8 ms·
A magnitude 5.1 earthquake would not have done much to a GE Mark I BWR like the one in Fukushima - the 2011 magnitude 9 earthquake didn't damage the Fukushima M
by ovi256 6y ago
A magnitude 5.1 earthquake would not have done much to a GE Mark I BWR like the one in Fukushima - the 2011 magnitude 9 earthquake didn't damage the Fukushima Mark I. The tsunami did.
This is a bad kind of fearmongering.
- pvaldes 6y agoNot a joke at all. Just the presence of a old nuclear plant in a place being hit by an earthquake would have created enough reasonable doubts to distroy the tourism in the area. Loses by 2% of the country GDP at least since them. Probably much more if we extend the bad publicity to adjacent Mediterranean coasts. Tourism is like 14% of the Spanish GDP so raise your offer or go away with your nuclear crap. No matter how safe you claim that it is, would be still a lose. This in the best case. With even minor damages in the plant, things would turn scarily expensive. Really fast. So it is a mistake to think in terms of either nuclear or fossils. In real life either you have nuclear, or you have tourism plus fisheries plus agriculture plus wind turbines. You can not just say that you want to replace Silicon Valley with a nuclear plant; that would be political suicide. Nuclear needs to use exclusively a lot of room, can damage huge areas if something goes wrong, and is only justified if there is not a better option. At this moment there are potentially dozens of alternative uses that are not only better economically but also much safer.
- ovi256 6y agoIt's telling that the same argument didn't work in say, France, which has dozens of nuclear power plants (and a fuel reprocessing plant) on the coasts and yet continues having successful fisheries and tourism. You're implying that Spain couldn't have done the same thing ? Why not ? Are they any less capable ? More sensitive to radiation ?
- pvaldes 6y agoMaybe more smart? Spain has the biggest fishing industry in EU and is the biggest producer of fish in the area. Period. France is not even close in terms of captures or people employed. And the area where the plant was about to be raised exports tomatoes to all EU currently. There are kilometers of greenhouses in the countryside. Another activity totally incompatible with the presence of a maybe-cracking-maybe-not ancient nuclear plant.
- m4rtink 6y agoA lots of greenhouses nearby ? Well, thats perfect - nuclear power plants produce a lot of heat that could be used fow greenhouse heating instead of being dumped via cooling towers/sea water thermal exchangers. Win-Win!