I am happy that I found a post related to micro wind turbine here….

It’s true there was much initial casualty. Most prominent were the force of liquidators who fought the reactor fire and desperately labored to contain the deadly debris. The first responders died. The following waves suffered latent health issues to appear weeks to years later. Residents living around Pripyat and surrounding areas largely, but not totally, escaped unhurt. Some returned to the exclusion zone and some refused to leave. There is documentation to support claims of children born in the years surrounding the disaster, especially those still living in the zone, being in poorer health than the average.

But, there are also quite a lot of healthy folks living in the zone. Many who always had and witnessed and lived in the zone straight through the disaster and its aftermath, in contravention of the government.

Perhaps most telling are the wildlife, plant and animal. These recovered extremely quickly and have enjoyed more bountiful populations now than ever. I recently watched a documentary seeking to investigate some of the new surge of biomass, which uncovered data counter to the conventional wisdom on radiation exposure. Most of the healthy populations lived with Chernobyl-spawned radionuclide levels many times that of comparable populations outside the zone. The early research is suggesting it could be the case that certain low-level radiation exposures might actually cause a protective reaction in plant and animal species, and that such exposed species start adapting and thriving quickly in this environment. Longer-than-average lifespans are being documented, and this effect is thought to be in part based upon damaged cell apoptosis mechanisms honed and made more efficient by the radiation exposure.

The reality is that we can manage the risks, and therefore make the risk/reward such that, like air travel, we couldn’t imagine not doing it. Renewed development of orphaned advanced breeder reactor concepts could pave the way to pull much more energy out of presently “spent” fuel, as well as react down stockpiles of salvaged Pu from weapons, and…leave behind a waste product much less radioactive and dangerous for much shorter timespans (like decades and fractions of centuries vs. multiple centuries, eons, and geologic time).

Renewables cannot hope to provide enough energy to afford us our present lifestyle. I doubt the earth’s photosynthetic capacity accessible to human tech is high enough to meet our present and future energy demands, while still providing us food. And growing energy as biofuels only displaces food use of scarce arable land, food we need already, globally.

In a greenie world, re-wrangling atomic power would allow us to reserve fossil fuels for air transport, were pure renewable substitutes may be a practical impossibility. It would provide a route to non-CO2 emitting electricity generation in sufficient quantities to actually serve electric car markets which would be starved for power and unable to be competitive without. And it would allow us access to energy reserves large enough to enable us to power ourselves on the same sort of time scale as the sun.

So a new nuke disaster, while very bad, would perhaps be more akin to a major volcanic event than an extremely long-dated apocalyptic dead zone. Advances in high-voltage DC grid tech could make distribution efficient enough to enable confining reactors to remote areas away from population centers for as long as needed to keep refining the tech to ever safer degrees.

You had me at Accidental Empires.

However, I find your advocacy for the construction of additional nuclear power plants unpersuasive. They are economically uncompetitive, are not less harmful with respect to global warming and carry the all too real potential for catastrophic failure. That the Chernobyl accident has been the worst to date is only a matter of luck.

My first and second assertions are argued eloquently in a January 2009 publication by the Rocky Mountain Institute entitled “The Nuclear Illusion”:http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf It is a summary of a more extensively documented peer reviewed paper written for Ambio, the journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, published in May of 2008. It “summarizes why nuclear power cannot in principle deliver the economic benefit, climate-protection or energy-security and reliability benefits claimed for it.

My third assertion with respect to the suspect safety record of the nuclear power industry is supported by the book, Normal Accidents, published in 1984. It is a five year effort on the part of Charles Perrow, a Yale professor of sociology, and a team of graduate students, who analyzed the human and organizational dimensions of complex high risk technologies. The book includes extensively documented, detailed case studies of the two accident types cited in your piece: nuclear power plants (specifically Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—incidentally explaining why they are located proximal to population centers and abundant water supplies) and chemical plants (which he found not as safe as you imply). TMI and Chernobyl were system failures, not operator failures. Chernobyl occurred during a safety exercise after all. He concluded that accidents in such complex coupled systems are inevitable no matter how well conceived or operated. The is no such thing as a foolproof nuclear power plant.

In summary, the economic argument for commercial nuclear power is and will forever be nonexistent given the alternative replacements for fossil fuel, i.e., coal. Further, the cost of a massively catastrophic unconfined breach of containment in property, morbidity and mortality would be too much to bear.

Please maintain the flow of thoughtful missives.