear power has its advantages, but countries first need robust and transparent political structures to manage nuclear safety properly. Even and advanced Asian country such as Japan, has a weak nuclear regulator - I am tempted to call it very Asian. For developing countries such as India, where the will to be transparent or have a strong nuclear watch dog, just does not exist, it is better to delay going nuclear until such open political structures exist.
The India US nuclear agreement went through parliament, only because of buying off of members of the legislature - literally sack loads of cash was used to buy off MPs etc. Naturally people living close to nuclear plants get worried and have temporarily stopped plants such as Koodankulam, in Tamilnadu, which is at an advanced state of construction. I the day the Prime Minister is willing to live next to a nuclear plant, I am willing to vouch for its safety.

Nuclear energy is a boon for humankind. There are energy deficits all throughout the world. Without reliable energy streams a nation cannot raise its general welfare. Israel runs on 7,000 MW per capita; Norway 24,000 MW. Colder climates need more energy; Haiti 80 MW. No explanation needed. The potential of nuclear desalination plants is also profound. A literal Ganeden down here on terra firma is predicated on the supply of reliable energy sources. There is enormous energy able to be unlocked in a single atom. The universe is full of energy. G-d’s power is limitless. The matrix of abundance lies within our reach. All it requires is the right moves.

P.S. Charles D. Ferguson and his colleagues at FAS are doing a great job. Thank G-d there are highly intelligent, ethical and altruistic people alive today who are trying to make the world a safer and better place. The Master of the Universe makes sure there are always a few righteous souls alive down here on terra firma who hold the very fabric of the universe together.

While our military capabilities have kept the peacetime economy afloat and growing steadily over time, taxpayers and borrowers have grown complacent and alienated from the costs of operating a modern civilian society.

With fewer conventional wars, social and moral decay of the reduced cost of living enabled by the economies of scale from high capital investment into areas such as civilian nuclear power bring into question the wisdom of allowing civilians to drift further away from the sight of these compounded costs.

How much longer can nuclear reactors be operated while tax revenues widen out from the fixed overhead of develop economies? Long term financial implications of peacetime economics and the global industrial overcapacity enabled by those conditions, weakens civilian perceptions about the real cost of living and makes a difficult task for policy makers to communicate an understandable policy agenda to those who are expected to cooperate in exchange for these low cost benefits.

It remains to be seen how ordinary people will come to grips with the accumulated capital investment of the last fifty years and what that investment has evolved them into.

Will the outgoing generation of policy makers and planners realistically be able to hand over their responsibilities to any incoming actors? How will those actors be regarded by foreign counter parties who have quietly allowed the ball to roll, furnishing every amenity and creature comfort to mobile consumers in exchange for the time value of their money?

Until those costs are sufficiently acknowledged by television viewers and ordinary voters, its hard to rationalize any more development.

The radioactive waste products from the nuclear industry must be isolated from contact with people for very long time periods. The bulk of the radioactivity is contained in the spent fuel, which is quite small in volume and therefore easily handled with great care. This "high level waste" will be converted to a rock-like form and emplaced in the natural habitat of rocks, deep underground. The average lifetime of a rock in that environment is one billion years. If the waste behaves like other rock , it is easily shown that the waste generated by one nuclear power plant will eventually, over millions of years (if there is no cure found for cancer), cause one death from 50 years of operation. By comparison, the wastes from coal burning plants that end up in the ground will eventually cause several thousand deaths from generating the same amount of electricity.

William is indeed right, the folks complaining about nuclear waste, explosions, costs, etc. are unaware that "nuclear power" is not equivalent to "Kleenex" -- there are many types and the one in existence now is only in existence by accident of Cold-War politics.

The inventors of the present water-cooled reactor (LWR) in 1946 knew better could be done and the one mentioned by William is exactly what they went on to invent & run in the 1960s. But, it didn't make bombs -- too bad for funding.

