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Japan Fukushima Nuclear Plant 'Clean-Up Costs Double,' Approaching $200 Billion (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Japan's government estimates the cost of cleaning up radioactive contamination and compensating victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has more than doubled, reports say. The latest estimate from the trade ministry put the expected cost at some 20 trillion yen ($180 billion). The original estimate was for $50 billion, which was increased to $100 billion three years later. The majority of the money will go towards compensation, with decontamination taking the next biggest slice. Storing the contaminated soil and decommissioning are the two next greatest costs. The compensation pot has been increased by about 50% and decontamination estimates have been almost doubled. The BBC's Japan correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, says it is still unclear who is going to pay for the clean up. Japan's government has long promised that Tokyo Electric Power, the company that owns the plant, will eventually pay the money back. But on Monday it admitted that electricity consumers would be forced to pay a portion of the clean up costs through higher electricity bills. Critics say this is effectively a tax on the public to pay the debt of a private electricity utility.
An off the cuff estimate of a complicated event with virtually no precedents. Made by an entity responsible for the disaster.
I think everyone who thought about it for more than a couple of minutes was figuring to multiply the 'estimate' by a factor between 2 and 10.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Like the previous story?
Prepare for the worst instead of bullshitting risk assessments. The actual, absolute worst. This wasn't it, and it's still PLENTY bad and PLENTY expensive.
Learn the lesson. Some endeavors cannot have corners cut nomatter the business SOP rhetoric du jour.
If Tepco's profit are not enough to fill the bill, then there is a good case to go after Tepco's capital. Japan's state could seize the company.
What about the lost productivity of the land that's now quarantined? Or the tourism money that would've went to Japan if it wasn't for Fukushima?
I'd like to see an honest calculation of how much nuclear power costs, because all the numbers I've seen never takes those into account.
You see, the thing is, nuclear *is* a great idea.
However, putting 40 year old designs next to the ocean on an island chain on the Ring of Fire tectonic plate zone with a hundreds-year old history of tsunamis along that coastline *isn't* a great idea.
Pebble bed designs, CANDU reactors, SMR (Small Modular Reactors) and reprocessors are available today. Soon, Molten Salt reactors and Thorium reactors will be available. To top that off, on the other side of nuclear, ITER is coming along nicely with the promise of commercial level over-unity fusion.
Yes, Nuclear is a great idea, but one has to be smart about *where* it's built, not *whether* it's built.
Sorry mdsolar, we can't take that risk. And fusion is only 50 years away 50 years ago.
The supposed "critics" are fucking idiots. Thins as big and as costly as a nuclear power plant is not built on the whim of a corporation. Rate payers, government at all levels from the first responders that are funded to serve it to the indifferent elected officials the public put in office and who appointed the deficient regulators; everyone was at the table and everyone got the benefits for forty years. Japan used the power of those nukes to build its prosperity from the 70's to 2011 and there is a whole generation of geriatric Japanese living off the pensions built by that engine of wealth. The public is just as obligated to pay for the consequences as Tepco or anyone else involved in Fukushima.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
When dealing with Utilities, there is no way for the company to pay back without taking the money from the rate payers. The only real way to do it is for the government ot require the company to issue stock representing a percentage of the company value that would go to the government. Therefore the owners of the company ie stock holders pay for the damage they caused by placing idiots in charge and the government can then sell the stock to pay for the cleanup or hold it in trust to ensure this does not happen again.
It's completely standard that any and all fees against corporations are passed along to the customers. It is sales tax, not purchase tax, after all.
In times like this we must remember that corporate profits are the most important thing, and anyone saying otherwise is simply a commie. The beauty of the free market is that if the customers don't like their new rates, they can just quit their jobs and move their families to a part of the country not served by Tokyo Electric. (And then later to South Korea when all the other power companies take the opportunity to jack their rates up in kind.)
"But on Monday it admitted that electricity consumers would be forced to pay a portion of the clean up costs through higher electricity bills." Which is exactly what would have happened before the accident if the company had not been externalizing it's costs. I am no fan of corporate welfare, and I am smart enough to know I am below average IQ for a 6 digit Slashdot user. But - They could "pay now or pay later." The argument could be made the plant would not have been built because of the costs. But these costs would never have been forecast, because the event was not forecast. Just $.02
So much for the Japanese Miracle
Tokyo Electric management was criminal in technically trivial ways that were long known,some obvious to even a beginning engineering student. The industry magazine Nuclear Safety discussed some of these deliberate flaws over 40 years ago in their articles.
Personally I think some of the senior management and directors of Tokyo Electric should be stripped of all assets to compensate a small part of their criminally willful acts of greed.
I don't understand how the costs of this can approach that magnitude (using $100k / man-year as a generous number). The linked article was very sparse on numbers, so it's unclear how many people are being compensated, but even if you compensated ten thousand people 100 years worth of income each, that would only be half the cost, and I don't understand how any huge civil engineering project could cost 1 million man-years of effort. The Hoover Dam apparently only cost $700M in today's dollars - what is involved in the cleanup of things that has the equivalent cost of about 100 Hoover Dams? $200B is also roughly equivalent to the entire Apollo space program.
Mind boggling... that's just how big $200 billion is.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Taxpayers and customers are footing the bill. They might grumble a bit, but they'll still pay.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
45% of that increase could be depreciation of the Yen against the US Dollar, roughly from $75 Yen per USD to $110.
Were 2011 and 2016 estimates in USD compared, or was the comparison made in Yen and then only the difference converted to USD?
And if the governments weren't so hard bent on using the uranium for bombs then they would be using thorium that was postulated decades ago and we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
Does this mean that every nuclear power plant is "too big to fail," with each installation possibly representing a trillion+ dollar liability?
It is unless you have for-profit corporations building and running them.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yes, Nuclear is a great idea, but one has to be smart about *where* it's built, not *whether* it's built.
there is a little problem, and you just nailed it. Where it is built. And smart. Sorry, but there are humans involved, and perhaps a nuc plant gets built in a certain place because the person who sold the land gave great head, or a fine ass contribution to one of his employees, also known as an elected politician. Added to the mix is the CEO of the project who demands the schedule is met, and the CFO who even thought they don'nt know a thing about niuclear power, knows exactly where to save money by cutting corners.
It's a mighty big damn genie in that bottle, and it wants out really bad. And while corporations are darn good at turning a profit, they aren't so good with genies. Samsung has problems with tiny little genies in their phones. So while they might be great at making sneakers or selling Pizza, corporate culture doesn't like engineers and scientists very much, and doesn't consider their input necessary on the "important matters"
Until that damn genie gets out of the bottle.
In hindsight of course, the Fukushima Power plant was simply going to fail. The walls were 100 percent certain to breach, the water was 100 percent going to settle where the emergency generators were. The design itself however, would still be working today if not for the terrible decisions made on siting and building the place.
Can a safe reliable nuclear based pwer generating plant be built? I'm pretty certain the answer is yes.
Will they be built? Having a pretty good grasp of human nature, my money is on only by accident.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The senior management and directors of Tokyo Electric should be punished?
Critical thinking and non-conformity is not the way in Japan. 2000 years of brain washing does not go away easily.
The US and the west were all to happy to buy low cost Japanese goods, where constructive trading sanctions would have woken them up.
Post war Japan were not allowed to have an army(?) but nuclear plants built 1 inch above the sea level that can spew shit around the globe is OK in Tsunami-land with earth quakes galore? Spacing plant close to each other is not a good idea either.
Do not forget Thorium based nuke plants which can be built to be intrinsically safe. (But no Plutonium bonus here for the arms industry.)
... because they skip right over human fallibility.
Look at Katrina.
Books were written about how New Orleans was a bowl below sea level, years and years ago.
The Army Corps of Engineers, their brothers, nieces, and adoptive children knew the score.
Look at the Mississippi floods. We know it does that and yet people live there.
Look at earthquake-prone California.
In the final analysis, we find that shit happens.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I assume that any government project will cost 10x more than projected.
People saying we shouldn't do nuclear power is like someone saying we should not buy 2016 Volvo's or Subaru's because 1970 rust buckets were death traps.
But it's simply not. Tout all the vaporware you can buzzword - breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc etc - it's still going to be more expensive than wind and solar. Build nukes as safe as you want, they're still going to be more of a risk, and still be more expensive to decomission.
Yes, nukes are so economical. Japan has just paid $2 Billion extra for each reactor in the country.
FFF they coulda built a fusion reactor like ITER or even DEMO for 1/8th the cost.
You anti fusion luddites are unbelievable with your snideness and negativity. The budget for nuclear fusion was cut by 90% in the 1970s. Have some patience, maybe it's just delayed by 50 years or 100years. So what, it hasn't been shown to be impossible and they are credible paths to acheiving it. Thank goodness you weren't around 125 years ago to ridicule the aviation pioneers like the wright brothers for their failures.
