[Xist]

I have been watching silly and useless YouTube videos while I did silly and useless things on my computer. Then it started playing Ted Talks, which were more entertaining, and I started learning while I did silly and useless things on the computer. Did you know that if you know a man in the U.S. at least seven feet tall between the ages of twenty and forty, there is a 17% chance that they are in the NBA? Did you know that competitive swimmers did not always do a somersault and kick off to turn around? They used to just turn around!

That is the only part of swimming that I do right!

Anyway, I am finishing my second video about how great and wonderful nuclear power is and anyone who disagrees is willingly ignorant. From one video:

He quotes Stewart Brand: "Look, despite what you might think, according to the intergovernmental panel on climate change, nuclear actually produces four times less carbon emissions than solar does."[/QUOTE]

"Last year, Germany installed 4% more solar panels, but it generated 3% less electricity from solar."
"Germany installed 11% more wind turbines in 2016, but it got 2% less electricity from wind."

"[E]lectricity prices in Germany rose about 50% over the last 10 years. Today, German electricity is about 2 times more expensive than electricity is in France."
"France gets 93% of their electricity from clean energy sources, mostly hydro and nuclear; Germany gets just 46%."
"German carbon emissions have actually been going up since 2009."

But this was actually studied in an important article for the journal Science last year. One of the authors was James Hansen, the famous climate scientist, and what they found is that, even when you combine solar and wind, you just get a lot less clean electricity than when you do nuclear, and that goes for Germany as well as the United States. So what they did is they just compared the ten years of the most deployment of those two technologies, solar-wind versus nuclear, and it's a pretty stark comparison.

Chernobyl is the worst nuclear accident we've ever had, and I think some people say it's the worst we could ever have. I don't need to make a statement that strong, but they literally had a nuclear reactor without a containment dome, and it was on fire, it was just raining radiation around everybody. It was really a terrible accident and when they start counting bodies, what they come up with is 28 deaths from acute radiation syndrome, 15 deaths over the last 25 years from thyroid cancer, which as horrible as it sounds,
it's actually the best cancer to get because hardly anybody dies from it.
It's really treatable, you can take thyroxine, which is a synthetic substitute, get a surgery. In fact, most of the people that died were people that were in remote rural areas, that couldn't get the medical treatment they needed, and if you take the 16,000 people that got thyroid cancer from Chernobyl, they estimate 160 of them will die from thyroid cancer, and it's not like they're dying right now, they'll die of it in old age, and that's not to say that it's okay, but it is to put it in some kind of context.
There's no scientific evidence of thyroid cancer outside of those three main countries: Belarus, Ukraine, Russia. No effect on fertility, malformations, infant mortality, no conclusion or no data for adverse pregnancy outcomes, no evidence for any genetic effects, and I think this last one is the most striking thing: There's no evidence of any increase in cancer, including in the cohort of people who put the fire out and cleaned up afterwards.

What about Fukushima? This was the second worst nuclear disaster in history. There was a much smaller release of radiation than Chernobyl, and so what we find is that there's no deaths from radiation exposure from Fukushima, which is kind of amazing. 1,500 people died being pulled out of nursing homes, being pulled out of hospitals. It was insane, it was a panic. The Japanese government should not have done that, it violated every standard of how you deal with a disaster like that. You're supposed to shelter in place. In fact, by pulling people out of their homes and moving them around outside during that accident, they actually exposed them to more radiation.
Of course you have to put that in comparison to the other things that were going on, like 15 to 20 thousands people dying instantly from drowning, pinned under many different technologies, by the way, getting killed by that tsunami. Unlikely be any increase in thyroid cancer, and the big problem, of course, is just the stress and the fear that you've been contaminated when the evidence suggests that that's not the case at all.
They did an interesting study. They brought a bunch of school kids from Paris to Fukushima, and they wore dosimeters - that's what we call the old Geiger counters now. And what they find is that, those kids, when they go through the security systems, the radiation would spike. When they'd get on the airplane to fly to Tokyo, the radiation would spike. They'd go to the French Embassy, the radiation would spike. Iwaki didn't get - Iwaki is a city - it didn't get the plume, the radioactive plume. Tomioka did, and it's still a tiny blip compared to just going through the security system.
So let's look at some of the basics to put this in context. If you live in a big city like London or Berlin or New York, you're gonna increase your mortality risk by 2.8%, just from air pollution alone. If you live with someone who smokes cigarettes, 1.7%. But if you were somebody that cleaned up Chernobyl, got exposed to 250 millisieverts of radiation, 1%. 100 millisieverts, 0.4%. It's just because there just wasn't as much radiation as people think. The atomic bomb testing in the sixties exposed people to just - there's so many different measurements for radiation. You can just see a lot more radiation exposure during the a-bomb test than either Chernobyl or Fukushima. [...] I'm from the state of Colorado in the United States, we have an annual exposure, just because there's so much granite around us, about 9 millisieverts a year. That's what you'd get if you're the 6 million people that live around Chernobyl today.

But when you go into a survey, in most countries - this one was done in Russia - only 8% of the population surveyed accurately predicts the death toll from Chernobyl, and 0% predicted accurately the death toll from Fukushima.

"[T]hat's why every major medical journal that looks at this - this is from the British Medical Journal Lancet - finds that nuclear power is already the safest way to make electricity. And it leads to this really uncomfortable conclusion, one that the climate scientist James Hansen came to recently, which is that nuclear power has actually saved 1.8 million lives."

The thing about the nuclear waste is it's the only waste from electricity production that is safely contained anywhere. All of the other waste goes into the environment, from coal, gas. And then here's sort of a equally uncomfortable conclusion: Solar panels, there's no plan to recycle solar panels outside of the EU. Meaning that all of us in California - it's just gonna join the waste stream.
We calculated how much toxic waste -because the panels contain heavy metals, and lead, and chromium, and cadmium - how much toxic waste from solar is there?
To get a sense of it, look at how much more materials are required for each different energy source, and when you calculate all the panels that it'll require to produce the same amount of electricity as nuclear, solar actually produces 300 times more waste than nuclear, very little of it contained, and all of it containing toxic heavy metals.

He quotes Sting: "If you're going to tackle global warming, nuclear is the only way you can create massive amounts of power."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak