Pebble bed is a quick-and-dirty solution. It can be made safe enough (Germany had problems with an _experimental_ reactor).
Actually, they also had problems with the production model. Also, the designers of the experimental plant were THOROUGHLY CONVINCED that there weren't going to be any problems whatsoever. But there were. This, and many similar incidents prove that you cannot trust designers of nuclear plants.
There are other solutions: IFRs, thorium reactors, CANDU, etc. There's no shortage of designs, actually. Some of them are being built, for a fraction of price that goes towards 'green' incentives in Germany alone.
That's an accounting trick. It involves not paying insurance, because nobody would insure the kinds of risks in these designs. Also, you haven't factored in the costs of managing the waste for a couple of millennia.
The Japanese plant was hit by both a Earth Quake that was larger then its designed specs and it was also hit by a Tsunami. How can you honestly with a straight face say it was not safe excluding what happened to it.
Perhaps because I am not a propellerhead with a bad case of aspergers. Somehow, there is this misconception that if you build to spec and something goes wrong, it is not your fault. (Hint: the "you", in this case, was involved in rigging the spec in the first place).
Current reactors have passive cooling systems that don't need power.
that simply is not true. Current designs have cooling systems that can work passively for some limited amount of time, and if all goes as predicted in the spec (surprise).
If we had accidents once a year sure. But major accidents every decade, 2 of them being human error and over 20+ years ago forget it. Its credible for me.
You put the bar rather low. A little lower and you'll have to dig it in.
OK, you're probably not going to like this, but I'll use Wikipedia because you used it. The reason I don't think you're going to like it is because it doesn't say what you claim it says.
You have to skip the propaganda and go for the history. In particular the original report on the AVR. One thing was that the temperature was too high inside of the pebbles, and the thing might as well have blown up, spewing massive amounts of highly toxic radioactive waste. Also, the nastiness of granular media (a pebble bed) played out in full. Stuff just did not work as intended.
In a PBR, if containment gets breached, air and hot graphite produce what I am sure is a nice to watch firework. With lots and lots of crap released.
Can these problems be fixed? Might be. But why should we believe claims from an industry that is notorious mostly for not telling the truth?
Third generation designs improve on early designs by incorporating passive or inherent safety features which require no active controls or (human) operational intervention to avoid accidents in the event of malfunction, and may rely on pressure differentials, gravity, natural convection, or the natural response of materials to high temperatures.
Thing is - that's exactly what they said the other times!
1) One of the funniest things about this type of discussion is that nobody talks about phasing out personal vehicles (i.e. cars) and going for mass mass transportation ("mass" repeated intentionally). That is the most likely scenario, as far as I am concerned.
4) Yes, you are hopeless optimist:-). Hydrogen is cheap. It's the storage of any significant quantity of it that is the major problem. It also has a fairly low energy density compared to gasoline, which means that you need more of it to go the same distance. But you can't store it well. Bummer.
Nuclear power is clearly desirable from many standpoints, and there are absolutely no insurmountable problems (most definitely including nuclear waste disposal/reuse).
Care to put some substance to that claim? What are you going to do with nuclear waste? Reprocessing produces more waste than what goes in.
Fukushima was a worst-case scenario involving both forty year old technology and very poor planning.
There is a plant in Germany, same model than that in Fukushima, that lost power (from the outside) one especially cold winter, and almost melted down. That was in the seventies (google for Grundremmingen). The block in question has been shut down since then. No worst case, it was just a little bit too cold.
If only the backup generators had been in a tsunami-proof vessel, like at other plants, there would have been no meltdown.
Yes, but they didn't have them. You see, real safety, not mickey-mouse make believe duck-and-cover safety is much too expensive to the folks in the executive class that get to become rich with this type of projects. So they prefer to allow for the occasional meltdown.
The main problems with nuclear is not necessarily technical, but political and social. We'd need a very different type of management technology to make nuclear succeed.
Does not change the fact that coal is a dirty fossil fuel, while modern nuclear is clean and safe.
Yes, just like was claimed for the Chernobyl plant, and that old Westinghouse pressure cookers the Japanese have. "Safe. No problem. Never ever. Power too cheap to meter". Only thing: they weren't that safe. The pebble bed reactors, btw, were also supposed to be guaranteed safe, but they weren't. Nuclear has one hell of a credibility problem. Those claims of "passive safety" are just that: claims. And made by people that have been caught lying more than once too often.
That will power our world for as long as it takes for fusion to become viable.
That might as well be never. The upshot of decades of research has been that the problems are much, much harder to solve than initially thought.
