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Italy Votes To Abandon Nuclear Power
ElementOfDestruction writes "Italy has joined Germany in halting the production of energy from atomic power generation. This differs from Germany in that the Italian decision was made by a public vote, rather than a government mandated shutdown. 57% of Italian Households voted in this public measure. While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"
Yes, why not.
You were too late to save us from human intuition.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
What a terrible question. You mean, is it wise to let people decide their own fate, versus letting an individual (let's call him "dictator for life") figure out the answers for them?
Absolutely awful question. ElementofDestruction and Soulskill should both go back to their civics class and figure out why democracy is important.
What do you do when the voters are conditioned and misinformed and the majority is wrong?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
We did it de facto instead of de jure but the fact that we haven't built any new plants in 30 years means we have ultimately also given up on nuclear. The politicians caved to public fear and so made the process of permitting a plant to be so expensive as to make it economically impossible to continue to build new facilities. We will ultimately shut down our current plants and shift that generation to something else, it will just take longer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Why do you associate this event with slowing down progress ? (or is that that you mean ?)
As opposed to what? The usual corruption and lobbyism that grind progress to a halt for the sake of a select few?
This way there'll be more progress in the area of renewable energy. Nuclear energy is old and had no progress for quite some time.
Holy biased summary, Batman!
Yes. Majority opinion should be held so high, even if it trumps conceited arrogance assumptions of what is progress. Let me be clear, I fully support nuclear power, I think it should be expanded greatly, safely using advanced techniques. I think these countries are idiots for closing it down, but it is their democratic right, and don't anyone dare take that away from them.
Libya.
Oh wait...
Italy renews contract to buy more nuclear generated power from the Ukraine.
The summary is a bit misleading. In 1987 after the Tschernobyl disaster Italy had a public vote to abandon nuclear energy. The last reactor was shut down in 1990. This was only a vote against a re-entry into nuclear power, something Berlusconi was pushing forward.
"Die endgueltige Teilung Deutschlands - das ist unser Auftrag." - Chlodwig Poth
The question contains the premise that nuclear power is progress. Why do you believe that? What are the implications of that assumption?
"While democracy should trump all..."
Democracy is 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what is for dinner.
>> is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
Sometimes.
Italy has never had any running nuclear reactors anyway (there is one not fully built though and being an investition ruin since some decades). This vote is just a confirmation of the status quo. But don't let that interfere with your opinion.
But that started when George W. Bush got re-elected.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Germany's at least committing to trying to do this in a nonpolluting (i.e. non-fossil-fuel) way, and they actually have the infrastructure and engineering acumen to pull it off (maybe).
Where's Italy going to get their power? Russian gas? Somebody's coal? Magic space faeries?
Fukushima notwithstanding, nuclear power is reasonably safe (a hell of a lot better than coal), very environment-friendly, and economical (compared to things like large-scale solar). The only reasonable alternative I can think of is to build a big turbine in the middle of Rome and harness all of the hot air that comes out of the Vatican.
What progress does it slow down? I't rather say that this vote forces search for alternative ways and so speeds up progress!
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
I'm pretty sure going the nuclear way is actually not the progress. It was regression 50 years ago, it still is.
As an Italian I can tell you that the outcome was clear since the beginning. This referendum was more a vote on Berlusconi than anything else, and it showed that he is done for good, he is not supported by the people anymore. Then, voting on the nuclear matter, just months after the Fukushima accident, might have skewed the results... (by the way the referendum was scheduled before the accident)
leave the planet free from radiation.
What kind of doctor are you?? Oh, nevermind.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Next, a democratic majority of voters will elect to replace water with Brawndo.
http://brawndo.com/.
-Styopa
Funny but they have not abandoned nuclear power. They are pretending they have to make themselves feel good. They import no less than 16% of their electricity from France. They have just move the responsibility for the reactors to another nation. As Italy needs more power they will import more from France and use even more nuclear power outside of their own control and regulation. This should be called the Grand Delusion. They are just going to use more and more nuclear power while taking no responsibility for it themselves.
Welcome to reality 101.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
They're in a particularly sunny climate, there are already rolling out solar thermal storage systems so that their solar can generate 24 hours per day, They have tidal sources which France used to generate hundreds of megawatts back in the 60's out of a single installation -- ignoring the efficiency increases of what we can do today.
Fuel is finite, so fuel based sources are out of date. Meanwhile, renewables just keep coming down in price. Solar dropped 20% last year alone, and is expected to drop another 20% this year. Meanwhile, nuclear keeps increasing in cost. Costs for implementation, fuel, owner's costs, massive grid tie-ins, and let's not even discuss the fact that they don't pay for their own insurance and push that on to the public purse in the event of a catastrophe.
So "progress?" I don't think that word means what you think it does. The first world has made it's decision and you can flog the dead horse of nuclear, but the only new adopters will be the third world and powers that want to refine for nuclear weapons, such as arabic countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
Ugh. Please take the time to read up a little more on your civics.
Democracy should NOT trump all. Democracy is 51% telling the other 49% what it thinks is right. Tyrany of the majority and so forth.
Democracy has its best (and really, only) chance of working well in a small, homogeneous population which a high degree of shared values -- nobody gets badly trampled.
Switzerland makes a good effort at it, but even threre, the French and German speaking cantons are always bickering over issues, with the French side usually getting muffled in the vote.
Democracy is not about being wise is about respecting the will of the majority. It's about not imposing stuff, even if you consider it to be better, on the majority. Democratic process doesn't optimize the decision (it doesn't come to the best decision) it (or is supposed to) minimizes the discontent.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
If it is what the people want than it is their choice and they should strive to be a better democracy with informed decision making (like every country should). If their representatives made a choice that the majority disapproved of then it is a failed democracy.
Odd how tyranny is advocated when it's "for the good of the people".
As someone else already said, Italy doesn't have any nuclear plant. They were all shut down after Tschernobyl.
Starting to build a new nuclear power plant now means that it will take 2-3 years to make the design and plans, find the right place and so on. Then years to build it and then the usual years to have it operational. Which means that the first power plant would have been operational not sooner than 10-15 years.
Italy missed the nuclear wave in '87 after the fear-driven vote. Now it was no point in starting again, when all technicians were gone abroad.
In 15 years probably we'll have other sources of power.
While I think all the recent nuclear hysteria is sad, the answer to that question is an extremely solid Yes. Progress is desirable, but responsive government is necessary, even if it does bad things. Why? Because even the bad things it does, aren't as bad as everything else, which is worse. This is why I actually favor a democracy over a republic. A republic might have better performance and make better decisions, but that doesn't change that the populace is having to live with a government that constantly tells them to go fuck themselves.
Italy is, and always will be an energy slave. While neighboring France thrives producing and exporting their own nuclear power, Italy keeps on saying they don want nuclear plants but keep on buying electricity produced by France. Italy imports all its energy. The only chance for Italy to be energy self sufficient is nuclear.
A shrinking economy, unemployment, bat politics, and no energy. Well done Italians, keep on reading "Il corriere" instead of reading books.
Clearly you don't live in Italy. You wouldn't use the word "reality" so easily...
There is more to this decision than simple "anti-scientific" feelings.
First of all there is the trust we can have in people managing these beasts, i.e. zero. Our administrators are not the ones with public safety in mind. Google some info about two years' ago earthquake to see how well regulation on constructions works.
Second and related, public works in Italy (and many private ones) are often just a way to throw money at your business friends. It is unlikely that something so big will be done in the most efficient and quick way. Most probably it will never recover the expenses, if it ever gets built.
Third there is the timing problem. We are late to the train. Other countries alread recovered the initial expenses and only have to keep mantaining/improving. They can undercut us easily and we would end up buying from them anyway. (also notice we did not have plans for an erichment plant, so we would have to buy enriched uranium...)
Fourth and related, the plants will arrive in no less than 20 years. Then this is essentially a bet on the price of uranium in 20 years. With many developing countries building plants I think this bet is a losing one...
But yes, I am stupid and I only want to slow progress down, laugh at me.
Come out from under that rock, kiddo.
since France had to import a lot of power last year because of their nuclear power infrastucture failed in the hot weather.
...leave the planet free from radiation.
Ah, so now you want to blot out the sun?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Given the way things have been reported and discussed, I can't say I'm surprised. Dissappointed yes, but not surprised. I won't go into detail about how completely over the top people have been regarding these incidents (hell, one person told me that MILLIONS of people died at Chernobyl) because that's been well documented now.
The part that upsets me is that, as far as I understand it, all the incidents could have been prevented, or at least mitigated far more than they were. Chernobyl should have been entirely preventable. Hell, it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Three Mile Island. Preventable. Fukushima, while not preventable outright, they were asking for a catastrophe due to poor design decisions. What do these incidents have in common? Tight fisted management who valued profit over all else. They didn't do anything that wasn't absolutely necessary to keep the plant running, which resulted in sloppy maintenance. In the case of Fukushima, no effort was made to fix known shortcomings in the design.
I think these decisions to abandon nuclear isn't (solely) a verdict on nuclear energy itself. It's a a collapse of trust in the companies that run these plans because, well, they've demonstrated they they are undeserving of that trust.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yeh, just for those who don't remember: Italia has frequent earthquakes, in all regions of the country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Italy
Click on the epicentre cities to see where they are, dispersed along the length of the country.
Nuclear = "Progress"? Bonkers.
My favourite failed "trust technology!" argument was after the Fukushima quake when Sarkozy tried to reassure the French people by saying that France's nuclear power stations were the most advanced in the world. That's probably correct, and it would be a good point to make after a nuclear accident in a developing country, but this is Japan he was talking about.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Ya, this is another slam to our Government.
In Italy we don't need the nuclear power... Only with the solar, eolic and hydroelectric power we can send energy to the other states!!
Also... in Italy you want build a nuclear power plant??? In Italy??? With this governement????
Yes right... Mafia will build the factory... so another nuclear disaster is on its way.
Someone say:
"US coal power fleet kills 10,000 a year; Fukushima will kill under 100, total. We are very bad at evaluating risks."
- David Keith, Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment, University of Calgary
YES! But the coal power kill 10.000 people a year and then the effects STOPS!!!
With the nuclear power if there is any cataclysm more people, more children will be affected!!! Watch what happen @ Chernobyl!
Now the children born with CANCER And with malformations!! All because of the nuclear power!
That's so clear energy.
Yes i'm italian and i voted to STOP the Nuclear Power in Italy!
so what? it's less risky for Italians to have it that way, and the the french who like nuclear can assume the risks and make money for doing so. I pay people to do dangerous things for me (like putting shingles on my roof), they take the care to have safety equipment, training, insurance, etc. You do the same thing. Win-win all around.
this is not quite right. In Italy nuclear power is not currently operative!! What the government wanted was to start building NEW nuclear structures, that would have been done in God knows how many years. What is important to say is that Nuclear in Italy has been removed in 1987, after another Referendum. And today the politics tried to re-instate it for economic (for THEIR economy, not Italy's) reasons. To summarise, in Italy it is NOT a shutdown but a DON"T START.
Nuclear power is not the future for sure, not the way it is at least. And we don't want to throw away money for a not-renowable source of energy. The government will need to invest in renewable energy hopefully now.
Because you don't seem well educated. Radiation is a natural phenomenon and the earth will never be 'free' of it. Most high schoolers are aware of this.
