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Flood Berm Collapses At Nebraska Nuclear Plant
mdsolar writes "A berm holding the flooded Missouri River back from a Nebraska nuclear power station collapsed early Sunday, but federal regulators said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger. The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station shut down in early April for refueling, and there is no water inside the plant, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. Also, the river is not expected to rise higher than the level the plant was designed to handle. NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said the plant remains safe."
Its time to go back to burning dead dinosaurs, this nuclear stuff is clearly too dangerous!
Just look at how many news stories there are about it.
This must be what it was like to live in the 70s.
Still alive here in Omaha, right by the river. Water's not glowing, no evacuation orders.
The plant has been turned off since April, there's not any danger of anything catastrophic. Spent fuel ponds are not flooding, although I have no idea if they've drained/moved them or not. As much as I love conspiracy theories, there's nothing here to be worried about.
"...said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger."
Yep, we really heard that a lot lately.
I personally find that in Japanese it sounded even better.
Haha, I haven't been RickRolled in months... :)
Failsafe fails safely, mass gibbering ensues.
"The berm's collapse didn't affect the reactor shutdown cooling or the spent fuel pool cooling, but the power supply was cut after water surrounded the main electrical transformers, the NRC said. Emergency generators powered the plant until an off-site power supply was connected Sunday afternoon, according to OPPD." http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hwsIdVXW-V7xE60P0dUnI_qSIaIw?docId=252989d1dda94c1d83ee47ba8907e484
It seems everything mdsolar keeps writing about nuclear tech has a sensationalist fear-mongering spin to it.
Oh great, more ammunition for the protest against nuclear power. Just what this planet needs.
Damn, where is "Useful Offtopic" when we need it?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
What about the next time when a major natural disaster hits another one of these nuclear perils ?
Read radical news here
is definitely NOT more planetary-scale hazardous installations that can poison entire countries. too much convenience may be hazardous for your health - suddenly you may find yourself eating radiation in dinner instead of having a cheap power bill.
Read radical news here
Fear mongering is something the media has been good at lately. Let's just shut off all forms of power and deal with the brownouts... then let's see who's complaining then.
I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.
Misinformation does not help the cause of nuclear power.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
One of the sad things about our approach to nuclear safety is that we do shoddy work at each level because we thing the other levels will save us.
That is not "sad". That is good engineering. If you have $X dollars to spend on safety, it is almost always better to build multiple shoddy levels than one really good level. Three layers that are 90% reliable are ten times better than one layer that is 99% reliable, and probably cheaper.
How are your escape routes doing? Is I-29 open all the time?
One of the sad things about our approach to nuclear safety is that we do shoddy work at each level because we thing the other levels will save us.
That is not "sad". That is good engineering. If you have $X dollars to spend on safety, it is almost always better to build multiple shoddy levels than one really good level. Three layers that are 90% reliable are ten times better than one layer that is 99% reliable, and probably cheaper.
I agree, but I think it is worth adding that if you take that approach then you need to make quite certain that there are no common-mode failures that will defeat all of your protective measures at the same time.
That was the problem in Japan: one event was able to take out locally-generated power (because the reactors scrammed), grid power and backup generators, leaving only a very limited amount of battery power. This is one of the reasons why modern reactor designs tend to emphasise passive safety, so that it matters less if multiple systems fail.
Wrong. There are a great many deaths that may be attributed to the Fukushima mess.
Possibly in 20 years a HANDFUL of workers actually in the plant might get cancer. To claim anything more than that is fantasy - not science fiction to be sure, since there's no basis in science for your claims.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That was the problem in Japan: one event was able to take out locally-generated power (because the reactors scrammed), grid power and backup generators
As I understand, it took two events to do that: the earthquake and the tsunami. It also took an earthquake that was extremely rare in terms of the power of the quake. Really, while there are some questions about the way that the Japanese government handled the situation, I would not assign any blame to the engineering of the reactor. Nothing can be built to withstand anything.
Palm trees and 8
You're correct, the death toll due to Fukushima is single digits.
