Slashdot Mirror
All French Nuclear Reactors Deemed Unsafe
hweimer writes "A new study by a French government agency, commissioned in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, found that all French nuclear power plants do not offer adequate safety when it comes to flooding, earthquakes, power outages, failure of the cooling systems and operational management of accidents. While there is no need for immediate shutdown, the agency presses for the problems to be fixed quickly. France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology."
the report says the plants have to exceed the limits that are planned for/ stated. How can you build a completely fail-proof plant? By not building one...
Which is worse:
Taking the risk of a few nuclear catastrophes during the next couple of centuries, or to keep dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ignoring the fact that it pretty darn definitely has some effect in the long term...
Wild prediction: People 200 years from now are going to look upon us like idiots who thought relocating people due to a nuclear accident was harder than getting all that 'effing carbon dioxide back where it belongs and restoring the climactic balance to a reasonable degree.
.: Max Romantschuk
Yes but the deaths are nicely spread out so no one notices them. It's like car accidents vs train or plain crashes. By most statistics more people get killed in the former but what sticks in our minds is the big ones of the latter we see on the news.
It's just a human failing, if one that our addiction to a constant stimulus of easily digestible news nuggets only re-enforces.
It's also one many unscrupulous people exploit for their advantage, drumming up public support for something based on some newsworthy incident that everybody knows about, to push through laws or policies to further their own advantage , but thats a failing of our current democratic system.
N.B. this user is far too lazy to write a witty and intelligent sig.
I work for a large scale nuclear generator and we're certainly not subsidized by anyone.
Oh, so you're at a U.S. plant that's started buying insurance in the private market then, and are paying whatever the going free market rate is for your liability insurance?
No?
So in other words, you're being heavily subsidized by the taxpayers already with sweetheart rates for government-run liability insurance. And when there's a catastrophic accident near a major city, the government fund that nuclear power plants have been paying into - for decades - doesn't have enough money in it to begin to cover the liability. Which means more money will be stolen from the taxpayers to clean up your mess.
I'll believe nuclear power is safe and practical when the nuclear industry can buy private liability insurance - from an adequately capitalized insurer, one who has the resources to actually pay out in case of a disaster or two - and still turn a profit.
I'm not holding my breath.
Of course the plants can be made safer. Everything can be made safer. We could all wear crash helmets 24/7. All cars could be made crash proof (take the wheels off). "All the dams in France bursting at once and flooding the plants", if that happens the least of your problems is the nuclear reactor. Just like the problems at Fukushima were the least of the worries of the 20,000 killed by the earthquake and tsunami. No industry in the world spends money on preventing staggeringly unlikely events causing harm like the nuclear industry has to. Do you want to double your electricity bill so that the chances of a disaster move from 1 in 10 million years to 1 in 20 million according to the design calcs? Humans are staggering bad at risk assessment and the nuclear (and terrorism) panic proves it conclusively. You would think that a bunch of geeks could figure some basic stats.
Nuclear isn't "proven bad."
Coal is "proven bad," because it has continued to consistently kill people en masse. Nuclear has not, short of accidents caused by huge natural disasters and ancient primitive soviet technology.
Here's your citation for what their replacing nuclear with http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110713-36277.html
I find it interesting that you call coal "renewable," though now that I think of it hydrocarbons are much more renewable than isotopes.
I think the point is that a well-run nuclear plant essentially does not release any radiation into the environment unless there's a serious accident.
Therefore, coal is *more* radioactive. That doesn't mean that it's *dangerously* radioactive, just that it is more radioactive. You seem to be deliberately misinterpreting the argument.
Ultimately, coal plants are disgusting compared to nuclear plants.
Barring massive breakthroughs in geothermal, nuclear is our only viable hope to cleanly power our future. The sooner we implement some safe plant designs on a very large scale, the better. We also need to learn from the french and start reprocessing.
It is cheaper only if you consider wasting rare-earth metals on systems with 20% load cheap. Don't forget to deduce all the tax cuts and helps wind power gets to see how cheap it really is.
I also would like to see your 90% efficiency electricity storage system that can store 1MWh, let alone few dozens 1GWh. You've got yourself a Nobel prise in physics right there!
As for Fukushima, Chernobyl and similar, count the deaths they caused. Then look at Banqiao dam and coal miners deaths during past 25 years (and don't look at respiratory diseases caused by fossil burning). Suddenly it's not so dangerous.