But, now the Chinese are taking what we did and putting $1billion behind deploying it by 2020. Perhaps we'll wake up. Perhaps not. In any case, 1/2 the problem with climate change would not exist had we listened to our scientists 49 years ago this month...
http://tinyurl.com/6xgpkfa

Aw, but what do a few Noblelists know, eh?
http://ThoriumRemix.com
http://tinyurl.com/25mgqkd

Of course our balance of payments will now be more at risk too, since power & desalination go together...
www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/china_thorium_bet/
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

A. Cannara
650-400-3071

The article does not even describe the great benefits of advanced nuclear power generators such as the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). This design is compact, high temperature, and relatively inexpensive -- enough so to undersell burning coal for electric power -- the only way to convince all nations to stop CO2 emissions from fossil fuels -- economic self interest. LFTR is walk-away safe, burns inexhaustible thorium, and can even consume existing nuclear waste and excess plutonium weapons material. For more information please visit

http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh

http://energyfromthorium.com

http://thoriumenergyalliance.org

At "Radioactive Waste Is the Achilles' Heel of Nuclear Power."

no mention is made of advnaces in the concept of "burning" the tranuranic wastes in conventional PWRs in combination with Thorium. This technology hgas the advantage of utilising existing reactors with little adaptation.

Future Molten Salt Thorium reactors also offer the promise of using these as fuels within the system - waste can be an asset not a liability.

While nuclear technology is getting cleaner and safer, and it certainly saves the air polution of dirty coal stations, the potential for disaster must make us think of renewable power alternatives that are gifts from nature.

Solar power, tidal, wind, geo thermal, local fuel cells - there are so many clean and safe energy sources that are advancing every day. Nuclear just seems way too much risk for the reward.

I forgot to mention biomass as one of natures alternativegifts.

More info about biomass energy here: http://www.altenergy.org/renewables/biomass.html

If alternative energy is not able to replace the 14 % energy produced by nuclear power why are so many countries around the world including Japan building such large wind farms? With a single turbine now capable of producing 3MV and 6MV are not the start up costs more manageable as say installments that would start producing sooner with the ability to add on to the grid as needed or as finances would allow without any potentially hazardous risks? http://alternativeenergyfarming.com

We have gift that is given to us. Do we used it or just throw it? We have tidal and wind etc..as above mention and when talking about nuclear power, it always defect human kind.

http://www.saunasandstuff.com/

It's true that we really need to reconsider some different alternatives to energy and this was proven with the disaster in Japan. I run an executive coaching firm and we have clients in Japan and travel there quite often. It is scary what is happening out there. Even though they "say" everything is fine it really is not. I mean if things were a bad do you think they would tell people? Of course not as they do not want panic. Here in the US we really need to wake up already. I know the Obama green initiative with the solar company was a disaster, but please lets not let this stop us from continuing with looking for viable alternatives.

The State of California just passed into law an act that 33% of electricity from power companies must come from alternative energy< /a>sources by the year 2020.

Yes Atomic power can end the whole world..!!
Over the past six months, two geological events in Japan and the United States had similar characteristics but very different outcomes. At Fukushima, 40-plus-year-old reactors shut down as designed on March 11 following a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, but the combination of ruptured offsite power supply lines and generators flooded by the ensuing tsunami led to a massive meltdown.

On August 23, a magnitude 5.8 Virginia earthquake shook the US eastern seaboard, causing panic, confusion, and disruption in an area unaccustomed to temblors. The North Anna twin reactor plant in Virginia, which is more than 30 years old, underwent an automatic shutdown. One of the backup generators failed shortly after being started up, but power was continuously supplied by three other generators wisely installed as a precautionary measure. In the absence of simultaneous hazards like the ones that struck Fukushima, the power plant maintained continuous coolant flow around the fuel rods, avoiding a meltdown.
Where should the line be drawn between reasonable and excessive precautionary measures at facilities where cost effectiveness matters? The lessons of Fukushima are under vigorous scrutiny now, and it will take some time to grasp their full meaning. As the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has suggested, the lessons that need particular study are "those pertaining to multiple severe hazards." Such complex hazards don't emerge just from natural disasters. They can also be the result of action by terrorists or others with bad intent. It is even conceivable that a malicious human (or humans) with access to a nuclear plant could take advantage of a natural disaster to cause a nuclear catastrophe. Because severe hazards can arise in these three ways -- as what can be termed natech, maltech or combined events -- safety and security staffs at nuclear power facilities should be trained to interact with one another as they respond to all three.