However, the main reason for that being so is because the authorities evacuated people far away from the plant; hundreds of square miles of land surrounding the plant is now considered uninhabitable for many years.
Likewise with Chernobyl ... again, the mandatory evacuation is why the death toll there has been relatively low.
In both incidents, if people had been allowed to stay, the death toll would be in the thousands, at minimum, and potentially tens to hundreds of thousands, including many outside of the area...
How? Because not only are the people exposed to radioactive fallout at risk, but so are those that later come into contact with them. By keeping people out, there's less chance of the fallout debris being spread around contaminating other areas.
In short, the hazard is very real - it's the mandatory evacuations that has kept the death toll so low.
Nice to see the pro-nuke people out in force, demanding news black outs
The only people seeking to block access to anything are you and your kooky cohorts, trying to convince everyone the great noodley tentacles of Flying Spaghetti Monster of Nuclear Power have come to spread radiation across the land and claim us all.
Meanwhile you bury any attempt at transmission of anything like facts about radiation or safety in your mass of gibbering alarm.
And I'll bet you do that all with bananas sitting right in your house, if only you knew...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's one thing to report the news, it's another thing to blow something out of proportion.(I saw today when this was aired on tv that one anchorlady said that the reactor was going to meltdown. What in the world would the reactor meltdown with when there's no fuel in the reactor?!) You're looking at a form of power generation that accounts for close to 20% of all power generated in the US. Sitting here watching some cable news channels lately makes me feel disgusted because of the knee jerk responses from several people -- people want to shutter things over a single accident in the past 20 years. What about the Gulf oil spill? What about miners getting trapped farming for coal? Anyways, what would happen if you shut all those nuclear plants down here in the United States? What would they be replaced with? Everything has some form of risks, and they have to be taken for people to live comfortably. Renewables? I do have a lot of faith in them, but it takes time for technology to mature. When you're looking at things like solar panels and wind turbines, they take space. People want renewables but then don't want to deal with the space they take up, or the fact that it "disturbs the natural view. So what do people really want to do about this? That is the real question.
Yeah, look, we get it. You're into solar power.
You also live a long way south, where you get lots of sunshine, and - crucially - long days during the winter.
Solar power is completely bloody useless if you haven't got long days. Clear sunshine isn't so important. Guess when you tend to need electricity the most? On dark winter days. Guess when solar panels just plain don't work? Go on... there, I knew you could say it.
Here in Scotland we have one of the largest on-shore wind farms in Europe. It's spent roughly three-quarters of the year to date shut down, because it's either not windy enough, or too windy to operate it. So, wind is right out. We've got hydroelectric power too, but flooding huge areas isn't exactly ecologically very nice either.
We need to invest in modern nuclear plants. All this "renewable" stuff is just putting a pretty green elastoplast on a gaping wound.
Solar power is getting cheap. Just use enough to work in winter.
The reactors were scrammed manually.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Both nuclear plants issued flooding alerts earlier this month, although they were routine as the river's rise has been expected.
Yeah, that's not fear mongering. That's pooh-poohing. Everywhere in the article it says something scary, it surrounded with a calming rhetoric. WTF is a "routine" nuclear plant "alert", other than an oxymoron?
The federal commission had inspectors at the plant 20 miles north of Omaha when the 2,000-foot berm collapsed about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Water surrounded the auxiliary and containment buildings at the plant, it said in a statement. The Omaha Public Power District has said the complex will not be reactivated until the flooding subsides. Its spokesman, Jeff Hanson, said the berm wasn't critical to protecting the plant but a crew will look at whether it can be patched.
See? Inspectors were standing by, but couldn't avert the collapse. The berm isn't critical but after this is over they'll probably fix it anyway, just in case.
No mention that Fort Calhoun is the spent fuel repository for both Nebraska reactors, and that the spent fuel is kept in in-ground pools which seem likely right now to be under the Missouri river. The soothing, cooling Missouri river, wending its way to the Mississippi River and then to the Gulf of Mexico - providing essential irrigation for America's breadbasket along the way.
