4 ms·

I live in Illinois, and we have the exact same GE design that was used in Fukushima on the banks of the Mississippi. Anything that we build in the future must

by chasil 3y ago

I live in Illinois, and we have the exact same GE design that was used in Fukushima on the banks of the Mississippi. Anything that we build in the future must be walk-away safe, a Gen4 reactor or better. There can't be any question of exploding cooling ponds or other surprises with (design) flaws in safety systems. This obviously rules out diesel generators in the basement. Over the years, there have been nagging stories of drones that overfly reactors. We have no idea who is collecting this data or what they want with it. We have to reach much higher safety standards than the elderly fleet of reactors that remains with us. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/09/07/dozens-more-drone-incursions-over-us-nuclear-power-plants-revealed/?sh=6d09c6846296 https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2020/09/07/dozens...

vidanay 3y ago
With one major difference...the Mississippi River isn't subject to the same seismic (New Madrid notwithstanding) and tsunami events.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  I would indeed be curious about the risk as estimated by Japan and Illinois about their respective reactors before and after the Fukushima disaster, before forming an opinion on whether this is actually a problem. As you say, there's likely fundamental differences not obvious from the provided rhetoric...
- chasil 3y ago
  However, I don't know what these drones are doing. 36 hours. That's all it takes.
- methodical 3y ago
  This. Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima in application to a facility that is not vulnerable to nearly any of the series of worst-case scenario events is simply doomerism. This is exactly the kind of mindset that has prevented the US as a country from developing nuclear power in any substantial fashion for the last 50 or so years. In that timeframe, it's not unlikely to assume we could have a much more substantial amount of our energy produced by nuclear power; if not completely deprecating coal power plants. At the moment, barring magical energy sources that haven't been proven in any meaningful sense, nuclear technology has shown itself to have the fewest long-term consequences and the highest efficiency. However, it is unfortunately also the easiest to point to a few events in history and easily make the layman cast doubt on its safety. It's worth pointing out that the most significant nuclear accident in history took place in the USSR (which wasn't particularly notorious for its safety protocols), on a reactor that had several known design flaws that were ignored, and the only other major accident representing a one in a thousand years perfect-storm that overcame several redundancies. This concern about "drones" in relation to nuclear power plants is borderline paranoia. Are you concerned about drones dropping bombs or somehow disabling safety systems on a nuclear reactor? Every single nuclear power in the world has nuclear power plants, so they're all equally susceptible to the same attack in the same way that they're all equally capable of responding to said attack- mutually assured destruction as it goes.
  - chasil 3y ago
    No, it's not paranoia. The people at the Nova music festival in Israel would have said exactly the same thing as you in the hours before the event. Black Swans can and do appear.
    - vidanay 3y ago
      Comparing a regulated industry to a terrorist event is about the most irrational thing I have read today.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima A lot of the world's living population lived through Chernobyl, the various incidents at Sellafield and then Fukushima. All events that "statistically" should not have happened nearly as close together as they did - and that's without taking the risk of 9/11-style terrorism, actual acts of war (see Zaporizhzhia NPP) or catastrophic earthquakes into account. There are only two kinds of power generation that have a mass-casualty potential: nuclear power plants and dammed hydro power (as evidenced by what went on at Kakhovka Dam). We should, as a species, get rid of these. The sooner, the better.
    - vidanay 3y ago
      There are more deaths directly attributable to coal fired power plants than to nuclear energy in all forms (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki). https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/archive/2013_kharecha_02/ https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/archive/2013_khare... https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/marshall2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/marshall2/ https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nuclear-vs-other-energy-sources https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...
elil17 3y ago
One person died and six people got cancer from the Fukushima incident - which of course is very sad. In contrast, a single coal plant in Illinois, Prairie State, kills about 75 people every year with coal soot: https://www.sierraclub.org/illinois/blog/2023/02/prairie-state-makes-list-deadliest-coal-plants https://www.sierraclub.org/illinois/blog/2023/02/prairie-sta... For coal plants, murder is business as usual. That's why we need nuclear power.
- kagakuninja 3y ago
  I love how you just gloss over the 2nd worst nuclear disaster in world history, that required abandoning an entire town... We need to stop burning fossil fuels, but nuclear is simply too expensive compared to renewables.
  - chasil 3y ago
    I think that nuclear power must focus on safety and efficiency. Fuel rods from reactors near me are discarded after only 2% of the potential power is released from them. I understand that the best designs can extract 40%, leaving less waste. New reactors should be held to a minimum of 20%. The "daughter nuclei" in the 2% exhausted fuel rods require active cooling (circulating water) for well over a year before they exhaust and cool sufficiently for dry storage. We need "walk-away safe" designs where a complete loss of power doesn't result in catastrophic explosions. We have kept this 50s technology way past its design life. It isn't replaced because of resistance to building any more nuclear at all, which is not helping.
    - kagakuninja 3y ago
      The problem isn't "resistance". Reactors are just too expensive. The great hope of the pro-nuclear crowd is SMRs, and the current one being built in the US got canceled due to cost. Until the cost problem is solved, nuclear power is dead on arrival. The existing plants were only built because of massive subsidies and the government placing a cap on the maximum liability from nuclear accidents.
  - 3y ago

by chasil 3y ago

vidanay 3y ago

With one major difference...the Mississippi River isn't subject to the same seismic (New Madrid notwithstanding) and tsunami events.

