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Robert X Cringely Predicts More Mininuke Plants
LandGator writes "PC pundit Robert X Cringely had a life before writing 'Triumph of the Nerds' for PBS: He covered the atomics industry and reported on Three Mile Island. In this blog post, he analyzes the Fukushima reactor failures, and suggests the end result will be a rapid growth in small, sealed 'package' nuclear reactors such as the Toshiba 4S generator considered for Galena, Alaska. He thinks Japan may have little choice, and with rolling blackouts scheduled, he may be right."
I'd be fine with it. I think it's a way to go.
But nuclear power still has the stigma of Chernobyl. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to scream NO at the top of their lungs and most will probably point at Japan's current situation and say "You see why it's a bad idea".
Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream. Instead of pumping tons of crud into the air I'm fine with some barrels of toxic waste so long as they don't cut costs on the storage.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
the toshiba 4S is a sodium metal reactor. take that and shove it 30m underground to produce 10MW of power. awesome.
until you factor in the earthquake and tsunami.
water + sodium = BIG BOOM.
and the fact that regulatory approvals take a shitload of time for EACH reactor.
and you need 1200 of them to even come close to meeting demand.
and 1200 x 100s of days of regulatory paperwork is much more than 2-4 conventional plants with 100s of days of paperwork each.
not to mention environmental impact assessments at EACH SITE for EACH of those 1200 reactors.
the toshiba design needs to use lead and be rebuilt. the legal process needs to change which will take longer than it takes to build conventional plants. in short... NO.
Thousands died from the quake, and all they are writing about is what's happening in those reactors.
Every summer more people die of heat stroke than have died from ALL NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS COMBINED since the nuclear industry began.
With all this melodrama, priorities will be shifted in the public's minds. They will believe that reducing the, so far inexistent, deaths from the Fukushima reactors is more important than reducing the emission of greenhouse effect gases.
There are some indications of radioactive cesium and iodine.
Yeah, great. "Some indications" is evidence enough to make them want to shutdown nuclear power entirely, while overwhelming evidence for catastrophic global warming is disputed as "unconfirmed" or something like that.
If the same criteria were used for CO2 generation as is used for nuclear power, burning fossil fuels would have been outlawed long ago.
Wow, you have a direct feed from the Crack News Network or something?
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore? Why was there a spike of radioactivity in Tokyo, a couple hundred miles away -- are the winds really traveling 240km per couple minutes? What about the breach in in the containment of reactor two?
More interestingly, what about the torus half full of water under the reactor -- will the building withstand a steam explosion when the core at some thousands of degrees hits that level, breaches the container, and releases the water? That's a big question that the US Atomic Energy Commission first asked in 1972. Cited from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
These Japanese reactors are old and fairly well understood while Chernobyl was brand new. These Japanese reactors had already been in service for 16 years when Chernobyl melted down. In comparative terms there is no comparison — Chernobyl was vastly worse.
My reading: older, better known reactor designs are safer.
If I were to predict a clear winner in Japan’s new nuclear future it would be Toshiba with its innovative 4S (Super Safe Small and Simple) reactors.
My reading: the solution for Japan is to use a new reactor design.
My mind started to melt down, time for a cold ale to arrest the chain reaction in reaching the level of critical... well... thinking.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Joe Sixpack should also look at the current mess in Libya and Bahrain. Count the number of lives lost there and compare that to the number of lives lost to the reactors in Japan. How many lives have been lost in wars over oil? Tell me again which energy source is a better choice?
At the end of the day, we can learn from what's happening in Japan and build even better reactors. What can be done about the despots ruling oil rich countries?
We have a church near where I work that has a prominent nuclear free zone sign on it.
I wonder what they're going to do about the uranium in the granitic rock that some of it is made of.
But, in any case, I'm sure the sign will make a lot of difference. If someone explodes a nuclear weapon, they'll be sure to do it across the street where there isn't any sign.
ask any Victorian about their willingness to live near Hazelwood (note: Moe is near there...)