Nope nope. This is not fear mongering at all. Quite the opposite.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Who is demanding a News Black Out? I only see people demanding honest news which properly puts the risks into context.
If I told you "Coal plant kills hundreds of people!" you would be alarmed but we don't get those kinds of stories since they're boring and mathy. Instead we get "Catastrophic failure* at nuclear plaNT!#@!!!" and a fine print story below that then clarifies that nobody was hurt, there isn't any danger and this is pretty much a non-story.
How about "Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people and make hundreds of square miles uninhabitable!!#*!"
I'm surprised Cooper continues to operate since the NRC identified escape route problems in 1994.
"The elevated river level caused the closure of several area roads including a portion of Interstate 29 and Route 136 in the State of Missouri which isolated one of the planned emergency evacuation routes."
http://cryptome.org/0004/cooper-npp-flood.htm
Don't raft down stream I guess.
FACTS.
FACTS.
FACTS.
FACTS.
Pro-Nuke news is out there, it's just nobody will report on it, because it won't attract as much viewers/readers.
Seems like the flood preparations at the operating plant Cooper have made it very difficult to access emergency equipment. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27nuke.html
Do you know what kind of berm it was?
Sure. I guess 0.45/kwh to 0.92/kwh is cheap depending on where you live, and if you're snorting coke off the breasts of a $10,000 a night whore too.
Om, nomnomnom...
"Some sort of machinery came in contact with the berm, puncturing it and causing the berm to deflate, said Mike Jones, a spokesman for the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD), which owns the Fort Calhoun plant." http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/26/nebraska.flooding/
You don't consider the Thresher worth mentioning?
Luck the emergency generators worked, but they don't always.
If only there were some way to have a SECOND set of emergency generators? And if only there were a way to put generators on some kind of transportation device such that they could be brought to a place when needed...
And if there were some way to build a containment vessel around the dangerous stuff, in case everything went wrong...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
How much would I need? A few acres of panels?
How well does it work when you have five hours of daylight, and most of that with heavy cloud cover?
Who is demanding a News Black Out? I only see people demanding honest news which properly puts the risks into context.
If I told you "Coal plant kills hundreds of people!" you would be alarmed but we don't get those kinds of stories since they're boring and mathy. Instead we get "Catastrophic failure* at nuclear plaNT!#@!!!" and a fine print story below that then clarifies that nobody was hurt, there isn't any danger and this is pretty much a non-story.
How about "Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people and make hundreds of square miles uninhabitable!!#*!"
Let's try a thought experiment. How would americans have liked it, if after 9/11 George W. had declared that traffic accidents kill many more americans each year than al quaeda ever will, so to honor the memory of the twin tower victims he would enact policies to make american roads safer?
Not in Scotland I think. Not $10,000. That's not thrifty at all.
Here are panels for $1.40/Watt. http://www.sunelec.com/sv-solar-panel-190-watts-1740-vmp-p-1652.html Use them five hours a day peak equivalent for 30 years and that is $0.025/kWh. Wonder where you get your numbers?
No matter how many solar cells you have, they will not work when covered in snow.
As for; "Just use enough to work in winter." surely you jest! You would over produce all summer long, just so you can scrape by in the winter! LOL.
On a side note; Solar may provide sufficient power for home use, It will never be sufficient for industry.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot.
Let's try a thought experiment. How would americans have liked it, if after 9/11 George W. had declared that traffic accidents kill many more americans each year than al quaeda ever will, so to honor the memory of the twin tower victims he would enact policies to make american roads safer?
Me, for one. But rational response rarely plays well in politics.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You have pump storage in Scotland right? How much? A week? OK, so how much power do you want to use? Once you know that kind of thing you can use this tool to estimate: http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/apps4/pvest.php
There is always shoddiness, no exceptions. Somewhere a corner will be cut, or there will be something unknown, or some unexpected issue during construction. So yes, 3 layers, or 10 or how ever many the budget will allow, should be done, preferably by as many different companies as possible. Grated how many companies world wide build nuke plants these days? 1? 3? 4?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Building in flood plains or areas guaranteed to get smothered by storm surge is equally stupid.
