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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
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> The increase in background radiation will
> absolutely cause a raise in cancers
Increase in background radiation where? Do you have numbers to cite here?
> there's the matter of radioactive material put into
> environment
Details? Which isotopes are we talking about? Is it worse than your typical coal plant operating for a month?
> Radioactive elements can never be made safe.
That's just not true. For example, oxygen-15 makes itself safe in a matter of hours (half-life of 120s with decay to a stable nitrogen isotope). A large fraction of the radioactive release from Fukushima has been elements like that.
Now maybe what you mean is that long-half-life isotopes can't really be made safe. I agree; the goal would be to prevent them escaping the containment vessel.
> Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are much safer.
I'd _love_ to see numbers for this, on comparable scales.
That is, how safe or unsafe is your typical solar plant generating 0.8GW (which is what each of the reactors at Fukushima was generating)? How safe is your typical wind plant of that capacity? Whole-life numbers (i.e. including construction and maintenance) would be good. Problem is, no one actually tracks that stuff, so we don't have those numbers....
> that would otherwise plague a small area around
> the plant
Uh... you can't have it both ways. If pollution from coal plants (including the radioactive elements they put in the air) is localized to a "small area", how is that not the case for nuclear?
> But since the deaths from nuclear are primarily
> cancers
Citation please?
> The best you can do is mitigate the risks.
This is true for all power-generation setups. The only question is when in the life cycle the highest risks are. For photovoltaic solar, for example, it seems to me that they are primarily at the solar cell production stage and the related industrial accidents. For hydroelectric they're when your dam is operating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam is a good read). For nuclear there's the initial uranium purification or plutonium production and operating risks. But yes, risk-mitigation is the name of the game. That's how life in general works: walking down stairs is unsafe. People die from it all the time. We do it all the time, but we put in handrails and people who're particularly susceptible to the risk get single-floor houses...
The increase in background radiation will absolutely cause a raise in cancers, and there's the matter of radioactive material put into the environment that is different than simply a temporary increase in background radiation, and will also certainly cause additional deaths.
No it won't. This argument is based on the Linear no-threshold model which has been shown to be wildly inaccurate at low-levels of radiation dosing. The basis of the model is that they looked at the cancer rate of Hiroshima survivors who received very high levels of radiation exposure and assigned a value of N cancer cases per X amount of radiation exposure. Then because they had nothing to go on for low doses, the assumption was made that the cancer rate was linear, so you'd get N/4 cases for an exposure of X/4. Without assigning a threshold exposure value for when you start developing cancer, this is ridiculous and does not at all agree with observation; however, since nobody knew what happens at longer exposure times at lower exposure rates, and thus nobody knows where to put a threshold value, this was the model accepted.
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
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.
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.
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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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.
One could spin the same question in the other direction:
So there was a reactor running in a zone known to be exposed to tsunamis, which was not even designed to widthstand a tsunami? And the first tsunami to ever hit it managed to take out the cooling power and the backup cooling power too with one stroke? And the third cooling system managed to keep going for how long? 1.5 hrs? We have a flawly designed reactor at a flawly chosen place. We have been so lucky that nothing happened for 40 years.
Driving cars. What a death bringer. And yet, people don't shut down all roadways until safer cars are made that don't pollute at all, have no chance of crashing, and make economic sense. Cheese burgers. What a death bringer. And yet people don't run in the streets screaming about how cattle are gassing up the environment and clogging arteries. You want to talk about nuclear power being so damned dangerous? We all do things that cut our lifespans by a hell of a lot more than nuclear power every day for much less reason. I feel like the whole world is trolling me right now.
It isn't 100% safe, so its unacceptable is unacceptable in a world where everything we do, every day, has a risk attached to it. And the big risk with nuclear is always a hypothetical "the world may come to an end if this, this and this happens." And yet a huge disaster comes about that could be the start of a doomsday movie with almost zero effect on the world, and instead of looking at that and saying "holy crap, nuclear power isn't the bomb waiting to go off we thought it was" people are pointing and saying "see?! disasters happen!" as if we didn't already know.
Its time to grow up and realize our highways are going to kill more people every day than nuclear power will in generations. Being afraid of nuclear power is like being afraid of flying. Yeah, when something happens it'll probably involve more people than a car crash, but its a hell of a lot safer and normal usage is a lot easier on the environment.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
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.
I am no completely opposed to nuclear power, yet I find some statements defending it a little odd.
Many people die from complications of coal mining, etc.
I mean... do you think Uranium or Thorium grow in trees?
Why can't
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's really interesting actually. How are they planning on solving the base load problem (that wind and solar are intermittent)? Hydro is a good alternative, but that will drown a lot of land under several metres of water and kill a lot of wildlife in the building process. In Sweden, we shut down one nuclear power plant (Barsebäck) which was compensated by both importing coal power from Poland and upping the efficiency of the existing NPPs. Not even the Danes who have invested a *lot* of resources into wind power have managed to get rid of fossil fuels for base load.
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.
Actually, it's not. The Chernobyl disaster didn't kill thousands, it killed 28 people. About 4000 were expected to die from different cancers (mostly thyroid) but the actual numbers seem to be a lot lower now that we're 25 years into the future. The increase in cancer rates are included in the statistics and they're low.
What's not included is the amount of radioactive substances released by coal power plants -- they're a lot higher than from nuclear power plants. Therefore, more people die from cancer caused by coal power than nuclear power every year, not to mention the other substances that's being let out into the atmosphere ...
If you're able to build a society on 100% renewable energy, then that's obiously a lot better than nuclear power. However, given the track record of renewables, I don't think it's actually doable without significant specialized natural resources (i.e. Iceland can use geothermal, Sweden has a lot of large rivers, etc.).
I am surrounded by events no one ever expected. My hometown was hit in 2002 by a flood that was higher than any records ever, and flooding records for my hometown go back about 300 years. There was an underground shelter used for artifacts of the museum, with a flood protection that was built 30" higher than the highest flood ever recorded (which was 150 years ago), just to be sure -- and this one proved to be insufficient.
So we can conclude: Shit happens. Don't expect any design to be sufficient. Disaster worse than the worst ones we ever had can happen. If you want to assess the risk of anything, you should also assess the risk that all builtin protection fails. Every security that is founded on limited designs is only temporary.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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
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.