Well another thing is that the military is probably less concerned if the reactors used in subs are a potential weapons material proliferation risk since they have such tight control over the reactor's fuel cycle.
Civilian reactors, on the other hand, should be designed to minimize proliferation risks and maximize safety.
It's a false assumption that military reactors are inherently safer - look at Chernobyl. That's an example of a reactor that was initially designed to produce weapons material and was later repurposed for power generation. Some of the design choices to make it suitable for the former (such as a graphite moderator) made it fundamentally less safe for the latter.
"How about we just put the money in to them to actually modernize them and make them safe?" The problem is anti-nuclear zealots like yourself fight new reactors tooth and nail.
The end result - To meet power demands, old reactors get service life extensions instead of decommissioning.
This greatly increases the risk of an incident compared to building new plants that have significant improvements in safety design. The problems at Fukushima most likely would not have happened if the reactors were ABWRs due to having a gas turbine to handle SBO situations in addition to batteries/diesel. They definitely would not have happened with an ESBWR or AP1000 since they are designed to passively manage decay heat without any electrical backups at all.
Look at Russia - since it's so hard to get new nuclear plants built, they still have RBMKs in operation that don't have any containment building. RBMKs!!!!
Chernobyl is a horrible example when you are talking about nuclear industry safety. There are a wide number of reasons, including: 1) They were conducting a dangerous experiment 2) They chose to proceed with said dangerous experiment even when the reactor wanted to SCRAM - they overrode it. 3) Shift supervisor (a good Communisty party guy - even after the explosion he insisted for at least an hour that it was still intact) insistent on continuing experiment when all of the trained operators were saying they should shut it down 4) Reactor designed primarily for making piping hot loaves of weapons plutonium and repurposed to power generation, not primarily for power generation 5) Reactor with highly positive void coefficient (A reactor with ANY positive void coefficient is illegal in the United States for safety reasons) 6) Reactor with no containment provisions whatsoever
Google "decay heat". No uncontrolled reaction here. Thanks for the attempt at uneducated scaremongering.
However, I do agree - decay heat isn't being properly controlled here. That's a disadvantage of old clunkers like this reactor. Newer reactor designs have significant improvements in passive decay heat management.
I think the problem is that not only did the generators flood, but the place where they could be plugged in was flooded as well.
Ooops.
Now everyone is fighting the construction of new reactors like more ABWRs - except this wouldn't have happened at an ABWR, they have a combustion gas turbine inside the generator building in addition to the outdoor diesel generators.
I never talked about our water supply infrastructure, unless you mean our hydroelectric installations which are, currently, at their maximum.
Show me one case of a wind plant that has enough storage to completely even out its output variations.
"USA btw is leading in technology for hugh chemical batteries." - Show me examples. Show me one example of a battery installation capable of meeting the needs of a large city, or even a small city which is powered only by wind/solar. Wind power in the USA is already experiencing problems from the fact that in the areas where we have the most suitable winds for power generation, the wind speeds tend to be low when power is needed most. (Specifically, most of our wind power comes from California and Texas - the times when power is needed the most are hot days due to air conditioning - those happen to also be the times when wind output is the lowest.)
"Wind: you mainly use water plants or compressed air plants or hugh batteries. USA btw is leading in technology for hugh chemical batteries." What is a "water plant"? Do you mean pumped-storage hydroelectric? I already told you - we already have pumped-storage hydro in nearly any location that it can be placed. We have no more places to put large pumped-storage facilities in the United States. Pumped-storage carries nearly the same dangers to the population from dam failures as normal hydroelectric does. Remember, one dam failure incident in China (Banqiao) killed more people (26,000) in a matter of days than nuclear power has over its entire history (Estimate 4000-10000 from Chernobyl, beyond that only a few tens of people have died, mostly plant workers.) If you remove the dangerous Soviet experiments gone wrong using reactors that were designed primarily for producing bomb material and not safe power generation, the number of people who have died from nuclear power is in the tens or hundreds, nearly all of whom were plant workers or researchers.
"Compressed air plant" - Show me one example of one of these that is anything beyond a pilot/proof of concept. I'm not sure if any of these exist other than as a drawing on someone's computer. It's interesting in theory, but in practice - There are plenty of issues, such as how one creates the storage cavern in the first place. There are a few existing locations where candidate caverns exist but not many.
