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Americans Favor Moratorium On New Nuclear Reactors
An anonymous reader writes "While a drop in public support for nuclear power would be expected after an incident like the Fukushima reactor crisis, the nuclear disaster in Japan has triggered a much stronger response among Americans. When Japan — the nation that President Obama held up as an example of safe nuclear power being used on a large-scale basis — is unable to effectively control its considerable downside, Americans are understandably leery about the same technology being used even more extensively in this nation. And safety concerns about the existing nuclear plants also deserve serious attention."
Seeing a large nuclear disaster has made people wary of nuclear power.. now that's just shocking!
All seriousness though, between the American media fear mongering and the fact that there is actually something to be afraid of, this isn't too surprising.
I still personally think that nuclear power is the best bet. I imagine (and this is an uneducated opinion) all the junk coal and oil plants pump out under regular circumstances is probably going to kill more people than the japan nuclear crisis over the long run, and alternative energy just isn't close enough for people to wait.
I am beginning to think that my fellow Americans are afraid of success. We claim we want energy independence, but do very little to achieve it, despite valid and workable options staring us in the face. New reactors are precisely what we need in this situation (with more modern safety features compared to the reactors in Japan as well as decreasing our reliance on foreign energy).
With something like 20% of the US's electricity presently coming from nuclear power and *all* of those reactors approaching or already past their lifespan, all those Americans need to decide what exactly they want to replace them with.
While certainly worrisome, please keep in mind:
* Nobody has actually died from this incident yet. (Versus regular deaths in coal mines, etc.)
* The incident can be learned from and other reactors can be improved accordingly. (Again versus the situation in many coal mines, etc. which are unlikely to see any further improvement.) In fact, many claim the risks of these particular reactors were known but not acted upon, something which can be handled with stricter rules.
Poorly informed people, lead by sensationalist news stories, when asked leading questions, will give obvious answers.
moratorium, until we have at least a 20% wind power and 10% solar power in the energy mix.
What? Do you think that a truck rolls up and sets up the ACME Nuclear Power Station and they're rock'in? It takes years for a nuke plant to come on line. In the meantime, the solar and wind and whatever will have to be developed and implemented.
This just disgusts me. The ignorant public (who can blame them since all their info is from TV and shit websites) will keep nuclear on the sidelines for decades.
Wind / Solar along with NAS batteries -> http://www.ngk.co.jp/english/products/power/nas/index.html - really could handle our base load. Certainly the percentage that we in the US use nuclear for.
Not only that, we should be looking at new computerized internet electric meters, and laws that would require utilities to pay fair market value for electricity produced by small private generators. Little 5KW vertical turbines everywhere. Then, just put huge battery installations where the old coal plants are, and we are on the road to green energy.
Not today obviously, but it would grow. And new nuke plants would just not be needed. At least Uranium water/water plants. Thorium / Pebble Bed Reactors might be an option for the future.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Not all americans
Like anyone can even know that
I'm not against renewables but I fear the US will just do the same as Germany when it came to replace the electricity that would have been provided by nuclear reactors: talks about renewable energy, buy nuclear electrecity from neighbors and burn more coal.
If one were especially worried about certain classes of mishap, it would make far more sense to favour replacing existing reactors as soon as possible. For example, modern convectively-cooled PWR designs are not subject to the kind of cooling failure that occurred in Japan when external power was lost. Not allowing the construction of new plants is the worst of both worlds; the older designs continue to operate at a lower level of safety than new ones would, yet we're still forced to look to coal and gas as our energy needs grow. And not building new plants does nothing to address the problems associated with storage of spent fuel and other waste, which as seen in Japan and fought over for years in the US and elsewhere is a far greater problem than the operational safety of even the oldest BWRs. Fish or cut bait.
Nothing can be made safe to a 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Nothing. You can't build or plan for it.
The fact of the matter is, given the nature of the earthquake, the situation in the Dai-Ichi plant has been extraordinarily well contained. There have been only a very few casualties (due to hydrogen explosions), and the radiation leakage has been so low-level that it's unlikely to cause any measurable harm.
What's more, current designs are even safer than the Dai-Ichi plant (which is over forty years old), and don't require external power or working generators to safely shut down (convection of coolant will do it).
Many people die from complications of coal mining, etc. No form of power generation is completely safe, and if you look at the statistics, even now nuclear is by far the safest.
We have the technology for much safer and nearly unlimited nuclear power. Only hurdle is how to deploy. What I am talking about is TWR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor) and LFTR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor). They "burn" waste from current reactors, can be shut-of nearly instantly, no water cooling, and a smaller footprint and cost. Now we have to overcome this bad publicity provided by the old technology.
Journal
I find it amusing how US media is worried about Fukushima nuclear contamination of Japan and surrounding arrea, including US territories or... Europe. They seem to forgot hundreds of nuclear tests made by the US both in Pacific and continental US. I wonder which event released more radioactive material in the atmosphere, a few hundreds nuclear test or the damaged reactors from Fukushima? (and I'm not even considering detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
More Britons support the building of new nuclear power stations than oppose it, despite the crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant, an opinion poll says.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I certainly don't mind nuclear power any more than I did before the accident. I've lived near a nuclear plant since I was a child and obviously toyed with the notion that it might blow up. I learned to live with it and rather enjoy the idea that there's a powerful, clean energy source so near to where I reside! "Does this surprise anybody?" is a rhetorical question; America's "reaction" to crises like these is uniformly pious.
Just the ones who are easily influenced by questions that are designed to produce the answers desired to support whatever political agenda the media is trying to push.
This is the same kind of senseless knee-jerk reaction that happened after the oil spill... it is like issuing a moratorium on building new cars because someone crashed a 1974 Pinto and it spilled some coolant on the ground.
Yup. Due to the news media's disgusting exaggeration of the event, , and the 60+ years of "all radiation = bad = kill you dead", a bunch of people who don't understand a thing about nuclear power generation from the 60's, let alone modern reactor technologies are going to browbeat the power industry into the least effectual, most expensive forms of power generation. And it'll be the power industry's fault when power prices skyrocket. It'll also be the power industry's fault when these sources of power fail at maintaining baseline power levels.
Way to fucking go. Decision by committee of imbeciles.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yes, lets stick with the ancient reactors we have now instead of upgrading to safer modern designs.
Politically not a bad move. If anything goes wrong they can point to the succession of previous governments who continued the use and the politicians who gave the go-ahead in the old people's home.
If they permit a new reactor and something goes wrong it would be their fault.
In the meantime the gas and coal will be developed and implemented. Going for excess renewables is both energetic and economic suicide.
If I understand the process correctly (unlikely), the control rods dampen the reaction and keep things generally under control in the reactor?
Seems like I recall there was a lot of news a few years ago about safer designs where the control rods themselves are elevated by the power that the plant produces, and if that fails, they they fall into the reactor automatically when power fails. Seems like some designs with natural failover systems like those would be a good place to start, so that safety systems themselves don't in turn rely on power to function at a basic level. You would think gravity fed water for cooling in the event of a failure systems would also be a given.
What nuclear industry wants:
build new plants and keep the old ones running
What ecologists wants:
close old plants and stop building new ones
Compromise:
keep old plants running and stop building new ones. It's cheaper for the nuclear industry
and it ensures no nuclear plants in the long term. That's the worst solution in terms of security.
Sane thing to do if you care about security
Close old plants and replace them with new safer ones.
.
...Over half (53 percent) of Americans would now support "a moratorium on new nuclear reactor construction in the United States," if "increased energy efficiency and off the shelf renewable technologies such as wind and solar could meet our energy demands for the near term."
Emphasis mine.
Breaking News. American Taxpayers demand Buddy Holly Bobble Heads!
Our carefully constructed survey has found that over 80% of Americans want the government to give them a 10 foot tall Buddy Holly bobble head doll at the end of the April tax deadline... but only if the doll in question was filled with millions of dollars and constructed of solid gold.
The two most damaging hurricanes in the history of the US had very little effect on the nuclear plants directly in their path. Not every place in the US can experience a 9.0 quake and then a tsunami right after that.
Good feelings and hopes for tomorrow!
Hey, Americans refuse to face the economic facts that threaten to bring down the United States, and earnestly believe that money (value) grows on trees, so why should they concern themselves with silly things like the practical side of supplying energy? Just write a law mandating that all power come from safe, cheap, and renewable sources and call it a day.
That should do it!
What a terrible article, there is no way solar and wind energy will replace nuclear power, not even in the next 50 years with the improvements that can be made. Where are these American statistics gathered anyway? I guess international spoof.
I wouldn't say "no way" but it would require government compulsory purchase of land and a production effort equivalent to highway building. People forget what can be done in a decade if you have to (I saw a TV program showing how radar went from a back of the envelope calculation to a test in two weeks, an operational station in a month and a network along the UK coast in 6 months because a war was on)
I just got a postcard from 2211, They said to go with solar when we can... all the wind farms permanently damaged the jetstream and now the equator is 180 farenheit and the poles are -200.
Until we get the solar thing figured out, they recommend nuclear power; just try not to use 40-year-old reactors that are built on the ocean and within 150 miles of a major faultline.
Yes. That is how current designs function. They use an electromagnetic to hold the control rods up. When the power for the electromagnet is severed the control rods fall into place. Fukushima reactor designed featured control rods that were lifted into the reactor.
That said, control rods weren't the problem at Fukushima.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Off course not. Especially if wind energy is only seen as a green excuse. When wind turbines have to run in sync with the "real" energy on the grid. As long as we do not take "alternative" energy serious, it wont be serious.
Holland has had an entire industrial period based on wind energy. In a time that aerodynamics were far less developed than now. If you see what can be done and has been done in the past, the "wind energy is allowed as long as we can plug in in without any effort" attitude is a real shame.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Or maybe I should move to China, where whatever the government's failings, the polity still has its head located well outside its intestinal tract.
Probably related to the fact that a large percentage of the people running China have technical backgrounds (engineering, science, etc.)
The minute gasoline hits $10/gallon. Crude is still on an up trend and the scary thing is this time it's not a bubble, it's a clear trend.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why do you think nuclear shouldn't be on the sidelines? As it stands today, it requires tons of extremely toxic substances to be housed inside a super-heated pressure vessel. It seems like a recipe for disaster. There are safer designs that basically can't melt down (like molten salt reactors where the core is already liquid and liquid metal cooled fast reactors where fission essentially stops inside the reactor if it gets too hot) but they seem too expensive to be viable.
So, Deepwater Horizon (and hundreds of other smaller disasters, still with larger environmental impact than the Fukushima incident) never happened?
The reality is that nuclear is safer than oil, and yet there is so much fear, It's like airplanes, occasionaly one falls down and people are afraid of flying even though it is 100x safer than driving a car which people do every day without fear.
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Even then, it's only New Jersey.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
There haven't been any accidents in the USA that resulted in leaked radiation. 60 years of experience suggest that your assertion, "no amount of mitigation makes it a rational chance to take", is incorrect. Experience suggests that in fact risk can be managed. "billions of years" is also incorrect: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chernobyl-Still-Radioactive-After-23-Years-129912.shtml
Making the Internet a better place for everyone...Delineal
So we should block out the sun over large cities? The sun gives off more radiation than a nuclear reactor.
Common sense would suggest a moratorium on the old nuclear reactors of the type used in Fukushima and rapid construction of new safer alternatives which exist. But again, asking for common sense is demanding too much:-)
It's so hard, understandably, to argue for nuclear energy after something like this. No matter what any scientists say the general public will never be able to grasp how relatively safe nuclear power is. So long as we don't construct every single one of them in a region which has it's own damn nickname for how many earthquakes it gets people shouldn't be concerned about it being destroyed by a natural disaster. There are plenty of nuclear power plants in places like the Gulf Coast which are hit, hard, by hurricanes every year. In the end we have no other way of generating power as refined (no pun intended) and readily available as nuclear power.
americans will find themselves enthusiastic about nuclear power
oh right, sorry, i forgot, for all of those in denial: cheap easy petroleum will last forever! there is no increasing worldwide demand! supply is not harder to dig up and process! yeah!
pfffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I read contradictory statements regarding this topic.
If the stuff is going to become scarce in 150-200 years or so (these estimates are at current consumption levels but do they really know for sure I doubt it) then I really don't see the point in developing another dead end infrastructure. Esp one that while can be very safe, rarely is in practice (for the usual nontechnical reasons - save money, cut corners, unwisely build in an earthquake zone, ad nauseum).
I mean sure - that's great for us as individuals (until an earthquake strikes that is), but for once let's not foist a new set of problems on our grandchildren.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Already been stated a few times, but I'd say that this has probable been driven by very poor media coverage. It is so poor that, as someone who has had several years "exposure" (hah) and training to nuclear reactors, I physically cringe and usually change the channel (or skip the post) when the topic comes up. The "experts" they brought on early on (and continue to do so, I assume) were laughable. I specifically remember one being a journalist who had covered the industry for a couple of years. She had absolutely no idea what was going on, but tossed out the same trash that was being said elsewhere (people exposed to radiation, extremely dangerous and life threatening...CHERNOBYL! THREE MILE ISLAND! 2012!!!~!~!@~!$#@!!!). Most of the others, I vaguely remember being mostly made up of theoretical nuclear physicists, lobbyists of one persuasion or another, and people who dealt in the field of nuclear weapons. Jokes, all of them. How hard would it have been to find an SRO at a running plant to ask questions of? You know, someone how actually has a clue?
I just wish that they would at least get the verbage right so they wouldn't sound like a retard on a bad day. It's like they've never heard of the term contamination before and just use the term 'radiation' for everything.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
Seriously? I mean we have people like Homer Simpson working to keep OUR nuclear panner plants safe, how could anything go wrong?
Monstar L
Those would be the Canadian style reactors, which aren't physically capable of melting down. (Well, technically with a lot of outside assistance and deliberate sabotage, you could force one to melt down, but you'd probably die in the process.)
Unfortunately, our public are just as stupid and uneducated as the American public, and are screaming and pointing at exaggerations of the problems in Japan, and claiming them as proof that all Nuclear everything is bad and going to kill us all, despite any actual facts they might encounter. There are people campaigning to have the Canadian Nuclear plants shut down before "an earthquake causes them to explode just like in Japan", despite:
1) They're on the freakin' Canadian Shield, the largest, most solid tectonic plate on the planet, and we just don't _GET_ earthquakes here past about a 3.0, and those are not centered here, they're from way the hell off at the edges of the plate, usually causing mudslides in Quebec.
2) The reactor design is completely different, and, as you mentioned, the control rods are kept in place by the electric power produced - thus, a failure results in immediate safe shutdown.
3) It wasn't the damn earthquake that broke the reactors. The earthquake didn't damage much at all there, except probably knocking a lot of things off shelves, and giving a few people heart attacks. The damage was when more water than is found in the great lakes got dumped on the reactor buildings and shredded them. Again, our reactors are not anywhere near the ocean, and the great lakes don't have enough water to do that kind of damage, unless you found a way to take the entirety of Lake Erie, and dump it all on the plant at once.
The worst part? People screaming about how dangerous nuclear reactors are, are actually the reason they're still as dangerous as they are. They lobby politicians to make new laws banning research into improving the reactors, and then we're stuck with 1970s technology producing tonnes of toxic waste, because an "environmentalist" screamed "WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" and got improvements banned/restricted. 'cause nothing says "I'm thinking of the children" quite as well as sticking them with a massive pile of radioactive waste that didn't need to be there, if it hadn't been for some moronic busybody declaring that things were bad.
The reason nuclear power plants are very frequently along the costs is that they need huge amounts of cooling water. That means either the sea, or a very large river. There are not many rivers large enough.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Clean up (actually: close down and let the radioactivity decay for 50 years) an active reactor is very expensive. This will not get much followers. And i did no see much major proposals to increase safety on current installations (I am not a expert...)
Prepare for the people that say that closing down reactors is a choice for coal.
Anyways: (radical) new designs will take years and years. In those same years you can build a lot of water/wind/wave power that is understood.
Beside that, new reactor types have nothing directly to do with the (un)safety of older reactors. Allowing new (type) reactors will not make old reactors safe or unsafer. Replacing them might, but that would require someone with a lot of knowledge to declare an old reactor as unsafe. If an old reactor is unsafe (against what standard?) it should be closed down anyway, independent of the replacement. I do not see good reasoning skills in your one liner.... ;)
Dunt duh Duuuuuuuuuh!
Eight more people died when the Fujinuma dam failed in the earthquake than were killed in the nuclear power plant "catastrophe". When is Germany going to start dismantling all dams?