Do you honestly believe the Wright Brothers didn't suffer endless ridicule?
They were taking a big lumbering wooden and wire frame of crap and trying to make it sail through the air like a bird. Have you seen the spirit of 76? It's a heap of crap glued together.
What's important is when people like the Wright Brothers decide that in the face of adversity, they're going to change the world.
I'll never make any money off of nuclear reactors... at least directly anymore. I used to. But I don't understand why it's a bad thing to have companies running them.
Any specific reasons why you think the bad would outweigh the good regarding profiteering assholes running those? It seems it would be easier to pass and enforce regulation on the reactors given that circumstance.
Yes the cost is big. But everything about nuclear is big, including the amount of power generated. Fukushima Daiichi consisted of 6 reactors:
#1 generated 460 MWe from March 1971 to April 2012, or 41.1 years
#2 generated 784 MWe from July 1974 to April 2012, or 37.7 years
#3 generated 784 MWe from March 1976 to April 2012, or 36.1 years
#4 generated 784 MWe from October 1978 to April 2012, or 33.6 years
#5 generated 784 MWe from April 1978 to Jan 2014, or 35.7 years
#6 generated 1100 MWe from October 1979 to Jan 2014, or 34.2 years
Multiply the generating capacity by the time in service and you get 165.7 TWh for reactor #1, 259.1 TWh for #2, 248.1 TWh for #3, 230.9 TWh for #4, 245.3 TWh for #5, and 329.8 TWh for #6. For a total of 1478.9 TWh.
Nuclear's capacity factor in Japan (ratio of actual electricity generated vs peak capacity) started around 46% in the mid-1970s, and had reached 79% by 2001. Assume a linear increase followed by it remaining stable from 2001-2014, and overall capacity factor over this timeframe (which conveniently breaks down into 26 and 13 years) is (26*(.46+.79)/2 + 13*.79) / 39 = 0.68.
So actual electricity generated by the plant would be about 1478.9 TWh * 0.68 = 1005.7 TWh. Round it down and call it an even 1000 TWh.
The average price of electricity in Japan is 26 cents/kWh. Yes the price was lower in the past, but we want the inflation-adjusted total value of electricity generated, so using today's price is valid.
1000 TWh * $0.26/kWh = $260 billion worth of electricity produced over the lifetime of the plant. Even with the second-worst and most expensive nuclear accident in history, the Fukushima Daiichi plant still produced more value in electricity than the cleanup cost.
Now consider that the world generated 2731 TWh with nuclear in 2008. If you go with 20 cents/kWh as a global average electricity price, that's $546 billion worth of electricity generated by nuclear power each year. Add up the cost to clean up Fukushima ($200 billion), Chernobyl ($200 billion), and Three Mile Island ($1 billion). Amortized over the 37 years since the first of those accidents, the cost of cleaning up these nuclear accidents only works out to ($401 billion / 37 years) / (546 billion / 1 year) = 1.98% of the cost of electricity produced.
Basically, the cost of cleaning up nuclear accidents is just 0.4 cents/kWh.
We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. The challenge with nuclear is no different from any other project that deals with hazardous processes (and this includes coal and oil power plants among many other things): reasonable standards for building, operation, and inspection free from bribery, corruption, and incompetence, which are rigorously enforced. In some places (mostly the western nations), this isn't that hard to do. The designs are already rock solid and have been for a long time (minus the RBMK reactor designs, which were never a safe solution, but which weren't designed with safety as a high priority - they were experimental reactors and weaponized fuel factories). The plant at Fukushima was an early design which would have still be safe had the company operating the plant bothered to perform the remediation steps provided by the design manufacturer (GE) for known problems in the design. Had the regulators and inspectors forced them to perform those steps, even the plant's owners' negligence wouldn't have been allowed to carry the risk of the catastrophic failure following the earthquake and tsunami there.
We have great designs which have run at >90% capacity for decades on end without issue. We know exactly how to operate nuclear safely. In fact, per kwh, nuclear is the safest power production in the world. (yes, safer than hydro, solar, and wind - look it up, you'll find workers dying from falls, burning to death, drowning, etc). What we need to do is come up with a way to supply power to places with shitty governments at a rate that's cheaper than fossil fuel plants (for the environmental impact issues there) without giving them the opportunity to fuck up nuke plants or weaponize them. Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal will all play their parts in our worldwide energy future, but the fact is that well-run nuclear is our best, safest, most sustainable option for a backbone. Nothing else scales like it except fossil fuels and those wreck our environment pretty badly until they're all used up (which is pretty shortly - relatively speaking).
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Ok, I hope you don't protest when in the mean time I get free energy from the sun?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
There were numerous teams around the world actively working toward powered flight at the time. As for the apparent quality of their design, you're applying modern standards of what a prototype should look and feel like to a vastly more adventurous era. It's one of the reasons we made massive strides during the first half of the 20th and now typically make far more incremental advances: we're terrified of failure, particularly if there's any risk to any human life. It's the reason a design like the YF-12 would never be allowed to fly these days. On paper, the design decisions made to allow it to fly as high and as fast as it does are laughably insane. But it flew, and its 1950s design set records we still haven't broken.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
If the friends of the owners decide about (non) enforcement of the regulations?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Yeah, hazardous processes are run everywhere. But nuclear energy is so terribly hazardous that one accident can affect life all over the world.
I don't like to experiment with that risk, and therefore I am against the use of nuclear energy. Especially on a large scale and in great numbers.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
No it's not. With large scale wind and solar implementation you can affect a certain number of lives, true.
But with one accident with a nuclear reactor you can destroy a multitude of that number of lives.
Try that with a solar or wind 'accident'.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Running coal and oil power plants affects (at the very least) the local environment horrifically if nothing goes wrong. What do you think happens in the case of a major issue with nuclear power? You think the whole world gets consumed by a black hole or something? Nuclear power is proven safe, effective, efficient, and capable of handling base power loads. It's safer and more scalable than any other option. We already have nuclear power plants on a large scale and in great numbers, but you don't hear about them because they run for decades without incident. They run at 90%+ capacity day-in and day-out quietly providing power for people around the world.
Nuclear power results in less loss of human life per kwh generated than any other source of power. That includes solar, wind, hydro; you name it. Nuclear power is simply safer. We can make it even safer by stopping the resistance to replacing older nuclear plants with newer, better ones.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
...as in Fukushima which is contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean.
I don't care if a nuclear reactor is able to handle base loads for 40 years on a row.
If it is also able to totally destroy human life with its fall-out from a severe accident, then I simply don't want them.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
So while they might be great at making sneakers or selling Pizza, corporate culture doesn't like engineers and scientists very much, and doesn't consider their input necessary on the "important matters"
Let me take a moment to call bullshit on you here. I deal with this problem all the time and I spent years adapting and trying to learn to speak human to overcome it where I can.
Consider the different career tracks that people follow. A competent engineer or scientist spends probably 20 years sheltered within educational institutions studying and being rewarded for their intelligence and ability to present themselves as able to comprehend complex topics.
Take any "Gifted Child" which is a disgusting American disease which rewards children most for their achievements in what they're interested in and gives consolation to the same child when they fail to achieve "giftedness" in topics they don't excel at.
This is how people of all specialties are treated regardless of their "gift". It might be singing, communication, business, science, math, engineering etc...
We take engineers and scientists lock them away in a university for 5-8 years of their formative lives surrounded by people who understand their vocabulary or more importantly are willing to risk looking stupid by asking "What is Thorium and what is it's benefits to the nuclear process?" instead of pretending they simply know. Eventually, they become well versed in science, mathematics and other natural philosophies. They also develop their vocabulary and expectation of other people's vocabularies to be exceptional in their fields of interest.
Business people also have things like this. For example, they can use the world synergy in more forms and contexts than George Carlin could use the word "fuck".
While this may be true, it would seem irrelevant and simply a pot-shot on tie wearing drones, but it does illustrate an issue.
They learn terms like CapEx, OpEx, ROI, capitalization, etc... they learn how to communicate with people and maybe listen and understand their needs.
Then comes the scientists and engineers.
The fields are so drastically different that here in Norway where business and finance students aren't even allowed to enter the university... well maybe not so much aren't allowed but may actually fear entering the university. See, business and finance isn't seen as academic here. In fact, electronic engineering isn't part of the university directly either as classically, it's been more of a trade skill. This is changing on both fronts, but following high school, business/finance and academics are separated from one another. They develop themselves for the first 5-7 years of adulthood separated from one-another. They even have different bars and clubs. They have different everything.
We do this because we have oil and as a result, it's not necessary to combine the future brilliant minds of business and finance with the brilliant minds of... well everything else together with each other. The business grads are almost guaranteed a job at some point in something oil related.
So, when the engineer tries to talk with a businessman here in Norway, there is absolutely no common ground for communication. Even their socialization vocabulary is fundamentally different. It may as well be a different language altogether.
