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"Turns out the optimistic reports upvoted by hacker news were polyannish." There are way too many people on here who've been drinking too much of the radioacti
by gnosis 16y ago
"Turns out the optimistic reports upvoted by hacker news were polyannish."
There are way too many people on here who've been drinking too much of the radioactive koolaid doled out by the nuclear industry.
The general consensus here tends to be that nuclear power is wonderful and amazingly safe.
Well, we're seeing them being proven wrong yet again. How much more proof are they going to need? How many more nuclear disasters is it going to take?
- pyre 16y agoI generally see people talking about how safe the new reactor designs are, and how it's a tragedy that people are so afraid of nuclear that they won't let them be built. The reactors in Japan are 40-year-old designs. You can't compare them on the same level. It's like saying that people in favor of nuclear power claim that Chernobyl never happened because 'safe nuclear' == 'never was a reactor that was unsafe ever built.'
- exch 16y agoAdd to that the fact that the other reactors there have stood up to a 9.1 quake with about 600 aftershocks -- ranging from mild to "I'm a pretty decent disaster all by myself" -- A sizable tidal wave and numerous fires with hydrogen explosions. This could definitely have been far, far worse by now.
- gnosis 16y ago"This could definitely have been far, far worse by now." It still can. The disaster may be far from over. And it may take quite a while to calculate the real cost of this disaster, both economically and in terms of human life.
- dialtone 16y agoYou might be surprised to discover that a 40 year old life is fairly standard in nuclear power plants[1], in fact some countries hope to keep their plants active for closer to 60 years. At close to $7B+ investment in just the building phase of a modern nuclear plant and close to 7-10 years construction time per plant[2], the limited lifetime of the plant does start to become a concern in the financial sense though. [1]: http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2007/npp_extension.html http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2007/npp_extension.html [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor
- pyre 16y agoI'm not balking at the age and saying that the place is 'falling apart.' I'm saying that they were designed 40 years ago, and that it's possible that we've learned things since then and can build better plants (starting at the design phase). I'm no expert though, so I'm making no claims.
- borism 16y agoactually they were designed 60 years ago. they were built 50 years ago.
- sorbus 16y agoHow many major nuclear disasters have there been in the last, say, 50 years? Three mile island and Chernobyl are the two big ones that everyone knows about, and considering that people are saying that this is the third largest [EDIT: actually the second largest, at this point], I take that as an endorsement of nuclear power. As compared with coal, oil, natural gas, and so forth, which function by spewing pollutants into the environment continuously, during normal operation. Yes, I would be thrilled if we switched entirely to solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric power sources, but nuclear power isn't anywhere near as disastrous as the people strongly against it would like us to believe. It's also not as safe as a lot of people would like to think, but, by and large, it is fairly safe.
- dchest 16y agoHydroelectric? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#Ecosystem_damage_and_loss_of_land http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#Ecosystem_dama...
- rbanffy 16y agoThe problem with hydro is that you can't build it where you need the power (unless geography - or real estate - is uncannily nice to you) Most of Brazil depends on a single hydro facility with endless miles of aluminum wires crossing the southeast part of the country. If anything serious fails there, the country pretty much stops. Renewables like solar, hydro, biomass, and wind have their place, but you don't generate solar during night, you may want to spare your water during a drought, you may need to eat the biomass and you may have days without wind. Nuclear too has its place. Technology is a tool we should wield with reason, not passion.
- whateverer 16y agoIt should be noted, though, that solar thermal plants can indeed generate electricity during the night, by collecting heat in reservoirs to later produce steam, be them water or molten salt[1] heat reservoirs. [1] http://www.research-in-germany.de/61660/2011-03-08-molten-salts-for-efficient-solar-thermal-plants,sourcePageId=12358.html http://www.research-in-germany.de/61660/2011-03-08-molten-sa...
- mistermann 16y ago> how many more nuclear disasters is it going to take? Indeed....please provide us with the list of nuclear disasters, it should be an easy exercise judging by the tone of confidence in your post. Just for fun, throw in some stats on deaths per kwh of electrcity. PREDICTION: you will not respond to this, because there have been no nuclear disasters. And no one disputes that in practice, nuclear is the safest form of power statistically. If you want to assert that nuclear power is incredibly powerful and dangerous, that is one thing, but trying to pass off potential disaster as reality, is a but disingenuous.
