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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?"
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.
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.
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
"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
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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.
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.
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
preposterous. obviously indirect deaths don't count for nuclear yet they do for coal. what a bankrupt comparison
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.
No I believe the question is closer to "Should we let straight guys vote for number one gay, should we let youtubers vote on internet infrastructure designs, should we let Slashdot vote on best vag, and should Joe Frazier be on the HTML5 standards committee?" It's, you know, the basis for representative democracy. Vote for people smarter than you so they can educate themselves and vote on your behalf, because realistically you aren't qualified and don't have the time for well-informed decision making. This is one of those topics where maybe layman's opinion isn't what we should be basing our decisions on.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
yeah, i remember when George Bush was a white republican, since his re-election to a third term he looks like a black democrat.
Tell this the swiss. Their centuries old tradition of direct democracy was wrong all along!
I'm sure they will gratefully adopt only representative democracy so they can be saved from their abject poverty and misery.
PS: it's likely the Swiss will stop using nuclear power in the near future as well.
Sorry, if you have a logical argument as to why this is preposterous, please feel free to cover it. I'll add credentials to the above quote just for good measure, so you're aware of the source of this statement and why he may be in a position to make such a statement:
By all means, please now back up your statement that his comparison is bankrupt with some form of proof. I think given the scale of air pollution, mining dangers and associated health issues and such makes his comparison quite a reasonable assertion.
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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!
"Last week’s E. coli outbreak in Germany - potentially traced to an organic farm - was more deadly than the largest nuclear disaster of the last quarter-century."
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"According to World Health Organization statistics on E. coli deaths, in just the past two years, more people have been killed by the disease than all fission-related events since the dawn of the nuclear age - even if you include the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
To put it into perspective.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
You are missing the fact that italy droped out of nuclear power 20 years ago. The voting in this case was about the question whether they build new nuclear reactors or not. (in other words the last decades they produced their own power and imported the rest via the european grid)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
> 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
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)
And while I totally agree with the sentiment - I'd say that it is hard to consider Keith objectively when he has always been against fossil fuels at seemingly any costs (which he should be). So in the spirit of actually contributing something to the conversation:
Risks from reactor accidents are estimated by the rapidly developing science of "probabilistic risk analysis" (PRA). A PRA must be done separately for each power plant (at a cost of $5 million) but we give typical results here: A fuel melt-down might be expected once in 20,000 years of reactor operation. In 2 out of 3 melt-downs there would be no deaths, in 1 out of 5 there would be over 1000 deaths, and in 1 out of 100,000 there would be 50,000 deaths. The average for all meltdowns would be 400 deaths. Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 10,000 deaths per year, there would have to be 25 melt-downs each year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning.
From: http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm
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?)...
To their excuse, they do actually elect foxes about as often as they elect wolves. So it's not all that bad.
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.
I won't believe he's gone until I see a corpse. He managed to come back several times before. I don't know what made Italians vote for him in the first place, so I don't trust them to really vote him out of office for good until they actually do so.
Let's be careful about what we think democracy does for us.
Democracy is the best system out there because it recognizes that ultimately, the people are what gives any government its power and authority. Therefore, not only is it fair, it is also wise to co-opt the largest number of people into the system and have them feel like they are part of it.
On the other hand, just because the majority votes for something, it doesn't mean it is correct. That's not to say that the masses are ignorant, although they certainly may be about certain specific and advanced topics. What it is saying is that voters have local self-interest in mind, and tend to lack perspective.
Consider that 3,000 people died on 9/11 from planes hitting the World Trade Center. Not only were there direct deaths, but other people, particularly responders and bystanders in the local area could well have chronic health issues for years to come. Yet, we are in the process of building yet another huge building on the site, which could also become a target and no one has called for people to stop using planes.
Why does no one want to outlaw massive skyscrapers or jumbo jets? Well, that seems obvious: we feel that we really can't do that.
However, the underlying reasoning is that we can manage the risk from planes hitting skyscrapers. If we couldn't manage the risk, planes and/or skyscrapers really would face being outlawed because no one wants to constantly face waves of jets being used like guided missiles at buildings.
Now take nuclear plants. There is also risk there. But how much more risk is there in a power plant than there is in a jumbo jet with a skyscraper target? How much more is there from a nuclear plant than the air pollution, heavy metals and radioactive material produced by a coal plant?