Let's cover and important thing here in a way that should make sense. When I'm developing code for a project, I build things in modules. I rarely write things with less than 100,000 lines of code before I consider it anything but boiler plate, but I am able to do it every time. The reason is that I keep things clearly separated from one another. There are modules I have to use as well. For example, I use a PDF library quite often. Their coding style and program flow is generally quite different than mine and for the most case incompatible. I would never call their library directly. Instead I make an abstraction layer which hopeful tran
They cant pay their bills and the accumulated costs of their incompetent decisions, and some old private dude profits anyways?
Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
And again, nuclear power is safer for human life. Accounting for Fukushima, accounting for Chernobyl (which by the way wasn't a power plant - it was a research facility conducting extremely dangerous experiments and a weaponized plutonium factory which also happened to have excess power to dump into the local grid, but that's alright, we'll include that one anyway because it still doesn't change the outcome), nuclear power is the safest source of power generation we have. Per kwh generated, it causes less loss of human life than anything else, including wind, solar, and hydro.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
So don't do it, come on lets see how fucked shit can get.
I'd like to see a citation for the death rates. A citation that includes the uranium minors who died of cancer (uranium mining was quite unsafe back in the 50's, mostly out of ignorance), along with the Navajo who died of cancer when retaining ponds let lose. The citations I've seen don't even seem to admit that there were construction accidents during the construction of all the reactors in the world while counting the construction accidents involved with wind and solar. Perhaps there honestly was never a construction accident while building reactors, which would be pretty amazing.
Wind and solar, if good practices such as safety harnesses and ropes, are followed, should be as safe or safer then building a large reactor. Hydro as well as long as the locations are well thought out, much like nuclear. All four need to be built correctly and safely yet corners get cut, damns fail and eventually a nuclear plant will fail worse then the ones being discussed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Yeah, let's hear it for all those poor six year old kids working those uranium mines!
Pebble bed designs >> Nope. Germany still struggles to find what to do with the decomissionned experimental reactor. it's the radioactives thing on earth, contminated with dust that has potential to kill anything breathing on earth if released.
CANDU reactors >> Nope. Bad design, does not scale. Also, no proper waste reprocessing.
SMR >> Yeah, let's put a bomb in each backyard, great idea. Seriously, this thing is more of a financing for small military reactors (for submarines)
Molten Salt reactors >> Nope. There is no containment material that can hold the molten core at scale. Also, it implies a chemical processing plant with gigantic contamined waste integrated with each reactor. Tritiated Fluorhydric acid, anyone ? Nice cocktail, but no thanks.
Thorium reactors will be available >> breeders with sodium ? Yeah, no danger sir. We can wipe a continent if a bigger fire brakes out. We cannot put out this fire with water, or else booom :)
ITER ... the promise of commercial level over-unity fusion. >> what an empty promise. ITER is an experimental, not a commercial plant. And it's a failed one, at this. It will not sustain overunity for longer than a minute. Which every scam artist on youtube can also do for a lot less money by storing some energy in a flywheel.
aaaaaaa
>> The budget for nuclear fusion was cut by 90% in the 1970s.
Nope sir.
The budget for nuclear fusion has shifted to fission and just quadrupled in Japan to 200 Billion dollars. And it will double at least two times more, at least.
And also in Ukraine, the estimated long term cost is close to 1000 Billions.
Let's say 1500 Billion Dollars total over only two countries.
Now that's a useful budget.
Who's next ? USA, China, and France are statistically good candidates.
aaaaaaa
"We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. "
Exactly, and we will have to store and guard their ashes from terrorists for 184000 years, which won't come cheap.
Just wondering how large is 200B, then I search http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp
The 2016 Japanese GDP is about 4000B.
Well, as others will point out, nuclear actually still has one of the best safety records when you average it out over things and so on, and that is true - but it ia lilttle bit like saying, although your room is sometimes at 50 degrees centigrade and sometimes at 0 degrees, it is still comfortable, because the average turns out to be 20. I am not against nuclear, but I would much prefer something that allows us to clean up more easily when things go wrong. It may well be possible to think that into the design in some way. It's like so many other things - it isn't wise to go down a path of no return, unless you are very sure that you never want to go back.
Yes it is. Radiation causes sickness first in the longest living organisms, namely humans. Humans are the worst pest this planet has ever had.
Because of those reasons, nuclear energy is a win-win proposition:
if a power plant does not blow up, it gives lots of energy.
If it blows up then it will harm the population of the worst pest.
You must know you're arguing with the strawman, not the reality. Nuclear may have killed fewer people to date, but it has the capacity to kill more people than other forms of power generation in the event of a catastrophic failure. And the probability of a catastrophic failure leading to many deaths must be assessed over the lifetime of operation+decommissioning of a plant, which is decades or more. Maybe that risk can all be mitigated, but it's pointless to deny that the potential severity of a nuclear plant failure is much higher than for other forms of power generation.
Risk = frequency * severity
"We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world. "
Exactly, and we will have to store and guard their ashes from terrorists for 184000 years, which won't come cheap.
Which is why it's nice that there are newer reactor designs that produce less long-lived waste.
Plus, there are new techniques coming out that allow us to further use certain types of waste in ways not imagined earlier.
Google "nuclear diamonds".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You mean like a wildfire at a massive solar farm. Sure, the fire may not kill anyone. But if the power that's being generated is being COUNTED on in the base load, you're going to run short, you're going to have situations where power-critical events are disrupted and people are going to die.
Also, you're still conveniently ignoring that nuclear power has still killed fewer people than ANY other form of power extant.
So, as soon as you can point out these "multitudes" you're citing, we can move forward.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You're rather spectacularly missing the point. Everyone understands that nuclear bonds release orders of magnitude more energy than chemical bonds. I mean, duh. That's the whole point: it's a high-beta technology. When things go well, you get loads of controlled energy. When things fuck up, you get loads of uncontrolled energy... and humans aren't that marvellous at operating complex systems without ever fucking up for decades on end. So we try all types of risk mitigations, and plan for bad actors etc etc. But while we can reduce the likelihood of a severe incident, we can't eliminate it. And then we have to fork out $200bn as a consequence.
Nuclear power is great in theory, not so great when actual humans start implementing it.
A bit like communism, capitalism or any other pie-in-the-sky utopianism. That's basically what nuclear power is. A theoretical ideal not suitable for the real world.
Anyone able to run the numbers properly? From my v rough back of the envelope, it looks like $200bn would buy you about 0.7TW of solar capacity in today's money, assuming no economies of scale (!!) Fukushima was about 5TW, I think.
Just curious to know what magnitude of solar capacity could be created if governments put the scale of investment into it that goes into nuclear.
As for the apparent quality of their design, you're applying modern standards of what a prototype should look and feel like to a vastly more adventurous era.
First rule of product design: Fail fast, fail often. Companies that understand this are the ones that bring the 'must-have' products to market. This is true in the modern era too.
It's one of the reasons we made massive strides during the first half of the 20th and now typically make far more incremental advances:
Hmm, maybe, maybe not. An early test / improve loop when creating a product allows for more rapid advancement, and while those advancements are, for that product, all incremental the finished product is more than an incremental step forwards from the point before it existed.
...we're terrified of failure, particularly if there's any risk to any human life.
This is, I'd say, a twofold issue, each of which feeds into the other: the 'nanny state' with its assorted regulations - mostly good, some bad; and the 'special snowflake' psyche, where not trying is better than failing, and risks you're not willing to take simply shouldn't be taken by anyone - for their own safety.
Of course part of the problem is that while you could, working alone in your barn, build something that flies you are unlikely to build a jet plane or a manned rocket, or something that breaks records. Sure.lone inventors do still exist, as do people who are willing to take personal risks, but when it comes to creating something new the low hanging fruit has largely been picked over the last couple of centuries.
We can but hope (or dream) though...
>> Radiation causes sickness first in the longest living organisms.
Radiation causes sickness in all organisms, but, on the long term it accumulates higher doses the higher you go on the food pyramid.
If a power plant does not blow up, it gives lots of energy, and leak a lot of conamination on the long term.
On the long term, radiation cannot be contained.
All containments known leak after only a few decades, but need to hold millions of Years.
aaaaaaa
All four need to be built correctly and safely yet corners get cut, damns fail and eventually a nuclear plant will fail worse then the ones being discussed.
I hate it when my damns fail.
Tell me something, of all this safety that you think needs to go into the energy sector who is it that is supposed to enforce it? Government you say? Every nuclear power accident happened at a power plant that was government inspected and licensed. Every oil spill was from a drill, ship, pipe, train, or refinery that was inspected and licensed by a government.
TEPCO quite likely fucked up major here but they did so under government supervision. The government allowed the reactor to operate as it did, where it did, because it met all safety requirements imposed upon it. If it hadn't then it would have been shutdown.
