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As Sea Levels Rise, Are Coastal Nuclear Plants Ready? (nationalgeographic.com)
mdsolar writes with this National Geographic story about the danger of rising sea levels to low-lying power plants across the country. According to the story: "Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, off Florida's Biscayne Bay, two nuclear reactors churn out enough electricity to power nearly a million homes. The Turkey Point plant is licensed to continue doing so until at least 2032. At some point after that, if you believe the direst government projections, a good part of the low-lying site could be underwater. So could at least 13 other U.S. nuclear plants, as the world's seas continue to rise. Their vulnerability, and that of many others, raises serious questions for the future."
I am very close to a nuke that is right on the beach on Florida's Treasure Coast. Apparently to shut down a reactor and clean up everything that is contaminated is a process that takes years. This nuke has only one road that runs along the beach and if that road is swamped access to the plant would be by helicopter or boat, weather permitting. And that road frequently has challenges with hurricanes and spring tides as it is. I wonder if any planning is going on in regard to this situation.
Sea levels have been rising for hundreds of years, ever since the end of the little ice age. Maybe they should have taken that into account when the build the structures? Did they think it was going to stop?
Thorium thorium. Thorium. Thorium Thorium Thorium. Thorium.
(there ya go: you can go back to rest mode)
Yes the sealevels will rise, but they already rise with every hurricane or tides of the moon.
After Fukushima everyone knows that you need big ass dams, flood walls, protected and working backup generators etc.
If you build a 10m high floodwall or a 11m high one to also protect against global warming induced sea level rise simply doesn't really matter. If someone hasn't already built said 10-15m high flood wall, it's not global warming that is an issue but the regulatory commission in your country. A much more immediate problem too.
We can move them. Yes, it would suck complete and total ass and be ridiculously expensive and environmentally dangerous, but the sea doesn't rise over night without an Earth quake so in the many many many years while the water is creeping up the shoreline towards the plant ... we can decommission it and move the dangerous bits to higher ground.
Well, in theory we can ... unfortunately the utterly retarded NIMBY anti-nuke crowd will ensure that instead we'll leave it right where it is cause god fucking forbid some accident might happen ... and instead we'll just let it pollute thousands of square miles of sea and destroy our food stocks instead ... because thats way better than moving some dangerous materials in a controlled and actually very safe method.
So you either move it and don't tell anyone, so that NIMBY morons don't have a chance to stand in the way of the trucks doing the moving (which makes it way more fucking dangerous!) before you get it to higher ground. Remember these are the same morons who would swallow coal dust and get cancer for sure rather than take the risk that if they hang out at the nuclear plant after a major disaster they might have a slightly higher chance of thyroid cancer ... that can't be proven scientifically anyway.
Besides ... nuclear reactors are water tight from the start, at ridiculously high pressures, if you get them into a cold shutdown state, you can just leave them under water for centuries without anything actually happening. Put a concrete sarcophagus around it so that nothing can easily damage it and forget about it. By the time it actually starts leaking it will have decayed to something we don't care about nearly as much.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
but it's not.
Hello,
When $$ is involved, people can be hopelessly apathetic, willfully ignorant, utterly selfish, blind, even.
--PeterM
mdsolar writes with another sensationalist article about how we will all die a nuclear death.
In the mean time I live in a country that is mostly below sea level, yet somehow my feet have kept dry. Is it possible that humans are capable of engineering their way around problems? What does this mean for the future of the human race? We'll explore all of these questions and more at 11.
"Estimates for how quickly sea levels could rise vary widely, from up to 4 feet by 2100 to almost 30 feet anywhere between the next two centuries and 2,000 years from now."
So in the next 90 years, during which time we'll probably build and retire two generations of nuke plants, we might have a whole four feet of sea level rise.
Please excuse me if I don't take the title seriously.
Learning nuclear lessons is so enjoyable.
The fashionable retirement plan for nukes is sixty years in mothballs before decommissioning. Soggy mothballs are an issue for these plants.