From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic_education
Although the U.S. Department of Education lists the D.C.M. (Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine) as a type of degree granted to chiropractors, the degree has never actually been conferred by any academic institution.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
so high that it slows down progress"?
progress occurs in general society. progress does not occur in a special class, that then imposes its idea of "progress" on the supposedly unenlightened commoners. this idea of progress is elitist, and doomed to fail by provoking mistrust and a backlash
the cost of involving the general pubic is that progress is slow and messy. the gain is that progress is genuine and true, society-wide
because the real problem is not slowing down progress, the real problem is that plenty of people assume they have a superior idea about what progress is, and they are often wrong. if such people are an empowered elite, they can destroy a country with bad ideas about what progress is. only the court of public opinion matters on the question of progress. real progress is baby steps, and stumbles. it is about picking what seems to be the best new idea, then modifying it, feedback. progress is not some obvious linear clean highway to the future that can be engaged at 100 mph. progress only looks like this in historical hindsight. if you meet someone with a clear idea of what progress should be, without any doubt about them at all, you have encountered a dangerous idiot who doesn't know what real progress is
change in society has a certain steady rate. too fast, and you'll embrace bad ideas and destroy the country. too slow, and you'll stagnate and more nimble societies will pass you by. the trouble is achieving a balance. but this is the essential problem of life: balance. progress not too fast. progress not too slow
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Eat your own dogfood or you're nothing but a hypocrite. If you have ever used majority rule to justify an attack on individual liberty (as nearly everybody on this website does), then naturally you will have no problem being on the losing team this time around.
Government isn't fair. Government will never be fair, because government cannot possibly be fair. The notion of an organization holding a special "right" to employ physical force as a business model was unfair before democracy, and it will continue to be unfair as long as human nature exists. Get used to it.
You mean, is it wise to allow people to make the decision by vote directly rather than indirectly - but still by voting - on who gets to make the decision in secret?
Uh, generally, yeah, it's at least as wise. Once elections join the 21st century and are done with a level of security and quick tabulation technology matching that of, say, modern marketing surveys, it will be much more wise.
What nuclear fission power has to do with progress?
Which progress exactly is slowed down? The progress in grid technology and alternative energy production?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I see you don't know squat about Italy. Here we have no nuclear power because it was banished in 1987 with another referendum, then that was "idiocracy". Today with no nuclear plants it would have been a moronic task starting building them to have them working in twenty or so years. Don't you think so?
Consequences to natural gas: Russia is the biggest supplier in Europe. Why become a Western vassal of Putin?
Consequence to coal: you're guaranteeing the environmental damage that is theoretical with nuclear power. Plus, it's Italy. The Camorra will probably end up in charge of some aspect of the power that'll make life suck for the environment and public health.
Consequences of wind and solar: good luck funding this build out since you're on the short list of the next European states to have debt default problems. Even if that works, they can only be part of the strategy for a long time.
If you raised these issues with the average voter, they'd probably look at you like a slack-jawed idiot. "Wuuuuhhhhh we have to 'pick our poison'?"
And when electricity rates go up or Putin starts politely telling Italy where it's going and what it'll do when it gets there, they'll be mad as hell.
That's why democracy sucks :) Nuclear power is CLEAN and efficient.
They will probably make more damage to the ecosystem using other forms of power plants.
This vote is just a confirmation of the status quo. But don't let that interfere with your opinion.
Right, because the status quo is always such a good thing, that the ones wanting to change it must be the idiots.
Power demand the world over is only going to increase. Saying now that they won't even consider nuclear power to handle future power demands, yes, that makes them idiots.
That German organic farm which was the source of the recent e coli outbreak will kill more people than the Japanese nuclear meltdown and the Gulf oil spill combined.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Confirming other comments, there is no nuclear power in use now in Italy, and the country is a big importer from a foreign nuclear source, namely France. The vote was just a show, as everything is in Italy since memory serves. What progress ?
we had the chance to undo the terrible mistake we did 25 years ago, but again people proved to be a bunch of morons following FUD spreaded by politician that transformed this into a political matter rather than scientific
This is exactly correct, this goes on all the time in the US. We won't drill for oil or anything, but its fine if its in another country and not ours. Somehow that's green.
That would only be true if nothing else had changed globally. I'd say the massive increase in oil prices and increasing demand in the far east is enough to change the status quo. This is more like standing on the beach ordering the tide not to come in. It's all very laudable choosing alternative sustainable energy sources over nuclear if someone can tell us what those sources are.
Look at every strip mall in your area, odds are there is a Chiropractor. Coincidence?
Well let's see... To be a chiropractor dose not require the intensive medical a normal physician requires, nor does it always require the same licensing and insurance requirements, and insurance companies readily pay for the services because it's cheaper and odds are the patients don't have medical problems so significant that placebo treatments won't placate them. Yeah, I can't imagine why chiropractor offices spring up like weeds...
For the relatively small number of people who genuinely have skeletal-muscular issues that chiropractors can actually help with, that's fine. Maybe. For everyone else it's snake oil.
only on slashdot will you find a thousand people who perfectly understand the "trivial" safety and environmental concerns of nuclear power while simultaneously understanding "perfectly" all the possible conceptual reactor designs that are "literally" waiting to be instantly developed into full-fledged tWh producing commercial enterprises and how the logistics of such endeavors are "only" restricted by by the "ignorant" and "hysterical" concerns of hippie environmentalists. Comment forums like this one are the breeding grounds of slashtards. For ever duplicate pro-nuclear talking point, a slashtard is born. How many idiots reiterating the same three talking points does it take to realize that your autistic simplifications are simply irrelevant?
Nuclear power that has no risk of doing serious damage to many square miles of your country is as safe as any other.
It's not even hyprocacy, France chooses to profit from the risk, Italy chooses to spend more for power, but not take the risk, everyone wins.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You mean people should forfeit their right to self-determination, granted by the first article of the Italian Constitution, if favor of some kind of "wise dictator" which "knows what it is best"?
Not true, Italy had four nuclear power plants:
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia_nucleare_in_Italia#Centrali_elettronucleari
(sorry, Italian Wikipedia, English one has not such a table).
With the effective stalemate in Lybia curtailing energy exports, the Germans walking away from an operating nuclear power industry, and the Italians taking what is mostly a ceremonial vote on the issue, Western Europe has all but handed the energy market and a great deal of their destiny to Emperor Putin.
Putin is also putting the squeeze on Belarus, forcing them to "privatize" their energy industry in exchange for Russia's economic "assistance" -- which will result in Russian (or Russian-controlled interests) owning and controlling the Belarus energy industry as well.
So to the EU -- Well played! NOT!
While many Slashdotters happily wave away its real-world problems (waste, decommissioning, uninsurability, capital intensiveness, fuel supply, terrorism, non-distributed grid model, construction lead time and yes, slight potential for massive damage to life and property in a large geographic area) as irrelevant, many others are less sanguine. And that is not just because they are idiots--they look at the factors, weigh them and draw different conclusions.
And there are alternatives that might well be better. A recent study by the California Energy Commission that looks at estimated costs of 21 types of energy generation facilities estimates that a gen-3 Westinghouse AP1000 1,000 MW Pressurized Water Reactor would generate electricity in 2018 (the first year any of them could be expected to reach operational status) for between $0.17/kWh and $0.34/kWh.
The cost of solar PV today is already competitive with the high end of that range, and is dropping at a rapid pace.
This comes on the heels of another new report showing that the free-market insurance costs for nuclear would add from ($0.20/kWh) to a staggering $3.40/kWh.
If costs are the same or lower for renewable energy technologies that have numerous benefits and far fewer risks, why would rational people choose nuclear?
How can we define the elites whose minority opinions should be given priority over democratic majorities? By wealth? By academic degrees? By position in religious organizations? By a tendency to hang out in certain sectors of cyberspace where we can assure each other of our brilliance?
If the public is ignorant on issues, it's often largely because the "elites" (however self-defined) haven't shared their knowledge in an open way. Because the elites often define themselves as those who know better, if they were to freely share their supposed knowledge and wisdom, in a form where people in general could get it, then the elites would no longer know better. Couldn't have that.
On the other hand, nobody said the wise rule this world. The elites are often enough monumentally stupid on many issues. If that weren't the case, nations without democracy would routinely outperform those which have it. At the moment, the only example that comes close is China. But wait a year or two, and see if the Chinese bubble doesn't implode with a velocity making recent troubles in the Western democracies look like smooth sailing.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Mob Rule, or the tyranny of the majority. It's why we have things like the Electoral College and why senators were originally not elected by the people.
Hi all, from italy.
The majority that votes for reject new nuclear power station was well informed by an, at least, 6-month of campaign.
Obviously it was influenced by Fukushima disaster and by the fact that we (italian people) has ALREDY said NO to nuclear power in the 1986 (after Chernobyl disaster), with another referendum.
The Berlusconi's governement tried to reintroduce the nuclear power also if people alredy said NO. And this was another reason why the referendum meets the quorum and wons (it doesn't happens by 16 years).
Another problem, speaking about nuclear power in italy, is the Mafia. This because, if the nuclear power and slags are normally dangerous for all, it may be a billion times more doungerous in italy, where the Mafia control the buildings of power plants, his manage and, of course, the slags disposal. I really don't wont drive on a highway that has hidden nuclear waste in asphalt.
If Italy had chosen to use nuclear energy, this would be the likely scenario.
By the way, the question in the referendum doesn't spoke about "nuclear reactor", but about "nuclear power plant", so the research will continue, also if we hope that the nuclear power stay far far away of us for at least 20 years.
Of course. That way they can feel good about themselves and "outsource" any problems related with nuclear power. Of course they forget that radioactive clouds really don't care much about national borders but hey, more wealth for the French in the meantime.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And what is your problem with that?
Your country is likely importing incredible amounts of coal and oil and burning it and you don't care under what conditions it is mined and hoisted and transported and how many miners or what ever die in 3rd world countries. Nor do you care about the effects the CO2 you produce will have elsewhere ...
Where is the difference?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well - they're already the largest power importer in Europe - because they went out of nuclear power after Chernobyl...
Remember this one? A storm felled a tree that cut one of the power lines transporting power to Italy - this tripped of a cascading effect cutting off all of mainland Italy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout
But - even when you say 'This differs from Germany in that the Italian decision was made by a public vote, rather than a government mandated shutdown.' - this is only part of it. Germany had already decided on a nuclear exit before - it was the current government that extended the runtimes of nuclear reactors, causing public outrage. They mostly reverted back to the original targets now, since they increasingly find themselves becoming more and more unelectable, keeping to nuclear power. The governments stance pro nuclear power might have carried for a while longer, if it wasn't for Fukushima. Basically, the pro nuclear lobby said something like Chernobyl couldn't happen in Germany as our plants are safer than the Russian ones -- they couldn't convincingly say that they're safer than Japans...
I happen to be one of those people who owns a Geiger counter. After the incident in Japan, I set it on my desk so I could watch it. A few days after, I noticed that it was registering 3 times the usual background levels (@800 ft elevation). This lasted about a week until it went back to normal.
Now I know background is slight and 3 times background is really nothing to worry about for an individual, but at this point I'd like to point out that I was on the *other side of the planet* from Japan. While I know the /. crowd enjoys the smug hand waving and proclamation of radiation not being a big deal (myself included), I don't think anyone is qualified to really say the GLOBAL impact that these raised rates could have.