"Regarding your wind plants in Texas: then get bette wind turbines. Come on, that plant is how old?" - Two years. Roscoe opened in 2009.
You claim Germany is proof that we can fully transition to wind and solar, but so far, wind only accounts for 5.1% of your electricity. Denmark is highest at nearly 20%, however, it's only 20% in a country with consistent enough wind to achieve a 24% capacity factor. Good luck achieving more than 50% of your demand economically using a technology with a less than 20% capacity factor in your country. Nuclear is perfect for baseload generation, historically delivering a 90% capacity factor.
That's the problem with wind - as the percentage of electrical demand satisfied increases, the storage requirements increase. Most wind systems have not had to manage variation much due to being, at most, 20% of a country's electrical demand, but for every nuke plant you replace with a wind farm, you also need to add a coal or gas plant to fill in the holes.
"First of all, in a country like USA there is ALWAYS enough wind." - False
"It is impossible you don't have any wind at all on any of your costs." - "Second, the energy grids are interlinked. Do you really think germany for instance has an isolated grid?" - It's a known fact that the U.S. grid infrastructure is incapable of routing significantly "lopsided" loads. One major wind project in Texas got cancelled because it depended on a major grid infrstructure upgrade that didn't happen. A large wind installation in Washington state or Oregon had to actively reduce output in a number of high-wind situations because the grid couldn't handle it. Upgrading our grid will take years.
"If all power plants in germany would shut down, we had enough current from Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and France.. no one would even notice." - I don't think your grid has that much capacity. Your neighbors don't, and if they do, they're going to charge you an arm and a leg for the power. I'm going to laugh when Germany replaces their domestic nuclear power with French nuclear power and the French overcharge you for it.:)
"Third: the storage technology exists. It is a myth that it does not." - We have a saying in America - "Show me the money". You claim it exists. Show me - show an actual practical installation of a storage system that is capable of smoothing out the output of a wind farm to the point where it is suitable for baseload power. The only technology we have with sufficient capacity is pumped-storage hydro, but we alread have pumped storage in place in the majority of locations where it is feasible. (Such as the major pumped storage facility downstream from Niagara Falls.)
Do note that two of the largest wind farms in the world take a total of approximately 150,000 acres of land in Texas, and only provide as much electricity as two older nuclear reactors, or one newer one.
We don't have the technology to do that yet. Energy storage technology is just nowhere near what it needs to be to allow solar, wind, or tidal to provide primary baseload generation.
They may likely be there in 50-60 years, but not now - since the service life of new nuke plants would be 40-50 years, it's the perfect time to invest in another round of nuclear plants to replace the old clunkers we have now.
50 years from now, when the time comes to decommission a second round of nuclear plants, we can reevaluate: 1) Are solar/wind + the state of the art of storage technology where they need to be? (I suspect "maybe" in 50 years) 2) Where is the state of the art of nuclear? Are breeders that can burn what is currently considered to be waste commercially viable? (I suspect "almost surely" in 50 years.)
You have to keep in mind that while there were fault lines almost immediately under the plant, these fault lines did not contribute in any way to the disaster.
The plant suffered no significant direct earthquake damage - the problem was the tsunami and not the faults.
Nearly all of our plants in the US are along rivers and not shoreline. Many of those on shorelines are on the East Coast, which is not prone to tsunamis (no megathrust faults).
So the only plants at potential risk are a small handful on shorelines on the West Coast. Easy enough to build some berms for the backup generators though.
There are known reactor designs that can "burn" what is currently considered spent fuel.
I believe it was possible to supply the entire United States electrical demand for the next 100 years using IFRs and only the amounts of spent fuel we had in 1996 or so when the IFR was cancelled.
Please don't use Chernobyl and accident in the same sentence.
Read up on the timeline - it wasn't an accident, it was a dangerous experiment gone wrong, including acts of criminal negligence by the plant supervisor.
In the entire history of nuclear power, including Soviet nuclear power, there have been an estimated 5-10 thousand deaths from cancer. That includes Chernobyl, which was not an accident but a dangerous experiment gone wrong where the operators intentionally overrode numerous safety systems.
There is a recent estimate of 13,000 deaths per year due to cancer caused by coal plant pollution.
