As Japan shuts down nuclear power, emissions rise

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Governments are perfectly capable of cutting corners, too. Cut one here, cut one there and you can promise a tax break and win some votes. The effects don't matter because you won't be in office when whatever happens, happens. Someone else will take the fall - there's not much accountability.

Oil companies and industries that burn hydrocarbons are also heavily subsidized. How? They are never fully charged for the environmental damage and damage to human health that they cause. The government has given them an explicit tax break (depletion allowance tax adjustment) and no charge for the filth they put in the air. If hydrocarbon burners paid the full freight nuclear power generation would become economically competitive.

ruveyn

And aren't many of the costs of nuclear power also down to over-cautious regulation, put in place by corrupt politicians in the pocket of the fossil fuel profiteers in order to kneecap the competition?

Actually, no. The cautious regulation in the case of nuclear power is most certainly necessary and its more the case that governments are forced to put them in place if they are to promote nuclear power in the face of some public opposition. The corrupt part is not charging the oil companies for environmental damage due to crony capitalism. Oil companies frequently become some of the most corrupt piece of sh*t corporations on the face of planet. Shell, for example, has no compunction against going into another country and polluting the peoples drinking water for the sake of their mining activities.

depends on what regulations and what nuclear power we are talking about, some are almost proliferation safe for an example,
in general i agree that safety is the primary concern but much of that can be mitigated by design and type

Poorer people spend a far greater proportion of their income on energy than the rich, so high energy prices are a very bad thing indeed as far as social justice is concerned, but the super-rich will continue to fill up their limousines and corporate jets without batting an eyelid. And "feed-in-tariffs" force most ordinary people to pay higher electricity bills, in order to subsidize the wind turbines and rooftop solar panels of middle-class eco-snobs.

I fear the enemies of industrial society far more than I fear the downsides (in terms of accidents and pollution) of either fossil fuels or nuclear power. After all, we currently have over 7 billion people on this planet, and pre-industrial methods of farming can only produce enough food to feed 2 billion people. (The productivity increase comes partly from replacing working animals by farm machines, but mainly from artificial fertilizers produced using the Haber-Bosch process.)

Here is the latest big laugh from Japan. It turns out that irradiated gravel (from pits not far from the affected nuclear power generating stations) have been used to make concrete for building houses. It turns out that the radiation from the foundations using that concrete are at ten times the ambient level of radiation. When the people who live in these houses or apartment building made from this "hot" material found out they sh*t a brick. Japanese are understandably touchy about radiation and associated issues having been the only victims of atomic energy released in anger. Two things the Japanese cannot abide: too much radiation and gigantic monsters emerging from the vasty deeps.

Please see http://www.quarrymagazine.com/Article.a ... residents-

ruveyn

These true costs are very difficult for market structures to account for. It's called an externality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

Externalities can be good or bad, some bring benefits while others bring harm, but either way they distort prices and production levels. Beneficial externalities cause a thing to be underproduced because the true value of the product is absent for the two parties making the exchange, and therefore demand is lower than the true value would suggest it should be. Negative externalities cause a thing to be overproduced, because the costs are not reflected in the sticker price and therefore demand is higher than it should be.

It's usually used in terms of the market but I think it can somewhat be applied to command economies too, the big difference being it doesn't distort market demand in a command economy, it distorts the political demand, which determines production. So in the Soviet economy, vigorous industrialization was pursued to create jobs and produce goods and this generated political returns. But the environmental cost was truly staggering, because at the time it didn't represent any immediate political cost - similar to a negative externality in a market.

One example of unnecessary regulation (at least in the US) is that every new reactor built requires an enormous amount of paperwork to be done relating to the safety of every aspect of its design (costing billions of dollars) even if that type of reactor has already been built somewhere else.

It would be more reasonable if such stringent safety checks were only required for the first example of a new type of reactor, with subsequent examples only checked on issues specific to where they are sited. (This is how fossil fuel power plant construction is regulated.)

Before the 1970s the United States had the Atomic Energy Commission which (much like the FAA for aviation) was in charge of both regulating and promoting nuclear energy. However, under the Ford administration it was replaced (due to lobbying of the government by fossil fuel interests) with the purely regulatory Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As the non-regulatory functions of the AEC were merged into the Department of Energy, nuclear energy no longer had any government body that would fight for its interests against its fossil fuel competitors.