Episode Details

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host.

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01 Introduction

This is the second follow up to my 8 part series on nuclear power. In this episode I will attempt to answer a question posed by brian in ohio in a comment on HPR4583. In that comment he said:

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Loving this series. Maybe Whiskey Jack could give some cost comparisons between large and small reactors. He could also give us a realistic look at nuclear plant safety/accidents compared to conventional power production. Looking forward to the episode on FORTH generation reactors ;-)

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End of quote.

The first question I answered in my previous follow up, which was HPR4628. In this episode I will attempt to answer the second question, which was about the safety of nuclear power compared to other sources of electrical power generation.

One of the HPR janitors encouraged me to make this episode, so I think we can thank him for getting another HPR episode made.

04 Defining the Scope

First, let's define the scope of the question.

This will cover electrical power generation only.

Within that scope I will consider only the following sources of energy.

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Coal

Oil

Natural Gas

Hydroelectric

Nuclear

Wind

Solar

I won't cover geothermal, wave, or tidal power as these are only used in very small amounts and so there simply isn't enough literature on them to base a discussion on .

06 Foreshadow Conclusion

I should mention right away that I cannot provide absolute answers to this question in the form of a nice, neat ranking table based on numbers from peer reviewed scientific sources.

The reasons for this will become apparent, but to put it briefly, the data on which to base such a ranking simply doesn't exist.

I will however provide context within which people can think about the issue.

Wherever possible, I will provide links to the references that I used in the show notes so you can read further on this yourself.

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07 Energy Catastrophism versus Energy Uniformitarianism

First though I need to go off on a slight geological detour in order to explain an important analogy that I will use.

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In the 19th century there was a great debate among geologists over what is known as catastrophism versus uniformitarianism.

In seeking to explain the origins of the earth and of the landscape that we see around us, there were two points of view.

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One was "catastrophism".

This is the belief that the mountains, valleys, and plains that we see around us were formed as a result of great catastrophes which occurred relatively recently in earth's history.

This explanation was necessary in order to fit geological features into an earth that was believed to be only a few thousands of years old.

This view was heavily influenced by religious belief.

In this view Noah's flood was the great catastrophe and the fossils of dinosaurs were the remains of animals who had not been saved on the ark and so had died in the flood.

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The other point of view was uniformitarianism.

This was the hypothesis that the landscape we see around us can be explained by the very slow accumulation of very small changes over very long periods of time.

For this to be true however, the earth had to be far older than the few thousand years that a literal reading of the bible would suggest.

The earth in fact had to be many,