Fukushima • Hacker News Board

Re: Fukushima

#91

Post by wiz21 » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 1:36 PM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #79

InclinedPlane wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In ten years there will still be thinkpieces and photo essays about the disaster of fukushima while the tianjin disaster will end up as a footnote. Despite one being clearly an exclusively human caused disaster and causing a much vaster loss of life. But fire and explosions we are much more familiar, even comfortable, with as causes of death and injury than creepy, invisible, insidious radiation.

Or look at Banqiao Dam. What you ask, you've never heard of it? That was a form of electricity production that catastrophically failed and killed an estimated 171,000 people. Fukushima was a flea bite by comparison. Fear of nuclear energy is irrational.

100% agree. Look at : - asbestos - car exhaust pollution

all of those are so silent, so invisible and kill or hurt so many more people.

Re: Fukushima

#92

Post by speleding » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 1:43 PM UTC

orik wrote: post #29

ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

You are seeing a sentiment that isn't there. The author doesn't take a political stance on Nuclear Power. He's just documenting the contamination zone. He talks briefly about how the disaster could have been avoided if the plant was designed better. He gives factual and statistical information about how the residents don't want to return there. This is a primary source that offers an first-hand account of the Fukushi…

Are you really not sensing an anti-nuclear sentiment? For example, take this paragraph where he talks about Chernobyl?

"Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers... Have we learnt anything since then?"

I would say the framing of that question makes his stance pretty clear.

Re: Fukushima

#93

Post by mariusz79 » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 1:47 PM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

yeah, it's very safe.. you have areas of land where people won't be able to live for thousands of years.. and you have hundreds of these "safe" power plants all over the world.. in addition to that we have to store the waste from these "safe" plants for few millennia, and hope that after our civilization is gone, it won't destroy the life on this planet.

Re: Fukushima

#94

Post by 13years » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 1:48 PM UTC

fridek wrote: post #30

ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

It is interesting to read that burning coal actually produces more radioactive waste than a nuclear plant [1], only because there are loads and loads of it, and there are usually very few regulations involved. Some say that coal is not the only alternative and it can be processed in a safer manner, but this is wishful thinking. Renewable sources involve a costly manufacturing process that is not necessarily green [2]…

Burning coal does not produce more radioactive waste. It is just that under normal operating conditions more is released into the atmosphere from burning coal.

However, if there is an accident, then you are talking orders of magnitude more radiation in a nuclear accident. http://www.cejournal.net/?p=410

Re: Fukushima

#95

Post by notahacker » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 1:51 PM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #43

facepalm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I leave the judgement up to you, just wanted to point out some confirmation bias in your convictions.

The point you are missing is that these articles create a bias against nuclear power, but by rights there should be a deluge of articles documenting the ongoing tragedy of using coal. But there are not. And the result is that people have developed a fear of nuclear power while having an undeveloped fear of coal power. Coal is not the only alternative to nuclear, certainly, but coal has absolutely replaced some nuclea…

In fairness there's no shortage of articles on climate change calling out fossil fuel burning, and literally nobody advocating coal as the miracle energy source of the future (notwithstanding the fact that plenty of coal plants are being built in rapidly-industrialising countries with scant regard for the environment)

I'll grant that perhaps too much of the criticism of coal power links it vaguely to global climate change rather than specifically to the effect of exhaust gases and coal dust on people living downwind of the plant, but I think that obsession with massive future change rather than respiratory diseases and cancers of today is a more general problem in environmental reporting.

Re: Fukushima

#96

Post by euske » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 2:07 PM UTC

As a citizen, I'm still pretty much open to this is-nuclear-good-or-bad debate here. The biggest problem in Japan though is that people don't openly talk about this issue because of the embarrassment or fear of confronting others (Japanese people are notoriously bad at public discussion). It's such a divisive issue. As a result, the entire topic is avoided and kinda invisible. People are resigned and feeling that no one can change the situation (which is a pretty common feeling among the Japanese).

Sometimes I wonder if we, as a nation, really deserves a better future if so many people are simply giving up struggling. Sorry for a negative comment.

