If you're going to "challenge" someone's intelligence, try not to make two spelling mistakes and one grammatical one in the sentence in which you do it, hmm?
Wind doesn't magically turn itself into electricity any more than uranium does. The only cost that's relevant is the total cost of doing this, whether that's building a turbine or mining fuel.
By the same argument that makes the wind free, uranium is also free - it's just lying there in the ground.
True, it costs money to get it and do something useful with it, but then the same is true for wind. I don't see the distinction in cost. Where there *is* a distinction is in resource magnitude (wind should last forever) and reliability (wind not so good here).
Advocating punitive responses to human weakness is like shouting at a deaf man to listen more clearly: it isn't going to work, and after a while it makes the people doing it look really, really stupid.
Not only that, but it encourages cover-ups, which is the last thing you want as it prevents general lessons from being learned.
Facebook doesn't really do IPv6. Bits of the site do, bits don't (notably the part responsible for delivering images). Try dropping IPv4 and seeing how well it still works. The BBC is the same.
From what I can tell, the Japanese plant (and apparently most around the world) are designed in a way that they will have a 100% chance of a meltdown in about 24 hours if they lose mains power and their generator fails to operate (assuming no outside intervention).
As far as I'm aware, most nuclear plants have at least two backup generators, and new designs either have three or four or don't need them at all. The issue at Fukushima was that they were inadequately protected from external events. I'm fairly sure your data centre wouldn't survive being hit by a 15 metre tsunami either.
Yes, it's a limitation. But TV broadcasts are open to only a small handful of people who can determine the content. Most people don't have access to it at all - is that not a much more severe limitation of free speech?
Given the privileged position TV broadcasters hold in this respect, holding them to additional standards to ensure they don't abuse that power is entirely reasonable.
With the cheap nuclear reactors that are still being build today we will have a major nuclear disaster every 20-30 years, and the economic damage to the affected country is huge.
Where do you get that number from? There's only been one major disaster in the entire history of nuclear power (two if you count Chernobyl, but that's not relevant to the kind of reactors used elsewhere), not one every 20 years. And that's with the old reactor designs. The probabilistic risk assessments show a significant reduction in severe accident frequency - 2 orders of magnitude or so - for new desgns.
So, one disaster in about 10,000 reactor years of operation. Let's be pessimistic and say this costs $100 billion to clean up. That's $10 million per year per reactor, or about 2% of the value of the electricity. So no, it doesn't make it unreasonably expensive, especially considering the reduced probablity of accidents with new designs.
The anti-nuclear arguments are notable for their lack of *quantitiative* assessments, even back of the envelope ones like mine above.
It's not the same thing, as the newer nuclear designs exist and are ready to be built. Does anyone have a fully developed idea of how to manage a majority renewable (intermittent) grid? I've seen lots of hand waves about smart grids, large scale grids and so forth but nothing in the way of a serious study with actual numbers in it.
That report was paid for by the Greens. Would you be satisfied if I produced a report by Areva and Westinghouse?
A more neutral and authoritative source would be the WHO report, which says something like 4000-10000 excess cancer deaths. That's still a lot, of course, but the truth is that we really don't know the effects of chronic low-dose radation exposure - it may be a lot less in reality. Or more, of course, but that seems rather less likely, because then the dose-response curve would have a rather implausible shape - steep at low dose, going shallow in the middle before steepening again in the region where we actually have decent data.
$8000 per kW is surprisingly steep, more than most nuclear projects I've seen. Is that just for the reactors or extra costs such as new transmission infrastructure? I don't see why you'd bother at $8000 per kW for just the reactors, surely gas or coal would be significantly cheaper.
I said that the cost of the solar project was $12700 per kW ("not even that hugely overbudget plant in Finland is costing $12700 per kW"), and indeed I calculated it the same way that you just did. Last time I checked Olkiluoto 3 was still under $6000 per kW, despite the huge cost overruns.
Of course, $700 million per 55 MW average is a lot more expensive than a nuclear plant... not even that hugely overbudget plant in Finland is costing $12700 per kW, and capital costs are somethng like 70% of the total cost for both sources.
Concentrating solar with heat storage has merits, but cost isn't one of them, at least not yet. Maybe with development, maybe not.
While one country after another in Europe is moving away from nuclear power the trend of nuclear is cool stays very popular on/. a forum which is often progressive and modern.