A nuclear dump? Well I wouldn't want piles of crap sitting around in a vacant lot, but if it was miles below ground I wouldn't have a problem with it. And if I was next to a nuke plant instead of a coal plant, I'd get less radiation...
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I'm pro-nuclear but i'm sick of this downplaying bullshit. Reactors that require actively powered safety systems ARE flawed.
This entire crises we have had absolute dickheads claiming that the radiation levels are safe at a time when people in the immediate vicinity are being encouraged to evacuate by the authorities. There is a radiation leak. This is a fact. Up to 400mSv/h near the reactor has been confirmed (noticable radiation sickness will happen at 800 and above, but 400 is still very, very dangerous). People need to be acknowledging that fact. Much smaller than Chernobyl but there's no reason to downplay it. There are some heroes right now working in the irradiated zone trying to keep things under control. There are people in the immediate area who should leave for the next few days.
Assholes like the guy who wrote the following "even if you were standing at the top of the cooling tower you would be fine" and "fukushima is currently safe and will stay safe" should be sent to help maintain the reactors without any protective suit. Link: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
Enough with the downplaying. The design WAS flawed. People ARE risking their lives to contain it. We should learn from this.
I know. How stupid that "Joe Sixpack" would not want what's happening at the Japanese reactors to happen here.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the primary...wait for it...containment chambers! in the No 2 Fukushima reactor has been breached. Not because of the earthquake (if I'm reading this correctly) but because of the tsunami which overwhelmed the cooling systems causing the fuel to be exposed to air, causing a hydrogen explosion. That's what caused the mini-mushroom cloud that the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier. But that couldn't happen here because the corporations that build our nuclear plants would never cut any corners on safety because the "free market" insures that every possible safety measure has been taken.
Personally, I'm going to wait a few months and then eat a bunch of imported Japanese pickles. Maybe I'll get superpowers.
Seriously, I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other about nuclear power. But it bothers me when I hear proponents ridiculing "Joe Sixpack" for being a little alarmed about fuel rods exposed to the atmosphere and breaches in...wait for it...containment chambers!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Let's not forget things like mercury emission - we only so far managed to pollute most lakes and oceans with coal-sourced mercury. This is actually why governments say to use mercury-containing CFS (compact fluorescent lights), because they will emit less mercury via accidental breakage or dumping of them at landfill, than a regular bulb results in emissions at a coal power plant to supply it.
We are talking tons of mercury vapors emitted every single year. Hell, I remember that most polluted areas of some countries have mercury index for outside air!!! I'd take nuclear with its problems over inability to breathe and guaranteed early death. Cleanest air in Europe is in France for a reason. China, of course, will be building their 160 nuclear power plants, maybe more. 100+ will be passively safe and many orders of magnitude safer than current designs in operation around western world. It is up to the western world if they want safe, secure energy, or rely on the Saudi prince to be kind enough to sell them some.
And of course you are correct w.r.t. CO2 and global meltdown. CO2 is resulting in a meltdown that will affect generations and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. Some of us are just too narrow minded to see it.
You've vastly oversimplified what's going on. First of all, it's pretty clear that the first level of containment (the zirco-alloy cladding on the fuel) has failed. There's been radioactive iodine and cesium detected outside the plant, indicating the fuel rods have at least partially melted.
Those two can get outside the primary containment vessel because their primary cooling system is broken. Normally there are two water loops to keep the core cool. The inner water loop is a closed system which carries heat from the core to a heat exchanger. There the heat gets transferred to an outer water loop (ocean water in this case), which does the actual cooling. The inner loop water never leaves the plant, and thus not even the radioactive tritium which gets formed leaves the plant.
When the electrical systems and backups failed, that cooling system ceased to function. The only way they have to cool the core right now is to directly vent the water surrounding the core. Vent the steam, lower the pressure, cool the core. Best case you're releasing radioactive tritium. But since the rods have melted, the water is now in direct contact with the uranium fuel and fission products. That's where the radioactive iodine and cesium come from. Iodine is gaseous (so escapes along with the venting), and cesium is water soluble.