I try to err on the side of caution with worldwide issues. I urge everyone here to do the same.
As in earless bunnies ? dickless dicks ? brainless iditos - wait we already have a lot of those. like the summary of the article.
http://www.google.com/search?q=earless+bunny+born+in+japan&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
one of my long time friends who has been living in japan for over 15 years is now packing her bags in tokyo. she says things are not right there. (not talking about the earless bunny).
as far as votes go, i would want to have a vote to have the idiots who talk about progress through terminally dangerous nuclear devices out of this planet, shipped to some place they wont be able to harm anyone.
Read radical news here
The way I look at it, Democracy is just a civil war, fought with ballots instead of swords. It is an alternative to civil war. Really, that's what it comes down to.
The minority can either accept the will of the majority, or their only recourse is civil war. In the end, it's designed to minimize the amount of bloodshed, nothing more, nothing less.
I can imagine people think they're being green when voting down nuclear power, but actually their vote is causing much worse environmental impact and global warming by the necessary increase in conventional non-nuclear energy production.
> but it is their democratic right
Which is why the US Founding Fathers rejected democracy as a terrible idea. They understood the idea, knew the problems with it and designed us a system of a Constitutional Republic instead. The Constitution is intentionally hard to change but not impossible. This protects against temporary insanity in the other balances of government. The People are at the core of the system (all just power derives from the consent of the governed, etc) but the rest of the government is designed to act as a check against them because We the People can be just as stupid as the politicians.
Democracy is a group of 100 people wherein 51 vote to piss in the corn flakes of the minority. And if everyone believes in democracy the 49 can only demand proof the vote was fair before being obligated to chug the piss. That is why the US system has checks and balances including notions like inalienable rights that neither Congress nor the People have the right to abridge.
Democrat delenda est
Right now there are large numbers of places in the US that if the democracy was that direct, you would have highly restrictive abortion laws, civil unions/gay marriage wouldn't even have made it as far as they have.
I'd submit that much of the civil rights legislation would never have passed either. At least without a much longer period of protest/uprising to push home that the status quo was untenable.
Foreign aid would have been eliminated long ago.
I tend to like the longer time for mass policy changes by representative government as demagogues of all flavors can sway a direct democracy.
Note, I'm not minimizing the problems of representative government. A major one can be summed up in one five letter word. Money.
What kind of silly question is this? Is "fast" progress more important than democracy? Or let me put this differently: if a nation wants to foster progress, why don't they simply forbid stupid sitcoms and TV shows and make sure a lot of science-related stuff is aired. Encourage young and old to explore technology, nature, literature, and much more. This would certainly help with progress. But is this what (the majority of) people would want?
Italians have voted in 1987 that they don't want nuclear power plants. During the past few years, the current administration has taken steps to reintroduce nuclear power, and to build new nuclear power plants. A large number of citizens did not want to go in this direction, and therefore the public vote was held. And apparently the majority of Italians do not want nuclear power plants on their territory. This is a decision that the government has to respect.
And if you are a bit familiar with how things work in Italy, you can easily see that the whole thing was going to be a giant black hole where an incredible lot of (public) money was about to be shoveled into, never to be officially seen again. Organized crime has made a business of "taking care" of highly toxic waste by simply dumping it left and right, be it a green pasture or into the sea just a few miles from the beach. Do I want to find radioactive waste around the coast of Italy, just because someone has decided this was the cheapest way to get rid of it? Do I really believe nuclear power is cheaper than other energy sources, if I take into account all the public money that goes into construction, maintenance and nuclear waste disposal, and the emergency cleaning-up that has to be done eventually?
They invented it? ,
"While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?".
That in a nut shell is what is wrong with the USA (and the World frankly). How do you govern a country when no one wants to study and understand the issues, most people are to stupid to grasp anything more complex than 1 + 1 = 2, and the rest can't read?
It's the same every where, people just aren't intelligent enough to run their own affairs much less be involved in voting and making decisions bigger than "Do I supersize?".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"democracy should trump all"? I suppose you think slavery is perfectly okay if 51% of the voting citizenry approve it?
I see you don't know squat about Italy. Here we have no nuclear power because it was banished in 1987 with another referendum, then that was "idiocracy". Today with no nuclear plants it would have been a moronic task starting building them to have them working in twenty or so years. Don't you think so?
It's a common point for pro-nuclear people, but it's only half of the story. Italy imports 16% from nuclear-france daytime, and sells about the same amount nighttime.
Moreover, Italy doesn't have to manages radioactive wastes, that are the real risky thing.
Where will you get power now? France's nuclear plants?
we already do. I live in Turin, next to france, and we DO import nuclear energy from france: the total represents about 7% of energy consumption; the dominant energy producer, ENEL, operates nuclear plants in Spain and Slovenia (Link), and France is Upwind from us, so I would laugh my head off if it wasn't sad.
Italy operates a few small research reactors, and part of the energy bill that I receive bimonthly has an Item called "sovrapprezzo termico", i.e. the part that I pay ENEL to compensate it for the added costs of dismantling the reactors that were stopped after Chernobil, plus the lost income due to fossil fuel use. But hey, it's democracy, honey.
For all it's worth, two other referenda were worse still; we voted out compensation for capital expenses incurred in mantaining and building water infrastructure, which call the question of who will put up the money required to reduce the water losses that the acqueduct has (about 20~25% here).
Just the other day, my wife came in while I was brushing my teeth and closed the water tap, saying "the TV said to save water!"; I said "good Idea, let's reach the same level of eccellence of the water company: let's leave the tap open overnight."
coming back to Nuclear energy: the incumbent italian operator gets a sizable part of its energy production from fully or partly owned and operated nuclear plants, but all of them are abroad, and all except one (in slovenia) are too far to make exporting energy to Italy viable. To add insult to injury, many people said "we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of nuclear plants". Maybe the spanish public ain't so picky.
Now i want to see how they will sell to the public on building coke or gas turbine plants for baseline operations; as most Slashdotters know, renewables are uneconomic unless someone pays the piper.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Does this mean that Italy will also not buy power from France, its nuclear power rich neighbor?
I'll bet it doesn't.
A majority of people supported the government mandated shutdown. Polls have shown a majority also wouldn't mind having more wind turbines in their vicinity. And finally, this is how I imagine Germany can become more independent of factual energy imports, as there's no need to import anymore uranium. There are upgrades planned to the electricity grid so as to be able to handle many small sources at once instead of a few very big ones, too.
Nuclear power in principle is great, and I'd be a great supporter, except that it seems that profit orientated companies install just barely enough security. As it turns out, just barely enough isn't enough. And then there's the whole problem of getting rid of nuclear waste, which appears to be more complicated than many people imagine.
instead we should just allow a minority to build up their terminally dangerous nuclear devices and technologies, which would destroy all the others when they screw up.
fuck your understanding of pluralism. you dont have any right to make a choice that would endanger my right to make choices, leave aside my life. that is where your freedom stops. period.
Read radical news here
They didn't have any operating power reactors anyway.
Just means they'll continue to use other sources or indirectly use nuclear by letting France build them along the border.
i posted.
Read radical news here
And that's why we use republics. The voters are often ignorant of technical issues. They vote based on fears and emotion and ignorance. Mostly fear. By having them select representatives whom they can trust, we can filter out the bad decisions.
I'm generally not a fan of free trade, and I believe that applying comparative advantage at national scale has flaws. That said, this seems like a strong example of comparative advantage in action.
In other words, the Italians are not so good at nuclear. The French are better at it. Thus, the Italians are much better off importing nuclear power from France than making their own.
Maybe the US should import nuclear power from Canada. It's close. The Canadians are level-headed, educated, allies. In the unlikely event that something does go wrong, they also have a vast area we think of as "nothing". Not to say that contaminating the vast northern areas wouldn't be a tragedy; but at least very few people live there.
avoid the BigPharma controlled "MD" system. They don't care about you, they just want your money.
Are you a Troll?
Before you make many comments about people wanting other people's money, perhaps you should ask your chiropractor why he charges money to "keep your nervous system performing at its peak." Here is a hint people need to eat. Health care may be unaffordable, but you should put the blame where it belongs, health insurance, and more specificly government run health insurance programs that by the force of law are aloud to pay usually half of what it cost to provide care. There is a reason that small hospitals who have a high percentage of medicare and medicade patients are dying. Hospitals have to charge as much as five times what something is worth in the hopes of getting payed, and everyone that is self pay or using private insurance is picking up the tab for what our government is doing.
Insurance is like a giant blood sucking leach on the back of health care. Insurance companies do not exist to pay for our health problems. They only exist to make profit for themselves and increase the value of their companies for their shareholders.
/preach-off
"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
Funny but they have not abandoned nuclear power. They are pretending they have to make themselves feel good. They import no less than 16% of their electricity from France. They have just move the responsibility for the reactors to another nation. As Italy needs more power they will import more from France and use even more nuclear power outside of their own control and regulation.
Which is a pretty smart decision, you'll have to admit. France is far more capable of handling nuclear power responsibly than Italy ever would. And who knows what the mafia would do with all that fissionable material?
Also: less earthquakes in France.
You make it sound like we're doing a smart thing, paying other nations to handle the nuclear hassle for us.
Not really, since we ended up having nuclear plants on our borders anyway (notice that trend going on in western Switzerland/southern France?)...
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
Yes, majority opinion should be held high. One man's progress is another man's (read everyone else except 'the man') new world order.
We import electricity from France night time at very low prices (well under the standard pricing), as they can't shut down their reactors. BTW, there was not research efforts planned for nuclear, as we can do instead for alternative energies. There's no plans (and, likely, suitable places) where store nuclear waste (we even got waste from old centrals nearly exposed to atmosphere and floods after 20 years), and evidences from the past tell us that we are not able to do something better than Yucca Mountain (as we are not Finnish). We have no uranium mines. We can now concentrate our efforts on gaining efficiency on current production and on research for renewable energies. What's so wrong?
Maybe nuclear supporters don't know all the economical aspects of this technology :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/01/chris-huhne-black-hole-nuclear-power-budget
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article6717198.ece
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning
http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/nao_reports/07-08/0708238.pdf
It would be better to consider a nuclear plant not only for the building and running costs but also for the decommissioning ones.
Not all people know that nations that choose nuclear technology are giving a big debt to next generations.
And we actually are that generation.
Italy has a big government debt but they do own only 5 nuclear plants at ending life stage.
UK, France, Japan, USA, Russia and Germany have a lot of nuclear plants to decommission.
They will have to reconsider government debt soon, thinking also of nuclear debt.
And ban bananas :)
I used to agree with that but after Fukushima I started informing myself.
Clean?, what about the expent fuel?. After you burn coal or gas no residues are left. With nuclear you have a tons of radioactive crap you must store and contain for centuries.
The biggest issue with nuclear power plants is what happens when containment fails: look at Fukushima where the "unthinkable" happened: all cooling backups failed, cores melted down and breached containment. There is no way to control it or stop it because meltdowns were not supposed to happen, it was "impossible".
Now imagine what would happen if we get into a war. All our enemy needs is to bomb our nuke plants. Then they just sit and wait until we all die from radioactive poisoning.