- angus77 16y agoSafer than solar or wind power?
- Devilboy 16y agoThose are not comparable power sources. They cannot substitute for fossil or nuclear plants, because they are way too expensive and do not provide 24/7 power without even more expensive batteries.
- whateverer 16y agoActually, thermal solar plants can produce electricity 24/7 just fine. They can store heat in water or (more efficiently) molten salt up in a tower and use it to later generate power at a reliable rate. Spain is known to be investing heavily on concentrating solar power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain
- angus77 16y agoThis one deserves an upvote for at least citing a source.
- Devilboy 16y agoThose are great they just don't generate a lot of power though. The biggest one so far peaks at 60MW while your standard nuclear or fossil power plant generates 1000MW consistently. You'd need at least 20 of these to replace just one coal plant. That makes it what, 5 times more expensive than nuclear / fossil? Not even the USA can afford to go 100% renewable with a price like that.
- ANH 16y agoHistorically, coal-fired power plants have been much more dangerous for humans than nuclear power plants. I think the record shows that nuclear power is on the whole pretty safe. Regarding proof: I don't think anything has been proven, yet, except that there have been a lot of powerful forces at work with this disaster.
- hop 16y agoYes, in history. But that turns an eye to black swan events of mass proportion that only nuclear power is capable of.
- ANH 16y agoOnly nuclear power? What about the BP oil spill? Exxon Valdez? Coal slurry wiping out homes in West Virginia?
- hop 16y agoCaesium-137 has a 30 year half life. If that blew into Tokyo, the city would be uninhabitable for 200 years - just like Chernobyl.
- sho_hn 16y agoThat said, there have been some pretty nasty events associated with coal as well, which are however surprisingly unknown: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_sludge_spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_County_sludge_spill Doesn't compare to the potential consequences of a nuclear incident, but it's quite possible to build and mishandle crappy coal infrastructure, too.
- memetichazard 16y agoSo, coal is the car, and nuclear power is the airplane.
- redthrowaway 16y ago>Well, we're seeing them being proven wrong yet again. How much more proof are they going to need? How many more nuclear disasters is it going to take? You've had one and a half. TMI had no ill effects on health, Chernobyl was caused by Soviet incompetence, and Fukushima is the result of an earthquake 7 times more powerful than it was designed to survive. Compare that to the damage caused by oil spills alone. No power source that is economically viable on a large scale is 100% safe, including nuclear. They do their damndest, but sometimes it fails. There were some design flaws in Fukushima, namely the placement of the backup generators and the height of the tsunami barriers, but the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years. It looks like the containment vessel on the #4 reactor has been breached, and that's very, very bad. Still, the only people injured were those injured by the hydrogen explosions, not by radiation. There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers. Is this event bad? Yes. Could it be another Chernobyl? Probably not. Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did. Most of the "optimism" yesterday was based on what had actually occurred: the coolant had failed, #1 was flooded, and #3 had encountered the same problems. Both reactors had hydrogen explosions outside of the containment vessel that didn't compromise them. No significant radiation had been released. Today is a different story. We'll keep an eye on things and see how they progress, but the optimism was based on the situation at #1 and #3, not the yet-to-happen situation at #2 and #4.
- gnosis 16y ago"the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years" People keep mentioning this as if that matters. The fact is that it happened, and there's really no telling when future natural disasters will strike any given nuclear plant. All we know is that they can happen and that if disasters on this scale do happen, nuclear reactors are not up to surviving them. "Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did." Yet. But this disaster may be far from over. "There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers." That's not what I'm hearing. From a former nuclear industry executive and whistleblower interviewed recently on Democracy Now: "they talk about 160 people that have been contaminated. That’s all they’ve tested. Basically, everything they’re testing is coming up contaminated in that inner couple of miles around the plant. You’ve got radiation being detected 60 miles to the north in a Navy helicopter, a hundred miles to the east on a Navy aircraft carrier. So, it’s not clear to me that that cloud is not looping around and affecting Japan." http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/14/japan_facing_biggest_catastrophe_since_dawn http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/14/japan_facing_biggest_c...