Nothing in NOLA should be built in areas that require levee protection and nothing should be built below any possible flood level in flood plains.
The flood plains are easy. Giant dragline excavators are old news. If it matters, build it on a huge fucking mound. As for NOLA, the ORIGINAL settlers built things where they wouldn't get flushed. Do likewise.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
What is your concern with the Missouri river? Are you worried about it heating up from the fuel rods? I don't understand what you are implying with regard to the nation's breadbasket.
What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In other news: The sun today released an enormous amount of radiation. Enough to irradiate and kill everyone on earth! However, scientists report negligible risk in the event one limit themself to 15 minutes of direct exposure..
Thanks for wasting my time, Slashdot editors.
Now that we've all learned from the Fuck-U-Shima accident in Japan, let me give you a refresher. The power to the plant is off, disconnected, out of order. That means the pumps for the spent fuel pool are running on diesel generators. That's all well and good, but you are one fuel shortage away from a complete power outage. If the power goes out for a few days, the spent fuel pools start to boil off water, the rods get exposed - which means not enough cooling - and then they melt - right there in the swimming pool which is not contained anything like a reactor core - in fact, since it's shut down the core is probably in the pool. Is this scenario likely to happen? If I had to bet money I'd say no. If I lived nearby I'd pay close attention. As it is, I eat enough food from the midwest to follow this one, and I'm down wind like half the country. It doesn't look easy to do maintenance there with a couple feet of water for miles around. Nuclear plants that are "shut down" are not safe to evacuate and leave until the flood waters subside - not even close.
Let's try a thought experiment. How would americans have liked it, if after 9/11 George W. had declared that traffic accidents kill many more americans each year than al quaeda ever will, so to honor the memory of the twin tower victims he would enact policies to make american roads safer?
I for one would have embraced and welcomed that such sane and enlightened leadership. But not many. Are you saying that since people like sensational news we shouldn't be critical of it even if it has the tangible outcome of a less safe and secure world?
But the Tsunami was not an independent event. An undersea earthquake near that location of *any* size would've caused a tsunami of some size, and the site of the plant was close enough to the water that maybe half of any nearby earthquakes would've had associated tsunamis.
The problem was that a plant designed to withstand a 100 year earthquake was operated for half a hundred years and got hit by a 100 year earthquake - that happened to be an undersea earthquake. Designing for only a "once in 100 years disaster" was the real flaw.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's probably going to take that long to design a prototype let alone build it. As always the R&D we are not doing is the problem.
An example of what I'm talking about is that the "cutting edge" is the 1990s Japanese derived design (because US R&D was effectively abandoned) of the AP1000 of which none have been completed yet. We won't really know if the AP1000 is any good and worth deploying widely until one actually exists - and it will be the same story with any other reactor design. Very small reactors would cut the time but not by much.
Except that:
Doesn't include any installation costs. Or maintenance.
Has a ridiculously high assumption for load factor for Scotland.
Ignores the time value of money
The last of these alone would push the cost to about triple what you estimate.
Don't need much maintenance and since he is not thinking of a roof at this point, installation costs are not very high. Your time value of money applies to nuclear as well I think so it is a little silly to raise it.
Or, if shoddiness can't be avoided, avoid using technology with such high consequences in the case of failure.
"In response to the berm collapse, the NRC has activated its Incident Response Center." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304447804576410083499886642.html
This site stores the spent fuel for both Nebraska plants - a little in dry casks which should be safe, but most in in-ground cooling ponds. Presumably these ponds are now under the Missouri river. Cooling ponds need to be continuously cooled in order to stay cool. Spent fuel ought not come in contact with a flowing river. That by itself would be very bad, as the radiation would contaminate normal river debris but I'm not worried about that as the river's breadth would dilute it a few miles downstream. Cooling is known failed and the article doesn't say if the ponds are covered and structurally engineered to withstand being covered with several meters of river. If the ponds are in the ground and the site is underwater, it seems likely the ponds are under the river. If the structure of the cooling ponds is compromised by the weight of water, the river is silting up the spent fuel with debris normally found in a flooded river: mud, trees, the debris of homes washed downriver. But that's not the worst of it.