Gas drilling employing hydrofracturing has resulted in widespread groundwater contamination and sickness in only 5-10 years.
Not counting the experiment-gone-wrong at Chernobyl (dangerous experiment, dangerous reactor design, no containment building whatsoever) and Mayak (Soviets were willing to do anything to get piping hot loaves of weapons grade plutonium so they could make America go boom), the number of deaths resulting from nuclear power (nearly all involving plant workers) has been on the order of tens of people. I don't have time to dig up the citation now, but I believe the wind power industry has resulted in more deaths. It's just that some guy getting irradiated because he dumped reprocessing chemicals into a bucket he wasn't supposed to is MUCH bigger news (and is tracked in more detail by the IAEA) than a few guys falling to their deaths while maintaining wind generators (not reported at more than a local scale, not really tracked by anyone except possibly OSHA).
I disagree with some of your claims. While surviving a direct 9.0 hit at the epicenter of a quake is likely impossible - there are VERY few locations in the world that need this. Nearly all such quakes occur in undersea megathrust faults.
You need to keep in mind that in terms of direct quake effects, the plant DID survive the quake.
In terms of tsunami effects, the main plant itself DID survive the tsunami. Unfortunately, the diesel backup generators were placed on lower ground than the plant and didn't survive. Had the generators been at the same height as the main plant, things would be fine. Had the plant been an ABWR with a gas turbine inside the plant building in addition to the outdoor diesels, things would be fine. Had the plant been an ESBWR with passive cooling for decay heat removal, things would be fine.
Japan has been preparing for "the big one" for years - however, both geologically and historically, this has meant an earthquake in the Tokai region, with none known beyond an 8.5 magnitude. This quake was a major surprise to geologists, both its strength and its location.
In the next generation design after these reactors (ABWR, Japan operates a number of these), a 20MW gas turbine was added within a sheltered area - BEYOND the diesel backups. So if these reactors had been ABWRs we probably would have been fine.
In the next generation design after that (ESBWR - still under regulatory review), the gas turbine and diesels are still there, but not necessary - there are heatpipes up to large cooling pools that can handle 72 hours of decay heat without any intervention, and beyond that the pools can be refilled with a plain old fire truck. (They are nonradioactive due to the use of heat exchangers, and at atmospheric pressure.) - So ESBWRs would have been fine here.
Only about 33-36% of the reactor's thermal output is converted to electricity.
The rest needs to be dissipated into a heatsink.
To avoid heating rivers up too much, France uses cooling towers pretty heavily. However, cooling towers are big and unsightly and set off the NIMBYs, so many plant operators use rivers or, in Japan, the ocean as their heatsink.
The thing is - with a cooling tower, you could set up some large heatpipes to provide 100% passive removal of decay heat.
"A wind power plant is faster build up than a new coal plant or nuclear plant." What about the battery bank you need to build for when there isn't enough wind?
That is wind and solar's problem - We have the technology to generate electricity, but we don't have the technology yet to store it for when the wind/solar is at low output or demand is high.
Solar and wind are great but they are nowhere close to being able to meet baseload demand. A major buildout of wind/solar without a corresponding buildout of storage systems just means deploying more coal/gas plants to fill in the gaps.
Our roadmap does need to include wind and solar - but it just isn't technologically ready yet to meet the majority of our electrical demand, demand which is going to increase as our transportation energy needs migrate from fossil fuels to electricity. To meet our short-term (40-50 years or so, which happens to be the normal service life of a nuclear plant) we need to start a buildout of nuclear plants using the major improvements in safety that have been put into nuclear designs over the past 40 years since the first of the old clunkers at Fukushima were built.
That has been a pretty big focus in modern reactor design - remove the human from the loop as much as possible.
Newer reactors (ABWR and later) are designed to permit boron injection w/o writing off the reactor - that removes one of the major psychological barriers to doing what needs to be done.
Even newer reactors (ESBWR and AP1000) are designed to be passively safe without any operator intervention for at least 72 hours after a major accident.
I think a little bit of thinking could get us there. We're close with the ESBWR. That uses what are effectively heatpipes up to a nonradioactive cooling pond. We're almost there.
However, many plants make a choice in terms of cooling - they use a local heat sink that requires some active pumping. In the case of Fukushima, they dump waste heat into the ocean.