Not to mention the urgency of laws banning anyone from living withing 10km of the Pacific ocean...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Actually, if not a THICK layer of red tape, SSTAR and HPM type reactors could be deployed exactly like that.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well we can probably learn from what has happened and build in additional safety measures, but I agree that the events leading up to this latest accident were pretty much unprecedented and yet it's been dealt with in a professional manner and largely contained (despite scaremongering in the media). Given the fact that new reactors are much safer, the chances of something that can smash even an old reactor are minimal and we're fast running out of options, I'd say it's a risk worth taking.
and you end up with a disaster that affects the entire world
I don't think you can defend this statement, unless you are talking about induced fear and panic. The people who do follow-up studies on Chernobyl and Hiroshima find no increased cancer-related deaths. Depending upon the disaster type, you may or may not have long-term localized effects on the environment, but non-local effects do not seem to exist.
I'm not sure I'd want even relatively low-level radioactive materials being spread about a city in such vast numbers and being accessible to so many people.
Then close up the coal plants because they put out a lot more radiation than anything else.
It's happening here in Germany too. The CDU just lost a state in the west (Baden-Württemberg) for the first time in 58 years, and they lost it basically to the Green Party which managed to triple their support because of what happened in Japan. Not to mention the anti-nuclear protests going on in cities across the country.
Speaking to people around me it's clear very few people actually know anything about nuclear power, outside of what they pick up in the 6 o'clock news. Most have no idea that there's even more than one type of reactor, much less that there's some pretty significant safety differences between them. It just amazes me that in an age where nicely summarized information on any topic is just a few clicks away people don't at least invest one or two hours of their lives to educate themselves before they form an opinion on something. If someone knows even just a little about pebble bed reactors, nuclear reprocessing, molten salt reactors, safety deficiencies in the old Mark I light water reactors at Fukushima etc, and they're still against nuclear power then I can respect that. Just make an effort, that's not too much to ask is it?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Any chance safe nuclear power has is set back when governments lie about risks or the extent of any accidents. The USSR government lied about the safety of nuclear plants and then lied to cover up the extent of Chernobyl. Residents of the Ukraine heard about the disaster from the BBC days before their own government. I heard this first hand from friends of mine who lived in Kiev at the time. The government and power company in Japan is lying through omission about the extent of the ongoing danger in Japan. They have only been forthcoming when outed by foreign media.
I like nuclear power. I think it is safer than belching radioactivity into the air from burning coal. However, nuclear power has a long track record of official deception and lies that will make it harder to have a reasonable discussion about moving ahead with safe and zero carbon nuclear options in the future.
mostly survives a disaster it wasn't designed to cope with coupled with inept management and regulation?
If anything it seems like nuclear power is the way to go.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'd say it is the fault of the nuclear industry for failing to educate the masses that there are choices now besides the big ass clunky reactors like Japan has.
With the small Thorium reactors you can have a reactor in a shipping crate, just bury it when you are finished with it and which would power a decent medium sized city easily and you can simply add more as needed. With the smaller size comes much less risk and they would be much easier to harden to survive even the kind of unpredictable catastrophes like struck Japan, and they also need to be showing how well our current reactors are doing even though most are 40+ years old.
So if you want someone to blame blame the nuclear industry, because if they were educating the masses on their options instead of singing "oh poor me" or completely ignoring the public they might have a more favorable outlook.
Also having a CEO that isn't a greedy pussy and bragged about having his family home in sight of the reactor might do wonders, as it never ceases to amaze me how many CEOs talk about how nice their plants are and then live as far away from them as possible. Putting their asses with their mouths are certainly wouldn't hurt their image none.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Chernobyl was not human error, it was deliberate sabotage in the most Soviet way imaginable in a reactor that was inherently unsafe. As for Fukushima, the only global effect it has had is political, and even though the local effects within around 20km or so can be considered hazardous, it's a far cry from a serious disaster like the earthquake that caused the problems. It's only a serious disaster from the standpoint of nuclear reactor safety, not from the standpoint of environment (except perhaps for the very short term, like weeks) or human health. Most of the radioactive particles released have a short half-life (Mainly Iodine-131 at 8 days) which means that the radioactivity will go down relatively quickly.
In the long run deaths from Fukushima will likely number in the single digits, if not at exactly 0, and considering that the nuclear plant itself was obsolete and not designed to withstand the kind of disaster it faced, I consider that a testament to the safety of nuclear power.
"Local effects that will last for billions of years" is trollish bs, and now that I'm writing this I have the feeling that I have been feeding one.
Fusion is a great long term proposition, even if we never learn how to make a reactor other than the one we are orbiting, but I think we will. The thorium won't run out before we figure out fusion. But right now we need to be worried about if fossil fuels will run out before we get the thorium reactors built, not whether they will be prone to the same incidents seen in 30yr old reactors essentially designed as nuclear weapons refineries.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Here in the UK we have a joint assessment of the risks of new nuclear plant, with public involvement. People don't participate, even "environmental activists". But, at the end , they will announce their own opinions in a fact-free way. Stupidity - the inability to see the connections or lack thereof between the real world and your opinion - truly is a social engineering problem of vast proportions that will probably be the thing that wipes us out as a species.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I decided to try to start learning about nuclear power a little over a year ago, driven mostly by concerns about waste disposal, and safety.
One of the things I've learned is that current reactor designs only use a tiny, tiny percent of fuel potential of the Uranium - basically, about 1 percent.
So, one option is that we keep using the current fuel cycle for another 150-200 years, then when Uranium gets scarce, we start using breeder reactors, which 'unlock' the fuel potential of the remaining 99% of the Uranium which remains in our 'spent fuel' and 'depleted uranium' tailings.
With breeder reactor technology, after extracting 1% of the energy for about 250 years (we've already been using reactors for over 50 years, so the clock has already started), we should be able to get something like 99 * 250 years times more energy (assuming energy consumption levels remain about the same; that's a dubious assumption, but provides at least a good starting point; it also assumes the breeders can consume the full 99% of remaining U-238, which might not, in practice, actually be true - there might be some 'losses' in the process, but we should at least be able to extract a large percentage of what remains).
So, that might be something like 20,000 more years worth of power from that Uranium.
Then there's Thorium. Thorium is a metal which is 4 or 5 times more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium is. Right now, Thorium is a mostly useless 'waste' product from mining operations extracting other rare-earth elements (like Neodymium which is used for very strong permanent magnets in high-tech equipment, including those little earbud speakers for your phone/mp3 player, some designs of electric wind turbines, hard drives [I think], or anything which needs very strong magnets).
Thorium would most likely be used in a type of reactor called a LFTR (most folks pronounce that as "lifter"), which is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. A LFTR very efficiently burns the Thorium, extracting virtually 100% of the available energy, so we should have something on the order of 100,000's of years of energy supply using Thorium.
In the end though, we'll probably be using fusion power long before those eventualities. It's hard to say for sure, but I would think that at most, we'll only be using fission reactors for another 100-200 years anyhow.
I forgot to include a link I was intending to, in my previous post.
If you would like more information about Thorium reactors, check out:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com.
You say that as if they haven't already.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. There hasn't been a new nuclear installation in this country in more than 30 years, to my knowledge.
What should be banned is light water reactors. Those were NEVER a good idea for non-ship based reactors. Instead, we should be building hundreds of pebble bed reactors, whose safety systems neither have nor require moving parts, and can in fact be safely run for decades with no human intervention. Have a few breeder reactors to produce large amounts of power, but far away from population centers, and VERY CAREFULLY, to get new fuel, even.
The alternative is to switch them off, and go back to using oil and gas from foreign sources and coal fired stations. While people *think* nuclear is unsafe, coal mining is *proven* to be unsafe. Just consider the number of miners killed every year.
Somehow, public opinion has managed to come up with the worst possible solution, by not thinking through the consequences of the soundbite press and media and knee-jerk decisions it promotes.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You know you just lost all credibility when you posted that?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
In the meantime the coal reactors will keep on pumping more radiation into the air than a nuclear station ever would. And mercury, etc.
No sig today...
I am in favor of making the people that run them directly responsible for the consequences. They can't be allowed to profit and then go "aw gee what happened?".
Rick B.
Whenever nuclear comes up, there's an amazingly energetic crowd around here, throwing around the new cool designs "TWR", "Pebble", "Thorium", whatever -- which are supposed to solve all of our problems, somehow.
I'll tell you something: the engineering might even be feasible, but in the end, the older (and less maintained) such a behemoth is, the higher the margins. So those things tend to be shoved into ecoonomic constructs which are forced to cut corner by corner.
Regulations? If there's enough money at stake, it just pays off to buy them.
Where does this crowd come from?
Nuclear power is simply not worth the risk on any large scale. All it takes is one accident, either human error (Chernobyl) or natural disaster (Fukushima), and you end up with a disaster that affects the entire world, and has local effects that will last for billions of years.
As opposed to, say, coal, where the day to day operations affect the entire world?
I'm not sure how the fact that coal causes pollution somehow makes nuclear not dangerous.
Instead of increasing the danger (i.e., building more nuclear plants, which is what so many predictable Slashdotters will favor), why not work on moving off of coal (and existing nuclear plants) to cleaner sources of power?
Thing is, with nuclear, you don't want a bet, you need a sure thing, at least in safety. GE has lately been pointing out about the Mark I reactor design, that they've run for 40 years without a major mishap. That's with 23 in the US, and how many others abroad? Let's pretend in total there are 40 of them. Then of 40 Mark I reactors over 40 years only 6 have partially melted down! If we project that out to a century, there will only be a 37.5% failure rate for this design. What, you say they won't run for a century? But the NRC has recertified the plant of this design in Vermont for another 20 years, and issued that after the Japan meltdowns. Surely if they can recertify it now, they can do it twice more.
This is a design over which 3 top GE engineers resigned in the 70s, saying it was unsafe. The AEC at the same time considered ordering all Mark I plants shut down, but declined to because of the political implications for atomic power. And that containment vessel that's been leaking in the Japanese Mark 1s? In the US they're routinely packed with 5 times the spent fuel they were engineered to hold safely, while in Japan they are only at 2-3 times engineered capacity.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
True, but isn't this really an argument for a large-scale nuclear power plant construction program? We hear that nuclear plants take decades to build... and yet, as you say, it could be done much faster than that, if the orders for construction came from the very top.
What's more, I'd think it would be easier to use this sort of government power to build nuclear plants, because much less land would be required, there would probably be a lower environmental impact from doing it, and the power output would be greater and more reliable.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
It has nothing to do about educating the masses. It has to do with the Nuclear Industry building reactors on the cheap. If the industry did not build reactors on the cheap we would not have this discussion.
Of course there is still the problem of what to do with the nuclear waste.
I think that opponents of nuclear power create a bit of a paradox by opposing *new* nuclear power plants:
By opposing the construction of new nuclear power plants, whose designs benefit from decades of experience gained with older designs, knowledge about their failure modes, ways to improve cooling with passive cooling systems, etc, you effectively act to keep older, less safe nuclear power plants in operation longer.
So, would you rather be living near a newer, safer plant, or an older, slightly less safe (but still, mostly safe - it took a massive earthquake and tsunami to take out those old Mk 1's in Fukushima) plant?
That said, I certainly think we should (and I'm positive we will) do extensive investigation and analysis of the problems at Fukushima Daiichi, find what lessons can be learned from that, and apply those lessons to both existing, and new reactors.
But it's worth repeating: opposing new nuclear will likely have the effect of keeping older nuclear online longer than it would if there were new nuclear plants built to replace the old ones.
Here's an option for the US. Don't build nuclear reactors on top of fault lines! I'm not sure the Japanese had that option given the geography of their nation but we certainly do. It's great that people want to learn a lesson from what happened in Japan but I don't see why they can't just take the obvious lesson instead of pushing for more coal smog!
I hate to state the bleeding obvious, but it seems that I must.
Why would you want more nuclear power? There is only so much uranium to be mined. It really doesn't matter how long estimates say the uranium reserves will last, there is still only so much to be had, and then what? Eventually, we'll run out of uranium, just as we'll eventually run out of oil and coal. Sure, we'll have more some day, if you care to wait millions or billions of years. Frankly, I don't have the time.
The best source of power beats us on the head every day, the Sun. We should be seriously investing in solar, wind, and tidal for power generation. These sources are not likely to run out for the lifetime of the planet, and that's a damned site better than relying on finite resources that take millions of years to replenish.
NOTE: There are more ways to use solar power than just photovoltaic cells.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Seriously, i am in awe of capitalist ideology. It has managed to convince a large number of people around the world, if this thread is any indication, that the profit motive is as natural as the sun in that for some INSANE reason, the question of PROFIT does not come into consideration when expressing an opinion on whether you think nuclear power is safe to use. It really gets me down it does. Although the new Arab revolutionary upheavals are a welcome development to this jaded old lefty :)
Anyone who really does their research will understand that nuclear energy is by far the cleanest and safest.Apparent "clean" energy pundits are constantly on CNN or some news puff show saying "This is why we need to go solar or wind powered, its proven technology" Yes proven. But take for instance, The Roscoe Wind Farm (the newest and largest) which generates about 780MW of power. Compare that to the oldest nuclear reactors in Ontario (Candu series) that generates 3100MW (6 of them at full power before they began to get decommissioned) and you simply have nothing able to provide the power demands that today's society requires. The wind farm cost 1 billion, spans 100,000 acres and produces less than a third of power that 25 year old reactors are producing here in Ontario. Take the newer Bruce Power Plant which generates over 7200MW with 8 Candus online and there really isn't any competition considering that entire installation spans about 2500 acres. Yes accidents happen and nuclear is dangerous but I don't see ANY of the same criticism towards OIL after BP and their US cronies POLLUTED the entire US south-eastern coastline for the next 100 years. Why doesn't anyone scream about that? Why? Because it would require that fat-ass clean air economist to drive her bike to work the whole three miles from her cozy Manhattan flat instead of taking her gas guzzling car. Nothing in life is perfect but if you take the number of nuclear incidents and compare them to oil disasters it pales in comparison.
The thing that mostly makes them expensive is the ten years of approval process and the five years of meetings you have to have with the NIMBYs to eventually get to build one.
The only way to convince investors to sign up for all that crap is to promise them a massive return on their money, ie. the debt repayment ends up costing you an order of magnitude more than the sum of the materials/labor needed to actually build it. See Economics of Nuclear Power Plants
Still, you could be supplying the entire country with cheap energy for less than the cost of the banking bailout. Imagine what that could do for the economy...(as opposed to giving the bankers a taste for free money which will just make them do it all over again).
No sig today...
No effects will last for "billions of years", anything with a half-life that long is considered a stable isotope! The longer the half life, the less radioactive something is.
Chernobyl is a red herring because it was an inherently unsafe fail-dangerous reactor design which no one anywhere else in the world was insane enough to produce.
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There haven't been any accidents in the USA that resulted in leaked radiation.
That's physically impossible. Also, Three Mile Island.
60 years of experience suggest that your assertion, "no amount of mitigation makes it a rational chance to take", is incorrect. Experience suggests that in fact risk can be managed.
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima. It's 100% impossible to engineer away the risk for an incident. You can reduce the risks, but they will always be there, and it only takes the occasional accident to completely negate the safety of the intervening years.
"billions of years" is also incorrect: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Chernobyl-Still-Radioactive-After-23-Years-129912.shtml
Plutonium and Uranium remain radioactive for billions of years.
So we should block out the sun over large cities? The sun gives off more radiation than a nuclear reactor.
In the form of photons (as reaches the surface of the Earth). Some of which are dangerous, and we do block them.
But this is a red herring. The sun will be there no matter what we do. It's a fact of life. On the other hand, having nuclear power plants is optional. It's impossible to pretend like there isn't an increased risk. Just because there is a baseline risk does not justify voluntarily increasing it.
The media needs to report on how many people have been injured or killed during this accident. They have 2 works that have been missing from the beginning, presumably swept away by the tidal wave or killed in the initial hydrogen explosion. Then they have another <50 that have been exposed to low, but still unacceptable amounts of radiation.
Now lets imagine what would happen if the same disaster had hit a Coal power plant... or Natural Gas... Now the big one, how about the Hoover Damn? The first 2 would lead to hundreds of deaths immediately, and it's even including all the deaths we have every year due to mining. A Major eathquake at a large hydro-electric damn like the Hover? It would likely be the largest disaster in American history. Tens of thousands dead within minutes.
What's great about this is that it's been picked up by hundreds of blogs over the last couple of days - so now it's quoted all over the place as if it actually has some significance beyond being a study funded by an anti-coal, anti-nuke group. Their past "scientific polls" and studies have also been treated similarly.