From the original design this would probably not be a problem as old spent fuel which is still very active but not commercially viable would have no chance to "go critical" since it was spaced adequately to prevent that. Unfortunately we've not had the promised national disposal site this last three decades and spent fuel ponds have been re-certified over and over again for more and more material far past their original design limits and these ponds may contain more than three times their original design limits and ten times the fuel in the reactors themselves - dangerously close to sustaining a critical reaction outside of containment. Of course additional cooling becomes mandatory as the more densely you stack this nuclear material the more likely it is to "go critical" and create a self-sustaining fission reaction - particularly in the presence of water and unknown debris, and particularly if the cladding is burned off. The cooling in these ponds, river notwithstanding, is now known to be failed according to the fine article and no repair date is estimated. As the fuel heats, it expands - which makes it closer to the other fuel, and proximity is one of the things that make nuclear fuels work so the design constraints of the spent fuel ponds are important, as are the moderators such as water and clays. Thermal heat does impact radioactive output to some small degree.
The worst possible case in this scenario involves some 30+ active nuclear reactors worth of commercially unviable but still powerful nuclear fuel going uncontrolled critical, superheating, burning off its zirconium cladding and releasing unimaginable quantities of nuclear byproducts - particularly iodine and cesium - inside the flowing Missouri river that covers it, which by happenstance irrigates more than half the crops our nation produces. It's the biggest possible nuclear energy fiasco that makes the recent fiscal difficulties look trivial. The entire downstream lengths of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers would become uninhabitable and un-navigable for a hundred years or more from this site to New Orleans, and we can't irrigate crops with radioactive water because we then get radioactive crops and radioactive soil that grows radioactive crops long after the radioactive water is gone. Which leads to another American Dust Bowl as farmers suddenly refuse to irrigate crops with radioactive water. And of course flooding too, as the normally used water passes unused downstream. The entire Gulf of Mexico becomes a no-go zone to ships that want to thereafter make port somewhere else. Even if it doesn't happen there's a good novel in the possibility.
My post is a plea: someone please comfort me. Tell me those ponds are above the current level of the river. Tell me they're designed for this. Tell me they have containment of the spent fuel ponds. Please, for God's sake, tell me the fuel can't go critical. Jesus, lie to me if you have to. I'd like to go to sleep tonight. The article, the summary and the comments don't answer these questions.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Define alert. Define routine. Reconcile the difference. It's an oxymoron. These two terms are not compatible. A "routine alert" is an oxymoron. That's what the word "oxymoron" means. Words mean things. If they didn't, communication would become impossible. If it's routine, it's not an alert. If it's an alert, it's not routine. The terms are mutually exclusive.
The only possible world where these terms could be in agreement is a world that is routinely on alert. I don't want to live in that world. Do you?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're right. Now turn off your computer!
He thinks he can avoid you reading the parent comment by modding it down. He's mistaken. You'll read it now because it was modded down and I cared enough to bump it, and because he didn't want you to read it. There's good stuff in there. Trust me. If you don't think so you're free to mod me down twice for the same comment, more so since I've given this one all my bumps, which I almost never do.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The reactors were scrammed manually.
According to the IAEA they scrammed automatically (see http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/meetings/PDFplus/2011/cn200/documentation/cn200_Final-Fukushima-Mission_Report.pdf), but it makes no difference: even if someone has to press a button, if the operating procedures say to press that button in the event of an earthquake then you need to take that into account when performing the risk analysis.
All you nuke fetishists who tag any nuke-extension story with "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense", tell me now that these risks don't exist, because nobody got killed or something.
--
make install -not war
The entire Midwest is covered in floodplains and tornado alleys, as we're seeing every year now.
But we don't have to build nukesthere, where the deaths extend far beyond the locals in space and in time when the nuke catastrophe happens.