Re: Fukushima

#97

Post by simoncion » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 2:15 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #87

hydrogen18 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you convinced we can't store electricity? Pumped storage for storing potential energy has worked long before we even had electricity. Sure, the whole process of storing electricity is lossy. Thermodynamics guarantees it. But the point isn't to try and store enough generation capacity to meet our demand. You just need enough storage capacity to deal with the peaks. There is of course the argument of "pumped st…

It's not that we can't store electricity - we just can't store enough of it to turn renewables into usable tool for meeting baseline demand. We may be able to do that in the future, with battery technology improving and some clever shenanigans like using electric vehicles as grid storage - but we need something now , and there's no other alternative for doing it green than nuclear power.

> ...we just can't store enough of it to turn renewables into usable tool for meeting baseline demand...

/me puts on pedant hat and mad engineer jacket:

Are you sure about this? The US is huge and has an enormous amount of uninhabited space. If we covered -say- the north-western quarter of Nevada in the best batteries available today, would that cover base and peaking power during slack production time for -say- the surrounding states?

/me removes pedant hat

(Do bear in mind that I feel both that anti-nuke hysteria is hugely damaging to the planning and deployment of new nuclear power plants in the US, and that it's fairly clear that of the currently available non-hydroelectric base-load generation tech, nuclear power is the only good option. [Though, solar power beamed down from orbit is a really intriguing idea.])

Re: Fukushima

#98

Post by guscost » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 2:15 PM UTC

Swizec wrote: post #18

ekianjo wrote: post #5

> The disaster could have been forseen and prevented. As in the Chernobyl case, it was a human, not technology, that was mainly responsible for the disaster. It's always easy to say that with hindsight. Remind me, how frequent are Magnitude 9 earthquakes resulting in massive Tsunami? Of course you can plan for everything, but there's always something that occurs you did not think of. The good thing is, we learn from…

> Of course we have learnt a lot since Chernobyl, and designed subsequent plants to be much more safe based on what happened there. Unfortunately the anti-nuclear movement won and we are unable to build those safe subsequent plants because of political pressures. Half of nuclear reactors in the US, and likely the world, are over 30 years old.[1] They are licensed for 40 years [2], but can apply for a 20 year extensio…

If I had to pick one outlandish conspiracy theory to believe, it would be that the Chernobyl disaster was not an accident. It seems unlikely that someone could accidentally engineer a reactor as ludicrously unsafe as Chernobyl, at the time it was built. And you couldn't plan a better PR move to turn people against nuclear power. Guess which large-ish economy is built on petrochemical exports?

But I'm ignoring Hanlon's Razor, of course.

Re: Fukushima

#99

Post by sp332 » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 2:18 PM UTC

mariusz79 wrote: post #93

ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

yeah, it's very safe.. you have areas of land where people won't be able to live for thousands of years.. and you have hundreds of these "safe" power plants all over the world.. in addition to that we have to store the waste from these "safe" plants for few millennia, and hope that after our civilization is gone, it won't destroy the life on this planet.

The uranium used in reactors is refined from ore that's already sitting in the ground. No matter how bad an accident there is, it won't threaten "life on this planet" because if you spread it all around, it will be very dilute again.

Re: Fukushima

#100

Post by josh2600 » Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 2:19 PM UTC

speleding wrote: post #92

orik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are seeing a sentiment that isn't there. The author doesn't take a political stance on Nuclear Power. He's just documenting the contamination zone. He talks briefly about how the disaster could have been avoided if the plant was designed better. He gives factual and statistical information about how the residents don't want to return there. This is a primary source that offers an first-hand account of the Fukushi…

Are you really not sensing an anti-nuclear sentiment? For example, take this paragraph where he talks about Chernobyl? "Silence, lack of cries, laughter, tears and only the wind answers... Have we learnt anything since then?" I would say the framing of that question makes his stance pretty clear.

I don't know if I agree with you.

For example, it's entirely possible he's talking about not building active reactors in lieu of passive ones...