If I understand the process correctly (unlikely), the control rods dampen the reaction and keep things generally under control in the reactor?
They do, and at Fukushima, they did.
The problem at Fukushima wasn't with the reactor core. The problem was with the spent fuel. Nuclear fuel gives off the majority of its heat at the moment of the reaction, but once it's spent, neutron emissions from the fuel continue to react at a very slow rate for several days after the initial "firing" of the fuel; about 6 or 7 percent thereof. It's *that* heat that was a problem at Fukushima.
This video provides a good explanation.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
All joking aside, I keep hearing about "pebble bed reactors" as being the Power thats Going to Save the World.
But it's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that nobody on the planet has yet succeeded in building one that's actually worked, let alone a commercially successful one.
Yeah, nasty, ugly places like Dounreay in Caithness. Horrid place.
With all the fuss about nuclear power plant security out there right now, one thing astounds me, especially in the usually informed, well educated technical elite, which is usually quite sceptical about corporations:
Nuclear power plant safety is not only about physical security (including softwar). It is also affected by social and economical effects on decisionmaking. We have seen in Fukushima that known security failures were ignored and safety inspections forged during the past approx. 20 years. So nuclear power plant safety is also influenced by
"Can we trust big entities (corporations/state owned institutions) to run nuclear facilities?"
I am sorry to presume: propably no.
Yours Truly,
anonymous coward
And don't forget pebble bed reactors, which are helium cooled, and which don't melt down when all power is lost. However, all these alternatives have so far proven too costly and/or to dangerous. Molten salt reactors and metal cooled fast reactors have caught fire in the past, and none has ever succeeded in operating through it's design lifetime. Newer versions of the traditional US reactor is able to self-cool for a long period of time through convection if all power is lost. It looks a lot better than our current systems.
I'm more concerned about the storage problem. The one thing I learned from the accident in Japan is that our storage pools require active cooling. Without it, they can boil away all the water, catch fire, and spew radiation into the air. We really need that Yucca Mountain waste storage solution. Having a hundred pools around the nation run by companies that will not be held accountable for any nuclear accident is incredibly stupid.
In the meantime, I think we should fund more test reactors of the varieties you mentioned, to see if we can come up with a safer, cheaper solution.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
i like this quote from the article...
The April 26, 1986 accident was the largest nuclear accident in the world, and only a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
"only a level 7"? from my searching that is the highest the scale goes to...
...you end up with a disaster that affects the entire world, and has local effects that will last for billions of years.
Sorry, but that is completely wrong.
What is completely wrong? That there are local effects that will last billions of years?
The danger of a radioactive substance can be effectively measured by its "half-life". Isotopes with a very short half-life emit radiation very quickly (forgetting for this quick post whether we are talking about alpha particles, beta particles, neutron radiation, or gamma rays).
Nothing wrong with a little scientific primer. It helps act as a buffer between your initial claim and the statement that will completely contradict that claim. I can see why you did it.
Isotopes like U-238 / U-235 with a long half-life (700 million years for U-235 and 4.4 billion years for U-238) don't pose a danger unless they are in just titanic quantities.
Tada. Both last for billions of years!
In Fukushima, they stored spent fuel rods on site, which were strewn about by the explosion. These rods are radioactive, and won't simply vanish on their own (well, over many billions of years).
It's definitely possible to live in the area without being affected, but the very fact that these elements are introduced into the environment brings with it the risk of inhalation or ingestion, at which point the normally low-risk of simply being near such elements is replaced by the significant risk of having a radioactive time-bomb in your body.
In other words, effects that will last billions of years. Instead of proving me "completely wrong", you proved me completely right. Thanks.
However something like the particular isotopes of Iodine and Cesium that have been seen at Fukishima have half-lives on the order of days. They are very dangerous, but that danger is short lived. A small quantity of them can definitely kill, but they don't typically last long enough to travel far from the region where they were produced. None of this adds up to "effects that will last for billions of years".
This is entirely correct, but has nothing to do with the elements that do remain radioactive for billions of years.
Instead, it's a danger that is in *addition* to the one you were trying to claim didn't exist.
It is very interesting to see that so many people here are in favor of nuclear power. And the best are the arguments why nuclear is not such a big issue as coal or oil. The discussion in Germany is quite different. We are going to end the nuclear age in our country and have increased the output of electricity out of renewable energy up to 17% in the last decade. Based on current development in wind and solar power we believe that we can obsolete nuclear power by 2020 and meet our CO2 reduction goal as well. We think that we will reach that limit even faster with closing nuclear plant earlier.
But looking into the argument of coal kills more people than nuclear plants and their waste. This is definitely not true. It kill thousands after the Chernobyl disaster and something which is not counted in studies is the increase in cancer rates, babies born dead or deformed and the negative effects on the environment. So the argument coal kills more people is faulty.
Either you are extremely risk-averse, or you would have to also say that coal power is simply not worth the risk on any large scale.
Or oil.
Which is the worse disaster? The BP oil spill or the ongoing Fukushima emergency? Remember that the BP oil spill actually killed 11 workers and injured 17. Fukushima is ongoing and so hard to predict, but it sure looks like fewer people will die there. Also, look at the context - Fukushima was the result of a much larger tragedy. Perhaps 10,000 have died in a massive earthquake and tsunami. In contrast, the BP oil spill happened during good weather. No earthquake, no hurricane.
Imagine what could happen if an earthquake hit a region with a bunch of deepwater oil rigs?
Can you imagine what happened to all of the chemical storage tanks sitting around in Japan? Honestly, if I lived near that region, I'd be a lot more worried long-term about the new chemicals floating around seeping into my water supply than about a short-term nuclear accident that will get the governments full attention until it is cleaned up.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The last news I heard there has been a stop in approving new nuclear installations there, too. As a direct result from Fukushima.
Why can't
Well, I'd guess that's where the "modern safety features" come in. They do exist you know. They're actually pretty damn good. You can make reactors that shut themselves down safely the second power is lost to the cooling system, they've made them in Canada since the 1970s.
I keep hearing this.
But you know, the Japanese plant "shut itself down safely the second power was lost".
Turns out, you need to do far more than "safely shut down" since the fuel stays really fucking hot even after a shutdown. In fact, the fuel stays really fucking hot and keeps generating heat even after it is depleted and removed from the reactor, and has to be stored under water for a long time before anything can be done with it.
A reactor not only needs to "shut itself down safely" in the event of a problem, its associated systems need to be able to continue functioning properly for quite a while afterwards, and IMO that's where the uncertainty and risk are.
The exact thing that makes nuclear power desirable (high energy density) is what makes it dangerous. When you consider the system end-to-end, I seriously doubt there is such a thing as a failsafe nuclear reactor.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
You're an idiot. Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident man has known, had immediate, serious issues but nothing to the extent portrayed in the media and the results certainly won't last "billions of years".
Many thousands of people have died, and the nuclear meltdown is still underway. I'm sure this will significantly decrease the duration of the event, but just because Chernobyl's effects won't last billions of years does not mean other incidents will not. Fukushima, for example, may very well last that long, because of the dispersal of plutonium and uranium into the surrounding area.
Background radiation is only above safe levels in the immediate vicinity, and bearing in mind this was an ancient (by nuclear standards) reactor with none of the safety mechanisms in place on modern reactors. In fact, had the Chernobyl reactor been based on modern designs, it never would have happened, and reactors are getting safer and safer.
Just like with "newer, safer, modern designs", Chernobyl should never have happened either. It was entirely due to human error. No nuclear reactor can be made safe from human error.
Even Fukushima was an old reactor, things would have been much better if it had been a modern reactor, but even there the problems are nowhere near so serious as media is claiming. We've damaged the earth far more in the last thirty years by pumping the smoke from burning coal, gas and oil into the air than the damage caused by every nuclear "disaster" in that period. How is the risk "high" when there have been a handful of notable accidents in the entire lifetime of the nuclear industry? I'd say on those numbers it's incredibly low risk.
Nuclear power is less widely used than coal, gas and oil. Also, cancers from nuclear accidents (and even just standard nuclear operations, without the need for an actual accident) are significant.
But this is a red herring. Just because something else is also bad does not make nuclear good. How about we move away from fossil fuels as well, instead of heaping nuclear atop them?
Not the nuclear reactors....
Here in the USA, we've been relatively isolated from most natural disasters, and most man-made disasters.
Think about it: How disrupted would your life be if planes were bombing the crap out of your country, and there was random gunfire in the streets all the time?
On the west coast, there's more of a building code, but let's face it. If New York City were hit by a 9.0 earthquake, nuclear reactors would be the last thing we'd be worried about. Loss of life would be in the millions if the quake hit during the day. There's not a single skyscraper in Manhattan built to withstand that kind of shock. Try an imagine 9/11, but laying waste to the entire island. There's what, 20 million in Manhattan during the day? You're looking at at least 10 million dead. From the quake.
Then if there's a Tsunami to follow, there could be another 10 million (at least) killed from that. Because DC, Baltimore, Phildelphia Newark, and Boston would also be affected. The Northeast has a lot of major cities within a close proximity, and absolutely no building code regarding quake management.
And yet Americans are worried about the reactor? Ignorance truly is bliss. Americans have NO CLUE about what's really going to kill them. We are a fortunate lot to live in a politically and geologically stable environment. But neither of those conditions are going to last forever.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The one thing I learned from the accident in Japan is that our storage pools require active cooling
The reason those pools have such a heat problem is because they are storing fuel rods that were only recently removed from the reactor and are still very "hot" (that is undergoing a LOT of decay events which translates to lots of radiation and lots of heat). In that state they are considered too dangerous to move very far so they are kept close to the reactor until they cool off a bit (that is the elements with short half lives decay).
I agree the pools should have a big buffer of water so they can go without active cooling for a while but it's a totally seperate problem to the long term waste problem that yucca mountain aims to solve.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
there you go
thanks mr clinton!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I favor a moratorium on media and this political regime.
Following the outcome of 9/11, one conclusion is that high rise buildings, when they are compromised can cause many deaths. If people only built single story buildings then that disaster could not have happened.
If people didn't build nuclear power plants then the sort of outcomes than occur when things go wrong can also be avoided.
The point here is that no-one is opposed to high rise buildings, instead people draw on the experience and try to design high rise buildings in a way which don't collapse if damaged the way the world center was, and also try to come up with ways to prevent the buildings from being subjected to the attack they were on 9/11.
I'd love to here a good argument why the general consensus is different when it comes to nuclear power... surely rather than opposing the idea altogether we should work towards mitigating the risk when things go wrong (admitidly here we probably can't prevent earthquakes, instead we need to build more reduncancy into nuclear reactors)
I think this is one of hundreds of analogies which can be applied to many different technologies we use every day which, when something goes wrong is very dangerous, but we usually concentrate effort into making it safer (planes for example were very unsafe in their early days compared to what we have now, and their benifits are rarely called into question)
I think the main issue here is that people don't fully understand how detremental the current alternatvies (coal, gas, etc) are to human health... or how sustainable they are. People don't grasp how important the benifits of nuclear power are.
A lot of technologies have to be refined and improved.. I really think people should lobby for safer nuclear power rather than no nuclear power at all. At least until alternative safer methods are found.
Like there are alternatives to flying which are probably safer (like taking a ship) the cost outweighs the risk for most people.. I personally believe this applies to nuclear power
The NIMBYs are going "I told you so" around Tokyo right about now.
The reason nuke power should go through a lengthy approval process is (well, aside from Fukushima) that the taxpayer insures them, and major costs are externalized. For example, disposal of fuel, security of the plant, evacuations in case of small or large disasters, etc.
Nukes are the pinnacle of "socialize the costs, privatize the profits".
I don't think you can really be so angry with the anti-nuclear crowd. It's true that nuclear can be safe, as long as the plant builders/operators don't cut corners, plan appropriately for accidents, and follow the safety regs. The trouble is that those three conditions rely on people, and any time you start relying on people you risk getting hit with people who are crooks or who just don't give a damn.
3 Mile Island was caused by bad design and failure to follow procedure. Chernobyl was too. And the latest problem from Japan was caused by refusal to acknowledge that anything like a big earthquake/tsunami could happen. The latest reports say the plant was designed assuming a tsunami resulting from an 8.6 earthquake, despite ample evidence that larger quakes and tsunamis have happened over the years. When you're talking about something like nuclear, you over-design the hell out of it or you shouldn't do it at all.
I'll be all for nuclear as soon as someone can figure out how to ensure that enough checks are in place so that dumb/lazy/cheap people won't compromise its safety.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Dude, neither is petroleum
Did I say it was? Does it somehow make radioactive matter safe?
Seriously, we use electricity at an industrial scale, so we generate it at an industrial scale. When things go wrong, they do so at an industrial scale.
As opposed to a global scale, like with nuclear.
But I do agree with you, we should move away from fossil fuels as well as nuclear.
Because it's safer than what we do now.
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976
We favor solutions that spew millions of tons of crap in the air that indirectly kills a lot of people all over the world, or deep underground, over solutions that very rarely spew a little crap in the air and kill a small number of people right nearby. We prefer this only because one is dramatic.
Personally, given that we need to generate TWhs of electricity, I'd rather lose 0.04 lives than 161. I have little doubt the public will continue to behave like frightened sheep. Every single person who engages in this hand-wringing over nuclear's risks while ignoring those of every other method of power generation is responsible.
Some of the safer designs are already here.
The ABWR's inside-the-turbine-building 20MW gas turbine backup generator would have prevented the extended station blackout that caused the problems at Fukushima.
The ESBWR (under regulator review) would not need any backup power - the most it would have required is a plain old fire truck after 72 hours to refill the isolation condenser pools. (Note: These pools are not directly in contact with any nuclear materials, so can safely boil.)
The Westinghouse AP1000 (under construction in numerous locations) can suffer a line break loss of coolant within the containment building and not require any operator intervention whatsoever for 72 hours. At that point the main thing required would be to refill a water tank (again, one that is not in contact with any radioactive materials.)
You really have to put Fukushima into perspective - in a matter of hours, the earthquake and tsunami killed at least ten thousand people - and the confirmed death toll is rising. It was the fifth strongest earthquake in recorded history and the strongest in Japan's - the reactors all survived that and shut down as designed. The tsunami was significantly stronger than anything seen before in that part of Japan. The seawalls were around 12 meters high (highest tsunami there previously was something like 8 meters), but this tsunami was 13-14 meters and swamped the backup diesels.
The fact that first-generation reactors (one of which was originally scheduled for decommissioning this month but got service life extended) with the oldest containment designs in service held up as well as they did in this worst-case scenario says a great deal about the paranoia of nuclear safety system designers. Despite the fact that the original designs were impressive, they have been consistently paranoid and keep on engineering for scenarios that could possibly happen but have never yet happened - hence the improved backups in ABWR and the eliminated need for them in ESBWR/AP1000.
Wind and solar aren't ready yet - to make them suitable for baseload generation we need massive improvements in energy storage technology which we don't have. If we deploy wind and solar heavily, we'll need a lot of peaking plants to fill in the gaps. Peaking plants are usually gas-fired (they can change power output the fastest), and in just the past five years, gas drilling has been responsible for more groundwater contamination and illness than the entire history of nuclear power outside of the Soviet Union.
Even if we get coal-fired peaking plants to fill in the holes - those just spew out toxic pollution (including radioactive substances!) on a regular basis. Hell, in China they're looking into using coal plant ash as a source for nuclear fuel, the uranium content is that high.
Hydro - we're tapped out, almost any possible place where we'd build a dam already has one built.. Oh, and just one hydro incident (Banqiao Dam) killed more people than the entire history of nuclear power, INCLUDING Soviet nuclear power which accounts for the majority of nuclear illnesses/deaths.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
From TFA, the results give an indication of how leading questions were.
* Over half (53 percent) of Americans would now support "a moratorium on new nuclear reactor construction in the United States," if "increased energy efficiency and off the shelf renewable technologies such as wind and solar could meet our energy demands for the near term."
What a horrible question, and also what a stranger response. First, the question makes a premise that has no substantiation in reality. When will off the shelf renewable energy technology actually meet our energy demands. Hell, I'd support renewables over nuclear if renewables would meet our needs. That doesn't mean I am against nuclear now though.
Second, why isn't the response rate 100%? Who in their right mind would support nuclear over renewables if they both had the same output? The risks may be low for nuclear disasters but there are still risks. Renewables have very few risks that I am aware of, so why on earth would someone not support this?
Stuff like this is virtually meaningless and leads to sensationalistic headlines. Reading articles like this reminds me that "a public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought."
1. Not only American media
2. I can't remember the last time I heard "nothing to worry about" on mass media (unless you count Slashdot). They just tend to ignore and/or forget things that are not "everybody panic".