We can build nuclear submarines. Presumably we could build nuclear power reactors that live underwater from the get-go.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
In the US alone - 130 natural gas, 96 electric, 56 oil and gas, and 4 nuclear facilities at or slightly above sea level. http://www.motherjones.com/blu... Would seem to be a matter of national security !
In the U.S. we already have entire cities that are below sea level.
City, singular: We have exactly one city below sea level, New Orleans, elevation -2 meters.
Not sure if I'd call that the best example of why it's ok to have levees keeping out the ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I live below sea level too. Far in the midwest with dry feet. However I remember watching the levy break in New Orleans on live tv so my cynicism of engineering all our lives in to a utopian wet dream remains.
(Okay, I don't actually believe any of that, but.
Then don't post it.
The answer to misinformation promulgated on one side of a debate is not even more misinformation posted supporting the other side.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
[It would be a problem if sea level were rising...]
but it's not.
to the contrary, it is.
http://www.tribune242.com/news...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
http://gizmodo.com/miamis-alre...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
The fact that sea level is rising is not even controversial; and it's not particularly new information. The harder, and more controversial question is, is that rise going to accelerate due to melting ice?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...that an energy source that doesn't emit CO2 is being endangered by those that do. So far we've found a lot more "tipping point" mechanisms than buffering mechanisms. Not a good sign.
I live below sea level too. Far in the midwest with dry feet.
Unless you think that Death Valley and the Salton Sea basin are in the "midwest", or you live in a hole several hundred feet below the surface-- no, you don't live below sea level in the midwest.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I understand that the point of the article is really just to spread FUD, but even the terrified masses must understand that "warming" sea level rise is expected to measure a double handful of inches over the next century. Normal daily wave variation is more than that; if your nuclear plant designers aren't planning for bigger variation you have much more serious problems than what's going to happen a 100 yrs from now (and which of these plants is expected to run a century anyway)?
-Styopa
Wind and solar turn out to be so much cheaper, that really it is the opportunity cost of nuclear power that has delayed climate action. The politically promoted and protected nuclear industry has slowed progress for decades.
The only thing alarming about National Geographic is that the accumulated weight of back issues in attics may sink Manhattan before sea level rise gets a chance.
10 inchs last century, likely 100 this century.
if the climate alarmists are right, we will need a lot more nuclear.
For what? What reason would there be that we (in the west) need more electric power?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Miami Beach Florida already has issues with tides - certain high tides of the year flood the city, leaving it deep enough for fish to swim into major roads. In some areas they had to raise the roads a full meter above land level so that at least the roads are clear. Of course this leaves the houses, parking lots, businesses all flooded.
The main problem with Florida is that the water doesn't come from one direction it comes from all six directions. Rivers flow from the other states into Florida, sea water on 3 sides, rain falls down onto it and finally the land itself is porous limestone that sea water seeps into and UP out of the ground. Basically, most of the state of Florida is not solid land, but a sponge. That's why it has sink holes and why floods are so bad. Florida, unlike Holland, does not have a sealing salt/anihydrite layer that blocks water movement.
For this reason, unlike the Dutch, merely building a huge dike is not enough. As global warming raises the sea level it invades deeper into the center of Florida's porous, limestone ground. What used to be safe relatively dry land, miles from the dangerous shore, is now wet, eroded limestone. Fresh water wells turn into salt water wells, sink holes open up, new springs suddenly appear where there were none before.
Some of those new springs will be INSIDE the grounds protected by the dikes built around the nuclear power plants.
In such circumstances, to truly protect a nuclear power plant, you have to put a solid layer of water proof concrete UNDER it, connect that to the water proof 10 ft wall around the nuclear power plant and then arrange for a pumping station to drain out any rain water that falls into the plant area. Good luck with that.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The two Dungeness nuclear power stations (Kent, England) are built on the tip of a huge shingle spit. They employ trucks to move shingle from one end of the spit to the other to try and keep it in place like some labour of Sisyphus. That plan was deemed ok before anybody knew about projected sea level rises. Instead of abandoning the site, the owners are optimistic about getting permission to build a third station.
https://youtu.be/S34hOJE-DpU
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Build a nuclear carrier around it, add dirt and build houses on "flight deck" - and viola - floating city!
