Look at the response that the Fukushima plant had before the Tsunami hit. The quake itself hit, and the reactor SCRAM'ed as it should have. The facility had generators on site to walk the reactors through their cool-down period in case of local power system failures.
Part of the reason Tepco was so blind to the tsunami issue is that they'd been almost mono-focused on earthquake response. There, they're prepared for all but the unimaginable.
When the next Fukushima happens because reactors are practically all sited where they can be flooded, and because there's plenty of the same kind of reactor out there, will you finally STFU about nuclear power?
No I won't. Not with people like you making specious arguments like this.
A number of nuclear reactor safety system lessons emerged from the incident. The most obvious was that in tsunami-prone areas, a power station's sea wall must be adequately tall and robust.[6] At the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant, closer to the epicenter of 11 March earthquake and tsunami,[289] the sea wall was 14 meters tall and successfully withstood the tsunami, preventing serious damage and radioactivity releases.
The report noted that Tepco had not made any safety improvements to the Fukushima Daiichi plant since 2002, and had dismissed the possibility of it being hit by a massive tsunami, even though it could not produce supporting data.
It had, for example, insisted that Fukushima Daiichi's 5.7m seawall was high enough to withstand a tsunami generated by a large quake in the area, despite a warning in 2008 by its own engineers that much bigger waves were possible.
Why not simply build a better reactor that can actually burn most of this long-lived waste down to stuff that isn't (relatively) so long lived?
The big problem right now is that most of the waste is mildly radioactive, but it'll be mildly radioactive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. The problem with engineering is, do we REALLY think we can engineer a site that'll be good for 100+ millennia?
And worse, 75-85% of the fuel in that waste is still unspent. Because there's no reprocessing (the reason the fuel rods are removed is the breakdown of the casing, not because they're spent)..
We have the capability to reprocess fuel for extant solid fuel reactors and the capability to build newer reactor types that'll take said waste and cook it down to stuff that's more highly radioactive, but for FAR shorter periods. Now, can we build containment sites for stuff that's going to be cooking for a couple hundred years at most? Sure! A place like Yucca Mountain is ridiculous overkill for something like that.
And why spend billions for nuclear rather than solar?
Because solar simply CANNOT be baseline power. And what we need in the US is dependable baseline power. Solar, wind, wave, etc. They're great for peaking and for demand fluctuation. But, even with battery, they simply aren't capable of providing base load levels or reliability. And tossing enough battery capacity to actually do so would be both resource AND cost-prohibitive.
We're not going to see more Hydro in the US. The Environmental Concerns have spoken. Despite what they say, Coal and oil-fired are on their way out. Geothermal is geographically limited.
So guess what that means?
Nuclear or extreme austerity (see "Go shiver in a cave")
Design the facility appropriately for the expected natural disaster du jour. Implement a system to shut the reactor down before the storm comes ashore. Then simply shield the fuel and go home.
Thus, by the time it hits, even if it damages the facility SEVERLY, it won't be any more dangerous hitting any other storm-hardened structure.
What you're talking about is actually "failure of cooling systems".
This is a problem only for boiling water reactors. This is why BWRs are such huge, hyper-redundant, Rube-Goldbergian facilities. Because the actual reactors themselves are relatively small. The bulk of the physical plant is to accommodate the cooling systems.
If it were REALLY as much of a problem as you seem to think, we'd have it more often. But we have exactly 4 single-reactor failures of of hundreds and hundreds of reactor facilities.
Chernobyl was the Russians fucking around with an old, badly maintained reactor. TMI was a design flaw in the cooling system. Windscale was a military reactor that wasn't really designed for power production and operators who were mistaken about what was actually going on in the core. Fukushima was engineering cost cutting compromising safety systems.
We KNOW "don't fuck with the reactor". TMI simply can't happen anymore. Windscale simply can't happen anymore. Fukushima won't ever happen again. Because the next executive who tries to save a couple thousand in concrete and rebar for something like this would be reported and immediately ousted (then probably lynched).
There ARE ways to design reactors that are safe by default. Power cuts out, the reactor shuts down and dumps fuel into a dump tank. And it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE to cut out the safety feature. Also, since the reactor design isn't being cooled by high pressure boiling water, no steam explosions.
Chernobyl was the result of unauthorized modifications to the an aged reactor's operations that weren't communicated to the next shift.
TMI is an obsolete reactor that had several flaws in the cooling system.
Windscale was a military reactor and the operators misinterpreted what was going on in the core.
And Fukushima wasn't not "not doing safety right". It was a case of engineering cost-shaving. They basically saved a few thousand dollars in concrete and rebar and flushed a multi-billion dollar reactor facility.
In all of these, there were human fuckups. Sure.
But we HAVE learned from all of them.
Chernobyl, TMI and Windscale simply CANNOT HAPPEN today.
And Fukushima style cost-cutting for nuclear power won't ever happen again.
