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Nuclear Emergency Declared At 2 Plants In Japan
Hugh Pickens writes "CBC reports that Japan has declared a state of emergency and called for mass evacuations near two nuclear power plants following cooling systems failures that led to radiation escaping from a reactor at one location. The emergency declarations, which include five reactors at the two plants, followed Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake off the country's northeast coast. In a troubling announcement, Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official Ryohei Shiomi said a monitoring device outside the plant detected radiation that is eight times higher than normal and an evacuation zone has been expanded from three kilometres around the plant to 10 kilometres."
Though desirable, Thorium isn't even necessary; most any modern reactor design is passively safe. Read up on the Molten Salt Reactor for one example: the reactors run at atmospheric pressure, with no active cooling necessary. The reaction naturally stops if it gets too hot, and you can literally walk away at any time. As an added benefit, they can consume other reactors waste as fuel, obviating any further mining for the next century, and the waste they produce is much smaller it quantity and far shorter lived.
The anti-nuclear comments on that site are truly depressing, as are the ignorant responses to your own post. Coal has, and continues to kill far more people than Nuclear, both from mining, as well as respiratory diseases and cancer. Coal is not clean by any measure; it has put an immense amount of radioactivity and heavy metals into our environment--far more than nuclear.
The problem is the outdated reactor designs. This is essentially the exact same failure as at Three Mile Island, although the Japanese appear to have omitted the containment dome that made TMI such a tempest in a teacup (almost no radiation actually leaked at TMI, due to the dome, but it looks like the Japanese reactors are already leaking significant amounts of radiation). The TMI accident was 32 years ago. Its design was 10 years old even then.
Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away, but installing newer plants, which would be of the modern and inherently safe designs, would allow the old ones to be decommissioned or at least overhauled. Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan) and an increasing energy demand that is already taxing our current grid at times (again, in the US, especially on the west coast), we simply can't afford to take the older plants offline.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The danger with too much wind power isn't that you get some kind of sci-fi meltdown. It's that sudden changes in wind conditions cause huge fluctuations in grid voltage that occur faster than can be balanced using hydroelectric dams or gas generator plants. If that happen it's possible for the grid to experience a cascading failure that disables the entire countries electrical system, requiring a grid-wide black start. Most countries have never performed a from-zero black start.
Simply put, this reactor design (especially without the containment dome) is less safe than Three Mile Island. We (the world at large) really need to modernize our nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, that's going to require building new reactors - we can't practically afford the loss of generating capacity to take the existing ones off the grid that long - and there is, as always, a ridiculous amount of opposition, largely from luddites who wouldn't know a molten salt reactor from a bomb shelter.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Ribbon generators and windbelts can, in arrays, compete with solar panels.
See, this is your problem. They don't need to compete with solar panels. They need to compete against coal and nuclear. They can't. True, there are oil and coal subsidies, but there are also wind and solar subsidies. You also have to figure in the cost of a massive power grid upgrade, which is not cheap.
All factored in, if you put a high value on environmental and cost issues, then nuke is the way to go.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."