That's where we were at yesterday. It rated a 5 on the INES nuclear safety scale, which was the same as Three Mile Island. Unfortunately, today has had two very, very bad developments.
First, there's reports that the containment vessel for reactor #2 is damaged. No confirmation and no details. For whatever reason TEPCO and the Japanese government are being tight-lipped about it. Second, apparently some of the debris broke through the wall of building 4 and exposed a huge, huge flaw in the system. They have spent fuel rods and unused fuel rods sitting in storage pools outside of containment. The only thing protecting them is the water in the pool, and the building walls surrounding them. Walls which have blown apart in buildings #1 and #3, and have holes in #2 and #4.
Supposedly some of these spent fuel rods in building #4 caught fire (they're still experiencing nuclear decay, so still generating heat; just at a much, much slower rate than in reactors #1-#3 which were shut down recently). The water in the pool is supposed to keep them cool, but with the electricity gone, they suffered the same cooling failure as in reactors #1-#3. It just took a lot longer for the problem to exhibit itself since the amount of heat they were generating was much lower. Anyway, supposedly some of these rods caught fire, which corresponds to the sharp spike in radiation release yesterday. Those radiation readings dropped back down to "normal" again after the fire was put out.
But if those spent fuel rods have boiled off enough water to expose them to the air, then there is nothing stopping them from heating up. They will melt, possibly catch fire, and worst case they will start fissioning again after melting into a slag at the bottom of the pool. And all of this will happen outside of containment. Basically, the situation right now is only slightly better than what we had in Chernobyl - a hot core exposed to the atmosphere with a fire. That's why the situation was upgraded to a 6 on the INES scale today.
If the rods catch fire, it'll basically be the same as Chernobyl again. Maybe a bit smaller since the fuel isn't as hot as in
I agree, but can we please maybe put all the unemployed NASA folks in charge of nuclear power instead of the corporations? I'm not so much worried about nuclear power as I am about the same energy corporations who have demanded a cap on liability being in charge of it. And none of this "regulators who used to work for the power industry and who will again work for the power industry when they leave government" crap. I want civil engineers, who are paid by taxpayers and are not being pressured by ownership to skip a few steps to save a few bucks on safety measures. It's one of those areas where I'm OK with a little of that horrible "inefficiency of government" doing the job instead of a "lean and mean" multinational.
Energy is too important to leave in the hands of private industry. Like health care. And education. And national defense. And drug safety. And social security. I'm OK with private industry taking a crack at everything else. If they promise to be good, and none of this "liability cap" and "subsidy" nonsense.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just in case ... what minearl would you want to have in plentiful supply near your new nuclear reactor? How about galena. The raw mineral form of LEAD should absorb a few screaming subatomic particles. I think Galena, Alaska is a terrific place for this project.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
The Toshiba 4S is a reactor with a 10 MW capacity. The peak summer load in New England is 28,130 MW (see link below). So you would need 2,813 of these reactors. Get 50% of New England's power from nukes and thats still 1406.5. Whats the cost to protect them by the way?
Sure, its the next best thing for Galena Alaska. For national energy policy, this is completely irrelevant.
http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/new-england.asp#gen
Your sarcasm is well placed. The BWR design with a pressure-supression pool was designed so that a weaker containment system could be built as a, you guessed it, cost cutting measure. This design was been questioned in 1972 by S.H. Hanauer. Of course, because of the weaker design and the requirement for many valves and backup valves (which are notoriously unreliable), Hanauer concluded that costs are probably about the same as the safer dry containment system.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Are you personally willing to live next to a toxic waste dump from a coal fired plant or a petroleum refinery or even a solar panel manufacturing plant? There's this think about the word "nuclear" that makes people automatically assume the worst.
5 digit slashdot UID is a resume builder now?