The fact is that democracy is indifferent to facts, it is simply a way to produce effective governance. Sometimes, democracy tells the truth where a self-absorbed dictatorship won't or can't. This gives the impression that democratic governments are also "smarter". We know that isn't always the case. Voters can be convinced of things that are not scientifically reasonable. Both sides of the aisle know this. Democracy is a system that provides high legitimacy for a system by recognizing the people, but it can be held captive by small groups that have specific agendas.
So yes, the Swiss have a long tradition of working democracy. That only means that democracy works for them. It does not mean that their democracy makes correct decisions, only that the decisions they have made have yet to cause their government to fail. Chances are that Switzerland is small enough that it can dispense with nuclear power, if it wanted to. That doesn't mean that the rest of the world can. It doesn't even mean that the Swiss won't be using nuclear power, it just means it won't be produced locally. It means that the Swiss will be happy to let someone else take the risk to provide them power, confident in the knowledge that someone else will.
Absolute Democracy is the exact opposite of freedom. You cannot have a Right when all laws are subject to the will of the majority. The act of voting doesn't make a policy moral or even "effective." When your rights are violated it is little consolation whether it was done by a vicious dictator or by the voting of your neighbors. Both pure democracy and pure dictatorship are morally vacant and eventually, self-destructive. The only useful form of government is one that recognizes the individual and their inalienable rights.
That must be why no-one lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"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
I find thus statement along with the quoted figures a tad misleading. Does it take into account the largely immeasurable risks (both to human health and the environment) associated with containment of long lived nuclear waste? Whilst I'm no fan of coal (and have for along time been a fence sitter w.r.t. nuclear), coal power doesn't leave future generations with tonnes of highly radioactive and long-lived waste to manage and dispose of. Whilst coal power does leave future generation with a significant environmental burden (atmospheric contaminants and greenhouse effects) there is at least the prospect of clean coal and carbon capture on the horizon. There is no such equivalent for today's generation of nuclear fission (unless you count the possible, and as of yet unproven, ameliorative effects that the thorium cycle might have on the lifetime of nuclear waste).
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." -- Leonardo Da Vinci
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.
Nice statistics. So you deliberately exclude Chernobyl and assess Fukushima knowingly way before any long-term effects could have set in. Why don't you just roll some dice instead? Your argument boils down to "The random number i just rolled up is larger than the number of victims of the largest nuclear disaster of the last quarter century". And what, by the way, is the point of comparing two completely unrelated causes of death, anyway? Not like the decision to go with or to abandon nuclear power has any effect on E. coli infections. I find it quite telling that the proponents of nuclear energy have to resort to such blatantly nonsensical comparisons. But hey, good enough for "insightful" mods on slashdot, so go ahead.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's not 50% +1 though. The summery is somewhat misleading. While around 57%* of the voters turned out, the actual results for the four questions where as follows:
All against the laws in question. Partly this is because Berlusconi has always tried to stop referenda by calling upon his supporters *not* to vote. Thereby making them no binding if a quorum of 50% wasn't reached. This result shows that over 50% of *all* voters rejected the plans. Which seems a high enough threshold for a non-constitutional issue. Rather high even considering that the Berlusconi government was supported by around 40% of all possible voters in the last lection (47% at an 85% turnout).
While I'm not in favour of too many questions being decided by the electorate directly, this seems a fairly clear question (yes or no on new nuclear plants). You can be disappointed or disagree with the result but this is clearly what should happen in a democracy. The German example shows that the only difference betweens this referendum and âoeonlyâ having regular elections is that it would take one or two years more and included the removal of the party that is pro-nuclear from power.
* The official turnout is 54.8%. However, in a further effort to invalidate the referenda because of a lack of a quorum, it was decided that all oversea Italians would count towards the possible total as well. Regardless wheather they have ever voted in any Italian election. This is being challenged in court.
Nice statistics. So you deliberately exclude Chernobyl and assess Fukushima knowingly way before any long-term effects could have set in.
Chernobyl cannot happen again; it was the result of an ancient design not built to any safety specifications. Further, it's forty years old. A series of stupid decisions lead to that disaster. It's like using Titanic as a reason we shouldn't build boats.
