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Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by polit

• nnfy 9y ago
  Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
  • adamsea 9y ago
    Your standard of safety does not sound appropriate for nuclear reactors. And, the decision not to spend the money to make Fukushima safer may well have been a craven, if not corrupt, one. TEPCO has been pretty sleazy ever since the accident.
    • LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      > sleazy ever since the accident. Do you mean "even"?
  • lispm 9y ago
    http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-... > In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres respectively, both induced by magnitude 7.7 earthquakes. The June 1896 earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.3 produced a tsunami with run-up height of 38 metres in Tohoku region, killing more than 27,000 people. This risk needs to be addressed. That many people were killed by a tsunami is a catastrophe. But one would also like to have a stable energy system that does not go down like that and creates a huge problem (financial, technological, human, ...) for several decades. The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Reactors were claimed save, which in a single event were totally wrecked. We are not talking about a single problem, but multiple problems (failing electricity backups, failing outside electricity, exploding buildings, ...), design mistakes (fuel is difficult to reach) and problems generated by running these reactors (like the amount of spent fuel on-site which needs lots of electricity for cooling).
    • freeflight 9y ago
      > The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen. These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed [0]. The solution? Just "regulate" that in the case of emergency cooling the cooling water needs to be pre-heated, so the temperature shock doesn't break the pressure vessel. Whatever could go wrong with that approach? I guess nobody can imagine a scenario in which the reactor would need massive cooling but the surrounding infrastructure is destroyed and the water can't be pre-heated, what happens then? Nobody knows and I'd be really surprised if anybody, in a position of responsibility, has even thought that far about this whole mess. It rather feels like they are operating on the principle of "Let's just hope this never happens instead of planning for what we gonna do when it happens and set resources aside". [0] http://www.fanc.fgov.be/nl/page/doel-3-tihange-2-flaw-indications-in-the-reactor-pressure-vessel-steel/1989.aspx http://www.fanc.fgov.be/nl/page/doel-3-tihange-2-flaw-indica...
  • CydeWeys 9y ago
    How can you say it was safe with a straight face when it clearly wasn't? That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway. If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
    • gambiting 9y ago
      Well, I guess it's because I would consider my car extremely safe, with something stupid like 12 airbags, active brake assist, active collision prevention, it will even call for help automatically after an accident, without any input from me. Yet obviously it's not safe if it gets hit by a truck going 80mph, and it's not an impossible scenario. If they made fukishima stronger to withstand larger tsunamis, it could still be destroyed by an even larger one. It was "safe" within certain parameters. We can argue that those parameters were wrong, but that's a different discussion.
    • Broken_Hippo 9y ago
      Lets take your car that is smashed, upside-down in a ditch. When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch? In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens. Some vehicles have such safety precautions, but only when the situation seems to warrant it (a Jeep, for example). The nuclear plant was the same. It was safe when it was built, only it wasn't designed to handle that magnitude of earthquake because that strength is rare, especially for that area. This is despite designing it to withstand stronger than ever recorded earthquakes. Sure, afterwards the plant was unsafe, but so are many cars after accidents.
      • hrktb 9y ago
        What this car comparison is missing is that people accept cars getting crushed into flat metal sheets. Agree or not, as a society we have accepted that traffic accident is a problem we don't want to pay the price to solve. A "safe" car is just a mildly safer death trap. In comparison, people haven't accepted that reactors would go shit and somewhat kill hundreds of people and trash whole regions for hundreds of years. That's a risk that developpers have included in their plans to some point, but that the general public has not fundamentaly accepted.
  • galacticpony 9y ago
    Major tsunamis in Japan aren't rare at all, they've occured multiple times in the past century. They also don't happen to follow a fixed time schedule. If a built you a house, following all the protocols for safety, right next to an active volcano, would you consider it safe?