I could support nuke plants if there is a proven way to fully control and contain after a catastrophe. It could work if, for example, they don't make them so big but then they might not make business sense to build.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Nuclear power is very efficient and, under normal circumstances, the impact to the environment is low.
The options are: Coal, Oil, Gas or Hydro. So if there are no more rivers to create dams, Coal , Oil and Gas are the options.
Solar and Wind are less than 5% and still not very efficient without a storage method (let's see how good is the "molten salt".
Hello everybody,
I read almost all of your comments before posting this one. I am an Italian guy who actually lives in Italy and I'm very proud to have been one of the voters who choiced to stop developing nuclear power here.
As in every topic, different peoples have different minds so they get to different conclusions. I hope this post will help you clear out why italian peopled voted to stop nuclear power.
First of all, Italy's geological conformation makes it a happy place for earthquakes and floodings from north to south, no escape. I personally think that it's impossible to build a completely safe nuclear power plant in these conditions.
My second point, and I guess is the most important, is this fact: in Italy lives about 56M people. Only the 55% of the population went voting. This actually means that the 45% of Italians doesn't care about that and it's a huge amount of people imho. And by the way, only the 5% of the voters expressed their being pro-nuclear energy. This details, imho, how much italian people now care about their own internal business.
Last but not least, Italy would be a great place to develop alternative energy like solar panels, windpower, etc. but the government never pushed on developing these things: they rather make us import energy from France and other near countries then trying making our own and maybe selling the surplus.
For the cons: yes, Italy already voted in a similar topic back in 1987 after Tschernobyl disaster. Well, after we choosed to shut down the nuclear plants we had, nobody did nothing to dump the toxic waste, so we ended up with old unactive power plants still full of toxic waste and i live about 30 miles away from the biggest deposit of toxic waste.
Hoping this could help you claering a bit your mind about our decision.
Cheers
Lorenzo
I think the issue will be more that this news will be conveyed by the media as another point for countries with nuclear power to cease their use. If this gets on the mainline news at all it will be "ANOTHER country is voting to get rid of nuclear power, maybe we should be thinking about this as well?"
I think that if we took the finances required to build and man a nuclear power plant, and put those funds towards the education and infrastructure required for sustainable energy, we would reap a surplus. The problem is that energy corporations can't realize a hard and fast profit off of of this process. They are the primary entities standing in the way of real and healthy human progress.
You mentioning the rabbit shows your ignorance. There is no proof whatsoever that that rabbit's earlessness was caused by Fukushima. There's not even proof that that rabbit was really born there.
-- Cheers!
Although it's Slashdot and you can't never expect an accurate summary, I don't even know where to start with this one. First, the vote was not on "halting the production of energy from atomic power generation.". The vote was on stopping any new construction of nuclear powerplants. Italy already voted 25 years ago to stop using nuclear, and it never used it ever since. Second, "is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?". Provide any sort of support to your baseless statement about progress. Show how this vote will slow down progress. Because you can't. All indicators seem to point in a completely different direction. Because nuclear energy in Italy has been absent since the last 25 years, with no know-how, the new plants would had to be acquired from French companies. The push for renewable that this referendum will lead to, actually stimulates the local economy, further and further local research. It is an incentive, from the people to the government to act accordingly. Besides, again because Italy dismissed nuclear long ago, the energy market in Italy would not already rely on that "missing energy". In other words the situation is very different than Germany, that has a significant portion of energy produced by nuclear. If you really want report news, next time do it in an informed and impartial way.
Because we've never seen global repercussions from certain countries having a monopoly on the primary sources of energy in the past? I think you might come to re-evaluate how much of a win this is sometime in the future. Best case Italians end up paying over the odds for energy - that's best case.
"While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"
This comment made me feel really uneasy.
First, It's a classic case of trying to hide from criticism by starting the sentence with the opposite of what you're about to say. Pretty much like "I'm not a racist but ". The whole point of democracy is to let the (voting) majority decide.
Second, it uses "progress" without defining what it is. It is just this elusive good thing that everyone knows is good but can't define. It's how politicians speak when they run out of arguments: " taxes will slow progress". Anyone can make such a general statement but no one can prove you wrong since there are way too many things which could be counted as "progress". Higher taxes can be spent on health care which gives better health and thus "progress". Lower taxes helps companies make money and thus "progress". So, do you mean progress in nuclear research (they voted no to using it, not doing research)? Or, do you mean general progress? If so then...
Third, it assumes that "progress" will slow down because of the decision which is very unlikely. Abandoning nuclear power will lead to increased investments somewhere else. They will just disappear from the general economy. It is the same logical flaw the anti-piracy people make when they talk about "lost jobs because of piracy" when they actually mean "lost jobs in the content industry".
Fourth, it assumes Italy actually makes any "progress" in anything nuclear related. I mean, seriously? Italy?
Should not be subject to popular vote. "While democracy should trump all" is why the United States of America reformed in 1789 under a constitutionally limited government in the form of a republic where the representatives were elected by popular vote and the senators were essentially ambassadors from the States. The Bill of Rights was added to the body of the constitution to make explicit the boundaries which the government was not to cross. Unfortunately many of the citizens of these united states have cooperated or even encouraged the coopting of our constitutionally protected rights. Examples of this coopting, even explicit suborning of the clear wording of the Bill of Rights by our elected officials and even worst by the State and Federal judges whose primary purpose should be the protecting of our rights can be seen at such places as www.theagitator.com and waronguns.blogspot.com and www.photographyisntacrime.com.
> 57% of Italian Households voted in this public measure. While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down
> progress?
This is wrong in so many ways.
If I want to build a nuclear power plant, that's my business (as long as I don't pollute the environment and so on).
It's my money, I bought the land, the people building it agreed to build it in exchange for the money I pay them, etc.
Then I can produce energy. Now, if there are Italians who don't *want* energy from nuclear sources, then what should happen is that they should buy their energy from providers who offer non-nuclear plans.
This way those who agree with nuclear can buy nuclear and those who don't, don't. We don't have any one group forcing itself on everyone else - which is what we see here, both in Italy and in Germany, just by different means.
If nuclear really is unpopular, if enough people don't want it, it really won't exist, not because we happen to have an untrustworthy State or fickle Public which for now ban it, but because the mass of people just won't buy the stuff.
What's happening now in Italy and in Germany is really horrible. It's unfree. It's one group forcing something upon everyone else.
Slashdot however is IME rather left-wing and is in favour of using the State to force things upon others, so long as whatever it is being forced is something Slashdot approves of, like State funded science subsidy or flights to Mars. Slashdot does not understand freedom.
Can you provide morons like me with documentation to back up your claims? I spent some time searching for and reading reports, and couldn't find anything that that came even remotely close to what you claim.
-Please cite evidence for your assertion that millions around the black sea died, and are dying still.
-It is well known that there was a higher incidence of thyroid cancer due to children unknowingly drinking water and milk contaminated by radioactive iodine shortly after the accident. Since radioactive iodine has a one week half life, that problem would have disappeared on it's own within a couple months so any occurrence of thyroid cancer by people who lived outside that area and time, have nothing to do with chernobyl.
-earless bunnies are not a rare occurance, and there's no evidence to indicate that fukushima had anything to do with it. No one is even sure where the bunny came from, so claiming the defect was due to fukushima is ingenuous at best.
-What exactly are the children in japan going to suffer from? The children in japan were a) evacuated from the area well before things got very bad, and b) were provided with iodine tablets to prevent the accidental uptake of radioactive iodine. The likelyhood that fukushima will increase their risk of cancer is low to the point of being a statistical error.
If you can provide some concrete evidence to back your statement up, then I'll be happy to reconsider my position.
>> While democracy should trump all,
[Insert Your Opinion Here]
>>is it wise to hold majority opinion so high
[Insert Your Opinion Here]
>>that it slows down progress?"
[Insert Your Opinion Here]
whilst it's being used to harvest wind power.
If it's a nuclear power station, not so much.
Go google them.
And you can still farm so the "used land" is only about 0.1% of the area taken.
...this comes in a country with high risk of earthquakes, where warnings get ignored (see last earthquake in abruzzo), where the various mafia have a hold on most of the cement/waste market, where normal highway mainteinance can take more than 10 years, and you'll end up with melted asphalt anyway (see Reggio-Calabria), a country where when you build something you dump toxic or even radioactive waste in the construction material (see Expo in Bisceglie, near Milan, or Santa Giulia, Milan)...
I could go on for a lot more, but the basic idea here it's that the italians fear nuclear power more becouse of _their_own_ way of managing things than becouse of the risk in the technology. And, being an italian, I completely agree.
57% of Italian Households voted in this public measure. While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"
interviewer: "The people voted to end nuclear power."
DC: "So?"
It's kind of nice to see a government that doesn't feel so much contempt for its people as to ignore their view of things.
I'd hope that whatever they voted on exactly offers periods of review to consider advances in nuclear power planting that make things safer, and have a path back to nuclear in the future if it makes sense again someday to them.
Most US coal comes from the US... So if it makes you feel any better we *are* blowing up our own back yard :)
+1 Disagree
I'm one of those that voted against going back to nuclear (because we already closed our few plants years ago).
Progress is not a single, straight line in one direction. In particular, believing that your own direction is the only one is slightly arrogant. So is the original post.
There is room for research and development in many different technologies, and you should be glad someone other will try other ways, because differentiation is more productive than dependence on one single technology.
Since activating a new power source (whatever kind) needs enormous long-term investments, it is correct to ask taxpayers in which direction to invest. Here we have sun and wind, supposedly to last a little bit more than some year. We already have more than 5 Gwatts of solar plants (~ 5 nuclear plants), for which great investments have been made in the last years that is better to exploit even more.
Last, if in some parts of Italy (e.g., Naples) is hard to manage regular garbage, I prefer not to investigate our ability of managing nuclear debris.
The US doesn't import much coal we mine it ourselves. We still drill for oil in the US. We do not say we are going to a coal free and oil free system and then buy coal power plants in mexico and Canada. We may buy plants that but we do not say we are coal and oil free. Of course some states do pull that and they too are also annoying. And yes I live near a nuclear power plant and I am glad that it isn't a coal plant and feel safe.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
We have no active power plants in Italy, except some old ones shut down after the Chernobyl accident and that are still eating money from us because that stuff doesn't really shut down (and no, we can't use them for actually producing power because nobody produces the fuel bars they need anymore).
We also don't have any site for stocking radioactive material and we already have troubles with other countries such as Germany for sending them our nuclear waste from hospitals and other sources.
This vote hasn't stopped any progress: it just prevented us from spending A LOT of money for something we don't have and we don't want to have. Hopefully that money will be invested into something that will really help the future needs of this country.
Yap and it has been like this for years now. But would you really want the Italian to handle Nuclear plants? A quick check into the garbage business shows how the hand of the mafia is still strong in the government business.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I found this pretty interesting:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/surface-area-required-to-power-the-whole-world-with-solar-power-wind.php
Do you think it would help if they pointed out that bean sprouts killed more people this year than the Fukushima power station "disaster"?
If coal is viable, why the subsidies?
If gas is viable, why the subsidies?
If banking is viable, why the subsidies?
If nuclear is viable, why the subsidies?
You know, after 60 years of heavy subsidy, nuclear is still not working.