Not all plants do this - in France there are concerns about elevating river levels too much, so while their water intake is cold water from a river, MOST of the heat is dissipated by large cooling towers before putting the water back into the river.
One of these cooling towers should easily be able to dissipate the decay heat of a reactor passively - so just take the ESBWR approach, and add additional heatpipes up to a big passive cooling tower.
Boom - decay heat management problem goes from "solved for 72 hours w/o any external power" (ESBWR) to "solved indefinitely w/o any external power".
But doing this requires building new plants, not service life extensions for old clunkers.
The ABWR's inside-the-turbine-building 20MW gas turbine backup generator would have prevented the extended station blackout that caused the problems at Fukushima. The ESBWR (under regulator review) would not need any backup power - the most it would have required is a plain old fire truck after 72 hours to refill the isolation condenser pools. (Note: These pools are not directly in contact with any nuclear materials, so can safely boil.)
The Westinghouse AP1000 (under construction in numerous locations) can suffer a line break loss of coolant within the containment building and not require any operator intervention whatsoever for 72 hours. At that point the main thing required would be to refill a water tank (again, one that is not in contact with any radioactive materials.)
You really have to put Fukushima into perspective - in a matter of hours, the earthquake and tsunami killed at least ten thousand people - and the confirmed death toll is rising. It was the fifth strongest earthquake in recorded history and the strongest in Japan's - the reactors all survived that and shut down as designed. The tsunami was significantly stronger than anything seen before in that part of Japan. The seawalls were around 12 meters high (highest tsunami there previously was something like 8 meters), but this tsunami was 13-14 meters and swamped the backup diesels.
The fact that first-generation reactors (one of which was originally scheduled for decommissioning this month but got service life extended) with the oldest containment designs in service held up as well as they did in this worst-case scenario says a great deal about the paranoia of nuclear safety system designers. Despite the fact that the original designs were impressive, they have been consistently paranoid and keep on engineering for scenarios that could possibly happen but have never yet happened - hence the improved backups in ABWR and the eliminated need for them in ESBWR/AP1000.
Wind and solar aren't ready yet - to make them suitable for baseload generation we need massive improvements in energy storage technology which we don't have. If we deploy wind and solar heavily, we'll need a lot of peaking plants to fill in the gaps. Peaking plants are usually gas-fired (they can change power output the fastest), and in just the past five years, gas drilling has been responsible for more groundwater contamination and illness than the entire history of nuclear power outside of the Soviet Union.
Even if we get coal-fired peaking plants to fill in the holes - those just spew out toxic pollution (including radioactive substances!) on a regular basis. Hell, in China they're looking into using coal plant ash as a source for nuclear fuel, the uranium content is that high.
Hydro - we're tapped out, almost any possible place where we'd build a dam already has one built.. Oh, and just one hydro incident (Banqiao Dam) killed more people than the entire history of nuclear power, INCLUDING Soviet nuclear power which accounts for the majority of nuclear illnesses/deaths.
"sudo mod me up" - Sorry, not currently in sudoers it seems.
You are correct though - Motorola's semiconductor business was spun off to Freescale, and still IS an ARM licensee. They haven't been doing too well lately (Posted VERY high losses last year I believe), but they do exist.
But it's still the only platform that seems to be holding up well against iOS...
WP7 seems to have epicfailed from the get-go (crippled compared to its predecessor with the only thing to offer being a shiny UI, causing former Windows Mobile loyalists to jump ship - many of the hardcore WM owners have gone Android, and in some cases have taken to running Android on their Windows-Mobile targeted hardware.) On top of the above issues, WP7 has had some serious issues (excessive background data usage, numerous firmware updates causing bricking)
webOS - seems dead from the start to me
BlackBerry - Hanging in their due to their incredible momentum and entrenchment within the large business connectivity segment
Motorola has tried (and failed) numerous times to do their own thing. They're idiots if they think they can do it again.
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Well another thing is that the military is probably less concerned if the reactors used in subs are a potential weapons material proliferation risk since they have such tight control over the reactor's fuel cycle.
Civilian reactors, on the other hand, should be designed to minimize proliferation risks and maximize safety.