Wow are you really an American? You're views seem far too balanced and with a distinct lack of over-simplification. I'd mod you insightful but I don't have any mod points =(
The nuclear reactors in Fukushima are boiling water reactors. It uses water for coolant, which boils as it flows through the reactor chamber, goes through a heat exchanger, and is recirculated. Since the coolant systems are not functioning properly, they are dumping saltwater into the coolant lines, letting it boil off, and vent out into the atmosphere through pressure release valves. This is releasing radiation, however it is a small amount, and containing elements with short half-lives that will decay rapidly and cease to be a danger. This has been happening for several days
This steam release is very energetic. It is so energetic that the water is spontaneously disassociating to hydrogen and oxygen. When you get large volumes of hydrogen and oxygen, along with a high temperature source, you're going to have an explosion. There is no way around that, but it is not an indicator that the containment vessel has breached and the core is exposed.
The reports of a breach in reactor #2 appear to be part of the coolant system. The suppression chamber has developed a crack, which lead to an uncontrolled release of coolant, as the system depressurized to atmospheric. This resulted in a large venting of radiation as it depressurized, but now, the situation is no different than at the controlled steam releases at the other reactors. The containment vessel is still intact. Corium is not flowing out of the containment vessel. There is not currently any risk of it being released and contaminating the ground water.
Of course we are willing to have it next door. Do you really think we are lying when we say we think it's safe, in spite of the abundant evidence rolling in from Japan right now that even ancient relic ford-T reactors are safe in the face of much more forceful attack than designed for including the most serious failure mode possible for these ancient reactors (loss of cooling). Now a coal mine, that you could not get me to live next door to.
That was the housing outside the containment dome. That housing is not a safety feature which is the whole reason that there are not systems in place to prevent build-up of hydrogen gas outside the containment like there is inside the containment. It could have been done, it just wasn't important to do it since an explosion outside the containment is not a hazard to the reactor and it would only occur in situations such as this which exceeds what the reactor is designed to withstand. Obviously it's bad for staff nearby the explosion, though. As far as reactor safety goes, these explosions are non-issues.
Edano press conference going on right now. You can stream an english language translation of NHK from ustream.
Some of things he's said so far:
Radiation reached 1000 millisievert around #3 reactor for a while; all personnel were withdrawn at that time but it's lowering so they can go back in; may be a breach in #3 containment; spent fuel pool materials might reach criticality but this is not certain and probably won't happen; pouring in water can create its own risks; TEPCO is providing confusing info; dropping water from above risky to helicopters; radiation is reducing rapidly; he may have mispoke using milli instead of micro.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
nat geo: small town nukes
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/08/mini-nukes
i have the magazine somewhere, but cant seem to find the article at a glance and dont remember if the print article was any longer.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
ask any Victorian about their willingness to live near Hazelwood (note: Moe is near there...)
That's Victoria, Australia folks. Home of the meanest belching brown-coal moonscape and Pink-Floyd nightmare of a 1950's power station. And Moe (pronounced "mowie") is a Township, not a Stooge. Or was, anyhow. Just in case you needed more detail. Bad idea to leave your clothes out on the line for any length of time.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Well since the Ronald Reagan is a nuclear-powered ship itself, I am guessing that the political angle has nothing to do with it. If I am captain of a nuclear powered vessel, chances are I understand the consequences of hanging out downstream of a radioactive plume. 1) there is no reason to expose oneself to any radioactive contamination, no matter how inconsequential. 2) If my ship gets contaminated with radioactive particulates, how do I now distinguish that from contamination that might come about from a mishandling of radioactive material on ship or release of radioactivity from the reactor on board?
No, it is NOT a completely appropriate response. Using a 45 year old Gen 1 design, that's performed admirably in this situation, is not a legitimate reason to rail against Gen 4 designs. Where's Car Analogy Guy when we need him to work something up comparing the Model T to the Tesla.