3/4 of a million people in one of America's oldest cities is worth building and maintaining (real, F5) levees. A nuke plant in Nebraska is not. It's repleacable. New Orleans is not, even if you have now way of knowing that in your own limited life.
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make install -not war
A very small amount of pump storage, in one location. It can provide power to about 200,000 homes for a couple of days.
As a side note, if you find yourself in that part of Scotland, it's well worth a visit. The turbines and generators are housed in a massive underground cavern hollowed out of the rock - looks like a perfect supervillain lair. I refitted all their radio equipment recently, and got a tour into the very non-public areas ;-)
i think that would rule out most anything beyond bronze-age technology. even then, molten metal is pretty damn hot.
humans fuck up. engineers must understand that.
Solar power is completely bloody useless if you haven't got long days. Clear sunshine isn't so important. Guess when you tend to need electricity the most? On dark winter days. Guess when solar panels just plain don't work? Go on... there, I knew you could say it.
Actually solar does work on short, dark days. You just need more solar panels, although they are old hat now. The future is solar thermal, using mirrors to reflect light onto a tower to heat molten salt or similar. They work on short cloudy days (as long as you have enough mirrors) and continue all through the night using heat built up during the day.
power. If they had to shut down wind farms in Scotland due to high winds then they are doing it wrong. Modern turbines with blades that can twist will run in all bust the fiercest storms.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You were quoting a per kWh figure, which was based on an incorrect calculation. It would be incorrect regardless of any other power sources.
But yes, it applies to nuclear too. Without that, nuclear would have been able to completely out-compete fossil fuels, as it would have had a total cost of maybe 4 cents per kWh. On the other hand, it works in favour of nuclear when it comes to decommissioning and waste disposal.
You can get solar panels fitted on the Isle of Lewis and they work fine. Most people in Scotland live a fair bit further south than that...
Really? Whitelee has been down for 9 months? I didn't hear it on the news and Google gives me nothing. Link?
Nuclear is dirty, expensive and leaves us reliant on digging crap out of the ground in third-world hell-holes only to spend more money later figuring out where to bury the shite. Why would anyone want it? We can supply massively more energy than we need in Scotland purely from renewables using existing tech.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
you must have a problem with continuum of time. radiation is not something that strikes like lightning.
Read radical news here
Haha I remember a long time ago using a hex editor to rip my carrier's GPRS password from a file on my PDA, I used to have to take it to them whenever I restored my PDA, and that model lost all its data when the battery died, so that happened sometimes. More recently I did the same to find the login info my telco used to remote-admin my modem, it was welcome1 or something. That was with a Telnet login BTW. Great work guys.
Also there's a small local chain of coffee shops around here that boasts "FREE WIFI" and then the wifi's fucking encrypted, no password on the wall or anything. I bought something from them once, no info on the bill about "here's the wifi passphrase now that you bought from us!"
Well the other day I guessed it, it's $BUSINESSNAMEwifi. They use some kind of Windows box to host the wifi with ftp and icslap ports open.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It takes an extremely powerful disaster to actually create a dangerous situation.
yes it does.
and apparently, you are willing to take a gamble by living until one of them hits.
Read radical news here
perceiving what risk is.
"coal mines kill more per year" vs "a nuclear disaster will make at least 1/4 of the world unlivable"
to put these two in the same basket, one has to be either a fool, or a moron.
Read radical news here
We have electric rail systems in urban areas, but they're no good on the west coast. Electric cars will never be a practical proposition here, the distances they need to cover is just too great. Solar panels won't provide a useful amount of electricity in winter no matter where you put them.
I don't know why you keep bringing up the word "thrifty". The average Scottish home uses more electricity than the average American home, particularly in winter when we tend to use electric heating in addition to oil- or gas-fired heating - assuming the house isn't electric-only.
in its place: on submarines defending our country. It makes no sense on a commercial scale since accidents are inevitable, it is too expensive, and there is no place to put the waste or even a safe means of transporting it at the required volume. The Thresher was an acceptable loss given the mission but no commercial accident is acceptable.