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
"As long as we are able to continue the energy wars in the middle east, we don't have a need for 'alternative' energy." - The U.S. military industrial complex...
Worse... The one they did build ended up releasing a good helping of Cs 137 and Sr 90 into the local area.
Hardly any mention of the damage which is done to the environment and human beings when mining for uranium and hardly any mention on slashdot (if any) on the problem of "final" disposal of the waste.
Now go and inform yourself. And show up again when you have some new and very good ideas.
The coal reactors solved their "nuclear waste" problem by slowly releasing it into the air. Nobody seems to be in a panic over that, can't nuclear power stations do the same?
Or ... maybe we could build some of those new-fangled breeder reactors which gobble up their own waste.
No sig today...
Current levels of radiation outside the plant can only be said to increase cancer risks if you use the Linear no Threshold (LNT) theory of radiation exposure, one that has no real basis in science. Our bodies are pretty good at fixing low-level cellular damage as long as the repair mechanisms aren't overwhelmed.
I'm not talking about an increase in background radiation (which did exceed a minimum safe threshold in same areas). I'm talking about people being exposed to highly radioactive elements following the hydrogen explosion.
Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are not completely safe. There are deaths attributed to wind power generation, for example. Nothing is completely safe. Total safety is an utter myth.
Yes, it's a total myth. Fortunately no one is claiming otherwise. If a wind turbine collapses, it only kills the people it lands on, and doesn't cause deaths decades down the line.
Fission power can be made a lot safer than coal, oil, natural gas, or any other baseline power source we currently use. It will likely be many decades, if ever, when we can figure out how to use wind, solar, or geothermal as baseline power, so you can't really use that as an argument.
*Can* be, except for accidents and improper procedures, which are far more devastating with radioactive material than with fossil fuels.
Also, nuclear can't replace fossil fuels either. It's a dangerous power source, and there's no reason to heap it upon an already unsafe industry.
Fast reactors can eliminate the need for long-term storage of high-level radioactive waste (and by long-term I mean thousands of years, you'll still have to hold fission products for a hundred years or so before they become safe). You don't have to store spent fuel in water while you wait for it too cool, you could use an entirely passive air cooled system to house them, but it is cheaper put them in water with active cooling.
There are no commercial LMCFBRs that have operated without accidents, but those have all been tube type reactors. EBR II was a pool-type reactor that operated without incident for 30 years.
But they never made a commercial scale version of this type of plant because it didn't seem like it would be commercially viable. Part of that is because it was part of the larger IFR concept, and fuel reprocessing is expensive.
You mean like in Canada with the Chalk River reactor? Ask Linda Keen how she liked losing her job over shutting down the reactor. There were rules Stephen Harper didn't care. (Look at the US government, what have rules and laws ever stopped them from doing whatever they want?) http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2009/01/27/8159396-sun.html
I think that anyone that believes that Nuclear Power is a viable solution should backup their religion and go help out in Japan. That'll show all those ignorant fools how wrong they are. My personal belief is that there's cargo container loads full of Helium-3 on the surface of the moon, and fusion plants don't have radiation poisoning issues, but Helium-3 issues. I just don't know how to convince this planet that picking H3-dirt off the ground on the moon and shoving it into a fusion generator makes more sense than choking this planet's biosphere.
What caused the problem at Fukushima was really a loss of coolant. The earthquake and tsunami merely caused the loss of coolant.
Can you really claim that it's impossible for the Canadian reactors to not have a loss of coolant? Also, in an emergency, a CANDU, which uses heavy water, can't be cooled and moderated using sea water like in Fukushima.
Let's face it; nuclear power is inherently dangerous. The question is, whether the danger outweights the benefits. Does it? I really don't know, and after this one, I'm veering more towards "no".
Acid Rain is also a by-product of Coal Energy solutions.
Says the guy with an engineering degree and a MBA?
It might be an economic disaster for the power companies, but not for the economy. Cheap energy is good for the economy, you know ... Renewable is med and long term much much much cheaper than anything we do and have right now.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sane thing to do if you care about security
Close old plants and replace them with new safer ones.
Or replace them with some other form of power generation, maybe?
Can I coin the phrase "false trichotomy?"
Specifically:
We have 4M square km of arable land in North America (with 2.3M in use). The land requirement for algae:
The United States Department of Energy estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles (39,000 km2) which is only 0.42% of the U.S. map.
That would be 0.17% of our in-use crop land. No substantial displacement. And that's beside the fact that algae can make use of marginal land -- dry or salty, for example.
You are right. Having "nuclear power" as a topic shows that it isn't a serious discussion. It would be like talking about the safety of airplanes. Well you can design a safe airplane or an unsafe one. It is ALL about the design. You can have 40 year old reactors that require active shutdown and cooling and use one through fueling or you can use 3rd and 4th generation reactors that use passive cooling and passive shutdown that breed their own fuel either with thorium or uranium 238. This is how engineering works. You start with a preliminary design and test it. See what problems there are and you make the next design fix those problems. We don't fly 707's anymore.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The thing that mostly makes them expensive is the ten years of approval process and the five years of meetings you have to have with the NIMBYs to eventually get to build one.
Yes, let's abolish thorough approval processes for nuclear reactors! Because the fact that they manage to screw them up WITH regulation bodes so well for how they will perform WITHOUT it.
Personally I'm getting sick of the knee-jerk blame-the-regulators talk. It is so tiresome and I wish we could move beyond it.
Someone had to do it.
Hah. Actually, I would consider Caithness "nasty"/poor, and I'd even agree with ugly when compared to the scenery in the rest of Scotland. On the west coast you get a few nice mountains with snow, rocky outcrops and such, but here on the the east coast it's relatively flat and boring.
Caithness is definitely as far from civilisation as you can get in the UK while still being on the mainland.
which is totally what she said
This is an urban myth and is completely wrong.
There is no existing coal plant in the world that in our days emits any noticeable amount of radioactive material.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Only if there is no scrubber at the power plant. Modern coal power plants are quite clean.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
While I agree with parent post's apparent position that nuclear power is safe, it is quite obvious to anyone who takes an objective look at the nuclear power industry as a whole that in the last 50 years, there has been no significant improvement in the highly risky ways that nuclear post-production material is handled.
Don't talk to me about how safe nuclear power is; I agree with that. Talk to me about shovel ready plans to build the transportation, storage, and transmogrification infrastructure needed to handle the spent fuel and worn out radioactive structures.
Also, try to wrap your head around the fact that the Japanese nuclear plant survived both the quake and the tsunami. What that facility did not survive was its own shutdown. If just one of the reactors could have been kept operational, there would have been power on site for keeping all the cooling pumps going.
What a stupid, stupid design.
Will
Actually, a truck could roll up and drop a nuclear power station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
The Toshiba 4S is a small nuclear reactor in a box. Self contained.
Perhaps the old models of big nuclear reactors took years to develop, but the new small ones roll off the factory assembly line and can be trucked into place.
It seem that newer Nuclear reactors could be brought up to speed rather quickly. The main issues seem to be insurance related.
Cringely had an excellent blurb about them.
http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/is-anything-nuclear-ever-really-super-safe-small-and-simple/
The big sticking point with nuclear is always safety. And every disaster reminds us of just how unsafe nuclear can be. A 40 mile diameter section where people can't live in Japan is a major chunk of real estate. If this happened near any of our major cities it would cause significant problems.
Renewables could be brought up to date in the matter of a decade with a concerted effort. The right tax incentives could retrofit most every building in America with solar.
As to the ignorance of the public including myself, I want NO reactor anywhere near where I live simply because I like to live here and want my kids and grandkids to be able to live here safely.
This fear of nuclear contamination is not because of TV and shit websites since my understanding of nuclear issues comes mostly from magazine pieces from the last several decades and predates the internet.
Nuclear power is not "safe".... the best that can be said is that it is only "safe for now" and even then "sometimes safe". There are plenty of instances of problems with reactors and nuclear contamination of soil and water around them. No reactor has proven totally "safe" since the entire cycle of the reactors and their byproducts is hundreds or thousands of years down the road. What will happen after the reactors are taken offline and have to sit for many hundreds of years with radioactive materials in holding tanks or whatever seems to me the jury is still out as to whether this will remain "safe". I don't think humans have a particularly great track record maintaining things for the longer term since we think in relatively short term ways.
So I don't think that concerns by people about nuclear are unwarranted nor ignorant. Ignorance is actually from those who ignore nuclear dangers and say we should be flinging up nuclear plants everywhere. There isn't even enough nuclear substrate to power our planet over the long term. It is still a finite resource, so at best it is only a band-aid solution so we can keep doing what we are doing now.
Just as the drill baby drill crowd thinks we can magically produce increasing amounts of oil by drilling more when we have already passed the peak oil on our planet. Drilling more and using more will just accelerate the decline in the amount of oil we have long term and not address our more fundamental energy requirements. Not to mention it just runs us out of our worlds precious readily available industrial hydrocarbon pool by lighting them up to make us move. Pretty lame use of this finite resource in my estimation.
Certainly, nuclear plays a role, but we must be wise in our application of its use and realize that reducing the power we need is a better solution for the long term viability of our civilization. Our long term energy needs will not be met by coal, oil, or nuclear power. So I think it is pretty silly and greedy to say that our generation is more meritorious of these resources in our planetary bank than humans several generations from now. It only show how short sighted and self absorbed we are with our own needs.
I am not opposed to nuclear per se, but I don't think being cavalier about it is what a smart race of entities would do. I guess we will see if we are smart entities or are the type of entities which crap in our own food dish.
You scare me.
You threw in lots of disclaimers, like this whopper: "outside the Soviet Union". Sure, if we exclude every accident that ever happened in the largest nation in the world, which includes Chernobyl, nuclear power looks much safer. Anything would look much safer if you did that! And what's this about "oldest containment designs" holding up better than expected? Uh, why were we still using those designs? We have a frightening proclivity for continuing to run plants well after they should have been decommissioned, as you indicate with this nice little phrase: "originally scheduled for decommissioning this month but got service life extended". Why? Nuclear plants don't age well.
the original designs were impressive
Obviously, they weren't impressive enough. Nor were the operators paranoid enough.
Wind and solar aren't ready? We need massive improvements in energy storage to make them usable? We're using wind and solar right now! What's needed is transmission more than storage. You talk as if these are problems are worse than the problems with nuclear, coal, and gas. You mention peaking as if that's a problem with this kind of power. To the contrary, they are excellent solutions. Solar is particularly good for peaking.
Oh, and just one hydro incident (Banqiao Dam) killed more people than the entire history of nuclear power
You can't compare the dangers of nuclear power on such a simplistic basis. I'm sure people moved right back in after the dam burst. The land was not contaminated in such a way as to be unsafe for centuries. Any comparison that does not account for that is not a good comparison.
Yes, fracking has been done in a highly irresponsible manner. The idiots have used toxic waste as their "fracking fluid", a term expressly designed to cover that up. Is that a reason to use more nuclear power? Not hardly! If they'd do that with fracking, how do you suppose they would operate a nuclear power plant? An inspection found that many of these backup diesel generators were not in working order, and that records concerning them had been falsified. That's just one example of the routine corner cutting that goes on even in nuclear power plants. Some people are far too quick to do a 180 on the paranoia and take crazy risks. The only incentive needed to bring out such behavior is money.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Yep. And the other one suffered pebble breakages, control rod deformations and radioactive dust forming from the pebbles.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Can you really claim that it's impossible for the Canadian reactors to not have a loss of coolant?
Actually, there have been incidents where Canadian reactors have had loss of coolant. they shut themselves down, and wouldn't start back up again until they were fixed. Also, people got fired, because dammit Tritium is hella expensive, and we can't afford to go wasting it by letting it out into the ground water, when the hospitals are all having shortages. (Yes, we cool our nuclear reactors with an expensive medical resource that is in limited supply... it's still safer and easier to clean up than having leaks that spray liquid sodium or potassium around the building.)
Also, the Fukushima plant could _not_ be cooled and moderated using sea water - using sea water was basically a last ditch effort to hopefully cool things off while people evacuated, and an admission that "this reactor is dead and never going to be started up again". The moment they sprayed salt water in there, they effectively destroyed the reactor, and exactly the same thing would happen to any other water (even heavy water) cooled reactor. Most of the Canadian reactors are near large supplies of fresh water, and actually use that water for secondary heat transfer to remove it from the facility. (Which results in the local rivers not freezing over in the winter, a completely separate issue with environmental effects that are still being argued over whether they're good or bad.)
The problem with nuclear, besides technical safety factors which we can overcome by not being stupid and putting backup generators and pumps in a sub-basement in a tsunami zone, is that its not "sustainable" - we can only scrape enough fissionable material off the Earth and from sea-water to last 5B years. Oh wait, the Sun will red-giant an burn the Earth up in about 5B years... Maybe it is sustainable if we develop some good solar cells by then - and solar shields...
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
If the storage pools are giving off heat and need active cooling, that is energy being wasted and could be used somehow - surely it would be possible to have a mini-turbine + dynamo + condenser that converts that heat into a self-cooling system?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Clean enough that you would want one exhausting into your backyard??
The real headline should read, "Stupid Americans Favor Needlessly Increased Nuclear Risks". By preventing expansion of newer, safer designs, they are mandating certification extension of older, less safe reactors. Which is actually maintaining the status quo. Thusly, any moratorium which prevents the deployment of newer, safer designs is mandating the continued operation of older, less safe designs. In essence, they are mandating a more dangerous world.
In the US alone, we have over sixty reactors which would have likely long been replaced with newer, safer, more efficient designs if it were not for anti-nuke idiots. Sadly, rather than being replaced, these reactors are forced to apply for certification extension. And because of the hostile environment created by anti-nuke idiots, they are almost already granted their extension.
Its literally become real world safety versus scare mongering with intent for self fulfilling prophecy and sadly, scare mongering is winning by a wide measure.
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Actually, I think the earthquake itself had more to do with it than the refusal to anticipate it.
It appears that the Japanese nuclear facilities did withstand the quake and the tsunami intact.
What they did not survive was their own safety shutdown procedures, since as soon as they were all taken off line, there was no longer sufficient electric power to operate the cooling pumps.
A 6.0 quake without a tsunami would have also destroyed these reactors if it had taken out the power transmission lines. In retrospect, the design failure was in the shutdown procedure, that was designed around an all too simple model of what could possibly go wrong.
I don't have an adequate car analogy for this. But I can offer a Boy Scout analogy: As most Boy Scouts know, dynamite will burn and not explode in a fire. But a prudent Boy Scout will not build his camp fire with sticks of dynamite. The risks of an uncontrolled positive feedback acceleration are too great.
Will
The NIMBYs are going "I told you so" around Tokyo right about now.
Only because they are idiots. So far no one has died from radiation, and it looks like no one will. Instead we have 11000 confirmed dead and another 17000 missing from the disaster, but because people are idiots they only talk about the damn reactors. We are going to have more deaths this summer from rolling blackouts in a heat wave, then will happen because of these reactors.
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It's even safer than that. The primary purpose of heavy water in a CANDU reactor is not to cool, but to act as a neutron moderator (it slows the neutrons down). Without this moderator the reaction stops (CANDU reactors do not use enriched uranium so neutron moderation is required to keep the chain reaction going). In addition to control rods CANDU reactor support either moderator poisoning (they inject chemicals into the moderator tank that absorb neutrons bringing the reaction to an end) or a moderator dump (they actually dump the heavy water from the moderator tank). This coupled with the non-enriched uranium just makes them plain safer. It's a shame they didn't sell more of them.
But yet more people have been killed directly installing / running wind turbines or other renewable energy sources in the last 10 years than they ever have been from nuclear power over the last 50 years. Not to mention the number of people who have also been badly injured. May by its about time to start looking at the real risk here and measuring the number of watt's produced by the number of people killed! If you go further back and look at the accident china had with a broken dam that killed 230k people and caused bad issues for a further 10 million people then you will see what I am on about here :)
No, we need a moratorium on "new" reactors so that we can keep operating the 40+ year old versions that while hold up well in 8.9+ earthquakes tend to malfunction when someone throws an ocean sized bucket of water on them. Yes those 1960's engineers were good and all, got us to the moon, gave us color television, but seriously people... If we can't replace them with better designs what the **** do you expect?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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Also, in an emergency, a CANDU, which uses heavy water, can't be cooled and moderated using sea water like in Fukushima
Nonsense, the heavy water actually promotes the reaction (it's a neutron moderator). Getting rid of it and cooling with normal fresh or sea water would be doable and simply serve the double role of cooling AND stopping the chain reaction (by virtue of not being heavy water).
