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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."
MERDE !
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That's unfortunate - France's nuclear power plants were a key part of Germany's decision to go non-nuclear but still buy tons of nuclear-based power from France.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
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...
If a coal power plants fails, it is just a big fire, annoying and hard to put out BUT controllable. 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.
Chernobyl and Fukishama have now both shown that nuclear incidents are ALWAYS worse then estimated and even worse then admitted to afterwards by the nuclear lobby. You can build again on a flood plain, but radiated soil will be unusable for decades.
It is not as nuclear technology can't be made safe but since about the only argument in the past has been that it is cheap, costs are going to have to be cut in the hope that "it" never happens. That is not a very reliable method to prevent accidents. Or at least not reliable enough. The public might want safe power but they are not willing to pay the price of 1 nuclear accident every couple decades.
Nuclear energy is the same as oil drilling, techs that for many reasons are necessary but nobody wants in their back yard OR simply spend enough money on to make it safe. And when it fails, it fails so enormously that people lose all sense of proportion. Hey Japan, sure you lost a sizable area of your country BUT you build your economy on cheap electricity. Surely it is worth it because you thought it was worth it back then when you decided to build them? Oh, that is not how voters think? How unexpected.
Nuclear tech doesn't fit in a capitalist democracy. You can't have reactors build by the lowest bidder at the whim of voters with no accountability.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Give us more money"
I'm not against the concept of nuclear power per se, but eveything I've read about the industry and its practices makes me think they're rather untrustworthy and greedy.
Maybe the French industry is different, I don't know.
How likely is it for there to be an earthquake in France? Why should earthquake protection matter when other bad things are much more likely?
In related news, all nuclear reactors were deemed unsafe againt a meteorite strike.
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
The chronic problem is that, no matter how good your technology gets, you can always find a way to produce "almost as good and a lot cheaper". If nobody is looking too closely, you can probably go with "not actually almost as good; but cheaper still".
There are engineering problems that are simply at the outer bounds of present technology and inherently risky. For most everything else, though, the heart of the problem has more to do with some combination of lousy risk assessment, active dishonesty, or the fact that it isn't hard to take risks so that the rewards accrue to you and the consequences to somebody else.
This is why I'm somewhat pessimistic about our ability to innovate our way into safety: team science, and their applied brethren in engineering, have enormously expanded the scope of what we can do; but have had relatively little effect on the fact that we basically want it fast and cheap and the 'we' doing the choosing frequently aren't the 'we' doing the living next to it...
Cancer is not cost-effective.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
The problem with your argument is reality. We are still building new coal fired plants today. Not just not shutting down old plants, building new plants. Because it's known, cheap, and legal.
So let's go with your argument that geothermal is better than both coal and nuclear for a second. That doesn't change the fact that nuclear is better than coal, does it? So until we shut down all the coal fired plants, any talk about shutting down existing nuclear plants is an instance of defective prioritization.
OK, I'm a reactor operator for a nuclear reactor and this report is talking about "beyond design basis" faults. Faults which were not taken account for within the safety case for the plant. Now, bear in mind that this area of the world is not susceptible to the kinds of earthquakes Japan is, and also the fact that tsunamis just cannot happen to most of France's plants because they're inland, would make the event that happened in Japan certainly beyond design basis. Now, that's not to say that more safety cannot be added. Many of France's plants are relatively old and new ideas have been integrated into newer plants. All this report is talking about is that more things can be done to address big bang type stuff, stuff that's practicable and useful, like adding more generators and installing them onto roofs. Not prohibitively costly, and can be useful in most faults. There's always more things that can be done to all plants, it's a judge of whether it's practicable, economical and in all probabilities, worth it. If statistically, an event is not likely to happen for 10,000,000 years, are you really going to design it out?
This report isn't saying that France's plants are unsafe. The editor should be shot. In my opinion, Fukushima was a success. These plants were due to be taken out of service within a year, they were very very old, old design and old in age. Yet, even with a massive earth quake, and a beyond design basis fault that wasn't understood during their design phase, no-one died due to radiation and contamination is well controlled and understood. It's also worth noting that all the modern PWRs in Japan surrounding Fukushima all shut down properly with no issues.
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 see this comment a lot. It looks like the education cuts since Reagan left their mark.
One professional liar better known for writing books about classic cars writes a propaganda piece in a Oak Ridge Labs newsletter (Alex Gabbard: Soldier, Scientist and Author Extraordinaire!) and suddenly people think coal is more radioactive than the impurities of small amounts sand in it that actually contain those radioactive trace elements. Do the banana dose calculations and you'll see how many tens of thousands of tons of coal you'll need to match a banana.
Maybe it's homeopathic radiation!
The people that believe the crap about ash being nuclear waste should read to the end of the original source article. The "OMG Terrorists making nuclear bombs out of coal!" bit should show to even the dimmest readers it doesn't come within miles of serious science.
From the summary:
France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology.
No. France generates almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Not its overall power.
I'm sick of this consistently sloppy reporting about energy usage in the mass media. And sick of the idiots who think that electricity consumption is the big issue (oh noes! we need solar to make teh watts, and CFLs to save teh watts!). Dumbshits.
France's planes, ships, trucks, cars, and more still run on OIL. Not nuclear. Do the math. Electricity is relatively small component of power usage.
The data doesn't come from an Oak Ridge Labs newsletter or Alex Gabbard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Human-caused_background_radiation
It was already published in Science magazine in 1978.
Coal plants cause more deaths due to radioactivity (statistically) than nuclear plants. Even in this year, with Fukushima blowing up.
No, per gram fly ash doesn't contain more radioactivity. But coal plants emit a lot more fly ash in a year than nuclear plants consume fuel.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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...
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.