Do you think it would help if they pointed out that bean sprouts killed more people this year than the Fukushima power station "disaster"?
Maybe truth on the ballot might have helped a bit:
A) Fix global warming
B) Stop using nuclear power
Please choose one.
"To put things into perspective: Car accidents cause more deaths than unprotected sex, so it is fine to fuck random strangers without a condom."
You are ignoring the cost of dealing with the risk. Last I checked condoms were really cheap and easy to use. There's no magic, cheap solution to some peoples' hysteria about nuclear power comparable to condoms.
" coal power doesn't leave future generations with tonnes of highly radioactive and long-lived waste to manage and dispose of. "
are you high?
Yes, it does leave poisonous waste, as an added bonus it ALSO leaves poisoning waste we can't contain nearly as easily has nuclear waste because its in our air.
What I believe you, all of us, really, looking at is the modern nuclear designs. 4th generation reactors that not only use old nuclear waste for power, the waste they produce is at back around radiating in hundreds of years.
You complaint is with plutonium, not nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the safest power generation we have for the scales we need it.
Would solar be nice? sure. But right now it can NOT meat our demands. There just isn't enough practical area.
Hopeful in 20 years, the tech will get good enough so that's all we need, but waiting and hoping for a solar fix while creating such an atmospheric disaster, killing people, and running out of oil just isn't smart.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
It's not bankrupt, the existing comparison you are trying to enforce is. It's one of the basic facts of the two industrys that a whole hell of a lot less people are killed mining uranium or transporting either raw ores or processed fuels than are killed mining coal or transporting it. It's admittedly sloppy of the parent poster to compare US and Japanese deaths, but unless the Japanese are doing 10 times better on everything from mine safety to particulate scrubbing, you could total all the indirect deaths from both Coal and Nuclear and, excluding none of either, get the OPs numbers. Adding those indirect deaths for nuclear you claim he's left out might not change things at all.
In the U.S. alone, more than 100,000 coal miners were killed in accidents over the past century. Modern mining in the U.S. is safer than that average, but still results in approximately 30 deaths per year. Transportation related deaths from coal, again for the US, vary more significantly than mine fatalities so I'll calculate and give a high year/low year range (as of the last 28 years): 3 to 45 occupational deaths from coal transportation and 60 to 250 public deaths from coal transportation.
Deaths from medical conditions related to coal chemicals exposure - I could give you a number, but it's enormously higher than those two indirect death types above and you obviously wouldn't believe it. You may not believe these people either, but I've found you a source that isn't just wikipedia and isn't behind a pay firewall, and has numbers about as current as possible (2010) - anyone wanting to argue these numbers, you'd better at least meet those three criteria, or expect to be called an industry shill.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=External_costs_of_coal
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SPOILER WARNING - SITE RESULTS BELOW
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Now that some people have clicked the link, here's their most important numbers: 13,200 premature deaths in 2010, as well as 9,700 additional hospitalizations and 20,000 heart attacks.
Disclosure: I live in appalachia - I've buried some of those fatalities. I could drive less than fifty miles from my home and be in a community which lost every adult male of working age in the same day once. I also have lived near enough Oak Ridge, TN, in the past that I've seen DOE's trucks and trains hauling nuclear material to compare to the many coal trucks I see on the road, and trains on the railroads. I'm a degree holding engineer and can make a pretty good estimate of the relative maintenance and safety systems of those various trucks and train cars, and I have actually been a legally recognised expert witness as an accident inspector. All that I could personally say is still anecdotal, but my anecdotal opinion is coal is a vicious killer of thousands and the people who can overlook it are only able to do so because the deaths happen disproportionately to a class of people they have been trained to ignore or simply not care about. I dislike Nuclear because it is bad in some of the same ways, but have to admit it is on a significantly smaller scale.
Who is John Cabal?
Why not use geo-thermal, wind, solar or develop fusion, or anti-matter etc. Why the insistence that nuclear power is the only way.
I eagerly await your reply showing where we can find a large supply of antimatter so we don't have to use fission or fossil fuels any more.
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.
It can't happen again because... ...it won't happen again in Chernobyl ... it won't happen to the same model and make of plant ... it won't even melt, for God's sake, it'll blow up.
o)
o)
o)
Cross all that apply. Seriously, the "It won't happen again" argument does not hold much water (not as much as Fukushima's plant). In a way or the other, it always assume that some - if not all - of the safety subsystems will continue to work.