I guess after less than 15 years of puny actions, the "why are there subsidies" whining is a little early, don't you think?
they might as well as the public to vote on what medical practices to use for brain surgery or what materials to use to build a space shuttle. The public has no idea what the relative risks and tradeoffs are for using vs not using a particular source of power generation. You might as well flip a coin as put the matter to a public vote.
But, its a great way to let the public feel empowered if you don't care about the consequences... If you're trying to get elected and you don't care about what happens after your term, this is a great course of action...
Telling them they're idiots for taking risks because others want more power is that much better than saying "I don't like those risks"
You'll be the one telling them they lost a business opportunity in a few years, instead of sending them humanitarian aid.
Or at least, that's how they feel.
Why can't they democratically decide on the risks they're willing to take again?
You live how close to a nuclear power plant again? keep in mind all of italy would fit in the eastern seabord of the USA with room to spare, just like Japan, but both those countries have far denser populations, so far more people exposed, per plant.
As for "safer" power plants, even nuclear alternatives exist(like thorium plants) engineered up the wazoo not to failed, almost none of the plants being cancelled are of that high-tech type though, but a lot of candu and other "have been around for a while and do not cost too much in patents".
Do you have any idea how much the Fukushima accident is going to cost?
The water decontamination alone will cost $500,000,000
What it comes down to is this:
1.) Private companies, and even some small countries cannot afford the clean up a nuclear disaster.
2.) The privatization of profit, and the making of dept public is the essence of a banana republic, not a sophisticated government situation.
3.) Nuclear power is a high-profit but also a high risk endeavor.
4.) Nuclear power is only sustainable for another few decades anyway, so
Why pee in your own swimming pool, if it's going to be for keeps?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Or they are a few a thousand kilomoeters away from any fault lines? Or the fact that this happened in Japan was not only the onslaught of 2 back to back disasters, but the culmination of a perfect storm of negligent reactor maintenance of running a power station decades past its tear down date?
I swear, I will never shed the annoyance that FUD causes. Ask how many people know living 100 miles from a coal plant and a nuclear plant that you will get more radiation from the coal plant. But will swear up and down its "clean" and therefore safe.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
Basically, the pro nuclear lobby said something like Chernobyl couldn't happen in Germany as our plants are safer than the Russian ones -- they couldn't convincingly say that they're safer than Japans...
They couldn't? Are the German people really worried that a tsunami is going to flood their reactors (or more importantly, their reactors' cooling systems)? I guess tsunamis must be a big concern in Germany, with its thousands of miles of coastlines....
And I thought Americans were the most geographically-challenged people.
Look at every strip mall in your area, odds are there is a Chiropractor. Coincidence? No. Alternative medicine and its caregivers are at the forefront of subluxation, autism and cancer research.
We have loads more churches than chiropractors. You'd better get moving, or the clergy are going to beat you to that cure for cancer!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
yes. endless dosage of radiation, officially dubbed level 7+ has been spread around by the plants, but, an earless bunny cant be due to radiation. more than that, you are even questioning the rabbit being born there, despite it was on every major news outlet.
just fuck off.
Read radical news here
Because as we all know, Germany is subject to frequent magnitude 9 earthquakes and tsunamis.
shorter: "we couldn't find a soundbite, so we gave up."
"Funny but they have not abandoned nuclear power. They are pretending they have to make themselves feel good."
I don't suppose it occurred to you that the Italians and the Germans are going to end up ahead of the game.
No, it probably didn't. By the way, your CAPS LOCK nickname makes you look like an idiot. Is that truth in
advertising ?
What about pointing out that the Fukushima disaster was caused by building a reactor right on a coastline where tsunamis occasionally happen, and by being struck by both an earthquake and a tsunami at the same time? Now granted, you can excuse the Japanese for doing this because it's not like they have a lot of extra inland land area to build reactor complexes on, but it's disturbing that people in other countries are worried about the same thing, when these other countries (USA, Germany, Italy) have far more land than Japan, a much lower population density (meaning more available land for reactor complexes), and plenty of inland places to build such things. The German thing is the dumbest. At least Italy is mostly a big peninsula (though there's a really big part up north that's not), but almost of all Germany is landlocked. The Germans being worried about a tsunami striking a nuclear plant isn't much different from the Swiss being worried about getting hit by a tsunami.
http://www.nirs.org/reactorwatch/accidents/chernob_report2011webippnw.pdf
http://wn.com/Victims_of_Chernobyl_disaster
you can find many other sources that paint a precise picture. you will also find many researches (mainly by anglo-american think thanks) downplaying, even nullifying chernobyl.
the truth can only be seen locally, if you have friends, neighbors in the areas affected.
http://www.google.com/search?q=youth+cancer+rate+around+black+sea+chernobyl&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Read radical news here
Just cause they got the cold fusion power plants starting in October...
According to the national grid manager, only 1.5 % of the power used by Italy comes from nuclear sources. Therefore, the argument that Italy buys nuclear power from its wise neighbours is 98.5 % bullshit.
There's some problems with those maps.
First, with the solar one, it shows a giant solar installation in the Sahara desert. That's great for providing power to north Africa, but doesn't help Europe, for instance, or anywhere else that doesn't want to be dependent on northern Africa for vital infrastructure. What's Europe going to do for its solar power? Buy it from the mideast or north Africa? That's a great way to make your nation hostage to an unfriendly one.
Same goes with the wind maps. Wind power is great for countries with a big coastline, but what about landlocked ones? Again, you end up making yourself dependent on someone else, and they can then charge you whatever they feel like, and if you have a dispute, or don't feel like paying 10x all of a sudden, they shut off the power. Remember Enron? At least with Enron, there were legal repercussions, because it was a private company within the same country as its victims. Between nations, there are no remedies, except for war. You want more wars?
This is why different places have to make different choices about where to get their power from.
"is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?"
In the USA the people are kept from important decisions. And that is why we gave the banks trillions while unemployment nears 20%, if the people voted on it the bankers would be in jail. And that is why we went to Iraq and killed a million Muslims. And that is why we are bombing Libya. And that is why we do not have single payer health care. Without counting the majority opinion we can really "PROGRESS".
"While democracy should trump all"
Whoa whoa whoa, hot shot!
What kind of idiotic idea is that? Just because 50+% of the population agree on something doesn't mean that it "should" happen. When you have 80% of the population deciding it's a good idea to kill the other 20%, I suppose in your world view that's OK???
Why can't they democratically decide on the risks they're willing to take again?
Where did I say we should force a decision on them? All I'm doing is criticizing the decision they did make. Are we not allowed to do that?
You live how close to a nuclear power plant again?
About 35 miles actually. But thanks for assuming I'm one of those NIMBY nuts.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/october19/jacobson-energy-study-102009.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid
"with 70% total energy from wind at the same sort of costs or lower than at present"
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
it's less risky for Italians to have it that way, and the the french who like nuclear can assume the risks and make money for doing so.
France: Hey paisan, either you enact some austerity measures, or we turn off the lights!
I pay people to do dangerous things for me (like putting shingles on my roof), they take the care to have safety equipment, training, insurance, etc.
Do you pay people to build nuclear facilities upwind from you? Do you have absolutely no say whatsoever in the safety systems installed at those plants?
At least when it's your roof, the worst case is a wet ceiling.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I do like the overwhelmingly biased description - "is it wise" to let people make decisions that contradict my own beliefs? Yes, and get over yourself. More than 50% agree and last time I checked you don't get a veto either.
Also I'm anti-nuclear (shock). Not because it's a bad technology per se but because the human race is too immature and selfish to safely handle that technology. Just look at the behavior of TEPCO - If the Japanese can't do it then the Americans stand a frankly piss poor chance of pulling it off. It's going to be amusing to discover when we decommission that there's 100,000s of tones of radioactives they "couldn't be bothered to deal with" and all those billions of profits we didn't realize actually end up coming out of the public purse. Remember, business does the cheap and profitable thing, not the moral, responsible or safe thing.
Where is the difference?
Italy is downwind of France.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Start with the wikipedia article, I guess.
You can't just turn off a nuclear power plant. The short version is decommissioning any nuclear power plant is ~60 years of work and billions of dollars. This is a "best case" scenario. Worst case is something like Japan right now.
Bizzare. You provide a link to a Wikipedia page that quotes the time needed to decomission the Maine Yankee power plant as 8 years (rather less than 60) and the cost as 635 million USD (rather less than "billions of dollars").
Maybe you need to brush up on your reading skills.
Remember this one? A storm felled a tree that cut one of the power lines transporting power to Italy - this tripped of a cascading effect cutting off all of mainland Italy:
During that blackout, the southern parts of Italy remained without any power for almost a day because no power plant was able to bootstrap itself and the hydroelectric ones "experienced technical problems". I wonder what could have cooled an hypotetical nuclear reactor if it happened to be shut down during that time.
Well, in theory there would be many companies providing solar power. Although, I suppose, they could get together and form an organization to control the export of solar power. They might call it the Organization of Solar Exporting Countries (OSEC) or something similar. Obviously, if that ever happened with something much of the world relied on for power, it would definitely mean war.
Seriously, you can build redundant supply. Most countries should be able to generate at least some of their own power and as long as supply exceeds demand by some reasonable amount, it will prevent any one country from demanding huge prices in return for power. Of course, an OSEC organization might develop but we already have one, and while they're generally a bunch of nasty characters at the heads of those countries, the world has survived their price fixing schemes.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Nuclear power is the most expensive form of energy besides solar. So looking at alternatives to handle future power demands might be idiotic, but does make sense.
When something [nuclear in this case] can poison or damage large portions of the Earth and make it uninhabitable then that something is not worth the risk. For what, some electricity? Not to mention the toxic waste issues. Humans can do better & humans should pursue more effective, safer, and sustainable methods of generating power.
zap the food. Also comes with irrational radiation concerns.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
What was unwise was that this referendum was for multiple issues - the real kicker being Berlusconi basically asking for a 'get out of jail free' card (immunity from legal action). The Italian public are FINALLY starting to realize what an absolute joke he has turned Italy into and are fed up - they probably would have voted no to anything he proposed. This was more a vote against Berlusconi than it was a vote against nuclear power.
I have an Italian roommate and he told me that the reason why Italians refuse to build nuclear power plants is not because they don't like nuclear energy per se but it is because they don't have faith in the government or on the private sector to run them securely. They think that organize crime involvement will be unavoidable.
Look, buddy, Italy may not have much in the way of oil or coal.... but it does'n t have much in the way of uranium, either, and last time I looked, uranium rich countries were not exactly your "reliable suppliers" type.
We do not want only to be green. We are just aware to not be in the condition to reliably store nucear wastes. .. and it was just random rubbish on the street! So, imagine nuclear waste dropped in an unsafe area just because it is a cheaper way to deal with it according to some local Mafia...
For instance, remember when Naple had waste-related problems?
We are just aware this is a quite realistic problem in Italy. End of.
I'd like to imagine that Enrico Fermi would be dismayed that his homeland has given up on nuclear power.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Well, look at us. We had a referendum in 1980 but have only closed one plant yet...
Btw, I find it interesting that the Slashdot crowd seems to be so aggressively for nuclear power, much more so than any other "groups" I belong to. Hm...
