My ignorance is so thick on this subject that I suspect we must have been kept in the dark on this matter. (At least not shivering in the dark though, we do seem to have power everywhere I've been.)
Let's confront our misconceptions first. I remember reading some 20-25 years ago that if it weren't for all the monopolistic Rules & Regs we could have micro "pebble reactors" that would power large neighborhoods, communities, farm or industrial towns very safely, efficiently and cheaply. (Libertarian daydream?)
There is also an urban, anarcho-libertarian concept that nuclear weapons are bogus, a myth, a psyop, a fear tactic, false info, a paper tiger, a death threat, mental terrorism, a ghost story to put the children to bed. It does have a ring of truth to it... Search The Daily Bell before saying anything -- you have been subjected to severe brainwashing. Examine what you believe. (Here I'm not talking to @uruiamme)
I looked at a few Daily Bell articles to see what you're referring to.
It just so happens, I read their article on North Korea and their atomic weapons program.
And it just so happens that I know something about this situation that few outside the US government or part of an ally's spy agency apparatus would know.
Let me cut to the chase. The US government can verify what the N. Koreans are doing, independent of their press releases, and independent of any seismologic disturbance. The intelligence community of the US probably knows when Kim Jong Il blows his nose. The theory that nuclear weapons are in any way imaginary or paper tigers is not credible, whether in the hands of NK or the US.
I can present the evidence of inflated nuclear bomb damage assessments, but even those reassessments put them into the mass destruction category.
A simple google search of the Mike crater should serve as ample proof. I don't prefer my Bikinis with craters in the middle, but Castle Bravo made another one.
OK. The part I was reading was more historical, if not hysterical, regarding the firebombing of Japan, not only Tokyo but Nagasaki and even Hiroshima indicating that the real bomb wasn't yet ready and they faked it. And all the original movie footage looks very suspicious and there are lots of cheap video explanations. And you'll find a nasty brick wall around any serious investigation or even serious comment about the subject over long stretches of time. Look how much TNT and other explosives they constantly tinkered with. Blowing big holes in things was childsplay. So they took some pictures of that, where's the reporting. How many people saw the crater. What went on there before and after. What an information blackout! History's full of holes. Black holes it seems. there must be lots of information surrounding Big Mike and Castle Bravo those legendary hyper-terrorist firecrackers.
I think that jibes with what ... No, what do I know Korea? Casi nada.
As for the ubiquitous "reactor on every street corner," I am unaware that this was proposed. There has been a lot of "atoms for peace" proposals, but these were in vogue in the 1950s, not 1990s. The later designs were hyped up in certain circles, but I didn't know there was such ambitious predictions of their ubiquity.
As to the myth factor, I have studied a version of what you are saying. The myth that really has been researched and really is a thing is that the military exaggerated, sometimes to a large degree, the damage potential (short and long-term) of nuclear weapons. Somewhat mitigating this is the severe panic and you might want to cal it "psyops" that surround Fukushima Daiichi. The exclusion zone due to that relatively minor nuclear incident (compared to a bomb) is large and notorious. If such a little "explosion" can cause such widespread damage in a rural area, the surely the military of the 1940s to 1960s were correct in their assessment of how bomb would damage a city, make it uninhabitable, etc.
But not so fast. Was this a self-fulfilling prophecy of those 1950s experiments on bombs? Fukushima had so little fallout, yet a huge exclusion area. So does Chernobyl. What's the answer?
I still feel there's a myth involved here, and government misinformation. Hard to explain in a comment. :)
Hmm, I may have been reading Popular Science/Mechanics at the barbershop and it could have been post-millennium rather than pre-millennium. "Just the other day" often turns out to be a couple of decades ago (when even the remaining hair on the body has turned grey).
Still we are only heating water to create steam to turn a turbine. How complicated is that? The concern then is what if we don't need nuclear fuel at all, why not natural gas?
I am a little surprised to hear that Fukushima was relatively minor and the fear and panic was much ado about nothing. I thought the double or triple meltdown was downplayed and even blacked out and that huge levels or radiation came in by air and by sea without any safety warnings, while federal regulations were scrapped to just allow it. ¿No?
But, we are only here to learn and that is often best achieved by keeping quiet ... and listening. I'm willing to drop my preconceived notions and find out, why the devil do those rocks burn so hot and what makes them tick?
And yes, I'm still curious, would a free-market have chosen nuclear power? Do we or can we control it? Is it useful to mankind or just a dangerous boondoggle?
Good food. For. Thought. I think I will save some of my responses for a full article. I'm going to take some notes so I can get back to them.
The short version is that Fukushima is a catastrophe, but not just in the radiological sense. IF people want to live in an exclusion zone, there shouldn't be an exclusion zone. But because the governments of all nations are effectively driven by either high medical expenditures shared by taxpayers (centralized healthcare) or the industry is regulated by the long arm of the lawsuit (ad hoc class action lawsuits), the areas just have to be excluded. True enough, I wouldn't pick that place to live, but if my work took me there as a nuclear scientist, I wouldn't lose sleep over an elevated radioactive background, the occasional contaminated thing.
It's a bit over-the-top if you ask me. Now, Chernobyl is probably an order of magnitude worse, but even it's not the uninhabitable city that it's made out to be. If the same amount of work is done after a nuclear incident like it would be after a major earthquake or tsunami or hurricane... those places would be livable.
My point is that if this is such a global community, why not send all the displaced people to an uninhabited land and spend money on new infrastructure? But no, that's not what tax money is for... and we have international borders ... we can't just do that. So they don't clean it up, they don't allow anyone to live there, and they just want displaced people to live in some other crowded place. And since the government worked hand-in-hand with the reactor operators... You have articles like this: http://www.ien.com/safety/news/20855195/tepco-govt-liable-in-fukushima-lawsuit which would have happened sooner in the US. You see that both TEPCO and the government are being held responsible?
That's correct. It took two to tango.
Stupid people should not be in charge of nuclear safety. That has borne itself out numerous times.