218
This study, by a nuclear advocacy group, is based on treating a cubic meter of used solar panels as being equivalent to a cubic meter of spent uranium.
Just digging around the links, I find the following:
Yes, slashdot's description is pretty accurate.
"Environmental progress" is a pro-nuclear advocacy group. The website initially presents as a general ...
89
The number claim is correct in the context of nuclear power stations.
The "440" reactors from the claim indicate, that we are talking about nuclear reactors for power generation in power plants. Therefore I won't include reactors used on submarines or vessels.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) there are currently (May 2019) 452 ...
80
No.
The assembled facts are all fairly inflammatory, and include a few common misconceptions.
Reactor #4 contains 1,535 spent fuel rods which remain highly radioactive.
These fuel rods currently hold the potential to emit 37 million curies of radiation.
Firstly, definitions: Reactor 4 was shut down for maintenance(PDF, p35) when the earthquake ...
35
While the numbers provided by the sources seem to be strictly correct, they are lacking a significant amount of context. Once this context is injected into the discussion, the manufacture of Wind Turbines does not create as much radiation as Nuclear waste.
The primary claim, from the Institute for Energy Research (second quoted block in the question) seems ...
30
In "The Nuclear Energy Option, Chapter 13, Plutonium and Bombs" (Plenum Press, 1990, ISBN 0-306-43567-5), Bernard L. Cohen writes:
When plutonium oxide, the form in which plutonium would be used in the
nuclear industry and also its most toxic form, is inhaled as a fine
dust, 25% of it deposits in the lung, 38% deposits in the upper
respiratory tract,...
25
The New Scientist calculated the number of deaths per kilowatt-hour question based on the data from International Atomic Energy Agency in 2011.
According to the New Scientist:
The agency examined the life cycle of each fuel from extraction to post-use and included deaths from accidents as well as long-term exposure to emissions or radiation.
They ...
25
In 2012, there were 437 nuclear reactors. From the World Nuclear Association:
Over 115 commercial power reactors, 48 experimental or prototype reactors, over 250 research reactors and several fuel cycle facilities have been retired from operation.
Thus, if just 1.5% of 850 reactors (or 13 reactors) suffered a meltdown, over 1.5% of nuclear reactors would ...
20
Yes they absolutely did.
I know this because I've been in several of them. However it was only in the most dangerous places - the criticality labs, where there was enough nuclear materials that, if mishandled, they could generate a fatal radiation dose in a matter of seconds. Most nuclear power stations would not have had a criticality lab and hence not an ...
19
No. Nuclear energy produces far more toxic waste than solar.
Distribution of the fake news story
The fake news that began circulating at the end of June 2017 stems from a self-described "study" conducted by the nuclear industry advocate, Environmental Progress (EP). James Hansen, a nuclear proponent previously a lead in climate modelling at NASA, has ...
19
The Instagram video is a snippet of a longer video from Beyond Science's Facebook page.
It appears that some genuine quotes from Glenn T. Seaborg explaining that the find was puzzling have been misconstrued and/or misrepresented in the video to suggest that he favoured a completely different conjecture - that it was man-made.
HoaxOrFact has already looked ...
18
It doesn't seem that any cancer victims have yet been identified. The probabilities are low and are assessed over the whole lifetime of people in the worst affected areas.
It won't be possible to identify specific people whose cancer is attributable to the Fukushima Daiichi accident. At best, large scale studies may be able to measure the small increase in ...
17
That claim cannot really be proven or disproven, because there is not clear (or objective) what "cheap" means.
Nuclear power is fairly cheap, but it is not the cheapest.
As already mentioned in a comment "cheap" is only really useful in comparison to something else (i.e. in this case other energy sources). Furthermore, it depends on the costs that are ...
14
It is a common figure of speech to say [small amount] of toxin could kill [large amount] people. (Examples: 1, 2) It is an emotive demonstration of the toxicity, but it openly ignores the complexity of the delivery mechanism - an assumption Rockwell scoffs at.
What is more relevant than the figure of speech used to describe the toxicity, is the underlying ...
14
This claim makes one very important and very obvious assumption: That all wind generators use rare earth magnets. Or, for that matter, that they even use permanent magnets at all.
They don't.
From the linked article:
There are many different types of generators used today in wind turbines, but the most common types are asynchronous generators. The two ...
14
It depends on how you define "produced" and "nuclear energy". Without more details we can only speculate, but the possibilities are very limited.