I would not want any power plant in my proximity, making your point moot.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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It's STUPID to build a Nuclear power plant in a fault zone. Of course Japan is one HUGE fault zone being on the Pacific 'ring of fire'. Japan has learned how to live with earthquakes and they probably have the toughest building codes (for new construction) in the world as far as earthquakes go. In fact, those nuclear power plants were NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami, but rather by the lack of cooling when convention power backup failed as a result of the tsunami. The irony is that if the plant had NOT been shut down by the computers when the earthquake started it probably would NOT have been damaged as it would have been generating the necessary power to run the cooling systems.
I doubt that Japan will give up on nuclear power, though they will review all the safety systems and backups. They simply DON'T have a choice, they are a nation so dependent on electric power and have NO fossil fuels of their own. They might be able to develop geo-thermal or otec power however.
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Off point somewhat, but this will come back on topic at the bottom:
When the liquid sodium cooled Fermi reactor near Detroit, MI, failed in 1966, the contaminated and radioactive sodium was temporarily stored in containers on a dock in Lake Eerie. It was kept there for many years. The last I heard, there was concern that the contaminants were from the partial meltdown and included long lived radioactive isotopes. This was a fast breeder reactor.
Of course everyone involved had taken high school chemistry and knew what would happen if a 55 gallon drum of metallic sodium cracked and fell into the bay.
My question is what ever happened to that sodium? Did someone figure out a way to safely spirit it off to a dry salt cave? Or is it still on that dock?
My basic point is that arguing about the safety of nuclear power plants is not where today's discussions should be going. What we need to consider is arguments for and against the various ways of handling post-production byproducts of nuclear power. And we should not be thinking about building more plants until there are shovel ready plans on the table for dealing with the transportation, storage, and final transmogrification of these byproducts.
Will
Please don't use Chernobyl and accident in the same sentence.
Read up on the timeline - it wasn't an accident, it was a dangerous experiment gone wrong, including acts of criminal negligence by the plant supervisor.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Especially since Fujushima is actually a success story. Yes, the radiation levels in the plant itself and surrounding water table are high, but this isn't a full meltdown china syndrome like Chernobyl was by any means. Evacuation was orderly, and while there are some serious problems with the plant itself, it survived a 9.0 R Earthquake with primary containment intact. THAT is a testament to 1960s GE Design if there ever was one. And modern plants are much safer, we're almost at the point where a truck CAN roll up and set up a 1MW Acme Nuclear Power Station, completely safely.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
While Canada may be considering nuclear power itself, please keep American plants away from Canadian borders. Feel free to build them in Texas though, a nuclear disaster should have no noticeable effect on the collective IQ of American citizenry, while being extremely beneficial to the American political, educational and judicial systems. Okay this is going a bit far, but c'mon! Heck, just build it near one of the many prisons that have a "death row", kill two birds with one stone so to speak.
how is babby formed?
"As it stands today, it requires tons of extremely toxic substances to be housed inside a super-heated pressure vessel. "
That has not been true since 1977. Low pressure nuclear reactors have been available for several years now.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Wasn't it the tsunami, about twice the size the facilities were designed for, which caused the problem? It swamped the backup generators causing the cores to overheat.
"I don't think you can really be so angry with the anti-nuclear crowd."
But I can consider them to be a bunch of idiots whose knowledge on the state of the science is stuck in 1977 with GE LWRs like Fujushima.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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And yet Yucca Mountain has been designed to hold only a fraction of the long term waste that already exists in the USA, and is mostly stored in the ever-expanding temporary cooling ponds at the nuclear plants.
Yucca Mountain is a kind of security theater. It certainly is no solution. The sorry truth is that no one yet has a proven solution (although France and China may be close).
The USA can do nuclear power safely. But the USA hasn't got the beginnings of a clue about how to handle the byproducts in a safe way.
Will
That is why we need fast breeder reactors. These use far less fuel and have much less waste. We do need to find a better cooling solution, I agree there.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
The FA says Americans support a moratorium *IF* solar/wind can meet their energy needs. That's a long way from being against nuclear power.
How you ask the question is important. You might get different answers if you asked, instead:
Even if America faced a severe energy shortfall that other technologies can't make up, should we impose a moratorium on new nuclear plant construction?
While the survey sponsor may be non-partisan, that doesn't men they don't have an agenda. From their website it appears they are pushing solar/wind/renewable. It's important to have a diverse energy supply, and a reliable and secure one.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Renewable is med and long term much much much cheaper than anything we do and have right now.
Citation required. One with the numbers and sources.
To get the ball rolling he is one that is against this assertion. Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air [PDF warning] or the main website and i think the book in html.
Says the guy with an engineering degree and a MBA?
So you have *at least* these qualification then? Since you have made a statement in the same vein, which according to the book of angel'o'sphere is a minimum requirement for making such a statement.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
So, you suggest that we continue to use a system that is less safe because nuclear is not 100% safe. That doesn't make a ton of sense.
Also, the use of the term "peak oil" is a sign of being conned by media. "Peak oil" is a ridiculous concept. The amount of oil that exists simply cannot be determined based on the amount that we pump.
Traveling wave, or previously breed and burn reactors can save you the expensive reprocessing step.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
The only two pebble bed reactors that have been tried did *not* do well at all with respect to safety (or any other metric for that matter). They are not the fail safe design for nuclear power that you seem to think they are.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
No, you are mistaken there is no citation required. ... only ordinary maintenance, like any other plant (on a much lower level).
A plant that runs on noting than wind or sun costs NOTHING to sustain
WTF get a damn education.
And if you want citations than google your self. It is not my fault that common sense seems not to be taught in schools in our days.
I worked in the energy industries like 15 years, I don't need an MBA to debunk your "economical unfeasible" statement.
My point was, that my parent (was that you?) made a complete nonsense statement without any backing ... so I asked if he has a degree ...
And you make this an "according to angel'o'spheres book" hate speech, rofl ...
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh that's total BS, we already have the solution. Its just the rest of the world gets their panties in a twist when we change "waste" into "future-fuel" and toss it in a breeder and make plutonium.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Yes, let's abolish thorough approval processes for nuclear reactors! Because the fact that they manage to screw them up WITH regulation bodes so well for how they will perform WITHOUT it.
Let's keep in mind that "thorough approval processes" are a tool for preventing construction of nuclear reactors and other things that the people who have control over the "thorough approval process" don't want. Second, approval is tangential to regulation. Regulation isn't going to change because you moved it around a few miles.
Goodbye any hopes for energy independence. What? Wind and solar? Sure, kid, sure.
You threw in lots of disclaimers, like this whopper: "outside the Soviet Union". Sure, if we exclude every accident that ever happened in the largest nation in the world, which includes Chernobyl, nuclear power looks much safer.
The USSR was a notorious gambler when it came to nuclear power. Japan is outside the former USSR. End of story.
And what's this about "oldest containment designs" holding up better than expected? Uh, why were we still using those designs? We have a frightening proclivity for continuing to run plants well after they should have been decommissioned, as you indicate with this nice little phrase: "originally scheduled for decommissioning this month but got service life extended". Why? Nuclear plants don't age well.
Because it's a remarkable pain to develop and deploy new reactor designs. Far less trouble to keep running less safe designs than upgrade to safer designs.
My point was, that I made a complete nonsense statement without any backing ...
fixed that for you.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
I think that anyone that believes that Nuclear Power is a viable solution should backup their religion and go help out in Japan. That'll show all those ignorant fools how wrong they are.
The nuclear accident didn't cause the magnitude 9 quake. Rather it was the other way around.
I just don't know how to convince this planet that picking H3-dirt off the ground on the moon and shoving it into a fusion generator makes more sense than choking this planet's biosphere.
He3 concentrations are around 10-100 parts per billion in the near surface of lunar regolith. No way that shoveling lunar dirt into a fusion reactor would work. And you still need a commercially viable fusion reactor. Fission power works now.
Every few days nuclear industry folks come on slashdot and talk about how Safe, Safe SAFE nuclear power is.
The fact is that nuclear power is probably not gonna kill us all, but it's probably gonna kill a lot of people in the distant future because of the waste problem. If you have a technology that produces deadly waste, I'm sorry I don't care how much CO2 it avoids, it's not green or viable long term. Nuclear power is irresponsible when you look more than a few years down the road, period.
What we really need to be doing is shifting to decentralized power generation from renewables. You get way more mileage from the couple billion dollars you stick into a nuclear plant when you pour that into putting wind turbines on America's criminally underutilized Great Plains fields. You get way more jobs, way cleaner, and no sticky waste problem that we are passing on to our kids.
The consumer part of this is to cut back on energy usage. It's much cheaper to reduce inefficient economic activity than to build new plants. Spend the money building energy saving rather than energy generating devices, and you will be much further ahead over time.
For God's sake cut the subsidies for Oil and Nuclear and ramp them up on renewables and energy efficiency. Anything else is madness.
We need some government leadership here, but citizen's demanding better energy policy focused around balls to the wall buildouts of renewables, and strict efficiency requirements are the only way we are going to get around the energy industry trying to lobby their way into billions of centralized energy generation boondoggles.
If we're going to start making decisions on what kind of energy plant we build based on hos much radiation it throws off, doesn't that mean we'll stop building coal burning plants?
Tada. Both last for billions of years!
Jesus Christ you're stupid. By your standard the Earth is an uninhabitable planet because it's full of radioactive materials that last OMG billions of years. Do you know what a half life is?
Instead of proving me "completely wrong", you proved me completely right. Thanks.
If by "completely right" you mean "a complete idiot", then yeah.
Peak oil is a perfectly reasonable concept, they're just using a poor explanation of it. The amount of oil that exists is not relevant. Peak oil refers the amount of oil that can be practically (cheaply/quickly/easily) extracted, and that is what reaches a peak. Even if you had an infinite supply of oil somewhere, that doesn't matter if you can only extract a few thousand barrels a day or it costs more to extract it than you can sell it for.
Example : The Athabasca oil sands up here in Canada. almost 2 trillion barrels of oil, more than most of the rest of the world combined, and enough to sustain current oil usage worldwide (83 million barrels/day) for the next 50 years. Less than 1/10th of that is able to be practically extracted at current prices and it is slow, messy, and expensive to extract and convert into a useful form. At present, we're barely getting a million barrels a day and that will only scale up to 3 million in the next decade with a dozen companies going balls out to expand capacity.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
While there will always be dangers in nuclear energy, the Fukushima reactors are not CANDU. This catastrophe would not have happened if they were... or at least the damage would be far less... and would 'likely' not ever got to this point.
That's not to say the CANDU system is not perfect. there are lots of down times and accidents happen.
What is strange though are the places in which these plants are located. Understandably they are often located on the edge of a large body of water. But why did Japan decide that the east coast was better then the west coast?
The west coast has less effects by earthquakes, and hardy would be hit by a tsunami. Also, If there ever were a meltdown and it made its way to the water, it would be better off on the west coast so as to have less of an effect on the rest of the Pacific Ocean.
What are the advantages of the East?
The USA is a long, long way away from having shovel ready plans for building the transmogrifying breeder reactors, or the interim storage and transportation facilities they need. What parent post is talking about is a pipe dream. Pipe dreams solve no problems. In this case they are part of the problem.
We need shovel-ready plans for this infrastructure, not more cheerleaders yelling "Go Nuclear!" from the sidelines. The discussion is noisy enough already.
Will
I'll be all for nuclear as soon as someone can figure out how to ensure that enough checks are in place so that dumb/lazy/cheap people won't compromise its safety.
Label them critical national infrastructure and put the military in charge of building, maintaining, and operating them. It gives you a good reason to increase the military budget - which would keep the right-wing happy - while ensuring that profit and nepotism don't compromise safety - which should keep the lefties happy. You can even throw in an extra layer of civilian oversight, to include yearly inspections and procedural review.
Really, I think that there are already enough checks in place to ensure that safety isn't compromised. Three Mile Island was the worst disaster the US has had, and it was so minor that it's not even worth mentioning. Even this Japanese disaster - which is orders of magnitude worse than anything that's happened in the US - is unlikely to lead to a significant rise in the cancer rate. So I think the suggestion I made above is entirely unnecessary - but if you really want to improve safety and security, that's you best bet.
The interesting thing to me is how completely inaccurate all of the media has been in this entire "nuclear crisis". I work for a very large energy company with some of the guys that go visit those nuclear plants every year, most of them with PHDs in Nuclear Physics. Their concerns right now focus mainly on the nuclear fuel rod storage and how they are going to handle the excess amount of heating and unspent fuel rods sitting in empty cooling pools. There are absolutely no major concerns around the radiation levels past the power plants property lines. There has so far been ONE casualty to this accident, and people think that nuclear is unsafe? People in California are taking Potassium Iodide and several of them have gone to the hospital for their stupidity. If you are interested in the information about the nuclear event, and information about the actual power plants and exposure levels? Here's some reading, enjoy :)
Things it would be nice for the news media to have read before they started talking...
GE BWR Manual
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf
GE ESBWR - Latest Design: Unbuilt.
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/nuclear_energy/en/downloads/gea14429g_esbwr.pdf
Wiki Concerning Accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
Wiki BWR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWR
Spent Nuclear Fuel Calculations
http://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/ir/bitstream/1840.16/2309/1/etd.pdf
Graphic: Plant Status
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-nuclear-reactor-status/
Earthquake/ Radiation Levels/ No.2 / Status
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/03/16/graphics-explaining-japans-nuclear-reactor-disaster/
Tsunami
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-where-the-wave-hit/#more-52826
Inside Reactor 2
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-inside-fukushima-daiichis-most-worrisome-reactor/
Meltdown Dynamics
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/graphic-meltdown-fears/
Exposure Levels
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-how-fast-will-radation-kill-you/#more-52930
Earthquake Data/ H2 Blast/ Radiation Spread
http://news.nationalpost.com/photo_gallery/japan-earthquake-graphic-nuclear-plant-blasts/
Nuclear Fission product Decay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission_product
NRC: Zirconium Cladding Fire
http://www.irss-usa.org/pages/documents/SGS_213-223_response.pdf
Reactor Status: Excel Spreadsheet
http://www.jaif.or.jp/english/news_images/pdf/ENGNEWS01_13002
but just because Chernobyl's effects won't last billions of years does not mean other incidents will not.
It is not physically possible. You know why? None of the radioactive nucleotides have a half life that long.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
There are several really top notch designs from mother Russia. Who needs the open market when you can have Chernobyl. Thanks for attempting to put even more BS politics into the debate. Dumbass.
I would be more likely to accept your claim that you "worked in the energy industries like 15 years" if your written responses didn't make you seem like a 12 year old. As for the citation, yes, you certainly do need to provide one. Saying "duh, wind and sun are teh free!" makes you sound like a simpleton. You need to consider construction costs, maintenance costs, general servicing costs, and average lifespan of the power plant. Without those figures you simply can not make any informed comment about the average cost of "renewables" vs other electrical production methods. So far, the limited data we have seems to indicate that wind and solar are at least as expensive as nuclear, if not more so. Which would put them well above the cost of coal, gas, etc.
Units 5 and 6 in Fukushima didn't had severe problems despite being affected by the lack of power, and the Onagawa power station, closer to the epicenter of the earthquake, aside a small fire in the turbine building, survived unscathed. The main problem here is that TEPCO for menial reasons and hubris didn't make properly safety checks in their nuclear power stations before and they were caught red handed, so now that it is really important that their information should be believed, their previous record has destroyed their credibility and of regulators.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Germany built a pebble bed reactor. It didn't end well. They had some very nasty contamination issues.
Breeder reactors, on the other hand, would be good, but there's the issue of them possibly creating weapons-grade material. Why that would be an issue for the US, I don't know, but we damned well should build one at Hanford and feed it all that toxic sludge that's been leaking out of containers for decades.
No, that is your misconception. ... nope. I'm not your teacher. Go and teach yourself.
I don't need citations for stuff that is common knowledge, or should be common knowledge, depending what you define worthy to teach in schools.
I further more don't need to post citations for stuff people can google/wikipedia themselves.
I frankly hate the slashdot attitude to start a posting with citation needed
Your last sentence: Which would put them well above the cost of coal, gas, etc. e.g. I know you just ended your post emotionally .. however the most expensive energy source, surprisingly is: gas.
Not because of the gas itself but because of the gas plants.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Because plenty of other geologists said they should have been looking farther back than 1896 to plan their worst case scenario:
Shorter storyline: Japan's nuclear industry downplayed the risks and ignored outside experts not on their payroll. Funny how often that happens...