By Europe you really mean "Germany", as that's pretty much the only place that's firmly anti-nuclear. I can't see France abandoning it for example, and the UK still plans to build lots of new nuclear plants.
Slashdot is a forum which is technology-focused, unlike the politically motivated anti-nuclear direction of Germany. Replacing an established, reliable and reasonably affordable power source with an immature, intermittent and expensive one seems to me to be the opposite of progress from a technology and engineering standpoint, even if it does appease the Greens.
You don't need explosions for those to harm people. Radioactive contamination, air pollution, mining incidents, generations of cancer, dead zones, outright cost, centuries of waste storage, costly disasters,... if all the consequences of nuclear were piled into a single, per-decade event it would be an appalling accident, far worse than coal. Oops...
Fixed that for you.
Given that what you said isn't remotely true, "fixed that for you" doesn't seem appropriate. What contamination and air pollution? What cancers? Even if you include Chernobyl the effects are small compared to the effects of coal - which causes tens of thousands of early deaths per year worldwide due to air pollution. If you're just going to make shit up, there's no point even having a discussion.
The meltdown "boom" is a much vaster explosion, spewing radioactive material over a wide area.
Except that won't happen, and I don't know where you got that from. The molten fuel is extremely unlikely to have the correct geometry to go critical, since it needs to have a moderator present as well. The intact core is close to the maximally reactive configuration, and a molten core is unlikely to spontaneously assemble itself into a lattice of fuel + water. Criticality in a meltdown may be a concern for fast reactors, but these aren't fast reactors. Even then, it wouldn't be a massive blast like the hydrogen explosions - but the heat released could cause the containment to fail so it would be a problem, yes.
This seems to come up a lot. Are people so utterly certain that they're right that the only reason they can see for someone disagreeing is that they're paid to do so?
How many oil plant and coal plant explosions did we have in recent years?
You don't need explosions for those to harm people. Air pollution, mining incidents, global warming... if all the consequences of coal were piled into a single, per-decade event it would be an appalling accident, far worse than Fukushima.
I've read plenty about the TMI accident, thank you. The core melted, slumped to the bottom of the vessel, but didn't get much further. Hydrogen burned inside the containment building but didn't cause it to fail. They were worried about additional hydrogen problems at the time, but subsequent analyses showed them to be unfounded.
And you don't seem to have understood what I wrote. At Fukushima, something more serious *did* happen, thanks mostly to the hydrogen explosions causing damage and lack of power for cooling the containment, leading to a large release of iodine and caesium.
To your lack of knowledge: TMI was so close to go boom it is a miracle that it did not. Why don't you care to read up all the nice stories about it? Miracle I mean literally. Miracle as in: probably there was indeed a god saving that place.
That's nonsense. TMI had the same "boom" as Fukushima, except the hydrogen burn was inside the containment building, which held. After that, there wasn't a lot more with potential to breach containment, given that the plant still had power and cooling systems were still functional.
The containment system operated as it should have, and contained the fuel.
Unfortunately it failed to do so for at least one of the reactors, most likely due to overpressure or the hydrogen explosions. The containment is only "perfect" as long as cooling is available. Since it wasn't at Fukushima, the best that could be hoped for was a controlled venting in a way that filtered as much of the iodine/caesium out as possible. Seems they didn't even manage that, for whatever reason. Hopefully we'll find out why in a few months.
Some of the new designs, e.g. the AP1000, do have passive containment cooling, where natural air flow can provide cooling while keeping the containment sealed.
The primary loop is at high pressure, so you'd need to find a way to safely depressurise it while keeping core cooling going throughout the process. Only then will the water be able to flow down from the tank. Then you'd need some passive way of getting the heat out of the containment, as concrete isn't that good a heat conductor. You don't want to be venting primary coolant if you can help it, it's at least a bit radioactive even without fuel damage.
Some new designs such as the AP1000 do all this, but it's not quite as simple as you make out.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to "challenge" someone's intelligence, try not to make two spelling mistakes and one grammatical one in the sentence in which you do it, hmm?
Wind doesn't magically turn itself into electricity any more than uranium does. The only cost that's relevant is the total cost of doing this, whether that's building a turbine or mining fuel.
By the same argument that makes the wind free, uranium is also free - it's just lying there in the ground.