Grow up? Fabulous argument, but I digress. You can provide facts, evidence, etc. all day long. The general public is full of fools who will side with whatever talking point is on the news that day. It is black and white. Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop. There is no grey area, and you do a disservice not only to the nuclear energy sector, but to science and technology as a whole by allowing morons to debate using emotion instead of fact and scientific fact.
First off, the fuel pellets in these boiling water reactors are made of uranium dioxide -- a ceramic which has a melting point of 2,865 degrees Celsius and the zircaloy cladding melts somewhere in the range of 1,850 to 1,975 degrees Celsius (depends on which alloy they are using). I could not even find a combustion temperature for either material. That doesn't matter, though, because the temperature of the spent fuel in the pool would be somewhere around 200 degrees Celsius, depending on how long it had been taken out of the reactor.
So it is unreasonable to speculate that the fuel rods have `caught fire`.
Secondly, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that an oil leak in a cooling water pump at Unit 4 was the cause of the fire the media keeps talking about.
I would strongly suggest anybody interested in following this event watch that web page and/or this one for accurate, knowledgeable, non-scaremongering reporting. I've heard too many news reports totally screw the facts up. (Like when they reported there was a 3rd explosion when really it was the 2nd explosion that happened in the #3 reactor building.)
Most probably expense, infrastructure and suitability. Liquid nitrogen is damn expensive. Oceanwater is cheap. Liquid nitrogen needs to somehow be delivered to the core to cool it, and this without fracturing or damaging any of the pipework along the way. In the oil industry using liquid nitrogen to freeze pipes is nearly universally classed as an incredibly high risk activity. Finally for suitability, the way I understand it is that the reactor doesn't need to be cooled to a certain temperature quickly, but rather it needs continuous cooling while the reaction decays down slowly meaning you'll need a LOT of the stuff, and it isn't all that easy to come by.
There are competitive reasons to avoid a core meltdown, namely that the reactor would need to be replaced at incredible cost.
And how is that a problem for the senior executives and the shareholders who built and profited from a reactor 5, 10 or 40 years ago and have since cashed out?
Geeks seem to have the quaint notion that corporations will somehow protect themselves from exposure to massive liabilities in order to preserve themselves. But - in spite of the recent United States Supreme Court ruling to the contrary - corporations are not people. Corporations - especially the really big ones - are a vehicle which really rich and powerful people use to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Think of them as big Saturn V rockets - they burn up all of their fuel and discard most of their structure and mass in the process of delivering their real payload into financial orbit; the rich goons and wealthy investors running the operation.
There are plenty of billionaire psychopaths who are more than willing and able to destroy their "own" corporation if it can make them an extra few million dollars, provided they can skip away without being held responsible for any of the mess they leave behind. It's perfectly rational behavior, if you're a psychopath.
Mozillo over at Countrywide made $500 million dollars in a single year while shoveling fraudulent mortgages out the door like they were McDonalds hamburgers. He still has the billion plus dollars he made during his tenure running Countrywide, and he's protected by an army of lawyers and bought-and-paid-for representatives in government. He doesn't care that Countrywide was destroyed, as it served his purpose - it made him rich. The taxpayers and the customers of and investors in Countrywide have been left on the hook to clean up the mess.
You wanna trust these guys with nuclear power plants and - worse - tons of nuclear waste? Good luck with that!
I'm wondering why they can't pump liquid nitrogen in there to cool it down. Didn't they do that at Chernobyl?
Not clear on whether this was done before, however one reason to not do it is that it's not needed. IF you can get water to the problem, water would be good enough to have the needed cooling effect. Keyword being IF. Apparently this is not exactly working out.
LN2 would have a lot more cooling power but in this case it would be more than would be needed, plus there's no logistics solution for supplying LN2 in quantity. It takes tanker trucks or rail cars to transport mass quantities of LN2 and in this case it would take a LOT of them. Roads and rails may or may not be damaged. I'd tend toward wrecked based on pictures.
For sea water, it's as simple as "run some hoses out to the ocean, or tap the existing ocean water lines" which is what was done. All the water you can use, for free.