And no hassle from the nuclear power NIMBYs.
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If climate alarmists are right, we will have to convert all of our fossil generation baseload to nuclear. Renewables will help, but we can't run our entire economy on fluctuating sources and there isn't enough new hydro potential available in developed countries.
.. in the Dutch and start buying some bilge pumps. Or maybe just skip right to the end-state solution and dome the thing for underwater existence for the eventual new shoreline in Georgia.
--- Void where prohibited. Your mileage may vary. ---
Sea levels will have risen maybe a foot by the end of the century. Contrary to the magical thinking of some people, a foot is just a foot. The main area it makes a difference is in the height of dikes and other protective structures: a foot in sea level rise may significantly increase the probability that some water goes over such a structure if it is already marginal. That's easy to fix, though: raise such structures by a foot next time you maintain them (which is regularly).
About a third of the Netherlands is below sea level, so this really isn't a big deal.
Tell that to Kiribati, you brainwashed, gullible wingnut.
Suuure, they're not rising. Gee whiz, I guess all those Micronesian nations are just the victims of mass hallucination.
You wouldn't know real science if it sat on your face and shimmied.
The effects of warming make nuclear power more expensive, be it having to plan for sea level rise owing to long planning horizons, or thermal pollution issues made worse by warming. Wind and solar power are already less expensive and cleaner and don't require fuel which will run out. Nuclear is a climate problem, not a solution.
Maybe so we can shut the fossil power which is causing the sea level rise to begin with, should the climate guys be correct?
Worst case, we stop killing an estimated 50,000 people per year in the US alone from the diseases associated with the emissions of coal plants, even if you don't buy in on the climate change arguments.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Permanent storage was looking like would be in Texas until Congress intervened an selected a hydrologically porous site in Nevada. Congress actually gets in the way when it gets involved.
So, to get a hint of what is already buried in the ground in the general area of Yucca Mountain, go to Google Earth and search for "Sedan Crater" in Nevada.
Start scanning south.
Sedan Crater and every one of those other craters is a nuclear bomb crater, with the inside dusted with all the fission products and whatever plutonium didn't get fissioned. (A substantial fraction of it, as I recall.
That doesn't count all the tests that didn't create an above-ground subsidence crater, all the bombs that fizzled, etc.
None of this stuff has any containment whatsoever.
So, for the shrieking technophobes: How is glassified waste possibly any greater threat than what is already there in abundance? Please be specific, shrieking "OMG NUKE!! OMG RaDiOAcTiVe!! OMG NUKE!!" doesn't cut it.
Interestingly, the east coast land is sinking around 20 times faster than the sea level is rising. Maybe the sinking land is displacing seawater that is causing the sea to rise? Just a thought. In any case sea level itself is kind of an academic concept when the entire surface of the planet is in continuous motion, the planet itself is not quite spherical, and gravity itself is unevenly distributed. (Interesting articles: http://articles.chicagotribune..., and https://www.newscientist.com/a...)
In my opinion, Miami's perceived problems are likely due to overdevelopment, land subsidence, groundwater depletion, and perhaps climate hysteria -- not unlike Venice. The one thing I am pretty sure of is that the 1/4 inch of sea level rise is not a significant factor. The gizmodo article is misleading, and sadly the comments indicate that people are eating it up.
Most fission plants are incredibly vulnerable, and I'd say more about how, but I don't want to give you ideas.
Security is 99 percent perception and 1 percent reality.
Now stop whining and just build solar on every new building and wind everywhere already.
They're both cheaper than nuclear, which is heavily subsidized.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...to the nuclear shills prior to publishing one of these articles? Not that their boiler-plate would be so difficult to produce on the spur of the moment, but, credit where credit is due, it sure does exceed in smugness and smarmy hail-fellow-well-met!