It's a false assumption that military reactors are inherently safer - look at Chernobyl. That's an example of a reactor that was initially designed to produce weapons material and was later repurposed for power generation. Some of the design choices to make it suitable for the former (such as a graphite moderator) made it fundamentally less safe for the latter.
"How about we just put the money in to them to actually modernize them and make them safe?"
The problem is anti-nuclear zealots like yourself fight new reactors tooth and nail.
The end result - To meet power demands, old reactors get service life extensions instead of decommissioning.
This greatly increases the risk of an incident compared to building new plants that have significant improvements in safety design. The problems at Fukushima most likely would not have happened if the reactors were ABWRs due to having a gas turbine to handle SBO situations in addition to batteries/diesel. They definitely would not have happened with an ESBWR or AP1000 since they are designed to passively manage decay heat without any electrical backups at all.
Look at Russia - since it's so hard to get new nuclear plants built, they still have RBMKs in operation that don't have any containment building. RBMKs!!!!
Chernobyl is a horrible example when you are talking about nuclear industry safety. There are a wide number of reasons, including:
1) They were conducting a dangerous experiment
2) They chose to proceed with said dangerous experiment even when the reactor wanted to SCRAM - they overrode it.
3) Shift supervisor (a good Communisty party guy - even after the explosion he insisted for at least an hour that it was still intact) insistent on continuing experiment when all of the trained operators were saying they should shut it down
4) Reactor designed primarily for making piping hot loaves of weapons plutonium and repurposed to power generation, not primarily for power generation
5) Reactor with highly positive void coefficient (A reactor with ANY positive void coefficient is illegal in the United States for safety reasons)
6) Reactor with no containment provisions whatsoever
Google "decay heat". No uncontrolled reaction here. Thanks for the attempt at uneducated scaremongering.
However, I do agree - decay heat isn't being properly controlled here. That's a disadvantage of old clunkers like this reactor. Newer reactor designs have significant improvements in passive decay heat management.
I think the problem is that not only did the generators flood, but the place where they could be plugged in was flooded as well.
Ooops.
Now everyone is fighting the construction of new reactors like more ABWRs - except this wouldn't have happened at an ABWR, they have a combustion gas turbine inside the generator building in addition to the outdoor diesel generators.
I never talked about our water supply infrastructure, unless you mean our hydroelectric installations which are, currently, at their maximum.
Show me one case of a wind plant that has enough storage to completely even out its output variations.
"USA btw is leading in technology for hugh chemical batteries." - Show me examples. Show me one example of a battery installation capable of meeting the needs of a large city, or even a small city which is powered only by wind/solar. Wind power in the USA is already experiencing problems from the fact that in the areas where we have the most suitable winds for power generation, the wind speeds tend to be low when power is needed most. (Specifically, most of our wind power comes from California and Texas - the times when power is needed the most are hot days due to air conditioning - those happen to also be the times when wind output is the lowest.)
"Wind: you mainly use water plants or compressed air plants or hugh batteries. USA btw is leading in technology for hugh chemical batteries."
What is a "water plant"? Do you mean pumped-storage hydroelectric? I already told you - we already have pumped-storage hydro in nearly any location that it can be placed. We have no more places to put large pumped-storage facilities in the United States. Pumped-storage carries nearly the same dangers to the population from dam failures as normal hydroelectric does. Remember, one dam failure incident in China (Banqiao) killed more people (26,000) in a matter of days than nuclear power has over its entire history (Estimate 4000-10000 from Chernobyl, beyond that only a few tens of people have died, mostly plant workers.) If you remove the dangerous Soviet experiments gone wrong using reactors that were designed primarily for producing bomb material and not safe power generation, the number of people who have died from nuclear power is in the tens or hundreds, nearly all of whom were plant workers or researchers.
"Compressed air plant" - Show me one example of one of these that is anything beyond a pilot/proof of concept. I'm not sure if any of these exist other than as a drawing on someone's computer. It's interesting in theory, but in practice - There are plenty of issues, such as how one creates the storage cavern in the first place. There are a few existing locations where candidate caverns exist but not many.
"Regarding your wind plants in Texas: then get bette wind turbines. Come on, that plant is how old?" - Two years. Roscoe opened in 2009.