Even massive improvements in wind/solar will not change the fact they cannot supply base load in all conditions
Or improvements in energy storage. Calling solar energy a pipe dream is absurd and ignorant, virtually all the worlds energy comes from the sun in one way or another (except nuclear and geothermal, they came from another sun). Sure the energy industry aren't having any wet dreams about the profitability of solar energy right now, but whether big industry has a hard on or not is no measure of the viability of future technology. You would have called the internet a pipe dream too.
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.
it's 80% of electricity energy that comes from Nuclear power in France.
it's not 80% of ALL energy.
Also, any nuclear plant has to be by a very big source of water for cooling. So any nuclear plant on earth is at risk of flooding. It's not a French specific problem.
You might want to provide your own source, otherwise your claim won't be taken seriously. I know it's easy to find people spitting on nuclear power, even people who doesn't grasp the basic difference between fission and fusion. It's equally easy to find people religiously pro-nuclear with as much knowlege on the basic principles of the dangers. ( Hell, otherwise, nuclear plants wouldn't risk explosion from natural disasters... )
As I understand it, the true dangers with nuclear power isn't the source of the energy. It's the over-exageration of both the dangers and the safety of it, witch leads to confusion and some greedy bastards on the line profit from it cuting cost without being aware of the disasters that might result.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
I'd be very wary of pinning all my energy hopes on future technology (that XKCD stip makes the point quite well). Nuclear is the best option we have to satisfy our current energy requirements.
As for the reason that the Nuclear advocates don't mention alternative energy, why should they? What's the point of arguing against something that doesn't exist?
There's one big problem with geothermal: the theoretical amount of power we can draw from it (the thermal flux) is in the same order of magnitude we, as a civilisation are, it's still larger, but it isn't even twice that.
Geothermal is downright dangerous when used too much (read on geothermal depletion for example). Wind has severe issues with material science, specifically we do not possess materials that are sturdy enough to survive the massive grind of a wind turbine long enough to even pay for themselves, and are enormously work-intensive to maintain.
Solar, in addition to obvious problems with "must have Sun visible", "must have as little atmosphere between Sun and panel" and others also suffers from massive problems with material technology as well. We simply do not have material technology to convert sun rays to energy efficiently enough for panels to ever pay for themselves (beyond the manufacture in places where energy and materials are dirt cheap because they're produced on coal/nuclear energy and materials mined in conditions that no one that can afford to buy a panel would ever work in).
Essentially current wind and solar are not only not "cost-effective" but simply lack necessary materials.
The one realistic third option we do have is hydro. Unfortunately it's very location-specific, and in many countries pretty much all places you could make a hydro plant on are already dammed up. So again, we're left with only coal and nuclear for places that can't be reliably supplied by hydro, or are small enough and are sitting in a place where small scale geothermal operation can reliably supply the demand without causing depletion.
Last option is burning various fossil fuels, from oil to natural gas.
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.'"
I know it may be hard to imagine, but even in the affluent west there are people who will struggle to pay their energy bills this winter - and that's for the relatively cheap fossil fuel energy they're currently using. Disregarding the cost factor of energy is the pipe dream - it's not only energy companies that lose out if the price is too high.
The relevant issue here is cost. If we wanted to, we could build enough windmills to supply twice the power we need. Then we could user the power to generate hydrogen, which we could store and burn in combined cycle plants when the power is needed. It is absolutely possible to do this. But we'd need to spend time and effort doing it, and people don't seem to want to.
Let's not confuse things. Nuclear, wind, or geothermal... there's no space for fundamentalists, fanatics, and intentionally confusing people.
Energy expands to fill the waste available. A transportation executive told me of a simplified cost analysis for transportation that is roughly
1 for water/ship transport,
10 for rail/train
100 for road/trucking,
1000 for plane/air transport.
That's actually costs, but it does reflect labor, fuel and energy consumption. So to get more free energy (and reduce your national costs), encourage rail and ship transportation.
Policies are for decisions, technology is for implementation.
There's no reason to not adopt a policy of reducing waste. There is plenty of work that can be done more intelligently, reduce waste, and increase work output and capacity. That's just policy, and it can be implemented. As any change, it requires changes, and there will be resistance from whatever sectors that will lose business and money. Unavoidable, reducing waste implies someone reducing consumption of something. They will try and cloud the issue, create lots of confusion and barriers.
Once decided, structure taxes on one energy form to subsidize another, that will modify their market prices, and motivate the industry to seek the lower cost forms. It's simple. Even though some people don't want it to be.
Without analyzing numbers, facing the opposition, and reducing waste, we're going nowhere. That'll give more time to research more technology, and allow that research to go on without so much policy confusion.
The way it's looking, Europe is separating these issues better than most areas, and facing up the challenge to change - though they are also still quite slow.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I never said that all nuclear power generation should be shut down, nor did I claim that they contained the deadliest materials known to man. I'm sure most people would recognize that a power plant using smallpox as it's fuel would be incredibly dangerous. You are arguing against yourself.
Just because you say so doesn't make it so. Because just a few weeks ago, english edition of Spiegel ran a nice article on these new German offshore wind farms. Latest tech, those things. Google for it.
Still, same mechanical problems because stuff just doesn't last under that stress. Materials aren't strong enough. Same problems with ridiculous maintenance requirements. Still same problems with not functioning all the time due to both too strong and too weak winds. Etc.
What are your thoughts about EGS geothermal?
Too soon to tell, but so far, I am not encouraged. There was to be a project at The Geysers but the drilling choked several times and the same type of drilling may have been responsible for seismic activity elsewhere (significant similarities exist between the materials involved in both cases) and they stopped the drilling here pending, AFAICT, reduced public interest.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with all nuclear reactors is that they all contain tons of some of the deadliest materials known to man
What was that about arguing with yourself?