...and so did all my friends, including quite a few with a degree in Phyisics and an open mind. Apart from the universal issues on nuclear power and the soundness of a decades long investment starting from scratch, consider that:
Mama Mia! Itsa da nuclear plant, she's a melting down! Everybodies runs for a ya lives!!
we already do. I live in Turin, next to france, and we DO import nuclear energy from france: the total represents about 7% of energy consumption;
The article you linked, which, I'm saying it for non-italian readers, compares the referendum promoters to "Nazi hierarchs", is in conflict with the state Manager of Energetic Services, which says that only 1.5% of our energy consumption comes from nuclear sources (link).
and France is Upwind from us, so I would laugh my head off if it wasn't sad.
We have something called "the Alps" between us and them ;) . And even if they weren't there, as Fukushima teaches, the distance from the "ground zero" is important. It's easier to evacuate Bardonecchia rather than half of the Po valley.
i.e. the part that I pay ENEL to compensate it for the added costs of dismantling the reactors that were stopped after Chernobil, plus the lost income due to fossil fuel use.
In other words, we still pay for the disastrous italian nuclear program even 20 years after the plants have been closed. Good reason not to build more of them.
And by the way, half of those nuclear power plants were already closed when the referendum was held, so Chernobyl obviously had no influence on their decommissioning. For example, the Garigliano power station was closed by Enel themselves, because it broke down and reparing it would have costed more money than it could produce in its remaining life.
For all it's worth, two other referenda were worse still; we voted out compensation for capital expenses incurred in mantaining and building water infrastructure, which call the question of who will put up the money required to reduce the water losses that the acqueduct has (about 20~25% here).
The market will decide. When the leaked water will be worth more than the expenses required to fix the pipes, the managers of the water infrastructure (public or private) will invest in fixing them. Keeping the price of water artificially high is not an answer: we're seeing how well it is working with the highway system.
the incumbent italian operator gets a sizable part of its energy production from fully or partly owned and operated nuclear plants, but all of them are abroad
And yet, in their advertising, they only show happy people watching eolic mills and running next to solar panels. Looks like they're not proud of their nuclear side.
To add insult to injury, many people said "we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of nuclear plants".
Perhaps they're impressed by the track record of our nuclear power plants before they were closed for good. Anyway, since I live next to an oil power plant, I have a different opinion: we italians are incapable to guarantee the orderly functioning of any power plant. Just kidding, of course.
Wow! Ok, I will look at this later when I have time to read it properly (rather than just quickly skimming).
Thank you!
While democracy should trump all
One of the reasons the US has a constitutional democracy, because democracy (as well as the far more venal political systems such as kronyism) shouldn't trump all. For example, why have the legal formalism of private property, if the democracy can decide to have my stuff at any time?
np
Read radical news here
You all are completely missing a key part of the picture. Regardless of the environmental issues around nuclear waste disposal and all the arguments against coal power generation, Italy has one crucial difference with the rest of the world: Mafia. Mafia is in every aspect of the public life, especially public investment programmes and subsidies.
We have buildings crumbling and killing dozen of people, chemical plants exploding, all because of negligence tied to assigning public funds to mafia-owned companies that drain public money knowingly saving on safety measures because they are above the law and they will never pay if someone dies because of it.
Can you imagine what would happen in a power plant built using mafia contractors in the south of italy, close to rivers and farming fields? No thanks. We have far more pressing issues to solve before we can venture in something so volatile and risky.
We have a chemical chernobyl in the countryside region outside naples, lymphatic and bone cancers skyrocketing because of the widespread, systematic illegal disposal of wastes from the whole europe. Endemic corruption.
Even if i was in favor of nuclear power (which i am not, except for research), i cannot see how this technology can even be remotely safe in Italy. Italian scientists, traditionally supporting nuclear power, agree with me (cfr: Margherita Hack's claims about the vote).
This vote is not against nuclear power per se. It's against nuclear power *in Italy*, because we know we don't have the social, economical stability to tackle such a venture. The same reasons led to very harsh protests against building a massive bridge between mainland Italy and sicily. We can't really face modernization unless we get rid of this plague, and a lot of Italian people know this and voted accordingly.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
The voters in Tucson, AZ, passed a measure in the late 1990s to forbid the water utility to use water from the Salt River Water Project. For an area that depended solely on well water, and that was seeing major ground subsidence because the well water was being overdrawn, this was foolish in the extreme. The reason this passed was because the voters were pissed about how this water had been added to the water supply a few years earlier. The utility had not adjusted the pH of the water correctly, making it more acidic than the well water which had been used. This cleaned out the 40-50 years of corrosion and build-up inside everyone's pipes, with the result that hundreds (if not thousands) of home owners had to replace lots of piping and the water that came out of the tap was an ugly brown. This (the pH issue) was something easily fixed, but people were still pissed. Now, the goal of the folks who put this initiative on the ballot was quite different - they wanted to ride this anger to cut off access to more water in order to stop growth in the Tucson area. While this was a noble cause, throttling access to some resource or another NEVER works as a way to stop growth. Growth still happens and everyone suffers because of the lack of whatever resource was artificially controlled. Anyway, a few years later when everyone had cooled down another initiative was passed that revoked the first, and Tucson is now using Salt River water. I expect that this "run away" activity on the part of Italian voters and the German government may alter in time.
But it's already happening: http://www.desertec.org/
Easy. During normal operation, you have roughly half the nuclear reactors at a nuclear plant running. They provide power to the others to maintain any necessary cooling. That failed at Fukishima becase the earthquake triggered fail-safes that shut down *all* of the reactors (as planned). The following tsunami finished off any remaining connection between Fukishima and the rest of Japan's electrical grid, and drowned the backup generators. The backup batteries were only speced to handle about 8 hours of down-time, which in normal circumstances would be more than sufficient to get the plant reconnected to the grid and/or refuel the generators.
If you have a country full of reactors that can't be restarted without power from another country, you've got a much more immediate problem than the probability of a repeat of Fukishima.
It's very arguable that building nuclear plants is not progress. Before jumping to conclusions, please take into account some points from a person that voted against the government's nuclear plan. To make a long story short, Italy is very different from the US.
- Italy was already out of nuclear, the vote was on whether to re-enter. Investing on nuclear would mean spending a large amount of money now, to reap the benefits in, optimistically, 15 years (in Italy, times to build infrastructure are much longer than other countries). Can you be sure that nuclear power plants, with the uncertainties on the price of nuclear fuel, will not be obsolete in 15 years?
- It's impossible, AFAIK, to estimate the true cost of nuclear energy: handling nuclear waste on the long term is basically an unsolved problem.
- Italy doesn't have nuclear weapons: this raises costs with respect to countries that already have a big budget in nuclear military uses.
- Each part of Italy has seismic risk: in general much lower than Japan, but this is still a deterrent
- Italy is densely populated (one fifth the population of USA in one thirtieth of the area) and full of mountains: any place you build a nuclear plant -- or you place waste -- you'll be very close to a lot of people
- Italy is a country with, unfortunately, very high corruption and low discipline: we're worried that a society which is not able to keep regular waste out of the roads of one of its main cities might do something very dangerous with nuclear waste -- remember, we have no desert far from everybody where to bury it. The huge investments needed for nuclear energy will raise the interest of mafias and corrupt politicians: we can't at all assume they're acting for the collective good.
- Italy is a country with abundant possibilities in terms of hydroelectric, solar and geothermal power generation. It's weird that the rainy Germany has so much more solar than us! In addition, take into account that when sun is not working, we can still buy (at very low costs!) the excess energy from the French power plants.
- Last but not least, the vote had the beneficial effect of being a huge blow for Berlusconi's government. The discussion on how much he damaged is country is, however, off topic. Three other topics were voted simultaneously, one of them canceling a law made "ad-hoc" to allow him to postpone his trials.
Does the vote make more sense, now?
-- Matteo
Exactly. Italy has tons of problems with corruption. It's really a good idea for them to outsource their nuclear power production to a country without those problems.
Similarly, as an American, I'd like to see us outsource our own governance to another nation, as we Americans are too stupid to vote for good leaders, and our home-grown leaders are all thoroughly corrupt. We have no business leading ourselves, and should leave that to someone more trustworthy.
If I may nit pick, Democracy should not trump all...If all you have is popular vote, you have mob rule which is why a Democratic Republic is the way to go.
Second...Every source of efficient energy that we can have has risk and environmental impact...The fact that they voted to rid themselves of Atomic Energy makes me feel like someone was doing some fear mongering in Italy or someone stands to make a lot of money if other sources are used...or both!
Actually, your hasty speculation is incorrect. LWATCDR appears from his profile to be from the US, and the US imports essentially no coal. We are a slight exporter, but mostly just self sufficient in that particular resource. So no, there are no miners in third world countries laboring in terrible conditions, being injured and dying, to run our coal plants. At least use our REAL weaknesses against us, not fictional ones. God knows, we have enough real ones.
The water thing seems more a roundabout vote against privatization of the water supply. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing, the statistics might be on the side of safety for nuclear power where heavy water reactors is concerned ... but they aren't as squarely on the side of success where privatization of natural monopolies is concerned.
As for importing power, you could just upgrade the HVDC link you have with France ...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Likewise, I grew up within line of sight of the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania. Personally, if I thought I could swing it, I'd petition to have a modern, small-scale, passively-safe design of nuclear reactor buried under my back yard in exchange for free power from it.
Even if I understand your point of view, you should admit that the risk/benefit estimate for someone NOT living close to the French border will have been very different from yours (take Sicily as an extreme example).
The public is stupid. The public can be scared into making any type of decision.
That's a good point which I didn't realize was such a problem until I read more comments after posting my post above. You guys really need to clean up that mess. Of course, as an American, my advice is rather hollow since my own country is full of corporate corruption and our politicians are all for sale to the corporations.
Democracy = mob rule
It's not much of stretch to count (also) all the foreign coal supporting foreign manufacture for example, so that US consumers can consume...
One that hath name thou can not otter
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
Free Manning, jail Obama.
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
That presumes that nuclear fission power is progress. Currently it appears that this has been a 60+ year old wild goose chase, and that progress lies in some other direction. None of the expensive problems associated with nuclear fission power have been resolved yet, and none are significantly closer to resolution than they were in 1951.
Perhaps a blend of renewable resources and reductions in absurdly inefficient life styles, or perhaps fusion, will be the way to true progress. But it is not nuclear fission. Even the lay public can see that, despite the nuclear power industry's 60+ years of trying to fool all the people all the time about their "progress".
Will
May I propose the British? (or maybe their sort of still mild vassals in the north of your continent)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Foolish summary omitting the most important info.
Actually 95% of those who voted voted in favor of the abandonment. 57% of the people voted at all. Where did the 95% IN FAVOR OF ABANDONMENT of nuke plants figure go?
95% is a great, great majority.
http://www.repubblica.it/elezioni/2011/referendum/mondo.html#risultati
Yea, I agree. Even with our political lovefest, it's not as entrenched as Italy's. Aye, what a mess . . . .
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
Fusion won't come in the next 50 years. Fusion has many open question, in particular regarding the durability of the vacuum chamber if it is exposed to the high neutron flux of the fusion reaction.
So let's do a fast forward to 2060: Renewables had a learning curve of over 80 years. Production has been automated. The deserts in Africa, Asia, Australia and America are full of solarthermal plants. Wind energy generators are dirt cheap. Many roofs have photovoltaics installed. And now someone wants to sell a semi-experImental fusion reactor at x billion dollars? Only mad people would buy that, and they don't have these x billion dollars.
