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Russia's Floating Nuclear Plants Under Fire From Greens
slashdotmsiriv writes with a link to an International Business Times article about Russia's plan to build floating nuclear power plants (a subject we discussed some time ago). The project is getting a lot of flack over possible safety problems from green groups. "The first floating power plant will be named 'Academician Lomonosov.' Mikhail Lomonosov was an 18th- century Russian scientist who achieved worldwide acclaim for his work in chemistry and physics and was founder of Moscow's state university. Customers could include Russian state-controlled gas giant Gazprom, the northern region of Chukotka and countries from Namibia to Indonesia, according to industry sources."
Has ANYTHING Nuclear related not taken flak from green groups? I'm not surprised at all that they're objecting, I mean this is a perfectly clean form of electricity which wouldn't pollute anything and, in the event that it sank, would only deposit nuclear materials back where they came from, the Earth's Crust. Oh sorry, my anti-green group side is showing...
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Well fundamentally it's different because unlike the submarines the power plant cant launch missiles and torpedoes at you if you complain too much.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I used to be solidly anti-nuclear, but after I educated myself and weighed the pro's and con's, I realized that it's the way to go. One plant, with it's few tonnes of radioactive waste that can be reprocessed several times and then securely stored away even though it's not an immediate mortal threat, can produce as much energy as many ugly, smelly, waste-by-the-megaton, coal plants.
Really, it is the appropriate mid-range solution. Hydro plants are very good (the one in Quebec is amazingly huge), but you're limited in where you can have them. I don't agree with man-made lakes feeding Dam hydro, and tidal/wind are a ways off yet... nuclear is the way to go to get rid of gas and coal plants, that are doing more to mess up our environment than one glowing bar lost in Homers shirt ever could.
And a floating plant? It's not like it's riding on an inner tube, where one errant bb pellet is going to take the whole thing down. It doesn't exactly fill me with joy to consider it, but at the same time, it does have aspects that make sense, and if it'll get some more strip mines closed, I'm all for it.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I'm not surprised they can find someone to object to this idea - if you go far enough out, you can probably find people who object to the human race on the grounds the Earth would be better off (for some definition of "better" that I don't really understand) without us. There are people to whom the word "nuclear" is associated with nothing but disaster/mass destruction. This is understandable, but other objections have been raised to almost every form of power imaginable. Minimizing unnecessary damage to our environment is good, and I applaud the efforts to push for this goal, but there are limits to how far this can be done without becoming unrealistic. For example:
1) Wind farms are decried for noise, wiping out birds, and ruining the view.
2) Solar power is objected to in terms of the materials/processes needed to make the cells and the ecological effects of shadowing large portions of the landscape.
Geothermal is probably the only case where I don't know of any major objections, but geothermal cannot power everything we do. The fundamental truth is that extraction of energy from the surrounding environment (or introduction of it from storage by increased thermal/other emissions due to combustion/nuclear processes) MUST have an impact on the system. We cannot live without having an impact on the world around us - it is simply not possible. The concern is to minimize the negative effects of our activities while still doing what we need to do. Solar and wind appear to be much less intrusive compared to most current large scale power generation methods, and as such seem like logical directions to pursue. Reducing power usage is good but in the end our population is likely to expand either in activities or numbers to consume all possible economic power that we can generate.
I'm wondering if the folks objecting to this one are objecting on the grounds of practicality, or simply on the grounds that it is nuclear, period. If the latter, I think they will eventually need to face up to the fact that fossil fuels won't last forever and we are not going to abandon large scale power usage. The problem is thus defined as how do we sustain that usage without undue risk, not how do we live on power levels low enough to be generated without significant impact of any kind. The later is simply unrealistic and not a useful basis for discussion.
1st: Something with a 10k half-life actually isn't that dangerous, especially if you spread it around(dilution), rather than trying to keep it concentrated. It even neglects that there's still 90-99% usable fuel in that 'waste', it just needs some reprocessing. Some of the newer designs are even capable of using it with minimal reprocessing.
Should the last 65 years* be considered statically significant on the performance for the next 100,000?
* By the way, it's not good:
Not good? Compared to what? Coal power?
Particulate emissions from power blamed for 30,000 deaths/year
Coal power blamed for 22,000 premature deaths, in the USA, per year
From your links:
2000-2006: 13 workers exposed to 'slight' or 'trace' levels of radiation, one plant had increased radioactive levels about 10% over ambient for "several days" in Hungary. This was considered a critical event. Overall level probably still less than ambient in Colorado Springs. Deaths: None.
1990's: Deaths: 2 Japanese workers at a uranium reprocessing facility who violated procedures. Will likely increase to 3 eventually. Exposed: 2k or so Russian workers exposed to up to 50mSv(half the allowed 5 year dosage). Happened at a plutonium reprocessing facility; most likely nuclear weapons related. Unknown number(but probably under ten) Georgian soldiers; from a military training source, not nuclear power.
1980s: Chernobyl, currently blamed for 93k possible future deaths by Greenpeace(hardly a dispartial source), current death toll by the other side is placed at just over a hundred. The models predicting thousands of deaths use the linear no-threshold model, which is in dispute. Studys on low level radiation exposure actually suggest a negative correlation with cancer(IE more radiation, up to a point, leads to less cancer). Besides Chernobyl, there was 1 other civilian fatality, and 13 Russian navy members died in two submarine accidents. There were four other exposure incidents; half military half civilian, two escaped containment.
I'm skipping earlier than the 1980s. Nuclear power in the '70s was just under development, it'd be like using the model-T to express car safety. The models are just that different.
Even if we take greenpeace's number, pad to to 100k for two decades, that's still 1/6th the death toll as experienced in the USA ALONE for coal power over the same time. And Chernobyl was a worse than worst case scenario; especially when compared to the safety of US plants.
Even Russian power plants are far safer today; Chernobyl was their wakeup, as TMI was ours.
I don't read AC A human right