What is ironic is that it is quite likely because of the safety protocols imposed on it that the reactor melted down. The reactor itself survived the quake, what didn't survive was the backup power and the power lines to the facility. When the control systems detected the quake an automated scram was initiated. This shutdown the reactor but the fission products continued to produce heat. Without the power provided by the fission reaction the boilers could not maintain a head of steam to run the turbines. When the turbines came to a halt their was not enough electricity to drive the cooling pumps. No cooling and the reactor gets hot. So hot that safety systems start to fail and fission restarts on its own. Then things get real hot, hot enough to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Without power from the reactor to vent these gasses, or run the recombiners, and it builds up until something ignites it.
If the reactor had not been shutdown as required by law then perhaps none of this would have happened. I could argue that the government caused this, therefore they should have to pay for it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Any tall building has the capacity to kill thousands of people. But we don't generally think of tall buildings as dangerous or having "high severity". In the context of a tall building, it is only "dangerous" if it wasn't done right. Yet with nuclear, this sort of reasoning doesn't seem to apply? Like, it doesn't matter how "done right" it may be, we always focus on the "severity" and "capacity", as if "doing it right" had no impact on those? And one could ask, yeah well where's the evidence that they're "done right"?? And as the earlier poster says, just look at the 450 or so existing plants around the world and take that as evidence that they are being done right. Because if you mitigate the risk, then that's an actual outcome. It means people won't die. Like how flying is safer, even though the potential for horrific crashes is much greater. The risk is actually smaller, even if the "potential" is greater. But the "potential" is something your and my imagination are processing, just like the potential for becoming a millionaire is what drives people to play the lottery, even though the objective "risk" of winning is tiny. The fact that 450 plants are running, that's something about reality. The "potential for catastrophic failure" is more about the imagination. If anything, we ought to be looking at the safety culture, like the airline industry does. They don't just say, oh you must not fly, there is huge potential for crashing, no, they say, let's look at the culture and the systems and keep trying to better understand how to improve actual safety. In effect, nuclear is great, and let's keep trying to improve it.
Cleaning up the consequences of bad operations polices is not research and development.
That's a lot of words to say "I expect engineers to know the technical vocabulary plus the business vocabulary, but I don't expect the business guys to both learning the technical side. For reasons."
That must be why France and Germany have large-scale nuclear accidents daily, while nothing bad ever happened in the state-controlled power stations in the Soviet Union.
Either that or just use it as fuel.
Because you don't get something for nothing. People can decide they are willing to use less power, decrease power usage enough and you can get away with less plants. However that does mean compromising modern lifestyle, as increases in efficiency only go so far (and many people have already done what they can to increase the efficiency of their use). They can use fossil fuel power instead, though that requires buying the fuel on a continual basis (Japan has no reserves to speak of) and dealing with the pollution it produces, particularly when you are talking a smaller nation like Japan with less places to put power generation far away from people. Renewables are an option, but only to an extent. Again there's the space issue but also none of them so far are reliable for generation at all times. You can use them to deal with peak loads of various kinds, but they don't work well for continuous generation and thus don't tend to be a solution all on their own.
There are lots of feasible options, but they all have tradeoffs and that is the problem. People who dislike nuclear power are made about its tradeoffs (the danger in the event of a catastrophic failure and the high cleanup cost mostly) but often don't have an alternative solution. I see a lot of "we don't want that" or "we should do something else" but little of what that should be. It isn't magic, there isn't some great solution that we could all have if we just wanted to. We have to deal with the tradeoffs.
Personally, I imagine that while there will be complaining, in the long run Japan will continue to use nuclear for a lot of its power needs as they are not going to be willing to make big, permanent, reductions in power use and none of the other options have tradeoffs they are going to want to take.
Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
We've known since the 1970s that dilution is not the pollution solution. Currents and bioconcentration see to that.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
Well then, the safest possible kind of power will turn out to be offshore wind installed by robot ships and inspected by drones. You can't have a wind spill and if you build them over the ocean they can't start a fire by falling on something. And drone inspection of windmills is already a thing (In fact, a friend of mine is now operating an inspection company using drones, he was doing it with a pilot's license before these new rules that let you get a UAS operator's license and had a couple of other private pilots working for him on a contract basis) so this stuff is well-solved.
It's not hard to understand: if it's safer per kwh generated, then scaling out with other options presents a greater threat to human life and supporting other options is directly supporting the needless deaths of human beings.
So you're with me? Great!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The potential costs are too high, private insurers aren't willing to underwrite it. Same kind of shit with flood insurance. In the case of nuclear it is really, really hard to price that shit as well. I mean problems with it happen very rarely, but when they do the potential costs can be huge and the costs can be difficult to estimate because you deal not with just actual costs, but with political/PR issues as well. Things like big exclusion areas are not the kind of thing that is necessarily mandatory as a public health measure, but can be necessary because people are really, really scared of radiation.
There are some things the private industry just won't do, or at least won't do well, for better or worse. Well, that's part of the reason we have a government: to deal with those cases.
For nuclear power what should happen, and indeed may happen in some places I don't know, is that they should pay in to a government sort of fund/insurance. That doesn't mean they will (or indeed could) pay up front any and all amount that could be needed to cover any disaster, but that they've helped defray costs in the event the government does need to provide disaster assistance.
Tokyo Electric management was criminal in technically trivial ways that were long known,some obvious to even a beginning engineering student.
None of which turned out to be relevant to the magnitude nine earthquake, the resulting tsunami, the Fukushima accident, or the excessive reaction to the accident.
The industry magazine Nuclear Safety discussed some of these deliberate flaws over 40 years ago in their articles.
So in other words, these "deliberate flaws" were not only irrelevant but ancient.
Personally I think some of the senior management and directors of Tokyo Electric should be stripped of all assets to compensate a small part of their criminally willful acts of greed.
For what crime? There should be a crime first, not merely a bullshit assertion that there was crime. Obviously, the magnitude nine quake and the 15 meter tsunami was not due to TEPCO criminal greed. That leaves stuff like seawall height, generator placement (all the generators were flooded), and TEPCO's response to the accident. And sorry, none of those meet the standards of a crime (things like gross negligence or intent, for example).
Your accusations, supposed by decades out of date sources, are irrelevant because there is no such crime to point to and often, not even a living culprit either.
To be fair, luddites would have a lot less to work with if nuclear development didn't cling to stupid designs. The LWR was a great submarine reactor but should never have been scaled up on land. The inventors argued against it for exactly the reasons we see today, and developed molten salt reactors for safe civilian power production. Had that effort continued, the fossil fuel age would be winding down by now. We might even have fusion, if nearly all of the funding wasn't poured into things like ITER and NIF. There are many promising avenues for fusion, yet the focus is on two options which will never be economically viable even if proven to work. It is fundamental physics; the reactors can't be scaled down to reasonable sizes. In fact, as long as ignorant and incompetent politicians are setting our course on technology, the luddites may even be right.
Fortunately, there are many private investors in nuclear technologies today, both fission and fusion. They don't even need subsidies, just a friendly regulatory environment that allows them to move forward in a timely and predictable manner, and a level market to compete in.
Regulation and operation is a co-operative process in the Nuclear Industry between the regulator and operator.
Correction: TEPCO fucked up. No weasel words thank you. Some board members have been charged with negligence, which in reality, should be criminal negligence. Government operated in collusion with TEPCO. You need to read the report from the Japanese government.
Hydrogen production was an expected outcome from exposing the *TWO* basis design issues of that reactor type. What happened to the reactors is exactly what the manufacturer said would happen if the reactors lost power and why operators are supposed to make sure this doesn't happen. That is why TEPCO are negligent. That they had well over a decade to perform the modifications is why it is criminal - that is the nature of corruption and why regulations exist. The regulations weren't made or enforced, and the reactor went boom.
Otherwise they'd still have a functioning nuclear reactor plant, it survived the quake but not the TEPCO board.
I think you will find that it was shut down because there was an earthquake and since the operator decided not to comply with the regulation laid down to operate the reactor safely it is quite reasonable to ask the operator to pay for everything. It also means the regulator has to be given more impetus for performing its duties in preventing these accidents.
The regulation is made to institutionalize the knowledge to operate these things without killing the communities around them. If you undermine that process and refuse to stamp out the corruption then it is impossible to have a safe nuclear industry. TEPCO just reminded us why, so yeah, they should pay.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, the ocean is now magically radioactive, and that must have caused the coral reef death in Australia, so we can go ahead and spew billions of tons of CO2 a day into the air to avoid the risk of a nuclear accident?
My are you stupid. By the way, there has been no measurable impact to sea life anywhere due to the tepid iciest.
First rule of product design: Fail fast, fail often. Companies that understand this are the ones that bring the 'must-have' products to market. This is true in the modern era too.
That's generally a good idea, but we now live in a generation of snowflakes.