You will have to make a more intelligent argument. The Chernobyl area is all lush and green, but unsafe to live in. The open pit coal mines, would work stop there tomorrow, would be safe to visit the next day, and green, and lush, and inhabitable, in a matter of years.
They'll buy it from their neighbours, of course. That's not a problem. Maybe they manage to convince the Ukrainians to build lots of plants in their backyard and produce all the electricity there ever is going to be needed. I've heard they already have a nice place for that.
There is an argument to be made for not building nuclear power plants in densely populated areas like Germany.
Inherently passively safe designs are known for nuclear energy
This is being repeated over and over and over. Do you mean pebble bed? That was tried (in Germany, BTW) and the results were a) more waste and b) the realization that it actually is not "inherently safe" at all. It's in the wikipedia page.
Or do you mean something else, and want to come up with a reference?
Frankly, I think the problems with UIs are unsolvable. There is a point of diminishing returns, and after a while the returns become negative. And whoever is left out after that is a hopeless case.
No, I'm sorry. Even as a proposal this is utterly ridiculous. I am outraged. Were I working at that university my solution would be simple: screw you, Oxford, Cambridge, Sage and other archaic publishers. I'd cancel all my textbook requests for my classes, use *zero* conventional publisher-copyrighted material (Creative Commons and public domain okay), and hand-draw and photograph my own pictures if I had to when putting together my own class materials.
It would be way better for everyone if instead of routing around the problem, people would stand up and fight. Drawing your own pictures sure is cute, but does not change anything. And the fact is that a lot of very good books would be out of your and your students reach.
I am constantly amazed how fighting the system is not an option for so many people (may I call that cowardice?) People just prefer to go and find a way of hiding from all the evil out there, hoping that if they keep their heads to the ground, the might just dodge the bullets.
This is a tragic mistake. One has to get together, organize marches, actions, donate money to lobbying organizations, etc. etc. etc.
In the worst cases, you've got a journal getting an academic to review papers for free, charging the submitter to be published, and then charging the reader to get a copy.
What do you mean, "worst cases"?? That is the standard practice!
Pretty much everyone who is advocating that government needs to promote private nuclear power generation, since the main thing that is necessary to get the nuclear industry to do that is to (1) provide massive subsidies, and (2) provide complete immunity from liability in the case of accidents.
I would add to this that if the past (especially the banking crisis) is any guide, what will happen is that the companies (1) rake in the subsidies, looting the state, and (2) produce unsafe designs and build them in a shoddy way to further improve the margin. Which almost guarantees serious accidents.
The mentality most of the pro nuclear people show here on slashdot basically finds (1) and (2) ok, because (1) looting the state is good, as it never was legitimate to begin with ("government is always the problem") and (2) it's nuclear! What can possibly go wrong!
Pebble bed reactors are not safe. The pebble bed is a granular medium, and thus prone to produce surprises. The experimental reactors in Germany more or less proved the design unsafe (and that was quite a while ago). That people still believe this to be safe technology just shows how much propaganda there is floating around.
Dimock's water ran clean prior to fracking operations commencing
Which doesn't mean you "know" it was caused by the fracking operations.
It's some evidence for it but it doesn't prove it.
It is rather good evidence, apart of making sense scientifically. Under normal circumstances it would imply close scrutiny and a moratorium, because the risk for the hypothesis to be real is too strong to ignore.
In contrast, this line of reasoning...
Sony's PSN went down, and shortly after Osama bin Laden was captured. So do we know that online playstation gaming being unavailable caused his death?
does not make a shred of sense. Are you capable of seeing the the difference? Why are you making this braindamaged comparison?
It would be pretty hard for the government to cover anything up, much less the freaking power company. This isn't a communist state you know. geez.
That is sarcasm, right? I mean, yeah, it's not a communist country, but claiming that because of it the government and the power company cannot cover up stuff, or at least try, is pretty abysmally stupid. In particular because they are known to have done that quite a lot.
lying. That is what I predict. Because that's what they always do. Lying, covering up, lobbying, extorting - that's what they usually try. The reasons nuclear technology is having such acceptance problems has a lot to do with this. The mitsne ("planed failure mode") brouhaha is iconic for an industry with its head deeply in the sand (or did I get the exact nature of the damp place wrong?).
The nuclear industry has a completely authoritarian, reckless and corrupt management. I would not be surprised if they decided to lobby to outlaw Geiger counters Japan fairly soon.
You're not going to get a well-placed shot from a drone like this.
No, but maybe with a drone like this. A couple of those on a large area can be used to find the victim, and then only one of the big ones to perpetuate the crime.
