

Why renewables are 'safer and cheaper' than nuclear power - gnosis
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12960655

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drallison
BUT: 1) Renewable don't allow CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuels to be
retired. 2) Growing plants to burn will stress an already stressed
agricultural system. 3) The "dangers" of nuclear power are overstated. Many
more people die in the generation of electricity from coal than in the
generation of electricity from nuclear fuel. And those numbers generally
ignore the costs of global warming.

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gnosis
Growing plants to burn? What?

They're talking about things like solar power, or wind farms.

Where do you get growing plants to burn from that?

And, as for the deaths from nuclear power:

 _"Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation
released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new
book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th
anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility."_

<http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/26>

Excerpts from the book here:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2009.1181.is...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2009.1181.issue-1/issuetoc)

~~~
drallison
Growing plants to burn is a renewable energy source (or can be). The plants
grow, using energy from sunlight to convert CO2 from the atmosphere into
burnable material and oxygen. This burnable material, can later be burned to
generate energy. Fossil fuels release CO2, the carbon for which which has been
sequestered from a previous era. Since CO2 levels have been rising, it is
clear that the ability of the plants to re-sequester the carbon from the
released CO2 has been exceeded.

When comparing the costs of nuclear versus other energy sources, it helps to
consider the cost per kilowatt from each source and to include all of the
impacts. For example, what is the cost of coal fired electricity generation?
What is the cost, in human lives, of acid rain? of decreased fisheries, of
pollution, of global warming, and so forth. I believe, when you consider all
of the costs--economic and social--that nuclear power comes out pretty well
compared to conventional fossil fuel generation. I also believe that many of
the so-called sustainable renewable energy sources, when critically examined
over their full lifetime, do not fare well against convention sources.