Namely, look at the public outcry over Virgin Galactic's crash on October 2014. People all over social media and in newspapers were basically telling Virgin Galactic to stop entirely because the loss of even a single life is just not worth trying anymore. Thankfully, Virgin Galactic is continuing anyways, but this gives you an idea of just how increasingly difficult it is to accept failures.
French nuclear plants are primarily owned and run by the government.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, the ocean is now magically radioactive, and that must have caused the coral reef death in Australia, so we can go ahead and spew billions of tons of CO2 a day into the air to avoid the risk of a nuclear accident?
How do offshore wind farms spew CO2 into the air? I don't think you know how this stuff works.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What possible nuclear disaster could kill more than the tens of thousands of people coal pollution is killing every single year?.
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There are no nuclear accidents. People worked really hard to make Fukashima happen.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Of *course* we think of tall buildings as being more dangerous and having higher severity outcomes than other buildings, if the risks aren't adequately mitigated! Go look at the history of the 1906 SF earthquake, for example. Or the Rana Plaza disaster. That's why we have building codes.
You are rather missing the point: the outcomes from a failure in a nuclear power plant can be orders of magnitude more severe than the outcomes from the worst conceivable building or aviation failure. They therefore require much more stringent mitigation. The question at hand is, can such mitigation ever be adequate?
In the round, nuclear is better than coal, but worse than renewables, bearing in mind factors such as human health effects and carbon intensity.
Forgive me, but I thought the issue with this reactor was that the backup generators were in a basement and got flooded. There's another plant just a few km south of there where the backup generators were in the containment building and things didn't go bad there...
All great arguments; however, your arguments fail to take into account the US Navy Nuclear Program. They run nuclear reactors aboard ships and even submarines. I urge you to investigate their safety record. Perhaps the motivations they have put in place are sufficient to run a safe nuclear program?
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
We already have a super-massive fusion reactor located safely 93 million miles away. Pretty dumb of us not to use it since it beams more energy to the surface of this planet every single day than will be consumed in the entire history of all fossil fuels combined.
Yes, its a real problem. Even with a competent government, the next election is likely to bring in an incompetent government that implements self-regulation by industry. Seen it here where the railroads were allowed to self-regulate and pretty quick you have a train with only one engineer who doesn't correctly set the handbrakes and a town burns down, or a railroad that ignores a flood and runs a train over a weak and collapsing bridge.
Then you have the dam down the road, built by private industry a century ago and they didn't bother sinking the west side down to bedrock. 100's of millions of dollars to fix.
So we're left with governments that have a habit of incompetency or industries that are motivated to cut corners and push for incompetent government so they can be more profitable, usually by cutting corners and socializing the costs. Then there is the plain old corruption, whether in government, industry or suppliers.
Taking the various failure modes, it seems smarter to stick with stuff that under the worst scenarios can't produce too much damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Do you know how much energy is needed to produce "nuclear diamonds?" It's more than was generated during the creation of the waste.
That would be great if Tepco had been charging the 0.4 cents/kWh all along. They didn't and suddenly Japanese taxpayers are on the hook for $200 billion.
As the phrase goes, you are trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. No one is buying it, but they will buy the $200 billion cleanup, and will be most unhappy about that.
Yes because as we've seen from the unblemished operation of Chernobyl that government run nuclear plants are by far the best approach to take
All of this so plant management could save face by not admitting that they needed help, admitting that there were problems on their watch.
They blatantly ignored safety recommendations for the plant to maximise profits... So there is plenty of blame to go around the management..
Worse than renewables?
So you are ignoring:
- CO2 released by dams used for hydro?
- Lives, and land, lost when a dam for a hydroelectric plat fails?
- Pollution produced with Solar-panels?
- Pollution produced / environmental effects with wind-turbines being built?
- Environmental effects with wave-generators are build?
Sure we can improve all of these, but so can we do with nuclear-power... Today we have a few type of reactors, all based on the same concept of boiling water at a very high pressure and driving turbines with that. If we allowed the effort of researching and building new, safer, nuclear plants that would allow us to leave the 40+ year nuclear old technology behind and start constructing new reactors that would be safer and produce less waste.
Why do we have to compare 40+ year old tech with today's latest finds in solar/wind/hydro? I would say human ignorance and politics that vilify nuclear. (See what oil and coal companies sponsor and you might start wondering what we are doing.)
Of course I'm not ignoring the downsides of renewables. But they're not as bad as the downsides of nuclear, including of course the risks of catastrophic failure. If a wind turbine goes kaput, we have a brownout. If a reactor goes kaput, we've got a wildly expensive mess to clean up if we are very very lucky.
As to your rhetorical question: we have to compare 40+ year old tech with today's latest in renewables because nuclear infrastructure is built to operate for decades. We are stuck with its legacy for decades (and for many types of waste, centuries).
I really really really doubt that number very much.
Go ask the Japanese how much nuclear is costing them. Right now.
Add to the 200 (and growing) billion dollars to clean up Fukushima the lost income from tourism, lost land due to contamination, containment, hidden costs of polluted ocean, health care expenses, lost quality of life of all the children getting radiation disease right now and/or being mutilated from birth due to radiation effects etc. etc. etc. and I doubt you get any cheaper than 10 x solar.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
As if with the planning of nuclear reactors there are no provisions foreseen in the event of temporary reactor stops in case of problems?
It's a total non-argument that you are posting here.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Then I'm against it.
Contaminating the whole Pacific Ocean? ....
Were you absent the day they taught physics in physics class?
Meh... have a look at this, or is this not the Pacific?
http://blog.safecast.org/2014/...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
They blatantly ignored safety recommendations
When were those recommendations made? Why were the recommendations credible?
We already have safe, reliable nuclear power plants. We have them all over the world.
And a couple exceptionally unsafe ones.
The challenge with nuclear is no different from any other project that deals with hazardous processes (and this includes coal and oil power plants among many other things): reasonable standards for building, operation, and inspection free from bribery, corruption, and incompetence, which are rigorously enforced.
You ihave very little choice here tell me of the rigidedness and that you espouse was based on situating a nuclear power plant at sea level in an area that is going to have tsunami unless plate tectonics has stopped. Explain the thought process, and why it made sense to build there.
Next explain how a seawall was constructed that was not remotely high enough for the Tsunami of historical records that were simply going to occur in that place. Explain why some absolute facts were ignored.
Next explain why if you discount the historical record, the geological record of Tsunami rubble that shows that the plant was going to he it with a Tsunami and that was going to breach the seawalls.
Next explain the rationale of putting emergency generators that were going to be swamped when the Tsunami that was 100 percent going to happen breached the seawalls that were not built to the height that this Tsunami was going to have.
I expect you to do no such thing of course. You are the ultimate nucshill, oone who ignres anything negative, and prattles on how nuclear energy is th eonly option that we have. It isn't. It might be a good option if done right, but at this time, who believes ya? The worst part is you expound upon the safety, while people watch the reactor buildings blow up in Fukushima, and you wander why no one is saying - "How do I get some of that awesome Fukushima safety in my town?"
Anyhow, enjoy your delusions.
I am not anti nuc power. I am very anti-your type of attitude, with the constant undertone of anyone not agreeing with you being stupid. Nuc power has a serious credibiity problem, and those of your pursuasion actually make it worse. Remember, those stupid people who just are not smart enough to see theing correctly as you do, are the ones you have to convince, not tell them they are stupid assholes.
This is not rocket science. it's a higly energy dense material that runs best at a level near material limits. The effects of rapid release are rather spectacular, The long term issues of that release are a pretty big issue as well. When you pack that much energy into that small of a space, the people pulling the strings better know exactly what their decisions entail.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The walls were 100 percent certain to breach, the water was 100 percent going to settle where the emergency generators were.
That's an absurd claim to make. Higher walls and emergency generators protected from the particular failure mode of inundation by a large tsunami both would have worked.
The design itself however, would still be working today if not for the terrible decisions made on siting and building the place.
Notice the two obvious fixes above have nothing to do with location aside from making sure the sea wall was high enough for a 500 year tsunami at that location.
The problem with such a superficial analysis as you gave is that every location is terrible in some way. Instead of trying to find that near perfect spot with no significant flaws, we can just engineer for the problems that good but not perfect locations have.
The sad thing here is that the Fukushima location is even better now for nuclear power since the accident will clear out a lot of potential liability to its future operation. It still has great access to sea water for a cold sink (a huge consideration in nuclear power). And we can engineer for the problems of the location.
Nuclear power is proven safe, effective, efficient, and capable of handling base power loads.
Sign us up. I'll fill out the forms if you get them for me. We really need this safe option, and you have convinced us. The forms are here http://tinyurl.com/j3hbdlj Its building three of the proven safe effective, and efficient place. I think it's in the basement, but the people there can tell you.
Man, you should quit while you are ahead.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
But nuclear energy is so terribly hazardous that one accident can affect life all over the world.
Which, let us note hasn't happened yet. I notice your threshold for "affect" is barely detectable. Well radiation is detectable at levels that are quite irrelevant.
but it has the capacity to kill more people than other forms of power generation in the event of a catastrophic failure.