Even worse, if the nuclear reactors had NOT been shut down there would have been no accident since it was the lack of power that caused the coolant failure and the reactors were NOT damaged by the earthquake or the tsunami.
Mod parent up. Control rods do not prevent reactions. They merely control the reactions. That's why they're called control rods. They limit reactions such that once the fission byproducts stop breaking down, the reaction rate falls to almost nothing because you don't have enough mass in one place.
When the control rods are first inserted, there is still a lot of heat being produced. For the first few days after a scram, the reactor requires significant cooling to get rid of that heat. When you don't have enough cooling, you get what's happening at the Fukushima plants.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Wrong. Scrubbers don't stop the release of radioactivity from a coal fired power plant. You'd essentially have to go to CO2 sequestration for that.
--MarkusQ
Your example is perfect for describing just how dumb the idea of "peak oil" is. A new generator that runs off of wishes would make all forms of oil extraction too slow, messy and expensive to extract and convert into a useful form. All that your version of "peak oil" means is that there are other forms of energy generation that keep oil from monopolizing the industry. (The other version people use is the idea that you can count the amount that exists by how much is chosen to be pulled out a year) And yet, people keep trotting it out like it is some indicator on oil supply. It is a marketing con job.
The NYT has a nice summary of recent work on renewable energy on the large scale. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/renewing-support-for-renewables/
Basically, nukes are so expensive that they suck up resources for GHG emissions mitigation and slow things down. Renewables cost less even when you work in storage.
Indeed. The Japanese problem is not happening because of a quake, or because of a tsunami.
It is happening because of a fucking stupid power outage. That's it, that's why it's happening. There is no more to explain about it. They are having a nuclear meltdown because of lack of electrical power, due to flooding.
This is a) so inherently stupid it's hard to think about, and b) incredibly easy to keep from ever happening here.
None of the problem is due to the 'earthquake' or 'tsunami' per se. It's due to incredibly poorly designed of shutdown system. Yes, the generators should have been higher up, but that was just one of the problems.
For example, why did they have to run a wire in to run a pump? Why the hell aren't there easy 'pump electricity access points' where you can just roll up and hook to them? Or why couldn't they hook to the grid?
Why do you even need a pump at all? Radioactive stuff is hot. If you have something heating the water, you have a damn self-circulating pool of water if you make it big enough, you don't need a 'pump'. Okay, that's not practical for the reactors, but it's certainly practical for the spent-fuel rods. That should it a big pool a mile away that they just keep topped off, not a tiny pool next to the damn reactor that overheats too.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Excluding the only disaster to ever occur at a reactor that did not have any kind of containment vessel is the only rational way to discuss the risks of reactors operating today.
It'd be like talking about the dangers of vehicles on the road today, which does include older cars with fewer safety features, but including a freakishly stupid car that was once built that had tanks filled with nitroglycerin attached to its exterior. Literally everyone recognizes that it was ridiculously retarded to ever build one that way, nobody would ever build another one, and there are no such cars remaining on the road. The relevance to real danger is zero.
Note that a Chernobyl-free discussion still includes a whole gamut of human error, flawed reactor designs, and other things we can rationally talk about. But all relevant reactors -- including TMI and Fukushima -- include containment vessels. It's the simplest, most brain-dead, obvious ultimate back-up plan for reactor safety. Even really old, outdated reactors are using them. And the benefits, when comparing Chernobyl to every other disaster, are obvious.
So yes. Excluding that disaster is the only reasonable way to talk about the dangers of nuclear power today.
The enemies of Democracy are
Modern coal power plants are quite clean.
Wish people would stop parroting that. That comment is 100% propaganda and completely misleading.
"Clean coal" is clean compared to "dirty coal." That's very true. But it makes as much sense as saying you have slower growing cancer so its good..as opposed to fast growing cancer. That, of course, is dumb. Even clean coal is very bad for the environment, coal miners, and people with respiratory issues. Even clean coal sprays ash, including radiation.
Coal is literally one of the dirtiest forms of energy man has. Nuclear is the cleanest and safest forms of production energy known to mankind. Its also the cheapest and renewable despite an extremely financially hostile environment.
The real crime here is, nuclear has actively been prevented from developing into ever more safe an cost effective form of energy. And as an aside, coal is likely to be as clean as its ever going to become - which isn't saying a lot.
Where exactly did I say to use a system (non-nuclear) that is less safe? Where did I say we should not use nuclear?
What doesn't make sense is the how you can extract what you assert I said from what I actually said.
What I do think is that nuclear does play a role. We just need to be wise in it's deployment. But I don't want it near my beautiful part of the country.
Peak Oil is not a media coined term nor is it a ridiculous concept.
From the Wiki:
"M. King Hubbert created and first used the models behind peak oil in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970.[1] His logistic model, now called Hubbert peak theory, and its variants have described with reasonable accuracy the peak and decline of production from oil wells, fields, regions, and countries,"
The term has been in existence since before I was born and has been picked up by the media who is suddenly interested in the fact that we reached overall peak oil in the world in 2005. Peak Oil is based on analysis of data relating to the ability of the industry to develop more pumping capacity against the decline in pumping capacity of current sources of oil. Since the Hubbert peak theory has been shown to be a reasonable approximation of what actually is happening in the field, it seems reasonable that the predictive value of this tool and its wide use in determining what actually happens flies in the face of you calling it a "ridiculous concept". How exactly would you define the fact that we will never be able to achieve the worlds maximum oil pumping capacity as it existed in 2005?
Back in 1982 I talked with an oil industry insider who stated that by their estimates there were only about 62-65 years of oil left to pump. I recently read something by a guy from Shell which confirms that this is still basically the case. And the estimate was that sometime between 2040-2050 the industry would run out of cheaply accessible oil.
One has to remember that all potential pockets of oil have for the most part been identified and re-identified the world over. The industry has done all of the legwork and continues to go over the entire earth trying to hone in on the likeliest places for oil. But the rate at which new oil is accessible continues to be steady and consistent with the predictive models. Even the much ballyhooed ANWR region which the USGS says has about 8 billion barrels of oil potentially has been drilled like swiss cheese with something like 280 sites drilled with no oil ..... seems to be a bust.
"The amount of oil that exists simply cannot be determined based on the amount that we pump."
The industry already has estimates on the amount of oil that exist. But there metrics indicate an ever dwindling amount which will mostly be finished off by 2050. This correlates with the Peak Oil theory and its predictive capacity.
If you have some other metrics which the oil industry doesn't I would be interested in hearing about them.
Only if there is no scrubber at the power plant. Modern coal power plants are quite clean.
Clean coal is a myth. That radioactive (and mercury, lead, arsenic, thallium and other toxic material containing) fly ash the scrubbers capture still has to go somewhere, and scrubbers are not 100% efficient. What happens with the waste? It sits outside in large piles, until their containment pond fails and wipes out the nearest town and seriously pollutes the nearby water source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
At least nuclear plants keep their spent fuel waste inside and rarely have accidents (Note this is the Largest ash spill, there have been many others), especially caused by something as rare as rain and cold temps. This also does not take into account accidents, health complications, or environmental impact related to mining the stuff.
-Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
If we're using the same 50/60 year old tech that those Japanese nukes are using, then we've got problems. There are many much safer nuclear designs.
Also, designing your coolant pump back-up to be semi-tsunami resistant is probably a good thing for a coastal plant at the convergence point of several large tectonic plates.
Anyway, we're already having problems because several bi-products from nuclear plants are required for MRI/Chemo/etc. Our lack of nuclear power plants is causing a shortage of materials needed to save people's lives. Well, we're getting there anyway, but not quite.
Neither the parent, or the person who tried to respond, actually explained what peak oil is correctly.
Peak oil is the point where prices do not decrease. Well, not meaningfully, obviously there will always be tiny variations, but peak oil is when a running average of oil prices would show them always going up or staying steady, and never going back down.
It doesn't have anything directly to do with the amount of oil. In fact, there's nothing stopping more oil from being found after it.
However, at that point, the demand will be so high, and the supply so low, that even an moderate increase in the supply won't be much more than a blip on the upward price climb. As it's clear that no one else has any extra oil, the new supplier will just slightly undersell them.
That's the peak oil theory. It doesn't assume we know how much oil total there is, although it does assume we won't suddenly discover a huge, cheap amount of oil.
It's not an assumption to do with oil at all, it's an assumption about markets. It assumes if you have a product that's vastly demanded, and supply is functionally a limited resource, at some point the market will just start ascribing near-infinite future value to it, which means prices will never decrease, even if random amounts of supply come in.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
.....that we're only 4 years away from "Mr. Fusion", if the Back to the Future series is any indication..... THAT would be *great*.....
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Or replace them with some other form of power generation, maybe?
I hear unicorn farts have a really good ROI.
With the number of hands in the pot that there are, it's amazing these things don't blow up every day.
I wonder if the fact that excessive numbers of rods were kept packed tightly together in temporary cooling pools IN THE SAME BUILDING as the reactors was due to the fact that more approved ponds were, due to the excessive regulation insisted upon by NIMBYs, prohibitively expensive.
If it were easier to get storage space, then perhaps the rods would have been stored far enough apart that even without water there would have been no serious problem.
OFTEN common sense is sacrificed to satisfy bureaucrats need to fill in checkboxes.
That said, I don't think there can ever be a nuke plant that is safe should it become the target of a military attack. Wars happen every so often. ExpectedTimeTill(War) = 100 years seems reasonable for a given location. Power plants are definately valid military targets seeing as they provide power to everything else.
Can you scale your nuclear power plant down to the size of a matchbox car and hand it to a five year old with a hammer, and be confident of it's safety?
( Actually because of critical mass requirements, I should say can you scale up a five year old and give them a scaled up hammer, and allow them to go to town on your nuke plant? ) Ok, they'd be crushed under their own weight. Whatever - you get my point..
...
Even better, AECL is currently developing the ACR-1000 which is based on the proven CANDU design but delivers more power, has improved safety mechanisms, is simpler to build and operate, etc. etc. Unfortunately, the government has decided to sell off AECL, so the future of these reactors seems nebulous at the moment.
This is one survey. There have already been other surveys that have shown that even though support for nuclear power has slightly eroded recently, more than 50% still support it. You will never have a perfect survey on nuclear power until you can survey each and every American, because any survey will be contaminated by environmentalists, anti-nuke activists, energy company employees, etc. Half of what has been reported by the American media on what is happening in Japan has been spun to seem like it is Chernobyl all over again, which it isn't. What most people do not realize when there are these daily reports of 'radiation' found in soil/water/animals/etc is that the levels reported are not really hazardous at all. But all you will hear from the media is "1000 times worse than normal". When normal is essentially zero, 1000 times that is not much at all. It would be like going from a penny to $10.
Actually, it is all about maintenance. The safest airplane design in the world does not matter if the plane is improperly maintained. Unfortunately, in a competitive market, the first cost to be cut is maintenance. In a corporate environment, it is the obvious target for improving the bottom line without any short term effects. That is why nuclear power is expensive. Fuel costs are not the major cost factor. Regulatory requirements are. Until there is a way to safely handle radioactive material, this environment will never go away, good design or not.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
After all it was the main catalyst for this disaster.
I've had exactly the same thought. Maybe I'm just an overly simplistic layman, but it seems that materials generating their own heat would be a perpetual motion machine's dream.
Ah, so I get it. We're supposed to let the company build the reactor on the fault line, THEN tell them they are in violation of the regulations, and too bad about the billions of dollars sunk, you have to tear it down now.
(And yes, your point is all the more ridiculous considering the joke approval processes that brought us many of the badly sited, under-protected plants in our fleet.)
Someone had to do it.
No, that is your misconception.
I don't need citations for stuff that is common knowledge, or should be common knowledge, depending what you define worthy to teach in schools.
Right. Everyone knows that Nuclear is the cheapest form of power, and wind and solar are the most expensive, therefore I don't need to provide any citations. Since my comment is common knowledge, you can engage in autofelatio if you don't agree.
Your last sentence: Which would put them well above the cost of coal, gas, etc. e.g. I know you just ended your post emotionally .. however the most expensive energy source, surprisingly is: gas.
Sorry, but it's common knowledge that gas power plants are completely free, due to leprechaun labour. Again, you lose.
Now, while I'm really enjoying your "anything I say doesn't require a citation" theory, I'll actually provide some info that you can check out when you're not busy trying to pass off personal opinions as facts. Enjoy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_cost_of_electricity_generated_by_different_sources#U.S._Department_of_Energy_estimates
"Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." We've already got an Asteroid Belt after us and an Oort Cloud. You want to bring potential mass-extinction events even closer? Rethimk [sic].
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The rationale for this "temporary" (ha ha) measure is that nuclear power would not be competitive with alternative forms of power generation if they had to pay for their own insurance. THIS IS COMPLETELY INSANE!
We are intentionally tilting the playing field in favor of the most dangerous form of power production available (when the danger is measured by the marketplace via the cost for insurance). Imagine what the world would be like if for the past 50 years we had instead tilted the playing field in favor of safer, renewable, alternative forms of energy production. Or, perhaps better still, if we had just left the playing field level.
The only reason for this insane public subsidy of nuclear power is the greed of corporations. At the end of World War Two, many corporations had huge investments in nuclear technology. For example, DuPont had more capital investment in nuclear than all their other capital investments combined. In order to "maximize shareholder value" (wealth without work) they bought the Price-Anderson Act (politics without principles) in order to get rights without responsibilities.
In Soviet Russia the problem was that the government controlled the corporations. The situation in Capitalist America is exactly the reverse.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Right now the only viable replacement for nuclear power is coal.
Global Resource Corporation [GRC] has a neat technology that uses specific microwave frequencies to release liquid (diesel) & gaseous (propane/butane) hydrocarbons from solids like used tires, plastics, and coal.
But they haven't managed their company right (or they ran out of money), and haven't gotten past the prototype stage. Perhaps they're going to fold, or maybe Exxon-Mobil will buy up the patents to kill the technology. Or maybe GRC was infiltrated by big oil. Who knows.
There are energy options that are better than nuclear, they're just not profitable for the financiers & utility barons. Raphial Morgado says in one of the YouTube videos (one of these: SJSU demonstration) that his "Mighty Pump" is disruptive technology, because it makes every internal combustion engine everywhere obsolete. Nothing's safe with disruptive technology: every turbine, and every water pump is now obsolete too, and whatever will JP Morgan do when all those utility companies start defaulting on their loans (when their power infrastructure, bought on time, becomes unprofitable because of Mr. Morgado's pump)?
(Plug: I mentioned the Mighty Pump in my recent post that advocates having dedicated disaster response ships)
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Ah, so I get it. We're supposed to let the company build the reactor on the fault line, THEN tell them they are in violation of the regulations, and too bad about the billions of dollars sunk, you have to tear it down now.
No, a "thorough approval process" means coming up with a sufficiently ridiculous scenario that the proposed plant can't make it. It's not "design this plant so that it can survive the fault, you're trying to put it on", but "design the plant so that if a fault were to magically appear under the plant..."
Here's how you do it. Make a list of possible failure scenarios. First, disasters. What can happen to your plant? Earthquakes? Tornadoes? Volcanoes? Hurricanes? Deliberate terrorist attacks or nuclear strikes? And so on. Make reasonable estimates for the location and pad them. Then do the same for potential construction and operational failures. Go through the historical record of nuclear accidents for more examples. And so on.
The point isn't to come up with the comprehensive list of all possible accidents, but instead a sufficiently broad number of sufficiently likely scenarios that your plant can withstand what you know is likely to happen to it and build a safety buffer against the threats you don't know of.
The real lesson of Fukushima is that you then need to design the reactor so it will fail gracefully and in a recoverable manner, even in the presence of numerous simultaneous failures.
(And yes, your point is all the more ridiculous considering the joke approval processes that brought us many of the badly sited, under-protected plants in our fleet.)
It's worth noting that these so-called "badly sited, under-protected" plants haven't resulted in many serious accidents. For example, in Wikipedia that aside from Fukushima, there have been only three partial or complete meltdowns of civilian power plants (there are additional several meltdowns in experimental or military nuclear plants). One was the particularly crazy Chernobyl accident, using a reactor that wouldn't be allowed in the developed world and stripping away the safety features in a way that also wouldn't be allowed in a developed world power plant. So there aren't a lot of big accidents. Of the few serious accidents that have affected developed world power plants over the fifty to sixty years, only the Fukushima accident were dependent on location.
So where's the evidence to back your assertion that any nuclear plants are "badly sited" or "under-protected"?