You claim Germany is proof that we can fully transition to wind and solar, but so far, wind only accounts for 5.1% of your electricity. Denmark is highest at nearly 20%, however, it's only 20% in a country with consistent enough wind to achieve a 24% capacity factor. Good luck achieving more than 50% of your demand economically using a technology with a less than 20% capacity factor in your country. Nuclear is perfect for baseload generation, historically delivering a 90% capacity factor.
That's the problem with wind - as the percentage of electrical demand satisfied increases, the storage requirements increase. Most wind systems have not had to manage variation much due to being, at most, 20% of a country's electrical demand, but for every nuke plant you replace with a wind farm, you also need to add a coal or gas plant to fill in the holes.
"First of all, in a country like USA there is ALWAYS enough wind." - False
"It is impossible you don't have any wind at all on any of your costs." - "Second, the energy grids are interlinked. Do you really think germany for instance has an isolated grid?" - It's a known fact that the U.S. grid infrastructure is incapable of routing significantly "lopsided" loads. One major wind project in Texas got cancelled because it depended on a major grid infrstructure upgrade that didn't happen. A large wind installation in Washington state or Oregon had to actively reduce output in a number of high-wind situations because the grid couldn't handle it. Upgrading our grid will take years.
"If all power plants in germany would shut down, we had enough current from Austria, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and France .. no one would even notice." - I don't think your grid has that much capacity. Your neighbors don't, and if they do, they're going to charge you an arm and a leg for the power. I'm going to laugh when Germany replaces their domestic nuclear power with French nuclear power and the French overcharge you for it. :)
"Third: the storage technology exists. It is a myth that it does not." - We have a saying in America - "Show me the money". You claim it exists. Show me - show an actual practical installation of a storage system that is capable of smoothing out the output of a wind farm to the point where it is suitable for baseload power. The only technology we have with sufficient capacity is pumped-storage hydro, but we alread have pumped storage in place in the majority of locations where it is feasible. (Such as the major pumped storage facility downstream from Niagara Falls.)
Do note that two of the largest wind farms in the world take a total of approximately 150,000 acres of land in Texas, and only provide as much electricity as two older nuclear reactors, or one newer one.
We don't have the technology to do that yet. Energy storage technology is just nowhere near what it needs to be to allow solar, wind, or tidal to provide primary baseload generation.
They may likely be there in 50-60 years, but not now - since the service life of new nuke plants would be 40-50 years, it's the perfect time to invest in another round of nuclear plants to replace the old clunkers we have now.
50 years from now, when the time comes to decommission a second round of nuclear plants, we can reevaluate:
1) Are solar/wind + the state of the art of storage technology where they need to be? (I suspect "maybe" in 50 years)
2) Where is the state of the art of nuclear? Are breeders that can burn what is currently considered to be waste commercially viable? (I suspect "almost surely" in 50 years.)
You have to keep in mind that while there were fault lines almost immediately under the plant, these fault lines did not contribute in any way to the disaster.
The plant suffered no significant direct earthquake damage - the problem was the tsunami and not the faults.
Nearly all of our plants in the US are along rivers and not shoreline. Many of those on shorelines are on the East Coast, which is not prone to tsunamis (no megathrust faults).
So the only plants at potential risk are a small handful on shorelines on the West Coast. Easy enough to build some berms for the backup generators though.
You forgot Banqiao.
There are known reactor designs that can "burn" what is currently considered spent fuel.
I believe it was possible to supply the entire United States electrical demand for the next 100 years using IFRs and only the amounts of spent fuel we had in 1996 or so when the IFR was cancelled.
Please don't use Chernobyl and accident in the same sentence.
Read up on the timeline - it wasn't an accident, it was a dangerous experiment gone wrong, including acts of criminal negligence by the plant supervisor.
Define the severe risks?
In the entire history of nuclear power, including Soviet nuclear power, there have been an estimated 5-10 thousand deaths from cancer. That includes Chernobyl, which was not an accident but a dangerous experiment gone wrong where the operators intentionally overrode numerous safety systems.
There is a recent estimate of 13,000 deaths per year due to cancer caused by coal plant pollution.
Gas drilling employing hydrofracturing has resulted in widespread groundwater contamination and sickness in only 5-10 years.