In theory. In practice, hydro power has been far more dangerous for catastrophic failures.
That's a lot of words to say "I expect engineers to know the technical vocabulary plus the business vocabulary, but I don't expect the business guys to both learning the technical side. For reasons."
And the problem is you may be told to cut a corner that you know is dangerous act.
I decided not to reply to him becaus in addition to the length, he's saying that I said that "the suits" are stupid. Nowhere did I say that. Ignorance is not stupidity, but power is what the CEO and CFO have that an engineer doesn't have.
And they have duties that predispose them to what they would like to hear. If I say we need to do thing A, and it will add a week or two to the schedule, and another person tells the boss that I'm being too cautious, the Boss is inclined to listen to the other guy and overrule me. If the Head Accountant is worried about a cost overrun, and I don't want to budge on a safety check or some such, a meeting can be held with questions of "Well in reality, what is the likelihood of this part failing?" And if someone pipes in "Not bloody likely!", then we'll not bother with that test.
This isn't stupidity, as he thinks I am claiming, but humans interacting with each other, bringing all their jobs and fears and hubris together. And it isn't like Engineers don't have their faults either. Sometimes the job isn't done until the boss comes down and tells them it is done. Forcefully.
There were just some really odd and proven to be really bad decisions made in Fukushima, which are not the sort of problems an engineer would perform. The site could have been along a river rather than the ocean in a Tsunami area. Both for tsunami and that reactors don't like salt water. If there was a cooling problem that required water being pumped in, fresh water leaves at least some possibility of recovering. Sea Water turns the reactor into not a reactor any more. The sea walls were obviously not anywhere near high enough, a fact that could be found out in 15 minutes of research. And the emergency generators would not be in an area that the inevitible Tsunami that would swamp the seawalls and then swamp the emergeny power source.
So unless this was a perfect storm of incompetence, and you don't build a nuc power reactor with incompetence, some really bad decisions were made, and if the engineers were competent to build the reactors, the bad decisions probably came form elsewhere.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Uh, yeah. Who were you thinking - the Easter Bunny?
Hmm, sounds like Randian Dumbfuckery. Blame the results of monied interests buying off government officials - on the institution of government, rather than on the institution of capitalism.
Forgive me, but I thought the issue with this reactor was that the backup generators were in a basement and got flooded. There's another plant just a few km south of there where the backup generators were in the containment building and things didn't go bad there...
The generators were the proximate cause, because they were flooded. The ultimate cause was all of the events leading up to the generator failure. The Tsunami, the seawall overtopping because they were not built high enough to withstand Tsunami that historically happened in that area, and being in a basement in a site with those sort of problems. This was simply going to happen.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
All great arguments; however, your arguments fail to take into account the US Navy Nuclear Program. They run nuclear reactors aboard ships and even submarines. I urge you to investigate their safety record. Perhaps the motivations they have put in place are sufficient to run a safe nuclear program?
I'm going to get crucified for this, but yes, you are correct. US Navy Reactors are well designed, well built, and well run by motivated and competent people. A wonderment indeed.
They are also not built according to the same constraints that commercial reactors are built to. That's what I will get crucified for, as it is contrary to Libertarian principles that the free market will always win over Government inefficiencies. They are designed, built, and manned to not be a problem when fighting the ship, but to enhance it's survivability.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The walls were 100 percent certain to breach, the water was 100 percent going to settle where the emergency generators were.
That's an absurd claim to make. Higher walls and emergency generators protected from the particular failure mode of inundation by a large tsunami both would have worked.
Pay attention.
1. The area was a certainty for a Tsunami.
2. The height of Tsunami in that area were known both from Historical record and from rubble lines left by Tsunami in the past. 3. The Walls were not built to a height that would preclude likely Tsunami form overtopping them. They were simply not built high enough.
Call it absurd if you like, but do the research like I have. The citations are somewhere in slashdot history, so you can call the research absurd if you like, along with the source material
And my whole point, if you actually read the stuff I posted, was that human effects, schedule, economic, and possibly corruption was what doomed Fukushima. It was like sending your children to go play on the interstate.
The design itself however, would still be working today if not for the terrible decisions made on siting and building the place.
Notice the two obvious fixes above have nothing to do with location aside from making sure the sea wall was high enough for a 500 year tsunami at that location.
You know there is a fatal problem with your premise. THey didn't do that did they. They made a very amateurish mistake. 500 year Tsunamis don't actually only happen every 500 years. In my locale, we experienced 2 100 year floods in the space of ten years or so. Deciding that there wouldn't be a Tsunami during the lifetime of the Nuc plant was ovbiously 100 percent friggin' wrong, yes no? Here's a little on the fallacy of (probably) their argument in this matter. Its about flooding, but the same principles apply. http://water.usgs.gov/edu/100y...
Tl;DR version. It's a recurrance interval, a statistical frequency analysis, and should never ever ever be used to downgrade infrastructure.
The problem with such a superficial analysis as you gave is that every location is terrible in some way. Instead of trying to find that near perfect spot with no significant flaws, we can just engineer for the problems that good but not perfect locations have.
What you are saying is that since their is no perfect spot, a terrible location is equal to the best location. Because if you are trying to say that the location of the plant was even good - Yarbles. Its not even bad.
Somewhere in the slashdot annals I made a plausible location that would at least be safe from the effects of what happened. It is on a river, which would provide proper emergency cooling water, it is above the atitude of historical and rubble line records of Tsunami
The sad thing here is that the Fukushima location is even better now for nuclear power since the accident will clear out a lot of potential liability to its future operation. It still has great access to sea water for a cold sink (a huge consideration in nuclear power). And we can engineer for the problems of the location.
I sincerely hope that you are not working in the nuclear industry. Your ideas are interesting to say the least.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Do you know how much energy is needed to produce "nuclear diamonds?"
No. Please provide exact numbers rather than vague statements like "more than was generated during the creation of the waste".
Because then you're talking about power production in the gigawatt-to-terawatt range, since the C14 is culled from the graphite control rods.
And most control rods have a usable lifespan between 8 and 20 years, with a median age of 12.
That's an absolute FUCKTON of power. And I seriously doubt that the vapor recovery and deposition of C14 takes THAT much power on a per-diamond or even a per-batch basis.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Considering the sheer amount of land use required for PV solar (or even solar thermal), capacity planning a a bit more involved than simply dropping a couple extra gigawatts of reactor capacity.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
To be fair, large hydro infrastructure is built to last for decades, too, and also carries very large safety risks. One good example of this is Kariba Dam on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. There are concerns that the plunge pool is going to undercut the foundation and cause a dam collapse, threatening an estimated 3.5 million people living downstream. So the governments are investing another almost $300 million to reshape the pool. The dam was built before 1960, although part of the powerhouse was upgraded in the past few years. Large dams last for decades, and it seems people are trying to push them to a century or more now.
Or what about Mosul Dam, in Iraq? People debate over which one is more dangerous.
I think large hydro carries the potential for significant loss of human life if not done well. Returning to your original point, though, large hydro does have one advantage over nuclear in this department: the parts with changing technology are not the ones that will cause catastrophic failure. If a turbine fails, you lose power production. It takes a breach of the dam itself to threaten massive amounts of life. I'm not convinced that dam construction has undergone revolutionary changes in the past half century, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.
"Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist." -Indiana Jones
And then there's also wind energy...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
And any rise in background radiation will 'affect' more lives, killing and maiming people and making them ill.
Fukushima and Chernobyl are the empirical proof that all safety analyses and regulations are worthless, hence there is no guaranteed safe nuclear energy, hence we should just choose something else to supply our energy as it's simply too dangerous.
I'm not wanting to wait for the inevitable, so let's just stop it here.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
This is one of the fundamental problems with the nuclear industry. My own opinion is no nuclear facility should *ever* be run by private enterprise. The common thought is that the private sector would run it more efficiently. This is a fallacy. They run it cheaper because they do not bare the responsibility. In the event of something like fukushima by default (pardon pun) the nation and the taxpayer are the ones on the hook, *not* the private company. This disconnect between responsibility and operation is almost certain to produce situations where the company is willing to cut corners in favor of profit because of the fact that should anything go wrong, they are not really the ultimate responsible party. Until this fundamental issue is resolved this will always be of concern. There are a number of ways to address this without totally nationalizing everything, such as imposing very harsh non-monetary penalties to private companies in charge of the operation. Such as strong criminal legislation for any executives involved in a decision that ends up compromising safety, same goes for employees tasked to do the work if done so knowingly. However I suspect at such a point the "efficiency" of said private company will start approaching that of whatever it would be if run nationally anyway, as they would be just as risk adverse at that point.
And my whole point, if you actually read the stuff I posted, was that human effects, schedule, economic, and possibly corruption was what doomed Fukushima.
