So coal plants must all be shut down immediately? Not only do they produce FAR more HazMat per Kw/h, they even bring radiation to the surface and concentrate it in their waste.
Not to the extent nuclear power does, unless you have some evidence on that waste remaining dangerous and hard to store safely for an equivalent length of time.
Also, I wouldn't mind seeing coal plants shut down. Coal is ridiculously filthy.
I'm not sure if there are any good replacements, however, but saying "and coal is dangerous too, why don't you oppose that?" won't go anywhere.
Define "major disaster". While such a definition is subjective, my own includes "lots of people die as a direct result". Among nuclear incidents, only Chernobyl qualifies to the best of my knowledge. Compare that to plane crashes, coal-mine explosions, or earthquakes.
"Lots of people die as a direct result" and/or long term damage to the area - if the cancer rates skyrocket, even if few people are killed in the disaster itself, I'd count it as a major disaster. Not sure if this is part of your definition of "direct", but its part of mine for major disaster.
And I think for purposes of this we need to stick to comparable scenarios - coal mine explosions and oil spills, yes, plane crashes no.
Thank you for being both honest and open minded. Hopefully I can persuade you.
Open minded might be generous. But hopefully, because the good aspects of nuclear power
are real and the alternatives
do also suck. There are no unambiguously good choices here.
So your task if you want to change my mind is to convince me that the likelihood of disaster and danger of disaster are sufficiently low to be compared to the alternatives, since all things being even on that front, nuclear power is unambiguously superior to coal or oil or natural gas.
Disaster & routine operation, but routine operation other than nuclear waste is pretty safe.
And solar and wind are underdeveloped at this point, so they're not a viable option as a replacement - worth research, yes, but that's it, so that's easy to ignore for purposes of our discussion.
Additionally, we probably need to compare the extraction of the material necessary for nuclear power and any processing to that needed for other forms of power, since that is part of the process.
I don't know enough about it to say anything, but if you're going to mention the dangers of coal mining, the dangers with uranium have to at least be glanced at for the sake of completeness.
Again looking at Japan, and again acknowledging that I lack complete information, the quake itself did not cause anything but what would have been a temporary shut down. Had the tsunami not destroyed both the primary and secondary generators there would have been no hazard from the plant beyond normal operations (I can't say any power plant is truly 'safe' since they tend to contain large amounts of high-energy steam, which can be extremely dangerous). Had the plant been a mile inland or behind a better seawall...
We probably wouldn't be wondering if this will be a horrible situation - though I think this counts as a disaster of the nonnuclear sort for purposes of the kind of risks we have to worry about. That is, nuclear power didn't cause this, it just got involved. Bad enough, but different.
Was the tsunami a result of the quake (in which case whether it takes a quake that serious to be that bad should come up), or was it just a double whammy, incidentally? I haven't been following, you presumably have at least to some extent.