I don't really understand why this is modded a troll. The resulting sub rating program (as I understand it) has meant a focus on the engineering of Nuclear Submarines and the constant time based re-rating of the US submarine fleet has meant that the Navy hasn't lost another sub. Systemically, if the Thresher had no impact many more lives could have been lost.
Nuclear Submarine reactors are (of course) much smaller than commercial reactors but are maintained to much higher standards than commercial reactors AND they are operated in hostile extreme environments. In contrast commercial reactors are operated in a stable benign environments yet we see the abject and repeated failure to operate them safely despite known failure modes and processes to mitigate them.
Even if you have the polar opposite view of mdsolar how can anyone argue with the operational reality of Nuclear Power. It's the Faustian bargain and a cavalier attitude towards it has the most dire consequences, as the operators of Fukushima are now discovering. As a result the "reality" that many nuclear supporters built their beliefs on is now collapsing along with the resounding cries that "it wasn't that bad", which illustrate that the biological consequences are not understood by those who make that claim.
Instead of accepting the facts and science readily available and lobbying for the kinds of improvements that *might* make the nuclear industry viable many nuclear supporters just criticise those with opposing worldviews, belittle their point of view, ignore facts, marginalise reasoning, censor information (as we see here) and become plain old abusive.
Rest assured that these "supporters" have not only ensured the eventual demise of Nuclear power they have practically guaranteed the next Nuclear accident and passed a unacceptable radiological liability for the next generations to pay for as much as a carbon liability was passed onto our generation.
Nuclear power in it's current form has deep structural issues from the artificial handling of liability in the Price Anderson act, the shifting of taxpayers and rate payers money to the oil industry in the guise of the 2005 Energy act with the disassembly of P.U.C.H.A, the lack of net energy return backed up by peer reviewed science, the lack of geologically stable spent fuel containment, the list goes on and on and on.
Any pragmatic supporter of Nuclear Power would realise that a strong solar, wind and geothermal sector is a good thing for Nuclear power. Why? Because Nuclear power is simply not sustainable in it's current form. The Nuclear Industry needs between 30-50 years of infrastructure development before it is viable and it's deep structural issues are resolved.
I started off by supporting Nuclear Power and I wanted to learn more. The more I learned the less I could support nuclear power, that facts and science simply do not support a net energy return with nuclear power in it's current form and no-where is the propaganda and censorship more clearly illustrated than here where a terse but reasonable comment is modded down simply because it doesn't subscribe to the popular notion that all things Nuclear are good.
The Faustian bargain has been made and now the Nuclear industry is falling apart from within. It may be brilliant, with outstanding engineering but it's failings and consequences are so profound that the question has to be asked, is it actually worth it anymore? How we handle it now is how future generations will judge us.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
When it comes to nuclear safety no shoddiness can be tolerated.
Shoddiness has to be tolerated in any human endeavor. If the engineers were foolish enough to assume there would be no flaws in design or construction, there would have been no reason for them to put multiple layers of safety measures in place.
But they know that effectiveness is going to be 98%, not 100%, so they put multiple layers in place to bring the chance of error lower and lower.
My hope is, here, that the plant's successful weathering of this crisis will reassure the public in regards to the engineering competency of the nuclear plants; but I doubt it. The press will do what the press does, and we'll end up burning more coal.
Designing for only a "once in 100 years disaster" was the real flaw.
But was it? The injuries and damage from Fukushima are vastly smaller than from the earthquake/tsunami... all but the most fanatic anti-nuclear zealots admit that. Is there really a point to spending money on the nuclear plant so that it could withstand a disaster that is an order of magnitude more damaging than anything the reactor would do?
I'm just thinking out loud, but would 100 million dollars have been better spent on better protecting Fukushima, or spent on further earthquake/tsunami research, prediction, and defenses? Which would have saved more lives?
Does mdsolar have a financial stake in pushing solar tech and knocking nuclear? I just assumed he was 'ideological'.