Not counting the experiment-gone-wrong at Chernobyl (dangerous experiment, dangerous reactor design, no containment building whatsoever) and Mayak (Soviets were willing to do anything to get piping hot loaves of weapons grade plutonium so they could make America go boom), the number of deaths resulting from nuclear power (nearly all involving plant workers) has been on the order of tens of people. I don't have time to dig up the citation now, but I believe the wind power industry has resulted in more deaths. It's just that some guy getting irradiated because he dumped reprocessing chemicals into a bucket he wasn't supposed to is MUCH bigger news (and is tracked in more detail by the IAEA) than a few guys falling to their deaths while maintaining wind generators (not reported at more than a local scale, not really tracked by anyone except possibly OSHA).
I disagree with some of your claims. While surviving a direct 9.0 hit at the epicenter of a quake is likely impossible - there are VERY few locations in the world that need this. Nearly all such quakes occur in undersea megathrust faults.
You need to keep in mind that in terms of direct quake effects, the plant DID survive the quake.
In terms of tsunami effects, the main plant itself DID survive the tsunami. Unfortunately, the diesel backup generators were placed on lower ground than the plant and didn't survive. Had the generators been at the same height as the main plant, things would be fine. Had the plant been an ABWR with a gas turbine inside the plant building in addition to the outdoor diesels, things would be fine. Had the plant been an ESBWR with passive cooling for decay heat removal, things would be fine.
Please state why you think a 9.0 earthquake was a strong possibility - especially when expert geologists didn't think this particular fault was capable of more than an 8.5-8.6 or so prior to this - http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-japan-earthquake-20110310,0,7154967.story
Japan has been preparing for "the big one" for years - however, both geologically and historically, this has meant an earthquake in the Tokai region, with none known beyond an 8.5 magnitude. This quake was a major surprise to geologists, both its strength and its location.
There's also the fact that:
In the next generation design after these reactors (ABWR, Japan operates a number of these), a 20MW gas turbine was added within a sheltered area - BEYOND the diesel backups. So if these reactors had been ABWRs we probably would have been fine.
In the next generation design after that (ESBWR - still under regulatory review), the gas turbine and diesels are still there, but not necessary - there are heatpipes up to large cooling pools that can handle 72 hours of decay heat without any intervention, and beyond that the pools can be refilled with a plain old fire truck. (They are nonradioactive due to the use of heat exchangers, and at atmospheric pressure.) - So ESBWRs would have been fine here.
Only about 33-36% of the reactor's thermal output is converted to electricity.
The rest needs to be dissipated into a heatsink.
To avoid heating rivers up too much, France uses cooling towers pretty heavily. However, cooling towers are big and unsightly and set off the NIMBYs, so many plant operators use rivers or, in Japan, the ocean as their heatsink.
The thing is - with a cooling tower, you could set up some large heatpipes to provide 100% passive removal of decay heat.
"A wind power plant is faster build up than a new coal plant or nuclear plant."
What about the battery bank you need to build for when there isn't enough wind?
That is wind and solar's problem - We have the technology to generate electricity, but we don't have the technology yet to store it for when the wind/solar is at low output or demand is high.
Solar and wind are great but they are nowhere close to being able to meet baseload demand. A major buildout of wind/solar without a corresponding buildout of storage systems just means deploying more coal/gas plants to fill in the gaps.
Our roadmap does need to include wind and solar - but it just isn't technologically ready yet to meet the majority of our electrical demand, demand which is going to increase as our transportation energy needs migrate from fossil fuels to electricity. To meet our short-term (40-50 years or so, which happens to be the normal service life of a nuclear plant) we need to start a buildout of nuclear plants using the major improvements in safety that have been put into nuclear designs over the past 40 years since the first of the old clunkers at Fukushima were built.
That has been a pretty big focus in modern reactor design - remove the human from the loop as much as possible.
Newer reactors (ABWR and later) are designed to permit boron injection w/o writing off the reactor - that removes one of the major psychological barriers to doing what needs to be done.
Even newer reactors (ESBWR and AP1000) are designed to be passively safe without any operator intervention for at least 72 hours after a major accident.
I think a little bit of thinking could get us there. We're close with the ESBWR. That uses what are effectively heatpipes up to a nonradioactive cooling pond. We're almost there.
However, many plants make a choice in terms of cooling - they use a local heat sink that requires some active pumping. In the case of Fukushima, they dump waste heat into the ocean.
