lambda comments

@Thomas Anderson

Excuses, excuses, excuses. Does it matter whether it was the earthquake or the bureaucrats or human errors or some freak accident? The fact is that it happened, and you can't change that. I don't see any any other sources energy production exploding and causing a nuclear meltdown.

Speaking of sources of energy, it was indeed not the failure of the Fukushima nuclear plant that caused the most deaths (0), but rather the renewable energy source of Fujinuma Dam (4).

Producing energy always causes deaths, I suppose the worst being hydraulic power where dam failures have killed hundreds of thousands. Coal and oil, which are the energy sources now replacing nuclear, kill a lot of people and contaminate the mined land rendering it inhabitable for generations. If you calculate the risks and average them as you should, you'll find out that nuclear is actually a super safe way of getting current through the cables.

Wind turbines are a waste of time, there's no new technology there, all it takes is a generator spinning, and this has been known and optimized for centuries and thus now operates at a very high efficiency. This can be made more productive (in the bang-for-buck sense) through mass production, but the savings here are marginal to what solar and nuclear, both complex technologies, have to offer. Complex technologies tend to show a kind of exponential growth, best illustrated by Moore's law, as there are many points where you can improve on.

The only reason to abandon nuclear is political. In economics you'd never concentrate all your money on one investment, as this makes absolutely no sense, or to put it simply, is moronic. This is what the anti-nuclear movement is however all about. A sad state of affairs.