My answer in the end: you need to stop people from hacking into the database server in the first place. That's really the only viable solution for most businesses.
They should have used more reliable software and/or they should have had it locked down tighter. And they should have had staff watching around the clock, and hopefully notice the attack before the *whole freaking database* could be dropped.
With that last one, you hit quite another nail on the head, albeit tangentially. The question is: why one database? The problem is probably technological monoculture more than anything. If you can't afford having an accident or making a mistake, you are in trouble, because you are in the wrong planet, and you are the wrong species (human).
If you think about it, the situation is so desperate that it is comical. You have a relatively standard IT department guarding an extremely juicy target. Oh so absolutely, ridiculously juicy. That just can't go well!
I think the system is working here. Companies that make smart decisions survive. Companies like Nortel that pay zillions of dollars to people running the company into the ground do not survive.
Is that sarcasm? You surely have not missed that those running the company to the ground and those that decided their pay were the same people? It is the common worker at such a company that suffers the consequences of the bad decisions taken by the good folks with the golden parachutes. The system is not working at all!
The only driving force behind innovation is need that comes out of the market and causes manufacturers to compete.
I'd call this want since the division between a want and need is a matter of subjective opinion. Otherwise correct.
Right, because compassion, vision, inspiration, etc. amount to nothing. You guys are so severely impoverished on a spiritual level, it is incredible. How utterly horrible. And you are wrong too, btw.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they also had problems with the production model. Also, the designers of the experimental plant were THOROUGHLY CONVINCED that there weren't going to be any problems whatsoever. But there were. This, and many similar incidents prove that you cannot trust designers of nuclear plants.
That's an accounting trick. It involves not paying insurance, because nobody would insure the kinds of risks in these designs. Also, you haven't factored in the costs of managing the waste for a couple of millennia.
Perhaps because I am not a propellerhead with a bad case of aspergers. Somehow, there is this misconception that if you build to spec and something goes wrong, it is not your fault. (Hint: the "you", in this case, was involved in rigging the spec in the first place).
that simply is not true. Current designs have cooling systems that can work passively for some limited amount of time, and if all goes as predicted in the spec (surprise).
You put the bar rather low. A little lower and you'll have to dig it in.
With nuclear energy we have just been lucky.
You have to skip the propaganda and go for the history. In particular the original report on the AVR. One thing was that the temperature was too high inside of the pebbles, and the thing might as well have blown up, spewing massive amounts of highly toxic radioactive waste. Also, the nastiness of granular media (a pebble bed) played out in full. Stuff just did not work as intended.
In a PBR, if containment gets breached, air and hot graphite produce what I am sure is a nice to watch firework. With lots and lots of crap released.
Can these problems be fixed? Might be. But why should we believe claims from an industry that is notorious mostly for not telling the truth?
Thing is - that's exactly what they said the other times!
1) One of the funniest things about this type of discussion is that nobody talks about phasing out personal vehicles (i.e. cars) and going for mass mass transportation ("mass" repeated intentionally). That is the most likely scenario, as far as I am concerned.
4) Yes, you are hopeless optimist :-). Hydrogen is cheap. It's the storage of any significant quantity of it that is the major problem. It also has a fairly low energy density compared to gasoline, which means that you need more of it to go the same distance. But you can't store it well. Bummer.
Care to put some substance to that claim? What are you going to do with nuclear waste? Reprocessing produces more waste than what goes in.
There is a plant in Germany, same model than that in Fukushima, that lost power (from the outside) one especially cold winter, and almost melted down. That was in the seventies (google for Grundremmingen). The block in question has been shut down since then. No worst case, it was just a little bit too cold.
Yes, but they didn't have them. You see, real safety, not mickey-mouse make believe duck-and-cover safety is much too expensive to the folks in the executive class that get to become rich with this type of projects. So they prefer to allow for the occasional meltdown.
The main problems with nuclear is not necessarily technical, but political and social. We'd need a very different type of management technology to make nuclear succeed.
Yes, just like was claimed for the Chernobyl plant, and that old Westinghouse pressure cookers the Japanese have. "Safe. No problem. Never ever. Power too cheap to meter". Only thing: they weren't that safe. The pebble bed reactors, btw, were also supposed to be guaranteed safe, but they weren't. Nuclear has one hell of a credibility problem. Those claims of "passive safety" are just that: claims. And made by people that have been caught lying more than once too often.
That might as well be never. The upshot of decades of research has been that the problems are much, much harder to solve than initially thought.
You will have to make a more intelligent argument. The Chernobyl area is all lush and green, but unsafe to live in. The open pit coal mines, would work stop there tomorrow, would be safe to visit the next day, and green, and lush, and inhabitable, in a matter of years.