Gorgonite
Don't worry, once Germany figures out how to be 100% renewable [1], we'll happily sell our technology to everybody in the world [2].
[1] Not supposed to sound sarcastic.
[2] Or, judging by history, we'll invent it and somebody else will commercialize it.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
FTS:
I realize that the only point of these questions at the end of the summary is to jumpstart debate. But this is really stupid. I mean, if democracy should, indeed, 'trump all', then the rest of the question is completely irrelevant. Democracy either trumps all or it doesn't.
Look at the name of the poster, ElementOfDestruction, I think that sums it up very well.
Nuclear is the most expensive and the riskiest mode of power generation.
The expense is why it is no longer popular, the risk is the part talked about in the news. News stories about risk give the nuclear people something they can argue about and make up silly comparisons with. But the great expense of nuclear power is easy to understand and not able to be dismissed with stupid arguements.
I'm going to go buy all the oil-company stock I can find. These people are dumber than a box of biscotti.
What goal is Italy progressing towards? How does this slow it's completion of that goal? if so by how much?
The loaded phrase' slows down progress' assumes people first agree on a destination, which may not be the case.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Where's the map showing how much land mass is required for nuclear plants to power the world? Or is it just that it's too small to show up on a world map?
I also like how apparently creating wind and solar farms is now zero carbon. Are they just popping up naturally now?
These kinds of maps also make assumptions on how much energy these things will create. Fact is, the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine and equipment does crap out and require maintenance.
While I'd love to see us have a nice renewable solution, wind farms are not anywhere near and solar is limited to where it's guaranteed to be worthwhile (deserts, etc). Until we either vastly improve on renewable energy collection nuclear is the cleanest, safest and most feasible solution out there. If only the loudest 'environmentalists' out there would pick up a book and learn about the energy issues they spend their lives shouting about...
because no power plant was able to bootstrap itself
There is something fundamentally flawed with a electricity generation station that can't self start without outside electricity.
I understand the reasons why, don't get me wrong, I realize that from a practical perspective what I'm about to propose is ... well, not possible ... but ...
Shouldn't there be a damn hand crank or something that could start a pilot light or a carousel and some horses to power some pumps or something for pressurizing the system or SOMETHING ... I mean SERIOUSLY, we can't design SOME system so these things could be started via manual labor? Yea, it'll suck when half the plant workers have to leave their desks and air conditioners, go outside and do some manual labor for a few hours until help arrives and can power the pumps or start the generators or SOMETHING?
I just feel like that should be done like Chris Rock skit where he's ranting about Superman can't walk
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
[3] Or some "magical" energy tech will finally give die Wunderwaffe? (of course, again judging by history, somebody else will exploit it ...and/or it would be kinda like with, say, scifi cargo cultists virtually never seeing how wormholes / "jumps" / FTL / etc. make reactors or large weapons obsolete vs. just keeping a small link with the core of a nearest star)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Thus the Italians have today decided to deprive their Calabrian and Campanian (nuclear-) waste disposal entrepreneurs from their innovative and environmentally friendly businesses... a sad day for legitimate private enterprise in Italy!
</sarcasm>
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste_dumping_by_the_%27Ndrangheta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_waste_management_issue
One of the problems in the middle east right now is from where Iran nationalized the entire oil industry and took the tools and wells from those companies.
That's a large part of that happened to cause issues between the US and Cuba and some others later with Argentina. The physical concentration of the power or utility in a foreign country itself is far more of a danger then the companies who hold it.
Actually, we can be clear that nuclear power is bad for democracy because of the way it creates conditions for a police state long into the future. The necessity to guard nuclear waste implies that, for example, the Patriot Act, will never be repealed. Things should be dandy for people with nothing to hide, but everybody gets investigated.....
Would you like to have an Italian built and managed nuclear power station in your country? Add to that the fact that there's no zone in Italy that is not a seismically active area.
... the US has the Koch brothers. So things are not as different as they might seem - either way, a bunch of rich guys who control industry do whatever they want, and everyone else sucks it up.
That's 100% the absolute truth.
I'd mod you up if i've had mod points.
Italy - from a technological and industrial perspective - has full capability of correctly building operating nuclear facilities.
Considering the amount of money involved in a single project transforms fears into certainty of mafious infiltrations, which are bad for the very reason stated above: mafia has no accountability.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Not only are the capital costs huge, in many cases they've way overrun their budget. In some cases, yes, this is because of legal challenges. In others it's because of pure poor planning. But in any case, the risk of cost overruns is very high, and as a result, investors for nuclear plants are very scarce.
Then there's the insurance dilemma. Way back at the dawn of the nuclear age, it became apparent that you could build a practical nuclear generating station, but the plants couldn't get off the drawing board. Why? Insurance - all the underwriters looked at the industry, calculated that the potential liabilities involved in an accident were so huge as to be uninsurable, and refused to write policies. But the government was eager to get nuclear power off the ground, so it gave the industry a gigantic subsidy in the form of indemnity. The nuclear industry had to obtain insurance coverage in the amount of around $12B per incident, and the feds essentially provide no-fault coverage for any amount above that, at no cost to the plants. If it weren't for that, no nuclear plants would ever have been built. In a sense, the nuclear industry has been "pre-bailed-out" by the gov't.
Finally, there are externalities. Costs like decommissioning, fuel acquisition, and disposal are frequently not figured into the cost basis for nuclear plants. And yet someone's going to pay for that stuff. Usually it's the taxpayers.
So, yeah, nuclear power. It's a lot more expensive than you might think.
What's the definition of progress?
Every time I drive to my parents' house in Wisconsin, I drive through a windmill farm. Which is also, you know, a farm farm. This is not that complicated.
No, wind by itself will never be our sole source of power. But it can be an important part of it.
Italy has never had any running nuclear reactors anyway
So what was Latina?
There were others mainly of the cheap and nasty BWR design like they ones that melted at Fukushima.
Germany has them too. No wonder they want to phase out nuclear power. The trouble is that the public doesn't understand that there have been safer and more powerful designs available for the last 40 years. It's very difficult to get the message across.
By the way, here's a story about how dangerous some nuclear reactors were in the bad old days.
Stick Men
I wonder what could have cooled an hypotetical nuclear reactor if it happened to be shut down during that time.
The hypothetical gravity-powered coolant system that would continue functioning without power as long as water remained in the reservoir. These are included in many designs that are more modern than Fukushima (but not 'modern' by typical technology standards).
The enemies of Democracy are
Dude, you need to read up on the Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. Essentially, the US gov't has given the nuclear industry a giant subsidy in the form of free insurance. In effect, the government has "pre-bailed-out" the industry, by indemnifying them from all costs above about $12B per incident. Of course, all of that liability is now in the hands of the taxpayers. If the industry hadn't externalized the cost of that insurance coverage, there's absolutely no doubt that nuclear power would be unaffordable - the plants would never have even been built.
We have a small basin which is used to produce hydroelectric power during the day, and is actively refilled (consuming power) during the night, when the power demand is lower. The local grid relied on it to help restart the power production, but just that day it happened not to work.
watch this site: http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
Remember:
"Failure is not an option. But i never seen nothing created by men without problems"
nuclear is not Italy's primary source of energy by a long shot, 16% of electrical, and they deal with two countries for that (France and Slovakia). Looks like good risk mitigation with variety of supplies to me
in fact, I and you and other taxpayers helped build the plant 35 miles to the west of me (we have prevailing westerlies). I had no say in the safety systems. Please tell me again the total number dead and maimed from U.S. civilian nuclear power plants again? zero and zero.
First and foremost: Italy doesn't have any active nuclear plant.
We have 4 plants waiting for decommissioning that stopped operations in the late 80s (more than 20 years ago) after a first referendum (in 1987) banned nuclear energy production. These plants are not "fourth generation" (as the government marketed the whole issue) nor it would be any plant that we can build in the next 20 years, since there's no "fourth generation".
The point in your summary is that we "stopped progress". But we don't have a nuclear industry, so we would only buy obsolete technology (3rd gen plants) from Areva (France). Do you call that progress? I would call it business.
Add to your equation that:
* Italy has widespread corruption and italian Mafia (organized crime) has widespread entries to the construction industry: we had schools built with failing concrete. Schools. Do you think that a nuclear plant would be treated differently?
* Italy is a very difficult territory from an hydro-geological and seismic point of view: there's virtually no safe place for a nuclear plant.
* Seems that we can't properly treat our common rubbish, do you really think we can manage nuclear waste? All our nuclear waste from the 60-70s is still sleeping at the nuclear plant sites. We don't have a national waste treatment and storage facility.
For more reasons, I think comments #36435762 and #36436022 nailed it.
What would happen if San Onofre, Ca had a similar problem as Fukushima. Who would pay for an evacuation of all the people (and all of the million dollar mansions) in an 20 miles radius?
But then, San Onofre is not in an earthquake aera and it is not in danger of an tsunami.
I swear, I will never shed the annoyance that FUD causes.
It does seem politics can't do without FUD. Everywhere :
"illegal aliens are stealing our jobs"
"global warming caused these extremely typical tornadoes"
"nuclear power disasters ! OMG ! three eyed fishes" (or was that the simpsons ?)
The sad fact is, even if renewables magically became viable today, it would probably be too late to handle the extra loads these stupidities will create. Now if voters were to be held responsible for the actions of their elected representatives. Maybe we should vote in a law that the increased costs of legislation that turns out to have been moronic will be paid by the people who voted these representatives in ...
Well, I wonder who'd be more fucked ... Bush voters or Obama voters. How about we catch German voters and imprison them in hamster wheels ? Maybe a beowulf cluster of these ...
Germany is also just about as far from any geographical fault lines as you can get almost anywhere in the world.
Now if only there existed a defense against large amounts of morons thinking they know everything. Because in a democracy, that results in ... oh well.
So why couldn't they reactivate one of the reactors ? I mean, given the certainty that a meltdown would become unavoidable once the power ran out, and the power lines cut with little hope of repair for at least a week, if not months, why not make a little cross, pick the most reliable looking reactor, and start it ?
One reactor would have provided ample power to cool everything for 10 years or longer. I mean, they saw the failures coming 8 hours ahead. Why didn't anyone act ? Or is it so hard to restart a just-deactivated reactor that it couldn't be done with the reserve power ?
Well if you tell that to the greens they'll ask "but what if gravity fails ?". I means, that argument holds about as much water as shutting down German reactors because of earthquake dangers.
I mean, these people succeeded in putting mobile phones in the same health hazard category as DDT. You just know some lunatic will sue Nokia in a few years, and get a few millions, and we'll all get fucked (again). Frankly, it's just not funny anymore.
I live less than 1 mile from a (research) nuclear power plant, and about 15 miles from a "production unit" 2.5 Gigawatt nuclear power plant. So does about half the population of Belgium.
And yet you're the moron ...
What about pointing out that the Fukushima disaster was caused by building a reactor right on a coastline where tsunamis occasionally happen, and by being struck by both an earthquake and a tsunami at the same time?
The meltdown (they have confirmed that three reactors have experienced a meltdown) has been caused by greed and cutting corners. They were warned 20 years ago that flooding of generators placed in a basement was the most likely cause of reactors overheating and should be moved to a more appropriate location, this was brought up by the Japanese nuclear authority in 2004 and again 2 years ago. Who is going to pay?
