Tim Worstall has a must read post here.
You can only compare the safety of nuclear power to the alternatives, and if an earthquake strikes I'd rather live next to a nuclear power station than a dam.
Update: Okay, I am beginning to doubt Worstallian wisdom on this topic.
The Joy of Six 1289
4 hours ago
7 comments:
It is odd but very western that though thousands died and hundred of thousand are without water food and adequate shelter and future every media concentrates on the nuclear plants.
You might think that there is a plot to bring back coal as a source of energy.
Poor Japan, getting the earthquake, the nuclear reactor AND the burst dam...
"Absolutely the worst that could happen, absolutely the worst possible outcome" is quite a brave statement though, for someone who is not a nuclear engineer, or anywhere near the plants.
Presumably with things exploding everywhere then unpredictable things could happen but I assume he knows what he's talking about enough to be ruling out the possibility of anything like Chernobyl.
Nuclear crisis or not the one thing that has happened in Japan this week is that the market, possibly the entire global market is terminal. The Japanese have known this since the eighties.
What about a chemical plant?
As Worstall notes the Telegraph choice to big up a bureaucrat and an environmentalist in preference to a nuclear expert in selecting its headline. Even the BBC's chosen experts have refused to name this Chernobyl #2. The Telegraph has been front and centre in sensationalising the worst (even if - according to said experts - next to impossible) outcome.
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