Force of nature. The history of nuclear energy abounds with incidents where nature clashed with human infrastructure. Japan seems to top the list of emergency nuclear shutdowns with seismic activity taking nuclear reactors off line in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, and of course 2011. Because numerous nuclear plants are located along major waterways, tsunamis are a formidable adversary. The December 2004 tsunami set loose by an undersea earthquake off Indonesia reached the east coast of India, disrupting operations at the Kalpakkam nuclear power plant. Wildfire poses a constant risk, witnessed in 2001 when a unit of Russia's Novovoronezhskaya nuclear power plant shut down and internal troops were dispatched to support local fire brigades after a fierce blaze approached the plant and its adjacent fuel-storage site. Tornadoes devastated the southern United States in 2011, forcing the Brown's Ferry nuclear plant to take its three reactors offline when 11 high-voltage power lines were knocked out.

No inventory of natural perils would be comprehensive without noting the phenomenon of solar storms. High solar activity has been mostly a nuisance -- in 1989, a solar storm that affected the Salem pressurized-water reactor in New Jersey induced a current surge, melting an electrical transformer, but did not trigger a shutdown. The situation may be different in the next two to three years, according to experts who predict a new cycle of solar activity starting in August 2011. NASA, meanwhile, has warned of a super solar storm in 2012. An intense sun storm could damage a country's electric power grid, a potential catastrophe for nuclear power plants that rely on the grid to run their cooling systems.
Since the early 2000s, the industrial emergency literature has called complex interactions between natural events and industrial catastrophe "natech disasters." By definition, natechs involve multiple hazards and pose special challenges for those who try to prevent them and those who respond to them when they do occur. Response efforts are greatly complicated. Responders must simultaneously cope with both the natural disaster and its impact on engineering systems and infrastructure; that impact may involve more than one technical mishap. And many services and utilities needed to deal with engineering problems -- water, access roads, power, communications, and so forth -- may be unavailable because of natural or other hazards.

Force of malice. The record is clear: Nuclear power installations are attractive targets for deliberate acts of theft, sabotage, or unauthorized break-ins. Before its 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda had considered nuclear plants as targets of choice; the same is said to be true for the terrorists who planned the November 2008 attack on Mumbai, India. Attacks on fissile fuel production, reactors, spent-fuel storage, and reprocessing facilities would create serious consequences -- even if there were little or no damage to the plant or related sites. Officials responsible for protecting nuclear plants must, therefore, take account of not only nature-driven disasters but also such purposeful "maltech" events, Cruise agency which prominently include "insider" threats from nuclear plant employees and others with regular access to such facilities.

Thanks

I have grown deeply pessimistic about the global future in the light of the climate warming that is now bound to happen. The IAEA will soldier on, but it will take a decade or more to rebuild public confidence and we are already running out of time. Books are now coming out that look at the ethical issues, above all the inter-generational ones, that arise from our actions, or lack thereof. That is all well and good; but it is rather late to bemoan the consequences of our short-sightedness. Nuclear offered a slim reed of possibility that we might yet succeed in moderating the warming, with Germany and Japan in the forefront of the countries relying more firmly on this CO2-free bets technology. How fast the situation has deteriorated.

The only place that Fukushima has clearly had a negative effect on the future of nuclear energy is Germany, and zee Germans never quite dedicated themselves to the reactor thing in the first place. I don't see any of the future plants in the US being having been canceled or their outlet permits revoked, nor Russia, nor France, nor even Japan.