The link you cite appears to be by someone who has constructed a Farnsworth Fusor (or possibly some variant on the same theme). These devices make interesting (if expensive and advanced) high school science ...
13
Per World Nuclear Organization, there have been no deaths or cases of radiation sickness from the nuclear accident at Fukushima, but over 100,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes to ensure this. It states "There have been no harmful effects from radiation on local people, nor any doses approaching harmful levels. Government nervousness delays ...
13
No, this is fraudulent statistics
Here is a real life example of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics: they fudged the numbers to make it look bad.
The long answer is very long indeed. Here is a blog post on the subject. A complete analysis accompanies that post and can be found here.
In summary though: they cherry-picked the numbers, selecting towns and ...
12
Could a single EMP cause nearly all USA reactors to "go Fukushima" - melt-down and explode?
(paraphrased)
In brief
No because
NRC policies have taken into account EMP since the late 1970s
The USA has no nuclear reactors of the old design type used at Fukushima.
EMP
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have been studying the effect of EMP on nuclear ...
12
If the claims of Mr. Winsor are true that he worked as a safety manager in a nuclear plant, it is highly unlikely that he was actually able to accomplish anything that would have legitimately given him a lethal dose of radiation.
Swimming in the pools is actually a fairly standard practice among workers servicing spent fuel pools. Divers are used to ...
10
No, at least according to the information presented in the source they reference, which just doesn't actually attempt to establish any correlation.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20151020_34.html
Ministry experts determined that he was likely to have contracted leukemia following cleanup work at Fukushima Daiichi. They found he had been ...
9
This blog post has a detailed analysis of the deaths from various forms of energy. It would seem to agree with the result of a large number of deaths saved from the use of nuclear energy.
For just air pollution it says:
The World Health Organization and other sources attribute about 1 million deaths/year to coal air pollution. Coal generates about 6200 ...
9
The proposed process is to use the x-ray band bremsstrahlung photons from a electron accelerator (see also advanced light source) to initiate photo-disentigration reactions in long lived radioisotopes with the goal of generating either stable daughters or short-lived daughters that will decay to stability in a reasonable amount of time.
Here's a randomly ...
answered May 12 '12 at 16:57
dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
9431 gold badge12 silver badges17 bronze badges
8
No, the claims are completely untrue. The science of why is a little complicated.
The opinions of the users of Physics.SE are that it is:
improbable to the point of being gibberish.
The opinions of the users of Quora are:
The obvious problem with Mills theory is Hydrinos don't exist. It's 99.99999% chances to be a scam. [...] What we are looking at ...
8
Yes, they failed because they were turned off by operators according to the protocols for such situations and couldn't be turned on again due to the unanticipated lack of power.
The isolation condenser, which relied on convection and gravity to perform its cooling function, should have helped keep the water level high in unit 1's core through the crisis. ...
7
You can find a lot of varying estimates, based on other varying estimates, and they're almost always from a source with a vested interest in skewing the statistics one way or another.
And numbers for accidents caused by windmills?
Here's my attempt at nuclear vs windmills (except I'm only mildly biased in the pro-nuclear direction and trying to be as ...
7
Their claim is that currently nuclear power saves close to 80,000 lives annually.
It's true, that WHO attributes 1.2 mln deaths to outdoor air pollution. So at first glance numbers makes sense. Nuclear power is 6% of total, 6% of 1.2mln is 72,000. Close enough... or not?
Their fallacy seems to be believe that all pollution is equal, and all pollution ...
7
According to FANC
In 2014, a further inspection was carried out based on the improved procedure and the modified settings of the machine, resulting in the detection of a greater number of flaw indications than was measured in 2012 and 2013. This means that Electrabel now has to take into account 13 047 flaw indications for Doel 3 and 3149 flaw indications ...
7
The figures seem consistent with most sources:
A Lazard 2018 study puts nuclear firmly in that range.
A UK government study puts new nuclear construction at 95 GBP per megawatt hour, which sits somewhere in the middle of the range stated by Reuters, depending on the exchange rate of the day.
The OpenEI configurable chart trends lower, but only outliers lie ...
6
I paid close attention to the Fukushima investigation for years. I've lost my sources (I could use some help with that) but I can add some more detail as to exactly where it went wrong. If the lack of refs is a problem, I'll cheerfully delete this answer.
Yes, as you say, the earthquake didn't do any critical damage inside the containment area, but the ...
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