And my point is that you are blatantly wrong here.
Somewhere in the slashdot annals I made a plausible location that would at least be safe from the effects of what happened. It is on a river, which would provide proper emergency cooling water, it is above the atitude of historical and rubble line records of Tsunami
And with a sufficiently high sea wall, you can put it in on the coast. You don't need to artificially set aside some of the very best locations on Earth.
I sincerely hope that you are not working in the nuclear industry. Your ideas are interesting to say the least.
I think the huge problem here is that you equate stories and evidence as if they were the same thing. Sure, it is stirring to the emotions that we have this narrative of human corruption, greed, and hubris. Oh, and location. I've seen that movie. It can be fun to watch. But it is fiction for a reason. It doesn't represent reality.
Sure, I could too babble on about that, but I too would be missing some very important points. No other nuclear plant in Japan had significant problems (several of them had been exposed to the earthquake and tsunami as well). TEPCO had a nearby plant which survived the tsunami without significant problem. The very tsunami threat that inundated Fukushima was being evaluated at the time of the accident (and it sounded to me like they would have eventually recommended a higher sea wall for Fukushima which would eventually be built). Of course, there's the obvious that TEPCO may have trained for decades to handle nuclear accidents of this scale, but they had yet to experience one.
And that evaluation process had been delayed because Fukushima was originally going to be shut down (with the first reactor scheduled to shut down the very month that the earthquake hit). Fukushima received a lease on life (and restarted the tsunami threat evaluation) because the generation of nuclear plants that were going to replace Fukushima had all been scuttled in the prior decade and a half.
My view here is that it is not just nuclear operators that need to learn from the experience. You do too. Shoehorning every action of nuclear plant operators into this corrosive narrative is false and harmful to making sound decisions.
And any rise in background radiation will 'affect' more lives, killing and maiming people and making them ill.
Unless, of course, they don't do that. Unsupported assertions are like that. It's worth noting, of course, that the world has considerable variation in background radiation well beyond any temporary contribution from Fukushima or Chernobyl and that doesn't have a significant effect.
Fukushima and Chernobyl are the empirical proof that all safety analyses and regulations are worthless, hence there is no guaranteed safe nuclear energy, hence we should just choose something else to supply our energy as it's simply too dangerous.
And the fact that there are 400-500 reactors operating in the world today with meltdowns being a very rare thing, are evidence that nuclear power is far less dangerous than you suppose.
So let's build some of the new type of reactors that don't have the flaws of the current generation...
We do have things that can be shown down in a instance and can handle a complete loss of power or complete failure of the control-system...
Problem we have now is that we are banning *everything* related to nuclear power based on the old crap designs we have without looking at what the other options are..
Nuclear power is great, but let the engineers and physicists design and control it.. Let it be professors, not politicians, that sets the requirements and approves different designs and plants...
Problem with nuclear is popular politics where they follow the irrational fear of people have of something they don't understand... This has caused big problems with old plants just getting renewed permits instead of new plants being designed and built...
They don't do that? There is no such thing as a safe threshold. We already have to live with an increased background radiation level thanks to those idiots testing these nuclear weapons in the 40's and after, then Chernobyl added some, and here you come saying "that doesn't have a significant effect".
Any increase in background radiation leads to increased cancer rates.
And 'meltdowns being a very rare thing' isn't good enough. The fact that we have had two meltdowns already means that it does happen, contrary to what all those probabilistic risk analyses for the reactor designs have said and have tried to prevent.
In other words: safety isn't sufficiently guaranteed so we should simply terminate the use of nuclear energy.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
When these 'crappy' reactors were introduced the gospel wasn't that they were 'crappy', the gospel was that they were the best of the best, the safest of the safest, and that no harm would come over us.
Well, that turned out differently, and now you come with the same story again:
"This new design is the safest of the safest and nothing can happen."
Yeah, right...
Nuclear industry had their chance and they blew it, and let the population pay for it.
Are TEPCO or General Electric or whoever built that crappy reactor on a major fault line going to reimburse the Japanese people those more than 200 billion dollars?
No way.
Nuclear? Just don't do it.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
There is no such thing as a safe threshold.
And there is such a thing as a completely unsubstantiated statement too.
We already have to live with an increased background radiation level thanks to those idiots testing these nuclear weapons in the 40's and after, then Chernobyl added some, and here you come saying "that doesn't have a significant effect".
Or those idiots who choose to live above sea level or on top of igneous rock. There's a lot of things that result in higher background radiation levels, for which we don't see a significant effect.
And 'meltdowns being a very rare thing' isn't good enough. The fact that we have had two meltdowns already means that it does happen, contrary to what all those probabilistic risk analyses for the reactor designs have said and have tried to prevent.
You said it right there. "Probabilistic". The point is not to make it completely impossible, but to make it rare enough. The world didn't end when Chernobyl or Fukushima happened. We can handle a rather high rate of ongoing meltdowns without significant change in background radiation levels and our current rate is well below that.
You should go there
I see what you're saying, combination of a bunch of crap. Gotcha.
There is no such thing as a safe threshold.
And there is such a thing as a completely unsubstantiated statement too.
Sorry, I think you're a blathering idiot who has no idea what he is talking about and for some reason just wants to have nuclear energy with a reckless disregard and a blind eye for the dangers that it entails.
Let me refer you to the Australian National Academy of Sciences:
"According to the National Academy of Sciences, there are no safe doses of radiation. Decades of research show clearly that any dose of radiation increases an individual's risk for the development of cancer."
Good, I think I've had it with you.
Goodbye.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Further, "no safe dose" is an unusually irresponsible claim since no other human activity is held to that level of safety. For example, an obvious problem is that even if you accept without evidence as you did here that there is no harmless dose, there is still the matter of how much harm. Just how many people are expected to die of cancer over the next fifty years because of Fukushima? 10? 100? Fukushima would have saved more lives than any number you can come up with during its lifetime.
Good, I think I've had it with you.
I think what's particularly idiotic about your posts is the theater. Yes. Please go away and take your ignorance with you.
And my whole point, if you actually read the stuff I posted, was that human effects, schedule, economic, and possibly corruption was what doomed Fukushima.
And my point is that you are blatantly wrong here.
I see, Here's the thing though. Allow us to refer to the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, or NAIIC. You really hve to do a little better than simply making sweeping pronouncements.
Let us first quote a little from the messge from the Chairman of the report, Kiyoshi Kurokawa:
"Our report catalogues a multitude of errors and willful negligence that left the Fukushima plant unprepared for the events of March 11. And it examines serious deficiencies in the response to the accident by TEPCO, regulators and the government.
For all the extensive detail it provides, what this report cannot fully convey – especially to a global audience – is the mindset that supported the negligence behind this disaster.
What must be admitted – very painfully – is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan.”
Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity.
So we start.....
A “manmade” disaster
The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly “manmade.” We believe that the root causes were the organizational and regulatory systems that supported faulty rationales for decisions and actions, rather than issues relating to the competency of any specific individual.
Me again. Look up the word collusion in case you don't know exactly what it means.
The direct causes of the accident were all foreseeable prior to March 11, 2011. But the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was incapable of withstanding the earthquake and tsunami that hit on that day. The operator (TEPCO), the regulatory bodies (NISA and NSC) and the government body promoting the nuclear power industry (METI), all failed to correctly develop the most basic safety requirements
Now back to me for a moment. This is exactly what I have been saying. If you want to argue the point have at the people who made this report. I concur 100 percent with it. Now let us proceed back to the report
Reforming the regulators
The Commission has concluded that the safety of nuclear energy in Japan and the public cannot be assured unless the regulators go through an essential transformation process. The entire organization needs to be transformed, not as a formality but in a substantial way. Japan’s regulators need to shed the insular attitude of ignoring international safety standards and transform themselves into a globally trusted entity.
Reforming the operator
TEPCO did not fulfil its responsibilities as a private corporation, instead obeying and relying upon the government bureaucracy of METI, the government agency driving nuclear policy. At the same time, through the auspices of the FEPC, it manipulated the cozy relationship with the regulators to take the teeth out of regulations.
There is a lot of other stuff in the report - I suggest you read it before more sweeping pronouncements, but let us jump a few paragraphs to the recommendations, number 4 in this case.
Monitoring the operators
TEPCO must undergo fundamental corporate changes, including strengthening its governance, working towards building an organizational culture whic
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I see what you're saying, combination of a bunch of crap. Gotcha.
Oh yeah. WIth big disasters, there are usually multiple failures. A lot of the fanatics think I am anti-nuc. Nothing of the sort. I just hate the damage the true believers do when refusing to acknowledge actual and real problems. Hell, the group doing the research agrees with me, with the possible exception of that the site should never have been in that location. The didn't address that, not too surprisingly.
https://www.nirs.org/wp-conten... Is the location of the NAIIC report
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The direct causes of the accident were all foreseeable prior to March 11, 2011. But the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was incapable of withstanding the earthquake and tsunami that hit on that day. The operator (TEPCO), the regulatory bodies (NISA and NSC) and the government body promoting the nuclear power industry (METI), all failed to correctly develop the most basic safety requirementsâ"such as assessing the probability of damage, preparing for containing collateral damage from such a disaster, and developing evacuation plans for the public in the case of a serious radiation release.