And no one seems to speak of the environmental impact of these "100% pollution free" solutions. Like covering several square miles of delicate ecology with solar collectors or mirrors, or the strip mines to extract rare earths for high efficiency solar cells, or that hydrogen releases expected from the so called hydrogen economy will result in depletion of the ozone faster than CFCs ever could. In the meantime even one of the Greenpeace founders has gotten behind nuclear power as the safest and most eco-friendly power solution. We have many many newer and safer designs than the ones from the seventies that represent the latest of the US plants in operation. Instead we develop them for overseas operators. And Canada has what is likely the most inefficient but safest design. The CANDU reactor fails safe. But so do pebble bed reactors. When they lose cooling they slow down fission reactions instead of them speeding up if cooling is lost in a conventional hot water reactor. Personally I'd like to see the Intellectual Ventures wave reactor get an NRC license. But that is years away. I watched as Seabrook in NH was being built and the same protests that happen today, happened then and the cost went through the roof. So much so they didn't complete the project and not all the assets were able to be brought online. If the public looked at the tradeoffs like dams damage to the ecology and the risk of a dam bursting and that the WY wind power pilot farm eliminated a sub-spiecies of migrating birds, to tidal power damage to estuaries and so on, nuclear is the clear winner. We also need to make it easier to process the waste products or design nuclear plants (like the wave reactor) that minimize the created waste. It is somewhat perverse that purposely create radioisotopes for medicine while those same isotopes could be refined from existing "waste". So America needs to stop being driven my rule of the mob and proper science needs to be considered with all the tradeoffs and ignoring the psuedo-science and FUD. We have the technology to make safe nuclear power (well orders of magnitude safer than a coal plant with negligible radioactive release in comparison to the vast quantities released by coal plants world wide, along with all the rest of coals nastiness. (Hey coal can be preprocessed to make it cleaner too and burnt while containing the radioactive material released in burning, but the cost gets higher and the power companies are not required to do so, so they don't.) But with all that except for natural gas which adds to greenhouse gases (mind you, not a bad thing, but that's another argument thread) nuclear is the cleanest power we have, and natural gas just can't supply all the needed energy demand.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Yours is the third definition of "peak oil" that gets used and still is meaningless outside of investment purposes. Commodity products will naturally trend upward in cost. Improvements in the efficiency can cause a temporary reduction in price, but the downward trend is just temporary until you have refined your process. If we discovered that dwarfs digging deep in the ground were magically making oil, so that our existing wells never dried up, we would still see upward pressure on the price of oil.
II'll be all for nuclear as soon as someone can figure out how to ensure that enough checks are in place so that dumb/lazy/cheap people won't compromise its safety.
I'd suggest that we build a series of reactors near White Sands NM then. It is already contaminated far more than any nuke plant failure could cause. But can we say the same for dams. Burst dams have killed hundreds of thousands. Coal plants? They release more radiation each day than 3 Mile Island did. (And so do granite buildings) Chernobyl was a very bad design. North America has no plants with anything close to that. Even the oldest plants online have more safety systems. And, 3 Mile Island was really stupid operator error. Another nearby nuclear plant spotted the release hours before the TMI crew reacted. Initially Peach Bottom called them and TMI ignored them rather than checking into it.
We have limits to what we protect against. Plan against a century high water mark for floods and one will come along that is greater. Some calculations place the Japanese quake at 9.1. That is not an expected value or even close for the area. We have historic highs and lows all the time. So you can't plan for absolute safety.You plan for a statistical safe zone. And as had been previously mentioned. We'll lose more people to rolling blackouts from heat waves this summer than from all the people lost due to all the nuclear accidents in history.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Can you scale your nuclear power plant down to the size of a matchbox car and hand it to a five year old with a hammer, and be confident of it's safety?
Actually we sort of do just that. RTG modules have survived range safety officers blowing up space bound rockets only to be recovered and reused. And the most modern nuke plant designs are designed so that a fully loaded commercial jet can impact them without critical damage to the plant. The way military would best take out a nuke plant would be to destroy critical transmission or generation facilities if possible, without the release of nuclear material, or excessive damage to the plant, unless we are talking the Mideast of course. But rational (if that is possible) warfare wants to damage the military capability without excessive damage to civilian targets. We can take out, for example, the power transmission lines cheaper and easier than taking out the nuke plant itself, and if it is a war of territorial aggression, we preserve the nuke plant for occupation later. I am in concordance with some of your other ideas though. We store nuclear waste in reinforced vessels in fenced off sections of what used to be parking lots because the plant operators can't get permits to take the waste elsewhere, and the appropriate disposal sites are blocked from completion as well by people who strategically time the protests after the approval process happens, relying on the courts to stop them after money time and effort are committed but before they open their doors. I would personally like to see a "It's too late to protest more in the courts, file with the regulators." date in the approval procedures.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
For example, why did they have to run a wire in to run a pump? Why the hell aren't there easy 'pump electricity access points' where you can just roll up and hook to them? Or why couldn't they hook to the grid?
Why do you even need a pump at all? Radioactive stuff is hot. If you have something heating the water, you have a damn self-circulating pool of water if you make it big enough, you don't need a 'pump'. Okay, that's not practical for the reactors, but it's certainly practical for the spent-fuel rods. That should it a big pool a mile away that they just keep topped off, not a tiny pool next to the damn reactor that overheats too.
This is what gets me -- for some reason, with this reactor design, they were simply not allowed to have any sort of electrical hookup to allow the electricity generated by the plant itself to power the cooling system. Not even in an emergency. So even though the plant was melting down and no one cared about what regulations said, the hookups didn't exist to make that possible. That sort of thing just floors me.
It's on the north coast.
Label them critical national infrastructure and put the military in charge of building, maintaining, and operating them
Then you'll get the crowd that likes to claim the government is totally incapable of doing anything right and that the power grid should be fully privatized instead, since they'll run it better and more efficiently.
Though "having the military run it" might deflect those arguments, since the same folks who think the government is terrible at running things also think the military is exceptionally good at organizing.
Maybe the Army Corps of Engineers?
The thing that mostly makes them expensive is the ten years of approval process and the five years of meetings you have to have with the NIMBYs to eventually get to build one.
Yes, let's abolish thorough approval processes for nuclear reactors! Because the fact that they manage to screw them up WITH regulation bodes so well for how they will perform WITHOUT it.
Personally I'm getting sick of the knee-jerk blame-the-regulators talk. It is so tiresome and I wish we could move beyond it.
Useful regulation (like safety regulations) is fine. Regulation whose point is merely to delay and prevent anything from occurring is not.
It's been used very successfully in the past 40 years by the anti-nuke crowd not to ensure the construction of safe nuclear reactors, but to completely stop nuclear plant generation because they hate nuclear power and wish to stop it completely.
And that's not necessarily the "regulators'" fault either, it's the environmental lobby and the politicians beholden to them.
Plenty of oil is being drilled for and mined right now. Neither drilling nor mining has stopped.
This idea that we have to get at all of everything right now does a disservice to future generations. By what right do we get to use all of the easily accessible hydrocarbons on the planet? We are terribly greedy in thinking it only belongs to our generation and we need to use it up right in our own generation.
Nuclear fuel is the same way. Perhaps 3 billion years ago nuclear fuel was plentiful on our planet. Not so much now.
One of the biggest solutions to our energy problem is learning to do with less. We could cut our need in 1/2 if we would just work at trying to use less. And it would be a lot easier than trying to drill or mine our way out given limited resources.
So are you only a socialist when it comes to nuclear power, or do you believe other critical national infrastructure like health care should be socialized as well?
Eh ... it's complicated. On the one hand, I want government to remain as small as possible. On the other hand, I know that a minimalist-government system never works long term because people keep asking for more, and politicians are happy to use it as an opportunity to get more power. So, while I'm ideologically opposed to socialism as a rule, I'm willing to tolerate it in some circumstances. Since you asked about health-care specifically - I don't generally like our state-funded health-care, but I'd be less put-off by it if we still had a private option. Unfortunately, we do not. Now, we're lucky in that we can easily cross the border and get private care in the US, but it still pisses me off that there's no private option here.
Ideally I'd like to see the government acting only as an insurer, instead of the kind of iron-fisted rule they currently have over our health-care system.
As far as nuclear power is concerned, again, ideally I'd like to leave it up to private business, with the government just providing oversight for safety regulations. But I'm willing to compromise - if a private system means no power plants get built because everyone opposes them, while a government run system means we get to build new ones, then I'll go with the government option in a heartbeat.
Well, I could just snark and mention that the Fukushima facility, before this... problem... was successfully running several reactors for decades without incident, and thus as of the beginning of this year would have met the qualifications you just rested your laurels on.
However, since you asked for evidence, then maybe we could talk about the sordid history of Diablo Canyon?
Someone had to do it.
The lead cooled reactors used in some Soviet submarines looks like it could be a good way to go. They are working on various commercial versions of this design now. I think we should build some pilot reactors to investigate these new plant designs, while trying to deal with the waste storage issue rather than keeping spent fuel at the power plants. In the meantime, I think we should review safety at our existing plants, to be sure they can be safely shut down after events like what happened in Japan. I think we should put new plant construction on hold until the safety review is complete, so we can apply lessons learned from Japan's experience to our new plants. However, I would hope the safety review could be completed quickly, say 12 months or so.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
It's still the east side of the island, and I was talking about Caithness in general.
which is totally what she said
Where exactly did I say to use a system (non-nuclear) that is less safe? Where did I say we should not use nuclear?
That would be here:
The big sticking point with nuclear is always safety. And every disaster reminds us of just how unsafe nuclear can be. A 40 mile diameter section where people can't live in Japan is a major chunk of real estate. If this happened near any of our major cities it would cause significant problems. Renewables could be brought up to date in the matter of a decade with a concerted effort. The right tax incentives could retrofit most every building in America with solar. As to the ignorance of the public including myself, I want NO reactor anywhere near where I live simply because I like to live here and want my kids and grandkids to be able to live here safely. This fear of nuclear contamination is not because of TV and shit websites since my understanding of nuclear issues comes mostly from magazine pieces from the last several decades and predates the internet.
And repeated here:
But I don't want it near my beautiful part of the country.
The term may not have been media coined, but as it is commenly used, it is a media term. Your reference to Hubbert is ONE of the definitions used for "peak oil". It also useless outside of investment. First it references US production. Guess what? If you have tons of oil from other countries being dumped on the market, it is obviously going to reduce your dometic output unless trade barriers are enacted. His prediction is a prediction on the investment potential of US based oil extraction. Referencing it to point out that we are running out of oil is silly.
As for your comment about talking to oil insiders. First you have to determine whether they have any merrit. If you talked to any real estate insiders before the housing crash, you would know that it is not that uncommon for people to work in an industry and just go along with what everyone else is saying, even if they have evidence to the contrary.
So, while you and I simply will not have accurate access to the data necessary to judge directly, we will have to look at some reasonable indicators. We can't use the price at the pump, as that will be whatever the companies can goudge us for. So, lets look at what a rational person would do if they saw the Mad Max style apocolyptic world coming about in 30 years.
First, we would expect them to avoid having children that would be guarenteed to have to live in the hell that is being predicted. Did the oil insiders that you talked to have kids?
We could rationalize that they figure, a Mad Max style life is better than never being born. If that is the case, they would certainly spend their childs educational resources on teaching their kids servival techniques. They would bother with wasting those precious resources on things like a college education. They wouldn't be spending money on TVs, or suberban/urban houses that will end up burned to the ground anyway. They would be buying land that is easily defendable from the roving hordes. They would be buying equipment to manufacture their own weapons. Learning not only how to kill invaders with the remaining bullets, but how to craft your long bows and catapults for when the enevitability of "peak bullet".
Was this the behavior of your "insiders"? If it wasn't, then either they were stupid, evil, or full of shit. My bet is on the last one.
How exactly would you define the fact that we will never be able to achieve the worlds maximum oil pumping capacity as it existed in 2005?
Remember, your "peak oil" definition only applies to the US. That is what your link says Hubbert predicted with "peak oil". 2005 US oil production was beat in 2009. As for world supplies, 2005 was 73.72 Million barrels/day. 2008 was 73.69 Million barrels/day. That is less than a 1/10 of a percent in a heavily monip
The citation you gave is: ;D
a) for USA
b) from the US government - and is just a table of costs, with no citations backing those costs
c) does only include the e.g. for nuclear plants, the direct cost related to the plant - e.g. not the cost to store the waste
In other words the costs given in this article make no sense at all.
If you would read your own citation and scroll down to the California levelized energy costs for different generation technologies in US dollars per megawatt hour (2007)
Section, you would realize, I'm right, btw.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yep like the pair we have in my state why would anyone live there with the big beautiful lake, large forest filed with nature like large herds of free roaming deer, yep just horrible.
Seriously it just shows how out of touch these CEOs are to what they run as I've been to the one in my home state and frankly it is a beautiful place. I have also met and talked to some of the guys that work there and they are incredibly serious when it comes to security and safety, the company even has a full reactor sim set up on the premises similar to a shuttle sim where they can run every kind of failure scenario until the worker reactions are automatic.
But if the CEOs are NIMBY, why would they expect any different from the public?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Don't get me wrong. I don't require that nuclear be 100% safe. Nothing is or can be, and I agree with you about coal. I'm actually all for nuclear, once we develop systems that get it as close to 100% safe as possible. Those systems are not in place at this point.
I envision a system wherein a computer checks the work of the plant operators. Want to shut down the backup coolant pumps like they did at TMI? Nope, you can't, because you haven't shut the reactor down yet.
Additionally the industry needs to be heavily regulated by a party that has absolutely no financial interest in the plants it is regulating - namely, the government. If a for-profit corporation thinks it can get away with cutting corners to save money, it will, and the people in that corporation making the call don't give a damn what the consequences might be. We saw that with BP's little party in the Gulf last year. Imagine if we let BP open up a nuclear reactor. "Oh, hell, we don't need the emergency coolant system. What are the odds we'd ever use it, and it'll save money!" Google BP's three little pigs presentation if you don't believe they'd have that attitude.
I don't think it impossible to come up with a system that would allow for the building of nuclear plants that almost guarantees that there would be no accidents due to negligence or profiteering.
But you still have to decide what to do with the waste.
While you're right that coal plants release radiation, where the difference is, is that their waste does not stay radioactive for thousands of years, requiring specialized storage in . . Well. . Somewhere, hopefully, because usually no one's willing to take the waste. Even assuming the nuclear waste is rendered safe, in that once in the storage facility there is no way for it to contaminate anything, ever, you'll never convince the local city council of that, and therefore you'll have a hard time getting it into that safe storage facility in the first place.
The Prairie Island nuclear plant made the news several years ago because it turned out they were storing their waste outside in barrels on the site - not because they wanted to, but because they couldn't find any place to put it. We have to have the waste disposal and storage problem figured out before we go large-scale nuclear.
Again, I don't think that's an insurmountable problem. The biggest hurdle there will be getting the media to stop whipping the public into hysterics every time "nuclear" is mentioned. Given the choice between sensationalizing the DANGEROUS RADIOACTIVE WASTE that's GOING TO KILL US ALL and explaining that the waste is safe if stored properly, most TV stations these days are going to choose the scaremongering path.
So again, I'm not against nuclear, and in fact I think nuclear is, short term anyway, the only way we're going to produce the power that people demand without destroying the climate in the process. I'm all for nuclear, provided the industry can't get away with any BS shenanigans, and provided you can tell me where we're going to put the waste.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
The citation you gave is:
a) for USA
Scroll down.
b) from the US government - and is just a table of costs, with no citations backing those costs ;D
Yeah, I guess I must have imagined the part that says:
"Source: Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Outlook 2011, December 2010, DOE/EIA-0383(2010)"
Yep, that's definitely not a citation. Not at all. It must be google adsense inserting random ads.
And this cite note? Yep, that's a figment of my imagination, also.
c) does only include the e.g. for nuclear plants, the direct cost related to the plant - e.g. not the cost to store the waste
"Total System Levelized Cost (the rightmost column) gives the dollar cost per megawatt-hour that must be charged over time in order to pay for the total cost."
If you would read your own citation and scroll down to the California levelized energy costs for different generation technologies in US dollars per megawatt hour (2007)
You are one dishonest bastard, you know that? First you complain that the citation is "only for the US", then you scroll down past the estimates provided by the UK and start talking about estimates for California. Nice. In the process, you also fail to mention that Californias estimates "incorporate tax breaks", which immediately disqualifies their figures from any serious consideration, AND you miss the Australian estimates which appear immediately below the Californian figures.
Either you're the worst scholar in the history of slashdot, or you're deliberately misrepresenting the data in order to support your preconceptions. Either way, I don't see much point to continuing this discussion.
Ha ha.