I'll say one other thing about these polished shills - they win either way. Either they're out propounding their (sympathetic) "pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh..." rhetoric, or, when things do sometimes INEXPLICABLY go awry, they're the first to show up with their somber, contrite faces and roll up their sleeves and (make a pretense of) get (ting) down to DO ANYTHING POSSIBLE TO MITIGATE THE HIGHLY LAMENTABLE (and virtually inexplicable) TRAGEDY. They win either way! Either they're the cool, self-assured pooh-poohers of environmental alarmists, or they're MAKING A SHOW OF moving mountains to resolve something which NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND COULD EVER HAVE ANTICIPATED. LORD HAVE MERCY!!!!!
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
You can look at the firehose to see potential upcoming articles.
You might recognize yourself in this article: http://www.theguardian.com/com...
thanks. had heard that term somewhere.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Maybe so we can shut the fossil power
And why not replace them with wind and solar? No nukes needed.
Worst case, we stop killing an estimated 50,000 people per year in the US
Yeah, bad in math?
The USA has something like 400,000,000 inhabitants. 50,000 dead per year is 500,000 in ten years. That would be 5Million in 100 years, so over a course of 100 years more than 1% of the population is dying to power plant emissions? Sounds not really plausible. That would require plants far worse than what Indians and Chinese are suffering from.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As pointed out often enough on /.
Yes you can run a country on wind and solar alone.
The claim that hydro potential is exhausted is plain wrong. The problem with hydro is: high installation costs and low productivity, so a very long term investment. Besides that all countries have plenty of space to build flow water plants along the rivers. They simply don't want to install more hydro.
There is a huge initiative in the states to change that ... you can google for it.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ok, I remembered the stat wrong. It was 24,000 deaths attributed in 2004, and 13,000 in 2010. But it wasn't only those two years that people die from the crap being spewed forth from coal plants. The point is that tens of thousands die from diseases related to burning coal every year. It is the only energy source that kills on this order, and somehow that's okay. And that's not even speaking to the problems with mine tailings that are destroying waterways, or the several fly ash dam breaks that have destroyed rivers. And notice that I haven't even touched climate change yet, because you never know if you're talking to a rabid disbeliever or not.
And speaking of bad math, please tell me how 12kW solar installs will replace 1300MW nuclear plants at night. Or how many wind farms covering how much acreage of deforestation? I'm a huge fan of solar - I even work for a company that installs solar and has been involved in helping to get the ITC renewed so that the expansion of solar can continue relatively unabated. I'd love it, and my stock portfolio would love it if there was a massive boom in solar. But you still need to have something that works at 100% regardless of the position of the sun, cloud cover, and wind speed. We can't build more hydro, because any river worth having hydro on already has it. So that leaves natural gas, coal, and nuclear.
In a perfect world, we would be using 100% renewables. But we can't get there with today's technology. We need a stepping stone to get away from 1850s technology that kills people and causes untold environmental catastrophe (coal), and properly engineered and managed nuclear power is probably it.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And speaking of bad math, please tell me how 12kW solar installs will replace 1300MW nuclear plants at night.
Did you typo? Why are you comparing 12kW with 1300MW?
Obviously at night those 12kW don't need any replacement. Would make more sense if you asked how you want to replace 1200MW solar power at night. The obvious answer again is: most countries have at night a very low demand of power. Below 50% of the daytime peak, so again: at night you don't need a replacement for solar power.
Or how many wind farms covering how much acreage of deforestation? No idea what you mean with that, if your country is deforesting woods to built there wind farms, they do it wrong. Wind farms you build either on agriculture land or off shore.
But you still need to have something that works at 100% regardless of the position of the sun, cloud cover, and wind speed.
Just build enough and good enough distributed wind plants.
We can't build more hydro, because any river worth having hydro on already has it. So that leaves natural gas, coal, and nuclear. ... basically regardless of country. I doubt thee is a single country in the world that has exhausted its options to build more river dams.
That is extremely unlikely. In the USA there is an initiative that wants to build 1000 river flow water plants. If I remember correctly that would only replace about 10% of the current demand. So you see: river plants are difficult because of environmental concerns (unjustified), long construction times, relatively high costs, relatively low output, possibly long distance to a consumer. There are no reasons for not building more
In a perfect world, we would be using 100% renewables. But we can't get there with today's technology.
Germany, Portugal, Denmark and emerging countries like Bangladesh show otherwise.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.