Notice first the erroneous claim that the direct causes were foreseeable. This is the conceit of hindsight that everything can be foreseen just because it is obvious after the fact.
Second, notice that all these things were done, the report merely asserts that the various parties should have done them better. So where's the better example say of a nuclear meltdown evacuation elsewhere in the world to underline their point? Sorry, it appears to me that most of this stuff was good enough even in hindsight.
Since 2006, the regulators and TEPCO were aware of the risk that a total outage of electricity at the Fukushima Daiichi plant might occur if a tsunami were to reach the level of the site. They were also aware of the risk of reactor core damage from the loss of seawater pumps in the case of a tsunami larger than assumed in the Japan Society of Civil Engineers estimation. NISA knew that TEPCO had not prepared any measures to lessen or eliminate the risk, but failed to provide specific instructions to remedy the situation.
Finally, we have a date. 2006 is not very much before 2011, the year of the earthquake. Why are we to expect fast action again when the whole point of nuclear regulation is to be heavily conservative? It indicates to me that this report didn't take into account timeline or the slow nature of nuclear regulation.
We found evidence that the regulatory agencies would explicitly ask about the operatorsâ(TM) intentions whenever a new regulation was to be implemented. For example, NISA informed the operators that they did not need to consider a possible station blackout (SBO) because the probability was small and other measures were in place. It then asked the operators to write a report that would give the appropriate rationale for why this consideration was unnecessary. In order to get evidence of this collusion, the Commission was forced to exercise our legislative right to demand such information from NISA, after NISA failed to respond to several requests.
And this is bad why? The problem here is that the plant operators are the experts on their reactors. The regulator don't know all. Second, regulation is by its nature constraining. This particular situation sounds like a case where the regulation was too constraining and thus, the regulators had to come up with a work around so that nuclear plants could continue to operate.
In the next section "Earthquake damage", the report claims that TEPCO was too hasty in blaming the tsunami for all damage to their reactors without providing a reason for that claim or a reason to justify their level of concern (it is after all the second conclusion of their report). The best they can come up with is that reactor 1 might have experienced some earthquake damage as well as well as damage to the grid connection (power lines and substation were not earthquake hardene
If you don't take the word of the people who investigated this, and you say as much, well, there isn't much point in discussing a matter you have made your mind up on permanently and impervious to the truth. Good day sir.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If you don't take the word of the people who investigated this
The point here is that you shouldn't take anyone's word for it. Evidence trumps that. And what we have here is a notable lack of evidence for the charges you put forth as well as many of the claims made in the report you linked. Notice in particular that they don't back even in the least your assertion that there was something wrong with the location. They've written a lot about negligence, inadequate actions, and toxic culture, some of which I would agree with, but most not. But not even once have they said that the location was untenable.
My view is that you and they should give more respect to the people who make our society possible rather than run them through a gauntlet every time something goes wrong. Here, we have the second worst nuclear accident ever (by a common scale) and yet, no one died from radiation. Instead, it's a variety of people who died from the tsunami itself, industrial accident, stress of evacuation, and similar things. This remarkable feat should be lauded rather than completely ignored.
I feel much the same way as you. In theory, I'm pro-nuclear power. But when dealing with real world engineering issues, not to mention the incredibly decline in cognitive abilities in product engineering these days, not so much.
Let us note further, that the claim of "no safe doses" comes from the group, Physicians for Social Responsiblity, not from the Australian National Academy of Sciences. They are incorrectly interpreting the research, completely disregarding the actual levels of risk and harm supposedly approximated by the study, and of course, misrepresenting their interpretation of the research as having come from the original research itself.
That's typical dishonesty from anti-nuclear groups.
I feel much the same way as you. In theory, I'm pro-nuclear power. But when dealing with real world engineering issues, not to mention the incredibly decline in cognitive abilities in product engineering these days, not so much.
The problem is as you suggest. Altogether too many people seem to place a political mindset to the issue. Somehow, if you say something negative about nuclear, they bring out the long sharp knives and somehow know for a fact that you are a left wing tree hugger of some other pejorative.
Rule number one is that ideology has not once negated a scientific truth. The same with economics or the free market, or regulations or any other ephemeral human construct. Americans were not able to come up with a religious explanation that invalidated evolution, even when they use the law to ensure that it isn't taught, nor have they been able to cause the sex drive of teenagers to disappear. The old Soviet Union was not able to use it's ideology approved version of genetics - Lysenkoism - to actually ever work, even if old Joe thought it was the shitz. Many more examples, but I'm writing about physics, not politics.
Even in here, we have at least one person who won't even take the word of the people who investigated Fukushima and found incredibly indictful problems. His faith is 100 percent unshakable, I suspect he would gobble down a pound of Corium to prove how safe it is. I do not argue much with deluded people as soon as they prove what they are.
But although it is certainly possible to design a safe reactor, all of those artificial human constructs, along with a possibly inexhaustible supply of hubris, make it very difficult. Because physics gives not a teeny little tiny fuck what my opinion is, or anyone else's opinion is. It is what it is. I can't believe I used that phrase, but this might be the only time it was 100 precent appropriate)
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They are incorrectly interpreting the research, completely disregarding the actual levels of risk and harm supposedly approximated by the study, and of course, misrepresenting their interpretation of the research as having come from the original research itself.
Yes, of course, they must be idiots.
:)
Especially this Associate Professor Tilman Ruff of University of Melbourne's Nossal Institute for Global Health, who says there may be a threshold for some effects of radiation, but not for cancer. Ruff "...is also a member of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War."
Yeah, he must have totally missed the point.
Or this character Burns, a former chair of United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), former acting CEO of Australia's nuclear safety agency, ARPANSA, who on the one hand indeed says that "...the media lack[s]* scientific understanding and [that] coverage has tended to overplay the health effects from small amounts of radiation."
BUT that "...on the question of whether there is a safe threshold for exposure to radioactivity, Burns agrees with Ruff."
Or take 'the' (I think WHO) expert, Professor Robert Gale of Imperial College London who "...reported in The Australian this week [that] he would be happy to drink the water, even if it exceeded the maximum contamination levels set by the Japanese government."
""We live with radioactive water all the time," he was quoted as saying."
And of course, it wouldn't do him much harm if he came to Japan and took 1 or 2 gulps of that water. Statistics, you know.
Now in effect, "The Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) question Gale's position."
"His position illustrates very neatly the divergence between individual and public health risk," says PSR's Dr Ira Helfand.
Oh, look here, that must be another expert who has made it her job but 'got it all wrong'?
"The risk to any one individual from drinking water with this much radiation is indeed very low. The problem comes when 40 million people in the Tokyo water district drink the water and get this much radiation."
So, what if you'd raise the background radiation level from contamination for the whole world population?
A little increase would 'only' kill a few tens of thousands of people.
Countries go to war for the death of a few thousand people (9/11, Pearl Harbour), a few hundred people (USA, WWII), or even (allegedly) 1 person (WW 1).
And we were still lucky that all these spent fuel rods didn't blow up in the air...
But no, here comes a 'khallow' stating that all those experts incorrectly interpret research, disregarding existing levels and even maliciously (my interpretation) misrepresent their knowledge on the matter.
Yeah right. Let me go with the real experts please, thank you very much.
(Text within [square brackets] are my edits of quotes from the abc.net.au article.)
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Yes, of course, they must be idiots.
Oh look, another slashdot poster who has never heard of conflict of interest or adversarial debate.
A little increase would 'only' kill a few tens of thousands of people.
Or actually help tens of thousands live longer (radiation hormesis) . That's possible too especially given the complete lack of evidence for your claims.
But no, here comes a 'khallow' stating that all those experts incorrectly interpret research
You do recall I already found one example in your linksv where they did just that?
Oh look, another slashdot poster who has never heard of conflict of interest or adversarial debate.
Well, we also don't know where you stand in this respect...
Or actually help tens of thousands live longer (radiation hormesis) .
Is that the new 'fallacy ad absurdum'?
I do recall you alleging misinterpretation, yes.
But anyway. I argued already why a 'scientific and technical approach' to make safe reactors can and always will be defeated by 'management decisions', so you won't be able to rationalize-away my fears for nuclear, hence you won't be able to change my opinion.
Thanks for the discussion, I'd like to move on now to other topics.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Argument by pseudo science? Look at the actual research, there is no benefit to radiation exposure.
Which is powered by fusion?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If I'd moderate you 'funny' I'd lose the comment that you're replying to, so let me just tell you you are funny. :)
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
That is what I was shooting for. Thank you.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?