Perhaps the only saving grace is that the Fukushima #1 plant was built on the ocean so they do have all that water to use. However, water is also what killed them.
Sig for hire.
The ash from coal plants is radioactive. Coal has low concentrations of radioactive elements in it. When you burn the coal the radioactive elements are among the ash and are at a higher concentration of the ash than they are of the source coal.
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/coalandcoalash.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
A lot of the commentary about radioactivity and coal plants come from this Scientific American article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Many people read the headline of that article and didn't really bother to read the article. The argument that Scientific American makes is that a coal plant puts more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear waste is still obviously more radioactive than the ash. However, the nuclear plant carefully controls their waste and materials.
In both cases the radiation released is low and not a health risk.
Sorry to tell you this, but coal ash in Europe contains uranium, too—about 80-135 ppm, in fact. And similar levels can be found in Australian coal. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most coal deposits that are readily accessible are probably contaminated with a fair amount of uranium....
Also, the uranium problems from burning coal aren't just about smoke. If a plant does not use scrubbers, the uranium goes up into the atmosphere. However, if it does have scrubbers, the uranium still ends up in the fly ash. They dump that ash into giant ash pits that leach those heavy metals into the water supply, into rivers, etc.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
1) this was a *SPIKE* of 400 mSv, not a continuous 400 mSv/h. case in point soon afterward it descended to 12 mSv/h and now is at 0.6 mSv/h. This is what happens when you get your news from CNN. Citate : "Japanese authorities told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that radiation levels at the plant site between units 3 and 4 reached a peak of some 400 millisieverts per hour. "This is a high dose-level value," said the body, "but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time." Later readings were 11.9 millisieverts per hour, followed six hours later by 0.6 millisieverts, which the IAEA said "indicate the level of radioactivity has been decreasing." "
2) Japan *automatically* evacuate people as a precaution, not as a need ! Just like tsunami drill this is something Japan implemented to be on the SAFE side.
3) radioactivity , a doubling of the normal background rate of Tokyo was measured. Big Fucking Deal. if an inhabitant from tokyo was moving to my region it would take *FIVE* time the background radioactivity they get now per year : about 10 millisievert. And if they were moving to those naturally radioactive hot spring in iran they would get about 80 times the dose.
While i agree that downplaying the problem is not so good, UPPLAYING it as you made is adding to the fucking media circus fear mongering.
It is a bad situation at the moment, but not a catastrophal one. The likely scenario at the moment, is that the fuel goes into containment, a bit of radioactivity might escape, but basically the plant will have to be written off, and the REAKL environmental catastrophe will be all the chemical from chem plants washed inshore over crop field by the tsunami, the destroyed towns, and the dead people. The reactor at the moment isn't even a BLIP compared to that.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Water has a specific heat of 4.187 kJ/kgK and a heat of vaporization of 2,270 kJ/kg.
Liquid nitrogen has a specific heat of 2.042 kJ/kgK and a heat of vaporization of 199.1 kJ/kgK, and a specific heat of 1.04 kJ/kgK when gas.
So putting in 1 kg of water at 20 C and extracting it as steam at 100 C removes (4.187)*80 + 2270 = 2605 kJ of heat energy from the reactor.
Putting in 1 kg of liquid nitrogen at -200 C and extracting it at 100 C removes (2.042)*4 + 199.1 + (1.04)*296 = 515 kJ of heat energy from the reactor.
Per kg, water removes over 5x more heat energy than liquid nitrogen. The only reason to use liquid nitrogen is if you wanted to drop the temperature below the boiling point of water. AFAIK radioactive decay is not influenced by temperature, so there would be no benefit to doing that here.
If I had to guess, the Soviets had to encase an active pile in-situ with concrete. Concrete tends to be very temperature-sensitive when curing - too hot and it'll crack. So they probably used liquid nitrogen to drop the temperature to where the concrete which initially contacted the pile could cure without cracking.
