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 only alternative is coal. Nucular and coal is all there is. And coal is worse. Coal ash has more radioactive emissions than nucular plants, and arsenic and landslides too. There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
In Europe I believe the backup plan is buying more natural gas from Russia.
I think it appropriate here to point out that the past tense should not be used in describing either the Fukishima or the Chernobyl incidents. Fukishima is a long way from being contained or even put into a "cold shutdown" state. It is known that Chernobyl's sarcophagus will fail, maybe in decades, maybe next year (there are too many unknowns, too much pure guesswork, in the projections to know what to expect).
At this point, the problems with understanding these situations appears to be as much chemical as nuclear. No one has done any serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium, that constantly changing compound that forms when fuel rods melt, puddle, and interact chemically with casing material, coolant and coolant contaminates, concrete and whatever was in the stone of the aggregate, ground water, water vapor from slowly cooking the aquifer below the corium, etc. We do know from the naturally occurring nuclear reactors that aqueous chemistry is capable of concentrating nucleotides (and moderating neutrons) sufficiently to reawaken chain reactions in sites that had been dormant for geologic periods of time. Things will probably happen much quicker in these man-made corium deposits.
Just exactly how one would do serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium is left as an exercise for the student.
Will
[citation needed]
Their plan is to replace most of their nuclear power with renewables as part of a programme to develop the technology so that it can be exported. Having the option to buy power from France means they can get by with less spare capacity but in the medium to long term they do not want to be dependent on it regularly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream. Sure it sucks for the people down stream and there might be a lot of people downstream but the risk is calculable and limited.
The Banqiao Reservoir Dam killed an estimated 171,000 people
The Vajont Dam caused around 2,000 deaths
The St. Francis Dam killed more than 450 people
The Johnstown Dam killed 2,200 people
This incomplete list lists 23 dam failures between Chernobyl and Fukushima. (Well, one of them was caused by the same tsunami/earthquake and killed more than the nuclear incident.)
So yes the risk is calculable and limited, it just happens to be that it fails more often and kills more people than nuclear power. I guess we are still gong to build more dams, because you know, it's not nuclear.
Because the other options are unworkable pipedreams? Even massive improvements in wind/solar will not change the fact they cannot supply base load in all conditions and you will still need an always-on coal or nuclear plant for the times it can't work. Coal/oil and nuclear happen to be the only options that do not currently require violation of the laws of physics.
Great Intellect...
false: there are several sismic places in France, because of the growth of pyrenees and alps. There were huge eathquakes in pyrennes and alps with lot of victims during the 19th century. In Alsace, in Rhone Alpes, many nuclear powerplants are on sismic zones, and even the big ITER project is on a sismic zone. The calm of the underground activity is recent in France: the volcanos of the "massif central" were active just 6000 years ago.
false: the geothermal is very big in France: all the "bassin Parisien" ( about 30 million people) is a big hot water undergroung area. Some cities near Paris just heat their citizens with this. The big building in Paris " maison de la radio" is entirely heated with a thermal source at just 400/600 meters deep, since the sixties ! but this resource is unexploited. Other big geothermal areas: Brittany, bassin Aquitain, Alps, massif central...
Another unexploited very big ressource in France is "hydrauliennes" ( big watermills in the sea streams), because most of France is surrounded by coast with huge sea streams. Both geothermal and tidal/sea streams energy are 24/24 and 365/365 energies, with very few impact on ecology. But banksters prefers nuclear.
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
Geothermal is not automatically safe any more than nuclear is automatically unsafe. In the USA, where we have the world's most geothermally active region on the planet, we have a geothermal power plant that is perpetually under production and over budget. Calpine's steam plant at The Geyers, CA, has also been the source of a superfund site; when one of the massive turbines gets encrusted with deposits coming out of the vent, they position them above a concrete pit and pressure-wash the blades clean. The water is permitted to evaporate off and the remainder sits in open ponds. When the pond fills up with this material, they cap it over with concrete. The material contains a lot of heavy metals including some radioactives. In the past, they used to just put the slurry into drums and then bury the drums. This naturally contaminated the local water and we had cows born with two heads and that sort of fun stuff. Not being especially interested in Brahmin ranching, the locals made a stink and eventually it was all dug up and reburied with a rubber liner which will eventually fail and cause the same problem all over again, for our descendants.
Unfortunately, the concrete layer cake of heavy metals and radioactives at the site is just waiting for some major seismic activity to break apart and become a hazard itself. And because of its layered nature, even if the slurry were reprocessable into useful elements (which it isn't, at least not cost-effectively, or they would do this instead of storing it) it will be horrendously hazardous and expensive to clean it up later.
Geothermal is cool when you're talking about a cute little geo tap used to heat some water with a heat pipe. It's not so cool when you're talking about power generation on a grand scale. There are not very many places well-suited to such a facility, so it can never produce a significant amount of our current consumption. And it is not inherently clean as many people think. About the only technology we have for power generation that doesn't necessarily have a massive impact is solar. We can install it where we want shade. Oh, and wind, now that we know how to build windmills that won't kill birds even if you put them right on a migration path like a greedy tool.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"