As of April, there are roughly 450 operational nuclear plants in the world. And there are scores more decommissioned plants. All operating without incident. All of the decommissioned ones from first fire to closure without an accident.
But NOOOOO!
You have a whopping FOUR isolated incidents! So nuclear power is evil/bad/scary/dangerous/unholy/Republican!
Long haul trucking will be the first profession eliminated by self driving trucks. The robot trucks will be driven 24 hours per day not counting maintenance.
Excuse me. I know a bit about long haul driving. So I'll be over here, laughing at this statement.
For local hauling, it might be okay. For OTR, it's not a solution. Period. Companies want those trucks up and running as much as possible. And rules about downtime and resets ALREADY cut into that quite a bit.
In some cases they can get around it by team driving. So one guy closes a shift and the other climbs into the driver's seat while the first heads back to the bunk.
If you go 300 miles and have to stop for 6 hours for something other than a reset...
2.8% is a statistical curiosity when simple majority isn't a "victory" condition.
And no it is NOT a contravention of the 14th Amendment..
You are guaranteed the right to vote and the privileges that come with it (if you're a citizen).
But the electoral system determines that the presidency isn't merely a popularity contest.
Otherwise California would always have unassailable say in who becomes president. Even if the rest of the country voted for someone else. The electoral system requires that a would-be president have a broad base of support across the country.
Nah. Germans are so gelded now, that simply labeling someone a Nazi is nearly enough to have them arrested.
Or at least stalked by a bunch of dipshits hoping to have enough "friends" with him to jump the person and prevent it from even resembling a fair fight.
But hey! Communism's all the rage in Germany now...
So all the time I spent yanking the stupid, useless fucking thing off the toolbar are for naught. They're going to embed it into the URL bar now where I can't rid myself of the waste of screen real estate.
I honestly wish I had the time to go out to California and cunt-punt every last one of them...
Sorry, but contrary to popular belief, Google is (and always has been) Evil. It's just that they're good enough at coverups that it becomes hard to collate all the instances of bad behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. And the next person who tries it will have the local MSM informed of the fact. Cue public lynching.
They already HAD a sea wall.
Adding a couple meters to it was a vanishingly small expense compared to flushing a multi-billion dollar facility down the drain.
I never said there will never be another accident.
Simply that, as the technology advances, the likelihood of an accident shrinks back from 1.0 rapidly. Especially for MSR-style reactors.
Look at the response that the Fukushima plant had before the Tsunami hit.
The quake itself hit, and the reactor SCRAM'ed as it should have.
The facility had generators on site to walk the reactors through their cool-down period in case of local power system failures.
Part of the reason Tepco was so blind to the tsunami issue is that they'd been almost mono-focused on earthquake response. There, they're prepared for all but the unimaginable.
Fukushima won't ever happen again.
When the next Fukushima happens because reactors are practically all sited where they can be flooded, and because there's plenty of the same kind of reactor out there, will you finally STFU about nuclear power?
No I won't. Not with people like you making specious arguments like this.
Your argument is irrelevant.
I never commented on the soundness of the tech.
The original post basically said "you can't do that" with a nuclear reactor (talking about portability).
I simply countered with an example that, yes. You can.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Fukushima...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
Why not simply build a better reactor that can actually burn most of this long-lived waste down to stuff that isn't (relatively) so long lived?
The big problem right now is that most of the waste is mildly radioactive, but it'll be mildly radioactive for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
The problem with engineering is, do we REALLY think we can engineer a site that'll be good for 100+ millennia?
And worse, 75-85% of the fuel in that waste is still unspent. Because there's no reprocessing (the reason the fuel rods are removed is the breakdown of the casing, not because they're spent)..
We have the capability to reprocess fuel for extant solid fuel reactors and the capability to build newer reactor types that'll take said waste and cook it down to stuff that's more highly radioactive, but for FAR shorter periods. Now, can we build containment sites for stuff that's going to be cooking for a couple hundred years at most? Sure! A place like Yucca Mountain is ridiculous overkill for something like that.
And why spend billions for nuclear rather than solar?
Because solar simply CANNOT be baseline power. And what we need in the US is dependable baseline power.
Solar, wind, wave, etc. They're great for peaking and for demand fluctuation. But, even with battery, they simply aren't capable of providing base load levels or reliability. And tossing enough battery capacity to actually do so would be both resource AND cost-prohibitive.
We're not going to see more Hydro in the US. The Environmental Concerns have spoken.
Despite what they say, Coal and oil-fired are on their way out.
Geothermal is geographically limited.
So guess what that means?
Nuclear or extreme austerity (see "Go shiver in a cave")
Actually there are certain types of tents that are designed to be covered in shot-crete.
So they can actually hold up pretty well.
The fuck you can't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or you could do what's been done for decades.
Design the facility appropriately for the expected natural disaster du jour.
Implement a system to shut the reactor down before the storm comes ashore.
Then simply shield the fuel and go home.
Thus, by the time it hits, even if it damages the facility SEVERLY, it won't be any more dangerous hitting any other storm-hardened structure.