Not all plants do this - in France there are concerns about elevating river levels too much, so while their water intake is cold water from a river, MOST of the heat is dissipated by large cooling towers before putting the water back into the river.
One of these cooling towers should easily be able to dissipate the decay heat of a reactor passively - so just take the ESBWR approach, and add additional heatpipes up to a big passive cooling tower.
Boom - decay heat management problem goes from "solved for 72 hours w/o any external power" (ESBWR) to "solved indefinitely w/o any external power".
But doing this requires building new plants, not service life extensions for old clunkers.
Some of the safer designs are already here.
The ABWR's inside-the-turbine-building 20MW gas turbine backup generator would have prevented the extended station blackout that caused the problems at Fukushima.
The ESBWR (under regulator review) would not need any backup power - the most it would have required is a plain old fire truck after 72 hours to refill the isolation condenser pools. (Note: These pools are not directly in contact with any nuclear materials, so can safely boil.)
The Westinghouse AP1000 (under construction in numerous locations) can suffer a line break loss of coolant within the containment building and not require any operator intervention whatsoever for 72 hours. At that point the main thing required would be to refill a water tank (again, one that is not in contact with any radioactive materials.)
You really have to put Fukushima into perspective - in a matter of hours, the earthquake and tsunami killed at least ten thousand people - and the confirmed death toll is rising. It was the fifth strongest earthquake in recorded history and the strongest in Japan's - the reactors all survived that and shut down as designed. The tsunami was significantly stronger than anything seen before in that part of Japan. The seawalls were around 12 meters high (highest tsunami there previously was something like 8 meters), but this tsunami was 13-14 meters and swamped the backup diesels.
The fact that first-generation reactors (one of which was originally scheduled for decommissioning this month but got service life extended) with the oldest containment designs in service held up as well as they did in this worst-case scenario says a great deal about the paranoia of nuclear safety system designers. Despite the fact that the original designs were impressive, they have been consistently paranoid and keep on engineering for scenarios that could possibly happen but have never yet happened - hence the improved backups in ABWR and the eliminated need for them in ESBWR/AP1000.
Wind and solar aren't ready yet - to make them suitable for baseload generation we need massive improvements in energy storage technology which we don't have. If we deploy wind and solar heavily, we'll need a lot of peaking plants to fill in the gaps. Peaking plants are usually gas-fired (they can change power output the fastest), and in just the past five years, gas drilling has been responsible for more groundwater contamination and illness than the entire history of nuclear power outside of the Soviet Union.
Even if we get coal-fired peaking plants to fill in the holes - those just spew out toxic pollution (including radioactive substances!) on a regular basis. Hell, in China they're looking into using coal plant ash as a source for nuclear fuel, the uranium content is that high.
Hydro - we're tapped out, almost any possible place where we'd build a dam already has one built.. Oh, and just one hydro incident (Banqiao Dam) killed more people than the entire history of nuclear power, INCLUDING Soviet nuclear power which accounts for the majority of nuclear illnesses/deaths.
I think in terms of installed base and sales, iOS is still VERY strong.
In terms of growth, though - Android is growing rapidly, iOS isn't growing nearly as fast.
"sudo mod me up" - Sorry, not currently in sudoers it seems.
You are correct though - Motorola's semiconductor business was spun off to Freescale, and still IS an ARM licensee. They haven't been doing too well lately (Posted VERY high losses last year I believe), but they do exist.
But it's still the only platform that seems to be holding up well against iOS...
WP7 seems to have epicfailed from the get-go (crippled compared to its predecessor with the only thing to offer being a shiny UI, causing former Windows Mobile loyalists to jump ship - many of the hardcore WM owners have gone Android, and in some cases have taken to running Android on their Windows-Mobile targeted hardware.) On top of the above issues, WP7 has had some serious issues (excessive background data usage, numerous firmware updates causing bricking)
webOS - seems dead from the start to me
BlackBerry - Hanging in their due to their incredible momentum and entrenchment within the large business connectivity segment
Motorola has tried (and failed) numerous times to do their own thing. They're idiots if they think they can do it again.
Since it will be a different modulation scheme, probably they'll need a mild relicensing.
However a modulation scheme change with nothing else changing is almost surely subject to far less paperwork than a new site.