lucb1e 3y ago
I would indeed be curious about the risk as estimated by Japan and Illinois about their respective reactors before and after the Fukushima disaster, before forming an opinion on whether this is actually a problem. As you say, there's likely fundamental differences not obvious from the provided rhetoric...
chasil 3y ago
However, I don't know what these drones are doing. 36 hours. That's all it takes.
methodical 3y ago
This. Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima in application to a facility that is not vulnerable to nearly any of the series of worst-case scenario events is simply doomerism. This is exactly the kind of mindset that has prevented the US as a country from developing nuclear power in any substantial fashion for the last 50 or so years. In that timeframe, it's not unlikely to assume we could have a much more substantial amount of our energy produced by nuclear power; if not completely deprecating coal power plants. At the moment, barring magical energy sources that haven't been proven in any meaningful sense, nuclear technology has shown itself to have the fewest long-term consequences and the highest efficiency. However, it is unfortunately also the easiest to point to a few events in history and easily make the layman cast doubt on its safety. It's worth pointing out that the most significant nuclear accident in history took place in the USSR (which wasn't particularly notorious for its safety protocols), on a reactor that had several known design flaws that were ignored, and the only other major accident representing a one in a thousand years perfect-storm that overcame several redundancies. This concern about "drones" in relation to nuclear power plants is borderline paranoia. Are you concerned about drones dropping bombs or somehow disabling safety systems on a nuclear reactor? Every single nuclear power in the world has nuclear power plants, so they're all equally susceptible to the same attack in the same way that they're all equally capable of responding to said attack- mutually assured destruction as it goes.
- chasil 3y ago
  No, it's not paranoia. The people at the Nova music festival in Israel would have said exactly the same thing as you in the hours before the event. Black Swans can and do appear.
  - vidanay 3y ago
    Comparing a regulated industry to a terrorist event is about the most irrational thing I have read today.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Having ongoing concerns from a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm of an event such as Fukushima A lot of the world's living population lived through Chernobyl, the various incidents at Sellafield and then Fukushima. All events that "statistically" should not have happened nearly as close together as they did - and that's without taking the risk of 9/11-style terrorism, actual acts of war (see Zaporizhzhia NPP) or catastrophic earthquakes into account. There are only two kinds of power generation that have a mass-casualty potential: nuclear power plants and dammed hydro power (as evidenced by what went on at Kakhovka Dam). We should, as a species, get rid of these. The sooner, the better.
  - vidanay 3y ago
    There are more deaths directly attributable to coal fired power plants than to nuclear energy in all forms (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki). https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/archive/2013_kharecha_02/ https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/archive/2013_khare... https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/marshall2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/marshall2/ https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nuclear-vs-other-energy-sources https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...

elil17 3y ago

One person died and six people got cancer from the Fukushima incident - which of course is very sad. In contrast, a single coal plant in Illinois, Prairie State, kills about 75 people every year with coal soot: https://www.sierraclub.org/illinois/blog/2023/02/prairie-state-makes-list-deadliest-coal-plants https://www.sierraclub.org/illinois/blog/2023/02/prairie-sta... For coal plants, murder is business as usual. That's why we need nuclear power.

kagakuninja 3y ago
I love how you just gloss over the 2nd worst nuclear disaster in world history, that required abandoning an entire town... We need to stop burning fossil fuels, but nuclear is simply too expensive compared to renewables.
- chasil 3y ago
  I think that nuclear power must focus on safety and efficiency. Fuel rods from reactors near me are discarded after only 2% of the potential power is released from them. I understand that the best designs can extract 40%, leaving less waste. New reactors should be held to a minimum of 20%. The "daughter nuclei" in the 2% exhausted fuel rods require active cooling (circulating water) for well over a year before they exhaust and cool sufficiently for dry storage. We need "walk-away safe" designs where a complete loss of power doesn't result in catastrophic explosions. We have kept this 50s technology way past its design life. It isn't replaced because of resistance to building any more nuclear at all, which is not helping.
  - kagakuninja 3y ago
    The problem isn't "resistance". Reactors are just too expensive. The great hope of the pro-nuclear crowd is SMRs, and the current one being built in the US got canceled due to cost. Until the cost problem is solved, nuclear power is dead on arrival. The existing plants were only built because of massive subsidies and the government placing a cap on the maximum liability from nuclear accidents.
- 3y ago