"Run away effect".
*sigh*
You've been watching too much Jane Fonda again.
What you're talking about is actually "failure of cooling systems".
This is a problem only for boiling water reactors. This is why BWRs are such huge, hyper-redundant, Rube-Goldbergian facilities. Because the actual reactors themselves are relatively small. The bulk of the physical plant is to accommodate the cooling systems.
If it were REALLY as much of a problem as you seem to think, we'd have it more often. But we have exactly 4 single-reactor failures of of hundreds and hundreds of reactor facilities.
Chernobyl was the Russians fucking around with an old, badly maintained reactor.
TMI was a design flaw in the cooling system.
Windscale was a military reactor that wasn't really designed for power production and operators who were mistaken about what was actually going on in the core.
Fukushima was engineering cost cutting compromising safety systems.
We KNOW "don't fuck with the reactor".
TMI simply can't happen anymore.
Windscale simply can't happen anymore.
Fukushima won't ever happen again. Because the next executive who tries to save a couple thousand in concrete and rebar for something like this would be reported and immediately ousted (then probably lynched).
Sorry. But bullshit.
There ARE ways to design reactors that are safe by default. Power cuts out, the reactor shuts down and dumps fuel into a dump tank. And it's pretty much IMPOSSIBLE to cut out the safety feature.
Also, since the reactor design isn't being cooled by high pressure boiling water, no steam explosions.
Chernobyl was the result of unauthorized modifications to the an aged reactor's operations that weren't communicated to the next shift.
TMI is an obsolete reactor that had several flaws in the cooling system.
Windscale was a military reactor and the operators misinterpreted what was going on in the core.
And Fukushima wasn't not "not doing safety right". It was a case of engineering cost-shaving. They basically saved a few thousand dollars in concrete and rebar and flushed a multi-billion dollar reactor facility.
In all of these, there were human fuckups. Sure.
But we HAVE learned from all of them.
Chernobyl, TMI and Windscale simply CANNOT HAPPEN today.
And Fukushima style cost-cutting for nuclear power won't ever happen again.
As of April, there are roughly 450 operational nuclear plants in the world. And there are scores more decommissioned plants.
All operating without incident. All of the decommissioned ones from first fire to closure without an accident.
But NOOOOO!
You have a whopping FOUR isolated incidents! So nuclear power is evil/bad/scary/dangerous/unholy/Republican!
Gimme a break.
Actually the quake wasn't a factor. AT ALL.
The reactors went into shutdown properly after the quake. As they were supposed to.
And, had the sea wall been built to the height that the engineers had recommended, there would have been NO damage to Fukushima whatsoever.
Billions wasted, and an area contaminated. All because some jackass couldn't be bothered to pay for a couple thousand bucks in concrete and rebar.
Exactly.
Fuck PayPal. Them and the horse they rode in on.
Long haul trucking will be the first profession eliminated by self driving trucks. The robot trucks will be driven 24 hours per day not counting maintenance.
Excuse me. I know a bit about long haul driving. So I'll be over here, laughing at this statement.
For local hauling, it might be okay.
For OTR, it's not a solution. Period. Companies want those trucks up and running as much as possible. And rules about downtime and resets ALREADY cut into that quite a bit.
In some cases they can get around it by team driving. So one guy closes a shift and the other climbs into the driver's seat while the first heads back to the bunk.
If you go 300 miles and have to stop for 6 hours for something other than a reset...
Then use the Crashplan business offering to back up that machine?
2.8% is a statistical curiosity when simple majority isn't a "victory" condition.
And no it is NOT a contravention of the 14th Amendment..
You are guaranteed the right to vote and the privileges that come with it (if you're a citizen).
But the electoral system determines that the presidency isn't merely a popularity contest.
Otherwise California would always have unassailable say in who becomes president. Even if the rest of the country voted for someone else. The electoral system requires that a would-be president have a broad base of support across the country.
In the American system, simply getting more votes doesn't get you victory.
Thus, its not a "win".
It's a statistical curiosity, nothing more.
Watch Tim Pool's videos of his time at the G20.
Where merely being in a picture taken of a supposed "nazi" was enough to get people stalked and violently attacked.
Nah. Germans are so gelded now, that simply labeling someone a Nazi is nearly enough to have them arrested.
Or at least stalked by a bunch of dipshits hoping to have enough "friends" with him to jump the person and prevent it from even resembling a fair fight.
But hey! Communism's all the rage in Germany now...
I dunno. I'm pretty fat. I could use the exercise.
So all the time I spent yanking the stupid, useless fucking thing off the toolbar are for naught. They're going to embed it into the URL bar now where I can't rid myself of the waste of screen real estate.
I honestly wish I had the time to go out to California and cunt-punt every last one of them...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Oh. You were SERIOUS?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Sorry, but contrary to popular belief, Google is (and always has been) Evil. It's just that they're good enough at coverups that it becomes hard to collate all the instances of bad behavior.