I do not know how people think in the US, but in many European countries the idea of nuclear plants even small ones or special sealed ones has not many friends. We have a dense population structure and therefor such things would be even closer to populated areas.With more of these things more can fail and even if their impact is smaller than that of failing reactors, they still can fail. If there is a worst case scenario with a broken containment which does harm to the environment we do not want it. As it has been shown that those things happen.
As population in many European states does not like nuclear power, nuclear power will not be used for more than 50 years.
I own a very big building with many floors, and over 100 apartments on it, and I think a small nuclear plant is just what I need. I will place it just below the roof of the building, on the highest floor. It gets flooded every now and then because I sincerely don't have enough time to repair it, but I think this nuke should stand this and much more. I will just place it there, plug it in and just forget that I have it. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
Would you rather lose a few years off your old age (after having retired from a career and seen and played with your grandkids), or face a very small chance of dying soon after a devastating nuclear disaster?
Joe Schmoe has chosen the former, and it's entirely logical. Known risk vs. small chance of catastrophe.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Seriously, stop comparing the number of deaths caused. Every single death is one too many. You sound like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and cancer. Stop ignoring the dangers in case large amounts of radioactive particles leak and spread. One time is too many.
Every single death is one too many? Whilst that's a nice ideal, it's entirely impractical because life is inherently risky. You also make it sound like contamination is solely a nuclear issue. Couple of events for you to ponder:
By your logic we should also ban coal mining and oil drilling, a hell of a lot people die from accidents whilst extracting these and they contaminate the landscape with carcinogens galore. Frankly we have to manage the risk, because nobody wants to give up their car or central heating quite yet.
I am entirely pro-nuke, and I am sick as fuck of you industry apologists poisoning the debate. Of course nuclear power isn't safe. There hasn't been a "safe" form of power since the dawn of mankind.
That is part of the problem. Its well documented coal is far, far more dangerous than nuclear power. Period. But the sad truth is, anti-nukers are making the world more dangerous for everyone. Anti-nukers have scared the general public so badly, the word nuclear is now, officially, a scary word, having extremely negative connotations. Its so bad, MNRI was renamed to MRI. Guess what the N stood for. They had to do that because people refused to receive diagnostic treatment.
Anti-nukers also prevent the rapid adoption of safer nuclear technologies. They increase the cost everyone pays for energy. They are literally the reason why many reactors are run past their certified lifetime rather than being decommissioned and replaced with modern, safer, varieties.
Literally, the world would be a better place if all anti-nukers dropped dead tomorrow.
But ignoring all that, part of the problem is you're speaking of things in absolutes. Most people, when they say, "safe", they are speaking in relative terms. The problem is, most people don't realize there is a difference. In relative terms, nuclear power is one of the safest, if not the safest, form or power we have. It is by far safer and cleaner than coal. But in absolute terms, you are of course correct, no form of power generation is safe or clean. None. And that's where the rhetoric comes in. Anti-nukers lie and tell people nuclear is dangerous and everything else is safe. Meaning they speak of the dangers of non-nuclear power in relative terms and they go out of their way to speak of nuclear power in absolutes.
Allow me to complete some of your sentences for you:
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore
"...because the only reason an aircraft carrier would move in this situation is if the radiation posed an immediate deadly risk, and not as any sort of precautionary measure."
Why was there a spike of radioactivity in Tokyo, a couple hundred miles away -- are the winds really traveling 240km per couple minutes...
"...because sensors for detecting radiation only detect deadly levels, and there's no way this signal means that the levels detected might be harmless."
What about the breach in in the containment of reactor two?
"...because everyone knows that when you put 'breach' and 'containment' in the same sentence, that means Chernobyl!"
And since you're having this discussion in the context of safety of nuclear power generation, have you stopped to look at what's happened with Japan's non-nuclear power generation facilities? How do you think the US's coal power system would fare? Have you looked at newer nuclear power technologies (e.g. Thorium)?