True, it costs money to get it and do something useful with it, but then the same is true for wind. I don't see the distinction in cost. Where there *is* a distinction is in resource magnitude (wind should last forever) and reliability (wind not so good here).
Advocating punitive responses to human weakness is like shouting at a deaf man to listen more clearly: it isn't going to work, and after a while it makes the people doing it look really, really stupid.
Not only that, but it encourages cover-ups, which is the last thing you want as it prevents general lessons from being learned.
Facebook doesn't really do IPv6. Bits of the site do, bits don't (notably the part responsible for delivering images). Try dropping IPv4 and seeing how well it still works. The BBC is the same.
Still, it's a start.
From what I can tell, the Japanese plant (and apparently most around the world) are designed in a way that they will have a 100% chance of a meltdown in about 24 hours if they lose mains power and their generator fails to operate (assuming no outside intervention).
As far as I'm aware, most nuclear plants have at least two backup generators, and new designs either have three or four or don't need them at all. The issue at Fukushima was that they were inadequately protected from external events. I'm fairly sure your data centre wouldn't survive being hit by a 15 metre tsunami either.
Nope. If IPv6 is a good answer to address space limitations, why are we not already using it?
Because we haven't needed it yet, as IPv4 addresses were still available. And still are, apart from in the APNIC region.
Yes, it's a limitation. But TV broadcasts are open to only a small handful of people who can determine the content. Most people don't have access to it at all - is that not a much more severe limitation of free speech?
Given the privileged position TV broadcasters hold in this respect, holding them to additional standards to ensure they don't abuse that power is entirely reasonable.
With the cheap nuclear reactors that are still being build today we will have a major nuclear disaster every 20-30 years, and the economic damage to the affected country is huge.
Where do you get that number from? There's only been one major disaster in the entire history of nuclear power (two if you count Chernobyl, but that's not relevant to the kind of reactors used elsewhere), not one every 20 years. And that's with the old reactor designs. The probabilistic risk assessments show a significant reduction in severe accident frequency - 2 orders of magnitude or so - for new desgns.
So, one disaster in about 10,000 reactor years of operation. Let's be pessimistic and say this costs $100 billion to clean up. That's $10 million per year per reactor, or about 2% of the value of the electricity. So no, it doesn't make it unreasonably expensive, especially considering the reduced probablity of accidents with new designs.
The anti-nuclear arguments are notable for their lack of *quantitiative* assessments, even back of the envelope ones like mine above.
It's not the same thing, as the newer nuclear designs exist and are ready to be built. Does anyone have a fully developed idea of how to manage a majority renewable (intermittent) grid? I've seen lots of hand waves about smart grids, large scale grids and so forth but nothing in the way of a serious study with actual numbers in it.
That report was paid for by the Greens. Would you be satisfied if I produced a report by Areva and Westinghouse?
A more neutral and authoritative source would be the WHO report, which says something like 4000-10000 excess cancer deaths. That's still a lot, of course, but the truth is that we really don't know the effects of chronic low-dose radation exposure - it may be a lot less in reality. Or more, of course, but that seems rather less likely, because then the dose-response curve would have a rather implausible shape - steep at low dose, going shallow in the middle before steepening again in the region where we actually have decent data.
$8 per kW would be a bargain, sign me up :)
$8000 per kW is surprisingly steep, more than most nuclear projects I've seen. Is that just for the reactors or extra costs such as new transmission infrastructure? I don't see why you'd bother at $8000 per kW for just the reactors, surely gas or coal would be significantly cheaper.
I said that the cost of the solar project was $12700 per kW ("not even that hugely overbudget plant in Finland is costing $12700 per kW"), and indeed I calculated it the same way that you just did. Last time I checked Olkiluoto 3 was still under $6000 per kW, despite the huge cost overruns.
Of course, $700 million per 55 MW average is a lot more expensive than a nuclear plant... not even that hugely overbudget plant in Finland is costing $12700 per kW, and capital costs are somethng like 70% of the total cost for both sources.
Concentrating solar with heat storage has merits, but cost isn't one of them, at least not yet. Maybe with development, maybe not.
While one country after another in Europe is moving away from nuclear power the trend of nuclear is cool stays very popular on /. a forum which is often progressive and modern.