We are dealing with stuff that, unless continuously cooled, keeps giving huge headaches. Which means that, every time some shit hits some fan in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant there is a strong chance that a major shitstorm ensues unless: (i) no stupid errors are made (ii) no emergency generators decide to malfunction (iii) and so on. But, sorry, stupid errors will happen and safety subsystems will malfunction.
OTOH, Even when things go horribly wrong, conventional power plants have a way of just cease functioning... compare with "keep burning for a few thousand years". And, speaking of Italy, sorry to rain on everybody's bucholic view of our peninsual, but consider that it is a country which experiences frequent earthquakes, has had a major tsunami about a hundred and ten years ago, and has interesting way of experinecing all manners of floods almost yearly.
Deliberately missing the forest for the trees. The propagandist tricks are far more common on the anti nuclear side of the court where small numbers are made into horrific nuclear disasters. Then when someone comes along and says "hey food poisoning kills more people than have ever died of nuclear material" they sidestep the point that the nuclear menace is overblown and argue how they aren't the same animal. Death is death. Really. It's not, or should not be about which death is more appealing.
If you took a list of all the causes of death for the last 100 years and ranked them, nuclear would be near the bottom of the pile. Why don't these people do something useful like protest sprouts or drunk driving or smoking, or whatever 50 things are actually less regulated and more fatal. Oh wait, it was never about saving lives, it was about being part of the fear team...
US coal has not rendered any location on earth uninhabitable for future generations.
5 seconds of googling later...
Do you think this is why we were states with most of the power, and a federal government with limited power and the electoral college instead of popular vote for president? I do, it seems we took a good framework and eroded it with generations of poo-brains.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
When the checks and balances aren't bypassed anyway?
I've heard it said, anarchy and monarchy/socialism are the perfect governments but the first requires perfect people and the second requires perfect leaders. So we have a perfect government to handle all of our imperfections (hopefully).
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.
Yes, it has.
That didn't happen even when actual nuclear weapons were used - both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited today.
It turned into a de facto natural reservation?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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
No, but they also tend to be used by people who don't rub unprocessed shit on plants as fertilizer as well.
Just because you think 'pesticides' when you think organic farm, doesn't mean thats where the problem lies. In this cause, its probably more likely to be caused by organic fertilizer or shitty cleaning processes that any other farm would have done.
You know why we have longer life expectancies than we did 100 years ago? Because we've gotten smart enough to fix a lot of problems in our life cycles using technology ... organic farming is basically ignoring all that in search of some silly notion that 'more natural is always better'.
As the GP said, the reason we don't farm like that any more is because ... WE LEARNED IT COULD BE DONE BETTER! And now most people live long enough to retire rather than dyeing before their first born would be able to start collage.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
consider what happened a Chernobyl.
Uhm, maybe you should learn what happened at Chernobyl and what its like there now ... you know people still work there ... right?
Most of what happened was an after the fact over reaction to the event.
People left the town near Chernobyl, planets and animals seem to be doing perfectly fine and are healthy and happy. In fact, only a few years after the people disappeared, everything more or less returned to wilderness showing not only was the effect of the explosion and radiation far far less than everyone freaked out about, that also nature can recover pretty fucking quick once the humans get the fuck out of the area.
or anti-matter etc.
You do realize that our only currently known sources of anti-matter require billions of times more energy being put into them than we can get out of the anti-matter thats produced ... right?
Of course not, its clear from your post that you're just stuck in FUD world, you don't actually know about the things you are afraid of, you just know that you're afraid of them.
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side.
I sense much fear in you.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No one lives within 30 km of the site, and only loons or paid professionals live in the pink areas
Because their government said so ... as an after the event over reaction to the issue.
The whole area has been basically converted into a nature reserve, and if the place is so inhospitable as you'd like to make it out, why does the area have more healthy normal animal life living in it now than it did before the government threw all the people out?
You know that people still work at the Chernobyl plant right? And that it was a functioning nuclear power generation station until just recently (last few years), right?
You really have no clue what Chernobyl 'did' to that 30km area, get a clue, and no, you can't get a clue by browsing wikipedia.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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