They'll buy it from their neighbours, of course. That's not a problem. Maybe they manage to convince the Ukrainians to build lots of plants in their backyard and produce all the electricity there ever is going to be needed. I've heard they already have a nice place for that.
There is an argument to be made for not building nuclear power plants in densely populated areas like Germany.
This is being repeated over and over and over. Do you mean pebble bed? That was tried (in Germany, BTW) and the results were a) more waste and b) the realization that it actually is not "inherently safe" at all. It's in the wikipedia page.
Or do you mean something else, and want to come up with a reference?
I thought the same when I read about the project a few years ago. That figures sound insane.
Frankly, I think the problems with UIs are unsolvable. There is a point of diminishing returns, and after a while the returns become negative. And whoever is left out after that is a hopeless case.
This is how it actually works in practice (it's supposed to be satire, but, damn, it's way to accurate)
It would be way better for everyone if instead of routing around the problem, people would stand up and fight. Drawing your own pictures sure is cute, but does not change anything. And the fact is that a lot of very good books would be out of your and your students reach.
I am constantly amazed how fighting the system is not an option for so many people (may I call that cowardice?) People just prefer to go and find a way of hiding from all the evil out there, hoping that if they keep their heads to the ground, the might just dodge the bullets.
This is a tragic mistake. One has to get together, organize marches, actions, donate money to lobbying organizations, etc. etc. etc.
Because otherwise, evil will win.
What do you mean, "worst cases"?? That is the standard practice!
+1, insightful.
Still, do you have pointers to the standard oil story? It is truly scary. Rather heartening that government managed to step up and do something.
I would add to this that if the past (especially the banking crisis) is any guide, what will happen is that the companies (1) rake in the subsidies, looting the state, and (2) produce unsafe designs and build them in a shoddy way to further improve the margin. Which almost guarantees serious accidents.
The mentality most of the pro nuclear people show here on slashdot basically finds (1) and (2) ok, because (1) looting the state is good, as it never was legitimate to begin with ("government is always the problem") and (2) it's nuclear! What can possibly go wrong!
It is scary. They must be stopped.
Pebble bed reactors are not safe. The pebble bed is a granular medium, and thus prone to produce surprises. The experimental reactors in Germany more or less proved the design unsafe (and that was quite a while ago). That people still believe this to be safe technology just shows how much propaganda there is floating around.
The Zen way. You stand by instead of using it, and watch with compassion how the rest of humanity does something really stupid.
It is rather good evidence, apart of making sense scientifically. Under normal circumstances it would imply close scrutiny and a moratorium, because the risk for the hypothesis to be real is too strong to ignore.
In contrast, this line of reasoning...
does not make a shred of sense. Are you capable of seeing the the difference? Why are you making this braindamaged comparison?
That is sarcasm, right? I mean, yeah, it's not a communist country, but claiming that because of it the government and the power company cannot cover up stuff, or at least try, is pretty abysmally stupid. In particular because they are known to have done that quite a lot.
lying. That is what I predict. Because that's what they always do. Lying, covering up, lobbying, extorting - that's what they usually try. The reasons nuclear technology is having such acceptance problems has a lot to do with this. The mitsne ("planed failure mode") brouhaha is iconic for an industry with its head deeply in the sand (or did I get the exact nature of the damp place wrong?).
The nuclear industry has a completely authoritarian, reckless and corrupt management. I would not be surprised if they decided to lobby to outlaw Geiger counters Japan fairly soon.
No, but maybe with a drone like this. A couple of those on a large area can be used to find the victim, and then only one of the big ones to perpetuate the crime.
With that last one, you hit quite another nail on the head, albeit tangentially. The question is: why one database? The problem is probably technological monoculture more than anything. If you can't afford having an accident or making a mistake, you are in trouble, because you are in the wrong planet, and you are the wrong species (human).
If you think about it, the situation is so desperate that it is comical. You have a relatively standard IT department guarding an extremely juicy target. Oh so absolutely, ridiculously juicy. That just can't go well!
Maybe it got lost in translation? "Those unnamables thoroughly, professionally, fscked us"?
Is that sarcasm? You surely have not missed that those running the company to the ground and those that decided their pay were the same people? It is the common worker at such a company that suffers the consequences of the bad decisions taken by the good folks with the golden parachutes. The system is not working at all!
Right, because compassion, vision, inspiration, etc. amount to nothing. You guys are so severely impoverished on a spiritual level, it is incredible. How utterly horrible. And you are wrong too, btw.