If shoddiness can not be avoided, then nuclear power should be.
You do realise we don't actually border any country that has extensive pump-storage hydroelectric systems, right? And I'm guessing you know how much it costs to run electrical cables long distances under the sea...
Deaths aside, you can only accommodate so many 1,000 square kilometer exclusion zones. You need to make sure that the rate those areas are eventually reclaimed is equal to or better than the rate at which they are created.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think of nuclear power as a battery. We're going to have to pay everything back in energy to transmute the waste.
Energetically, I cannot see transmutation (of transuranics) ever happening outside of a 'burner' reactor. Most of the Nuclear fanbois tout this type of reactor, the Integral Fast Reactor, as the answer to all our nuclear woes and the design is sound. Achieving a transmutation rate of almost 20% of the plutonium fuel it's an ideal platform for global nuclear disarmament and produces spent fuel products (fissile ash) that last 600 years instead of 25,000 years (pu-239). Obviously the fissile ash is highly radioactive.
The problem is that material technology simply is not advanced enough to implement this technology leaving it with the same issue every nuclear reactor has. The capital investment is written off over forty years and is pretty much junk at the end of it. What this does is expose the facility to the energetic costs of decommissioning the reactor and facility. Peer reviewed science costs this, energetically, at roughly a third (iirc) of the reactor facilities total output over it's lifetime.
Clearly this is not an issue that is going to go away and the only logical conclusion of a reasoned mind is to implement a viable energy solution such as wind, solar, geothermal etc for at least the next 5 decades. What seems to be beyond most nuclear fanbois is any seriously engineered Nuclear program would be the type of project that would restructure the entire nature of a nations economy and take between 30 and 100 years to complete. It's possible but I'm too tired to go into the how right now.
So, it really only has specialized applications. Add to that the safety issues and it is pretty clear that it only has application in life-or-death situations such as in the submarine service.
I don't disagree with you in the here and now but I think that the devil really is in the detail. We are leaving behind a legacy of plutonium that by conservative estimates will last 10 times longer than our entire civilisation has existed. This is the enormity of our responsibility, now, to future generations that remains a largely unrealised aspect of the nuclear industry. To get an understanding of the scope of this issue have a look at this National Geographic article. We are manipulating elements that are toxic into geological time frames, yet our engineering is framed in terms of capital investment. If there is an insistence on Nuclear power our engineering must be framed in terms of geological time frames.
The irony of this debate is that while it is so polarised the structural issue that needs to be addressed whether you are for or against nuclear power is the same, construction of geologically stable spent fuel containment facilities *in granite*. Granite being the only element that science has shown to be able to contain ground water contamination from radioisotopes. Fukushima has shown us that the spent fuel containment issue has to be solved 10 years ago to mitigate the scale of these accidents. Anyone for nuclear power will inevitably realise that there is no future of Nuclear power without such a facility and those against Nuclear power need to be pragmatic about what has to happen to mitigate the scale of a disaster and reduce the amount of transuranic sites. Any discussion about future nuclear reactors is only appropriate after such an infrastructure project.
Unfortunately, I think there is some inevitability in another nuclear accident, San Onofre scares me in the immediate future. America is so close and I fear none of these necessary lessons will be learned until this happens, heralding the post-fission age when it will be so much more difficult to accomplish energetically. This will be the price for our wisdom and the penalty for our arrogance.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, no, because solar doesn't work when we need the electricity. Unless you've got some magic batteries that can run an entire country for six months, that is...
Far easier to build a couple of clean, efficient, modern nuclear power stations than deal with dirty, inefficient solar power that doesn't actually work.
I think they already know the answer. It *is* clean. Tsunamis aren't particularly clean. What's the Gaelic word for "tsunami"? Hmm, doesn't look like there is one. Wonder why?
Have you ever seen the wasteland around China's battery and solar panel factories?
The reactors are still running, since the seawater isn't used to cool them. It's the steam part of it that has problems. If the jellyfish were 40 miles up the coast, they'd be causing problems for a couple of coal power stations.