  • outworlder 9y ago
    Well, would be sufficiently safe. Just not in Fukushima. It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok. Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis. Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generators brought by trucks due to some electrical incompatibility. Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
    • rurban 9y ago
      And how do you argue about the Diablo "safety" then? It's 6m above sea level, near a major fault line, in fact the only fault in the ring of fire which didn't go off yet in the last decade, and it's critical near to a major technical hub which will be destroyed for hundreds of years if the fault goes off, on land or at sea. There's no safety, only luck and irrationality.
    • freeflight 9y ago
      > Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology. That's really where you want to put the blame? Don't you think that's a bit dishonest? Nobody is stopping the operators of plants from modernizing plants, nobody except the realities of economics. Don't kid yourself: If they can keep on running reactors with the least possible effort they will do so because everything related to nuclear involves massive investment costs. If you had the choice between spending several billion of dollars on modernizing a plant, which you've already amortized, or NOT spending several billion dollars while still making massive profits from the plant, which of these two is the more likely thing to happen? Greed always wins out. It's not like plant operators want to modernize their plants and are being stopped by protests, nobody is stopping them from modernizing except for their own economic bottom line.
      • _Tev 9y ago
        Billions of dollars to modernize plants? Where are you pulling that number from? This is what parent meant - scaremongering (and resulting ridiculous hyperbole) destroys progress.
  • padseeker 9y ago
    this comment is completely on point, and also downvoted. :(
  • ece 9y ago
    So is it really economically at that point? Is developing, prototyping and building a next gen reactor worth the money? Do we even know how much it would take to account for other 1-in-100 year risks? Is it worth it over better solar/wind? Even this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-wants-to-fix-renewable-energy-s-storage-problem-with-salt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-... I think the answers are clearly, no, no, no, and fuck no. We should be spending money on better solar, wind, having a distributed energy grid, and fusion. Not on a technology that is equivalent to diesel at this point, and something that will kill us.
• hueving 9y ago
  >It was developed out of government driven military technology That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.
  • Retric 9y ago
    Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet. PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.
    • Turing_Machine 9y ago
      "Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons." Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
      • lispm 9y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield#Calder_Hall_nuclear... Early commercial nuclear reactors, here the British Calder Hall Power Station, were producing plutionium and electricity.
        • Turing_Machine 9y ago
          That was more or less a prototype. No one uses power reactors to produce plutonium. It just isn't done.
• dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Yet the Japanese use/used the crap out of nuclear. You'd think they of all people would want nothing to do with it. At the end of the day it's all about dollars.
  • alphonsegaston 9y ago
    The Japanese people do largely want nothing to do with nuclear energy. Opposition to it still triggers some of their largest scale protests in a country that does everything to shy away from this kind of unrest. But the political reality is that Japan is a client state of the US empire and the base of its operations in SE Asia. It's not functionally a democracy. The people who made money off of it were the alliance of conservative politicians and organized crime, backed by the CIA, who brought it to the country in the first place. http://www.japansubculture.com/how-the-cia-helped-put-the-yakuza-and-the-ldp-in-power/ http://www.japansubculture.com/how-the-cia-helped-put-the-ya...
    • valuearb 9y ago
      You forgot their experience with Godzilla too.
• digi_owl 9y ago
  Indeed. I suggest people check out part six of Adam Curtis' Pandora's Box, that cover this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#Part_6._.27A_Is_for_Atom.27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Box_%28TV_series%29#... On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout. And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly.
  • rsync 9y ago
    "And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly." As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared. This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.
    • nnfy 9y ago
      Thats borderline ludditeism. We can't detect CO or even CO2, should that stop us from using fire?
      • beat 9y ago
        The most pressing problem facing humanity today is "using fire" - that is, CO2 generation from fossil fuel.
        • nnfy 9y ago
          That has nothing to do with the nonsense that we should avoid using something powerful or dangerous simply because our human senses are not equipped to detect it. You are literally surrounded by toxicity in modern materials, power transmission, and machinery. 110 volts is enough to arc and create ozone. Basements can accumulate radon. Cooking can release toxic gasses. These are not reasons alone to avoid modern conveniences.