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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.
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
That's not a very fair comment to make about a very immature technology.
Even taking a look at the more mature technology of later designs we've got decisions such as planning construction of a whole lot of AP1000 reactors when the first prototype has not been activated yet. Even that is still a 1980s design.
It's not really a nuclear problem but a management one. The current unbuilt designs that the fanboys pretend are the status quo should be built as a prototype and tested, and then we can move on from there to something viable and worth producing in large numbers. Instead there's been the rush to deploy worse than the state of the art yet still unproven.
One problem is the economic model for civilian nuclear power mostly grew out of being the peaceful side of the bomb but inherited some of the worst problems of defence procurement. When something doesn't actually have to work very well for the players to get their money and competition is almost non-existant you get the stagnation that dominated the US nuclear industry until Westinghouse adopted the current state of the art from Japan (Toshiba). Whether nuclear power is a good idea or not becomes irrelevant when far more is spent on lobbying and advertising than on R&D - you'd end up with a crap product in any emerging technology with that sort of mismanagement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.'"