By Europe you really mean "Germany", as that's pretty much the only place that's firmly anti-nuclear. I can't see France abandoning it for example, and the UK still plans to build lots of new nuclear plants.
Slashdot is a forum which is technology-focused, unlike the politically motivated anti-nuclear direction of Germany. Replacing an established, reliable and reasonably affordable power source with an immature, intermittent and expensive one seems to me to be the opposite of progress from a technology and engineering standpoint, even if it does appease the Greens.
You don't need explosions for those to harm people. Radioactive contamination, air pollution, mining incidents, generations of cancer, dead zones, outright cost, centuries of waste storage, costly disasters, ... if all the consequences of nuclear were piled into a single, per-decade event it would be an appalling accident, far worse than coal. Oops ...
Fixed that for you.
Given that what you said isn't remotely true, "fixed that for you" doesn't seem appropriate. What contamination and air pollution? What cancers? Even if you include Chernobyl the effects are small compared to the effects of coal - which causes tens of thousands of early deaths per year worldwide due to air pollution. If you're just going to make shit up, there's no point even having a discussion.
The meltdown "boom" is a much vaster explosion, spewing radioactive material over a wide area.
Except that won't happen, and I don't know where you got that from. The molten fuel is extremely unlikely to have the correct geometry to go critical, since it needs to have a moderator present as well. The intact core is close to the maximally reactive configuration, and a molten core is unlikely to spontaneously assemble itself into a lattice of fuel + water. Criticality in a meltdown may be a concern for fast reactors, but these aren't fast reactors. Even then, it wouldn't be a massive blast like the hydrogen explosions - but the heat released could cause the containment to fail so it would be a problem, yes.
You want a coal accident? Try this. Yes, it's mining, but it still counts. You can't have coal power stations without mining.
Is everyone who disagrees with you a shill?
This seems to come up a lot. Are people so utterly certain that they're right that the only reason they can see for someone disagreeing is that they're paid to do so?
How many oil plant and coal plant explosions did we have in recent years?
You don't need explosions for those to harm people. Air pollution, mining incidents, global warming... if all the consequences of coal were piled into a single, per-decade event it would be an appalling accident, far worse than Fukushima.
I've read plenty about the TMI accident, thank you. The core melted, slumped to the bottom of the vessel, but didn't get much further. Hydrogen burned inside the containment building but didn't cause it to fail. They were worried about additional hydrogen problems at the time, but subsequent analyses showed them to be unfounded.
And you don't seem to have understood what I wrote. At Fukushima, something more serious *did* happen, thanks mostly to the hydrogen explosions causing damage and lack of power for cooling the containment, leading to a large release of iodine and caesium.
To your lack of knowledge: TMI was so close to go boom it is a miracle that it did not. Why don't you care to read up all the nice stories about it? Miracle I mean literally. Miracle as in: probably there was indeed a god saving that place.
That's nonsense. TMI had the same "boom" as Fukushima, except the hydrogen burn was inside the containment building, which held. After that, there wasn't a lot more with potential to breach containment, given that the plant still had power and cooling systems were still functional.
I can only assume you're reading a different Slashdot, because there have been a large number of anti-nuke comments on every Fukushima story.
The containment system operated as it should have, and contained the fuel.
Unfortunately it failed to do so for at least one of the reactors, most likely due to overpressure or the hydrogen explosions. The containment is only "perfect" as long as cooling is available. Since it wasn't at Fukushima, the best that could be hoped for was a controlled venting in a way that filtered as much of the iodine/caesium out as possible. Seems they didn't even manage that, for whatever reason. Hopefully we'll find out why in a few months.
Some of the new designs, e.g. the AP1000, do have passive containment cooling, where natural air flow can provide cooling while keeping the containment sealed.
Nice, you got a few people with that one.
No, you don't have to reinstall Windows every year - my ~ 3 year old installation is running fine. Maybe that was true in the Windows 9x days though.
The primary loop is at high pressure, so you'd need to find a way to safely depressurise it while keeping core cooling going throughout the process. Only then will the water be able to flow down from the tank. Then you'd need some passive way of getting the heat out of the containment, as concrete isn't that good a heat conductor. You don't want to be venting primary coolant if you can help it, it's at least a bit radioactive even without fuel damage.
Some new designs such as the AP1000 do all this, but it's not quite as simple as you make out.