Nuclear can be safe, it's the implementation and enforcement of standards that is dangerous.
There is a distinct (tongue-in-cheek) possibility that the Italian government might not be trusted to enforce the standards required. The Germans may feel the same way about their government. Is your government strong enough to stand up to multinational corporations?
BM3
That's the sensible solution. Unfortunately, most nuclear power plants are designed such that if you don't have a connection to a stable and functioning power grid, you can't safely run the generators. Daft, but it saves money, and of course there'd never be a situation where the grid fails that badly...
mod parent up.
Let's not forget the MASSIVE electrical grid the (moronic) locations for the plants would take. I mean, powering the whole of Europe from a single plant in Egypt ? That's not stupid anymore, that's "let's call the friendly guys in white"-crazy.
Oh, and of course, the extra transmission losses these locations will take have been taken into account by "treehugger", right ? Well, no, only electricity use is taken into account. So start with doubling the sizes of the plants.
And for the realism of having these plants distributed, look how the idiotically optimal sahara plant is already much bigger than 3 European countries. By 2030, the landmass required for Europe will be the size of a medium-sized country, like Switzerland. And of course, land use increases exponentially with time.
While democracy should trump all, is it wise to hold majority opinion so high that it slows down progress?
So this sentence seems to have two points:
self-contradiction, anyone?
Anybody want a peanut?
There is a distinct (tongue-in-cheek) possibility that the Italian government might not be trusted to enforce the standards required. The Germans may feel the same way about their government. Is your government strong enough to stand up to multinational corporations?
As an American, I know mine certainly isn't; it's owned by MNCs. However, Germany always had this reputation for engineering prowess and not cutting corners. Of course, much the same can be said of the Japanese, and we know how that went with Fukushima.
Pretty sad that the only country it seems we can really trust with nuclear power is France. Everyone else is either too greedy and corrupt or too incompetent.
Lol, at least one with a sense of humour!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sometimes some people just don't want to listen. You can share "your wisdom" as much as you want...
Anyway, if a majority make a bad decision, that would bad for all the community in the long run.
Now Italy is still somewhat an elite nation. Member of G8. The "rich" world. Russia, China... were the poors/corrupt of the world. I fear that in 20 years, continuing in this path, would be the reverse.
An italian.
The problem with most fusion reactors is that they produce copious amounts of neutrons which do not directly contribute to power generation, and require extensive shielding to avoid being a problem. That shielding itself will then become radioactive over time... Additionally, the energies needed to continually burn the fusion plasma exceeds the useful energy collected from the reaction. Often by an order of magnitude.
Now, the silly idea. You dont need to achieve direct over-unity on power generation from the fusion reaction itself, if you capture a sufficient amount of the resulting neutron spray in a suitably reactive shielding layer, and total energy release (including neutron spray) is greater than energy input. (read on.)
The material I had in mind with the silly idea was a high density carbon aerogel, filled with liquid nitrogen, and sealed to maintain pressure.
As the fusion reactor happily churns out neutrons, these will interact with either the carbon or the nitrogen in the shielding layer. Both interactions ultimately lead to the creation of carbon 14, which is a known beta-decay element, which decays back into nitrogen, emits an electron, and a neutrino. Neutrinos are harmless, the nitrogen isotope created is non-radioactive, and the electron can be directly used for power generation.
The issue of degredation of the cathode would be partially resolved as well, by continuing neutron exposure. The idea is to cause an equilibrium of nitrogen->C14 | C14->nitrogen reactions, so that the carbon components of the shielding will be continually regenerated by the neutron exposure. C14 is still carbon, and would still have semiconductor properties, in addition to its betavoltaic properties.
Sadly, that is all the further my silly idea went, because I hit a brick wall with paywalled neuclear physics data sets concerning what hardness the neutrons need to be for efficient capture, and at what rates that capture occurs, so I could not calculate how thick the shielding layer would need to be, nor at what energies the catalytic fusion reaction would need to burn. However, the fusion reactor would appear to able to be something as simple as a farnsworth fusor, since the goal is to release as many neutrons as possible to seed the shielding layer.
(If anyone knows where I can get such information for free, I would still like to work out the specifics as a thought experiment.)
Once sufficiently primed, the betavoltaic nature of the system coupled with the absurdly long half life of carbon 14 (thousands of years...) would mean that after the crucial incubation period, it would provide continual, and consistent electrical output for potentially thousands of years, with minimal additional fusion input.
[EG-- while total rate of decay is low, due to long halflife, the high concentration of C14 in the chamber would mean useful numbers of decay reactions would be statistically likely. You simply need to supply sufficient neutron flux of the right hardness to keep the system going after that point.]
Bonus-- It would make a great place to store all that carbon that is clogging up the atmosphere's ability to re-radiate IR radiation back into space.
Pretty sad that the only country it seems we can really trust with nuclear power is France. Everyone else is either too greedy and corrupt or too incompetent.
I'm surprised by France as well. Their nuclear industry seems well regulated, the majority are supportive of nuclear power and nuclear power seems to have done wonders for their "carbon footprint".
BM3
My point is that in the US we can insist on high safety standards at our nuclear facilities. If Canada were producing all of our power with Canadian nukes, we wouldn't have that option, even if they were building them all right on our border.
Not to say that Italy would do a better job with nuclear safety than France - I just don't see how "banning" nuclear power and then buying it from someone else next door actually accomplishes anything except removes control and oversight.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Slashdot is pro Nuclear. Notorious Nerds like Bill Gates proposed to drill a mile deep hole, fill it up with nuclear stuff and start the controlled burning. He made a TED talk about that. From my perspective, he wants to destroy the world with a huge nuclear blast.
Nuclear, No Thanks.
Fusion, Hell Yes !
Here are two pictures that explain visually.
The Yellow Stickers are everywhere.
http://linksunten.indymedia.org/de/system/files/images/1927184557.preview.jpg
Perception about nuclear supporters.
http://enno.verbrennung.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/burns_merkel_atomkraft.jpg
... is rolling his eyes in his grave. The guy who built the very first nuclear reactor on Earth (at least in the last two billion years or so) was an Italian-American physicist.
And progress of what?
OPG stated (in the Darlington New Nuclear Joint Review Panel) that they have between 11 and 12 billion in the fund at this time.
As it is a segregated fund required by the regulator, it will only continue to grow prior to the shutting down of any reactor.
From what I hear, Canada is heading in the wrong direction too.
Radiation doesn't kill instantly or even short term, ask the Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors and their descendants about that or the people that lived around Chernobyl.
There's been extensive studies done about power in general in Europe and it has been concluded that we can get around just fine without nuclear power by the time those plants are set to be closed if we put enough effort into the alternatives, the only reason they were going to be kept open longer was lobbying.
Popular opinion or no, no government is going to shut down power plants they desperately need to keep the country running.
Fact is that if shit hits the fan with a nuclear power plant it's real bad, it doesn't matter that it's "safer" than your average coal plant (who, for the record, aren't exactly considered alternatives to nuclear plants in most countries, except, it would appear from comments here, the US), you can't just shut down the plant as Fukushima has proven and we don't have any control over the process if things do go wrong, so if it's possible to do without nuclear power (and without reverting to coal or the likes) then why the hell not?
Billion dollar industry, 60 year average.
Huh? What?
You mean decomissioning plants is a billion dollar industry? Seems reasonable, there are quite a few plants (and the older ones, being wildly nonstandard, will be the most expensive to decomission).
As for "60 year average", we're in 2011 now, you're claiming that a decomissioning process started in 1951 will, on average, be finishing now. That's ridiculous.
"The plans of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority for decommissioning reactors have an average 50 year time frame."
Oh, it's 50, not 60 now.
The NDA say they will have all the Magnox reactors defueled in 10 years, and be ready for dismantling them withing 20 years.
Sounds like they have a job for life and don't see any reason to get a move on.
Germany invent? You are believing your own myths. The English invented the Jet engine. The US invented the liquid fueled rocket. The V2 was a scaled version of Goddards work. Germans just weaponized it. Even things like the swept back wing where in broadly known. It is funny but the US had such an odd inferiority complex after the war that it boasted the importance of the German contributions. Probably justify bringing any scientists or engineers to the US after war and just trying every man and women in German for genocide. If you look at other fields the US Invented the transistor and integrated circuit. As far as renewable energy Hydro and Windmills have been around so long that it is in the who knows. Solar well that was France and the US.
http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventions/a/solar_cell.htm
I will give you the internal combustion engine, cars, and a lot of chemistry but other than that... Not so much.
I will be kind and leave out the other "inovations" that Germany has contributed to the 20th century.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Basically, my point is taking down power plants cost a lot of money, and it's mandatory.
This is not unique to nuclear power. All industrial plant needs to be dismantled at end of life, or disasters will happen - look at that incident where a flood of toxic sludge poured into the Danube, killing four eople and destroying a village. Unlike the nuclear industry nobody had made any plans to take care of the waste when the smelting plant was closed down.
You say "noone wants to pay or clean up" but almost all of your figures come from the UK NDA which is paying and cleaning up..
(Although I thing they're doing a typicaly slow and crappy Brit job of it).
Well, I'm not sure what you're trying to say either, as you keep quoting sources that don't seem to support your conclusions.
Um, whatever. It was supposed to be a joke.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
is progress? if so, then i guess we abandon all efforts for a safe alternative?
A German attempting humor? Now that is funny. Sorry I couldn't help myself.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's a bit of history distortion. The original mentality was AFAICT that government cleaned up waste, whether household, industrial or nuclear, in exchange for our tax dollars. Only with the EPA did this become a private responsibility, but of course nuclear reactors predate the EPA.
But yes, we need some steps to keep the risks and rewards bundled. You shouldn't be allowed to run one nuclear plant. Run 20, and be aware that any severe mismanagement at any one means losing all of them, period. And this rule should be made clear to all financial backers, so they too understand what's at stake for them. Practically, TEPCO should be nationalized.
The summary is misleading, and it seems that there is much confusion and emotion regarding this issue.
Let's look at the facts, shall we?
54,79% of Italians voted. Of those, 94,05% voted against nuclear energy.
I can't undertand why, but some slashdotters, despite overwhelming evidence, seem to believe that nuclear power is the only way to solve global warming, that it actually provides a considerable amount of relatively safe and clean energy, and that's it's the future. All of these propositions are wrong, based on the scientific data available.
Nuclear power provides about 6% of the world's energy, whereas about 19% of global final energy consumption comes from renewables.
A study published in July 2010 by John O. Blackburn and Sam Cunningham from Duke University details how electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.
An analysis published in Energy Policy by researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis and authored by Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi states: "There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources", and to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing). And we can do it before 2050, Jacobson said.
Another analysis shows how solar will become the cheapest source of energy of all, even chapter than coal, in justa a few years, while nuclear costs will keep rising.
From TFA:
And here's the paper from The Rocky Mountain Institute.
So, if you are still blinded by your emotional attachment to nuclear and can't seem to reason straight, think about this:
Your statement is totally wrong. Italy uses like 65 GW of power and has installed 105 GW of power, one third is renewable. At night italy buys cheap nuclar power (that france can't throttle) and it is used to pump up the wather to the dams that will be generating power the next day and selling it out of italian borders when it will cost much more to buyers.