It was the Greens back in the seventies who pushed nuclear safety requirements to ludicrous levels. To the extent that nuclear power stations had to be orders of magnitude safer than any other energies and orders of magnitude more than they had been till then. All because of a few accidents, counted on the fingers of one hand, and which killed just dozens — not thousands, let alone millions — of people. And all because of scare mongering. Meantime Coal kills vastly more per year. Even solar and wind do.
As the Swedish scientists said recently in an article I posted: "if people say nuclear power is unsafe, we have to ask: in comparison to what?" Because relative to other producers of electricity, nuclear is the safest. Not just safe, but the safest.
Still, the result of the Greens' efforts at over regulation, was that nuclear became too expensive. "See", they said, "it's too expensive". Well done Greens!
Worth noting: after the Fukushima accident in 2011, the Japanese government made 380 square miles out of bounds. (It's now open again).
Fukushima was a 4.5 GWe station. For the same amount of land to produce 4.5 GW of wind power you would need 350 sq m. Actually more, because of the low conversion of capacity to output (wind doesn't always blow). That ratio is between 10% and 50%. Let's take the average, 30%. So you'd need 1,170 sq m of land if you used wind for the equivalent power, three times the area put out bounds after Fukushima. And that would be out of bounds all the ti,e not temporarily.
But wait! there's more! When Fukushima was producing, before it was devastated by the unprecedented tsunami, it only took up a bit over 1 Sq m of land. That is: 1/1,170th, 0.09%. of the land needed for wind; land, to repeat, needed all the time. Japan is short of land. Such huge land needs for wind power can't simply be ignored.
Go, nuclear!
Now, read on …
