It's a classic spin -- trying to blind people concerned with nuclear plants in their area etc, by using science selectively.
Fukushima
111–120 of 227 posts
Re: Fukushima
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Germany situation is mentioned in Scott Alexander's Livejournal post, linked above. Keep in mind that that post was written a little while after the tsunami came in and wrecked stuff, so it's pretty old. Nuclear plants are really good base-load plants. I guess that you can design a national power grid that's supplied largely by renewables, but I suspect that it's very hard and not cheap.
> it's very hard and not cheap That also describes nuclear power.
1) Infrastructure projects always appear expensive to the layman. The correct way to price power generation projects is to look at the expected actual cost per MW over the lifetime of the generation facility, and to factor in -as best you can- actual externalities related to the operation of the facility.
2) As I understand it, the hard part of nuclear power isn't the engineering and construction; that's a solved problem. The hard part is fighting pervasive, irrational anti-nuclear-power sentiment.
Re: Fukushima
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"you have areas of land where people won't be able to live for thousands of years.." Where are these areas? Can you name a few of them? " in addition to that we have to store the waste from these "safe" plants for few millennia" Nope. After a couple of hundred years it's no more radioactive than the ore from which it came. Long half-life = less radioactive. By definition.
How about Chernobyl exclusion zone? "Ukrainian officials estimate the area will not be safe for human life again for another 20,000 years" [1]
"The time frame in question when dealing with radioactive waste ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 years" [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#The_Exclusi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Long_term_ma...
Re: Fukushima
#114It's a classic spin -- trying to blind people concerned with nuclear plants in their area etc, by using science selectively.
It's impolite to accuse people on an HN thread of being deceptive. It also doesn't add anything to thread itself, so why bother?
Re: Fukushima
#115One thing that grabs my attention is that the radiation levels in the contaminated zones are much lower than I thought they'd be. For context, the limit for a radiation worker in the US is 50 mSv. Obviously, I guess it depends on the radioactive isotopes released and what kind of radiation they release, but I'm still impressed.
That's the limit per year. The figures you're seeing in this article are per hour. It's not immediately lethal, but it's drastically elevated.
Re: Fukushima
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not about uranium but about plutonium .
Re: Fukushima
#117One thing that grabs my attention is that the radiation levels in the contaminated zones are much lower than I thought they'd be. For context, the limit for a radiation worker in the US is 50 mSv. Obviously, I guess it depends on the radioactive isotopes released and what kind of radiation they release, but I'm still impressed.
The limit is 50mSv per year, not per hour. Sievert is cumulative unit that has to be either qualified by time or measured over entire lifespan to be meaningfully comparable.
But on the other hand quantitatively measuring and comparing radiation effects is hard problem as there is essentially nothing that can be precisely measured and at the same time has any meaning as to biological effects, in practice the conversions between various units are just done using various experimentally determined constants that may or may not be relevant to given situation.
Re: Fukushima
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are just creating straw mean to support your own belief. Comparing to other causes of death is hardly relevant. It's only relevant if you weigh two options against each other. So comparing coal to nuclear is kind of valid, except that coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power. Also, if you really want to nitpick, then you'd also have to count the lives that could have been saved with the money that now go…
What is the other alternative to nuclear power?
Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air has a section on the relative danger levels of various sources of electricity. I think we can assume Japan is similar to Europe in terms of regulation and safety.
http://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_168.shtml
And I should say that Sustainable Energy is the best book on this topic you can find and that it's free online.
Re: Fukushima
#119I 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…
The problem which nuclear disasters have that almost all other disasters don't is the permanence of danger over such a large area. There have been plenty of large-scale chemical or industrial disasters - everything from Bhopal to Tianjing to Agent Orange to Deepwater Horizon - but they have the common property that the smoke clears and it's possible to neutralise, disperse or otherwise clean up the mess. Whereas Chernobyl and Fukushima are going to have exclusion zones that must remain covered for our entire lifetimes.
Re: Fukushima
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You seem to suggest that the fact that Fukushima was not adequately prepared for this tsunami was human failure, presumably because they should have expected such a tsunami to occur. For your information, in France where we use nuclear energy a lot, we look for the most catastrophic events of the last 100 years to see how we protect our infrastructure. The Japanese looked for the last 50, but there were a tsunami o…
The height of the tsunami depends on the area. In the area in question, for a very long time people thought that it was impossible for the a tsunami to go above 5 meters. That there were tsunami of that size in other areas is irrelevant. The earthquake in question was the most powerful in 1000 years. Looking back 100 years would be insufficient. What is interesting is that there was actually a city that raised the se…
I guess he was talking about higher walls around the (few) nuclear plants, not the whole country. That would not make the country "a jail where the only place I can see the ocean is from on top of a mountain".