I admit I did not read your wiki article completely. So sorry for not seeing it is refering to other sources, that *again* come from the DOE. Sorr,y but the DOE is not trustworthy.
Also I really doubt that your total costs regarding nuclear power are including waste handling. My argument regarding it was only about germany btw. and not about your situation.
So, again: why are the California numbers wrong? I don't get your point.
Finally: what have costs in the USA to do with true costs? No outsider really knows how you work your power plants and what drives your costs.
My point is pretty simple: in europe nuclear power is on a global view the most expensive one.
Wind, water and solar: with no running costs except maintenance, are the cheapest ones.
You draw a figure out of your had that is mainly from the USA DOE ... rofl ... and try to "debunk" my claim? Then you are not able to scroll down and read this e.g.:
Costs of electricity production in euros per megawatt hour
Nuclear Energy 107.0 â" 124.0
Brown Coal 88.0 â" 97.0
Black Coal 104.0 â" 107.0
Domestic Gas 106.0 â" 118.0
Wind Energy Onshore 49.7 â" 96.1
Wind Energy Offshore 35.0 â" 150.0
Hydropower 34.7 â" 126.7
Biomass 77.1 â" 115.5
Solar Electricity 284.3 â" 391.4
Except for the peak in Solar here, which comes likely from the high cost installing it, it is EXACTLY what I said before. So how can you repeatedly claim that I'm wrong?
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
First you accuse me of posting figures which don't have a citation; after showing you that they, in fact, had multiple citations, you then quote "German" figures for which there are no citations whatsoever. So you're a hypocrite, at the very least. Worse than that, though, you completely ignore the Australian and UK figures in the same article, which are quite similar to the ones provided by the US, in favor of waving your unsourced German stats, which are completely out to lunch. So we have figures from 3 separate nations, all of which are sourced, and all of which show roughly the same trends, versus data from 1 country which isn't sourced and shows an entirely different trend. And you choose to go with the latter.
...
What exactly did you do for "the energy industry", again? Sweep the floors?
As for the California figures, I already told you - they're based on figures after government subsidies. Here's the exact phrasing from the article:
Note that the above figures incorporate tax breaks for the various forms of power plants. Subsidies range from 0% (for Coal) to 14% (for nuclear) to over 100% (for solar).
Looking at figures after subsidies is useless, unless your goal is to determine how you yourself can best make money - if we're looking at total cost of power generation, those figures tell us absolutely nothing.
Anyway, at this point, I'm convinced that you're being intentionally dishonest, so we're definitely done here. If you wish to discuss this further, I would - at the very least - expect you to acknowledge that your initial behavior was foolish, admit that this is not a question that can be answered by "common sense", and provide some data from a reputable source that supports your position. Otherwise, don't expect a response.
Sorry, the german figures are from the wikipedia article you posted!
And on what do you base THIS? Because I don't understand your tax laws? ....
Rofl
Obviously you are right here and I was foolish to assume you have accurate data on the USA.
Also it was foolish to assume you understand that I look at it from my perspective. As I said in several posts before: nuclear power is the most expensive one in GERMANY. It is so high subsidized that no one really understands its economics anymore. Nevertheless, like in your article, it is put into figures to claim it would be super cheap.
Also you neglect, even after I pointed it out: handling waste and dismantling of nuclear power plants is not in those equations (neither in the USA nor in germany).
angel'o'sphere ... and I certainly don't spend a year to find hundreds of citations. If you think it is necessary, that is up to you.
P.S. I'm following tis debates since decades
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How about this?. I know it's not a "shovel ready plan", but you need a site and a source of money before you can get one of those. I think it's safe to say GE would be happy to start building one for you tomorrow if you could put up the money.
And before you tell me it's just concept art for a pipe-dream, I'd like to point out that it's based on this reactor that was built in 1965 and operated for 30 years. We are not "a long, long way away from having shovel ready plans for building the transmogrifying breeder reactors". We've had the basic technology for a long time.
Where exactly did I say to use a system (non-nuclear) that is less safe? Where did I say we should not use nuclear?
That would be here:
The big sticking point with nuclear is always safety. And every disaster reminds us of just how unsafe nuclear can be. A 40 mile diameter section where people can't live in Japan is a major chunk of real estate. If this happened near any of our major cities it would cause significant problems. Renewables could be brought up to date in the matter of a decade with a concerted effort. The right tax incentives could retrofit most every building in America with solar.
As to the ignorance of the public including myself, I want NO reactor anywhere near where I live simply because I like to live here and want my kids and grandkids to be able to live here safely.
This fear of nuclear contamination is not because of TV and shit websites since my understanding of nuclear issues comes mostly from magazine pieces from the last several decades and predates the internet.
So your assertion is that installing solar on ones house and business is less safe than nuclear? Interesting. How do you get there exactly? A nuclear accident can irradiate a region for decades and make it unuseable. I know of no such risk from putting solar on buildings.
And further, nowhere in the above paragraph of mine you quoted did I say nuclear should not be part of fulfilling our energy needs. I am just a NIMBY. I fully believe nuclear will play an increasing role in our power structure. I just worry about its long term consequences so safety is more than paramount. That would seem to be reasonable would it not?
And repeated here:
But I don't want it near my beautiful part of the country.
Again ... a NIMBY comment of mine for certain, but it is not equivalent to "We should not use Nuclear". It is important that words you are interpreting do in fact say what you assert. And again, nowhere did I say nuclear should not be used. (NIMBY not equal to No Nuclear.)
The term may not have been media coined, but as it is commenly used, it is a media term.
The word terrorism is commonly used in the media to but that doesn't make it a "media term". It only makes the term one which the media uses. The two are not equivalent. Peak Oil and terrorism are words which the media uses because they have significance for all of us.
Your reference to Hubbert is ONE of the definitions used for "peak oil".
Yes it is "one" of the definitions...the first one. The only reason I referenced him was because you were saying Peak Oil was a media term, which it isn't and his use of the term predates most media usage by 40 or so years, thus supporting my assertion.
It also useless outside of investment.
You mean the term Peak Oil is useless outside of investment? I'm not sure what you mean. Certainly, peak oil has become a term with a more developed and elaborate meaning in the intervening 50 years since Hubbert first used the term. The term Peak Oil today also has other definitional significance which isn't exclusively tied to investment. Some people use the term these days to define the realities of our expectations for extracting oil from various regions of the world knowing the anticipated supply using the data we have had for decades.
The entire world has been mapped for all pockets of oil. Most of it is already under harvest. Some of the more difficult places still are there, but then you get into the weighing the feasibility and expense and the technology we have to get at it. The potential oil field off of Brasil is a nice example. Extremely deep water. Extremely hot oil under extreme pressure. I'm not sure they have figured out how to extract it yet. There are places to get oil, but getting it is ex
Actually just dropping the control rods doesn't stop anything. It's the heavy water that is used a s moderator that will stop the CANDU design. While in the Fukushima Design, although the control rods dropped and the reaction stopped, the left over material still went on and you need to cool it for some weeks. Because if you don't, well, you get the problem we have here right now.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gMcZic1d4U
radiation?
pollute i know of but radiation?
most reactors build on japanese tech.
Actually they maintain them on cheap
Let me explain again. This is not a fight between safe and unsafe.
if you replace an "old design" reactor with a "newer safer" you might improve. However what I am saying is that there is no replacing. You add new reactors. You do not replace old reactors in a current plant since it economically impossible to do so. There is not a direct connection between shutting down old plants and creating new one.
The explanation is easy: I am not a that large consumer of electric energy (3000 kWh per year due to electric water heating and a fish tank, otherwise 1000 kWh would suffice), in my proximity there are also no large consumers of electric energy. Therefore it would be a waste to place a power plant in my proximity instead of the proximity of large consumers of electric energy - due to transmission losses. It would be most sensible to place power plants near large electric energy consumers, such as factories, aluminium smelters and so on.
Now pray tell why a facility to make electric energy should be placed near me - except because you want it to for the sake of the argument?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It's said that William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, when he finally got a computer, was non-plussed with what he saw as the weird electro-mechanical Victorian contraption (you're reading data by storing it on rotating plates with a magnet hovering over it?).
Similarly, does anyone find it weird that all the cutting-edge technology of the splitting the atom is really doing is just boiling water?
Have we really no other way to boil water?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I am mystified as to why the Japanese nuclear issues of today are being taken as a sign that nuclear is unsafe instead of being taken as the opposite.
Shall we review some facts? Using an old design that is less safe than what would be built today the Japan nuclear plants were built and maintained for decades without adverse effects on the population. It was only in the event of a "perfect storm" of disasters chained together that the plant failed: an earthquake and a tsunami and a failure of the backup generators. While the long term consequences, if any, are still being sorted out the focus should be on the story so far: All of the safety mechanisms worked as designed even in this fairly ridiculous scenario. To the extent that radiation was released it was a relatively minor amount that is not cause for immediate concern.
Why is the headline not "Thousands dead in Japan but not one due to nuclear disaster."? Despite all of the fear mongering going on I have yet to see any credible evidence that the amount of radiation released is capable of causing harm. This is an enormous vindication of nuclear energy!
Furthermore, to the extent that safety systems failed they failed in ways which would not be possible with newer plant designs. At the worst the headline should be "30 year old nuclear plants should have been replaced with modern designs before disaster struck."
I want my Cowboyneal
Well, bombs miss. And sometimes they are fired by insane Kim Jong Il types from far away. ( Yes I know that the missle would almost certainly be shot out of the sky ). And I didn't see any substantial roof over the rod ponds in the reactor building design. If a jet hit those, I think they'd be open to the air.
...
NIMBY is being against it. NIMBYs often don't realize that they are arguing against it, but that doesn't change the fact that they are. Going around saying "It's too dangerous for my back yard." is arguing against it being used anywhere, as it is inevitably going to convince other that it should be in their backyards either.
The place that you said to use something more dangerous was where you argued against nuclear. It has been shown that non-nuclear power generation frequently causes more deaths than nuclear, your argument against nuclear by taking a public NIMBY stance is arguing for less safe power generation.
As for "peak oil".... Pick a definition and stick with it. Claiming that it isn't a media term because the same words were used by someone outside the media, and then saying your not using the definition that you just presented is disingenuous.
Yes, a nuclear plant delivers a big bang in a small space 24/7, but is not "the cheapest" energy source by a long shot. If it were, it would be widespread, regardless of the _ignorant_peanut_gallery_. It is not widely deployed because it just isn't all that, comparatively, plain and simple, the market is wiser than you are. The prior and current investment in nuclear is the driving force of nuclear. In reality it delivers maybe 5:1 energy return on energy investment, and carries the little problem of the incredibly toxic waste and god-forbid something goes wrong and hundreds of thousands die, etc..
look sig is kool
You're fricking stoned. No, Americans who are dumb enough to get cornered by the marketers / pollsters fear it because big media is telling them to be afraid of it, are saying they are.
Just as much as I could go on the news and tell them that there are zombies out there that will eat their brains.
Nuclear power can be safe, however sometimes the older reactors are not as safe as the newer technologies are.
= Grow a brain...
Nimby is being against nuclear right on this lovely peninsula I live on where tourism is a mainstay of the local economy. Having a big fat nuclear plant stuck at the end of the pastoral scene would attract less tourists and threaten the current economy.
"NIMBY is being against it. NIMBYs often don't realize that they are arguing against it, but that doesn't change the fact that they are."
Clearly you have ignored what I have actually written and inserted your own biases.Definitionally, Nimby is not equivalent to anti-nuclear. They could be same or they could not be. For one hypothetical example: Donald Trump might be pro-nuclear and yet if you chose to put a plant on an island near his mansion-island he would be a NIMBY. Or in another hypothetical example: The Kennedy's could be Anti-nuclear and NIMBY if one was talking about putting a new plant near their compound. You should hone your own understanding of semantics a bit more.
Nimby also is not equivalent to "It's too dangerous for my back yard, is arguing against it being used anywhere" and I have not argued that nuclear should not be used nowhere. Quite the contrary, I have explicitly said we should use nuclear, but we have to be careful about it. I am unsure as to the danger of the newer technologies since I am not an avid reader on the latest nuclear tech. I do not know whether it would be too dangerous in my backyard. But I still don't want it there based partially on my ignorance of nuclear, but partly because of the economics of the region.
Apparently you haven't understood this rather subtle difference and I understand because some people need to deal in absolutes and blacks and whites to make sense of things. But merely because you don't recognize the distinction doesn't mean that it isn't there. I liken it to the eskimos and their 18 or so words for the character of snow. I personally only can see about 7 or 8 distinctive types of snow, so if an eskimo tried to explain to me another 10 types I might be at a loss.
Your errant or limited interpretation of the terminology apparently allows you to read gross generalizations into what I have actually said.
Likewise my statement that nuclear is unsafe is not the same as saying it is the "most dangerous" form of energy.
Unsafe or even Dangerous is not the same as "More Dangerous".I would think you might be able to see this distinction and nowhere did I say that nuclear is the "More Dangerous" form of energy. Nor do I feel nuclear to be the "more dangerous" than all other forms of energy production. Those words are yours. Once more you are putting words on the page which I have not used and attributing them to me.
My assertion is that it is not safe, which it clearly isn't in our current age with one fine example sitting before us now in Japan on the precipice. I also wonder about the future safety of such plants given the history we have seen and longevity of its products and byproducts. Combine that with the relatively tumultuous history of human kind over the last 3000 years and it must give one pause as to how we should best approach the nuclear question. We are not just doing nuclear for our generation or the generation of our grand-kids but for countless generations into the future. Rationality would predispose us to recognize these issues and try and address them if possible.
Who knows what the future of plants and the fuel they contain will be 100 year from now or 1,000 years from now? Certainly neither you nor I have such a crystal ball. So the obvious answer is to be extra extra careful with nuclear because it has such a great potential for rendering a large swath of land useless for a considerable time. As our population increases land is an ever more important resource for the people of this planet and its proper management will be paramount to the type of future we leave to those a millenia or so from now. Installation of nuclear in a region is akin to a long-term land management issue.
I don't have a problem with nuclear that is a away from popula
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
To put that into perspective, in Hockey this year up in Canada, I had a pretty tough year, and managed to crack a rib, and mess up my rotator cuff on my left shoulder. As such I have had 3 xrays of my ribs, and like 6 (I presume because its a joint and harder to see) of my shoulder, so like 9 chest xrays in the last 6 Months.
So that's like 20 SV * 9 = 180 SV. Which is more than double the average exposure from within 10 miles of 3 mile island or more than 50 times the average of the dose that someone got living in one of the nearby towns as of March 17th.
Kind of puts it into perspective.
Wind turbines at their best are uneven suppliers of electricity. They are are also eye sores.
Maybe compared to Glacier National Park they are eyesores, but compared to coal and nuclear power plants, they are scenic beauty!
Also, what you said about wind power being inherently uneven is a lie.
It just requires a modicum of intelligence.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
But nuclear and petroleum shills like you do, constantly.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
All that is required for wind to provide baseload power is 10 or more interconnected, geographically separated wind farms.
www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
I imagine the real reason is that the theoretically engineering maximums were too optimistic.
Do you have any facts?
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2056604&cid=35672794
Now let's see yours.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p
“Firm capacity” is the fraction of installed wind capacity that is online at the same probability as that of a coal-fired power plant. On average, coal plants are free from unscheduled or scheduled maintenance for 79%–92% of the year, averaging 87.5% in the United States from 2000 to 2004 (Giebel 2000; North American Electric Reliability Council 2005).
Not 92%, which was your lie.
Figure 3 shows that, while the guaranteed power generated by a single wind farm for 92% of the hours of the year was 0 kW, the power guaranteed by 7 and 19 interconnected farms was 60 and 171 kW, giving firm capacities of 0.04 and 0.11, respectively.
So that's at least 11% for 19+ wind farms, not 4%-11%. You have both exaggerated coal's firm capacity and understated that of large numbers of interconnected wind farms. Maybe you just enjoy coal pollution, but the more likely motivation of your behavior is that you are a paid coal / petroleum shill.
Furthermore, 19 interconnected wind farms guaranteed 222 kW of power (firm capacity of 0.15) for 87.5% of the year, the same percent of the year that an average coal plant in the United States guarantees power. Last, 19 farms guaranteed 312 kW of power for 79% of the year, 4 times the guaranteed power generated by one farm for 79% of the year.
Finally, nobody believes we will decommission all coal plants any time soon. But wind is capable of adding to baseload instead of adding more coal plants or more nuclear plants. That is the relevant fact for the present situation. All new capacity should be clean, which means only wind and solar, and that is quite feasible using wind and solar thermal for baseload and pv solar for peak.
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