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Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

reuters.com

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Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#131

Post by lispm »

mpweiher wrote: post #61
lispm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you understand a tiny part of the Energy business. 'Nuclear' is not only a technical problem, it is a financial problem. Old plants will be run until they collapse - unless a regulator keeps the companies from doing that. But then the regulator comes onto pressure, because there is huge amount of money/corruption involved to keep the plant online. Every single plant is a multi-billion dollar investment, jobs, sur…

Yes, and despite the technical failings, the political failings and the corruption, the effects were comparatively benign.

Right, it will cost only a few hundred billion dollars, maybe a trillion, to clean up the effects from the earthquake on the nuclear power plants.

The country lost most of their nuclear power plants in a single day. It takes years, if not decades to bring them back online - partly. 50 plants. Each worth, say, ten billion dollar (current worth and future earnings - just an estimate). That loss alone goes into the hundreds of billions. Additionally fuel had to be imported, other plants had to be built.

'Currently 42 reactors are operable and potentially able to restart, and 24 of these are in the process of restart approvals. The first two restarted in August and October 2015.' Six years after the earthquake/tsunami.

Only a few ten thousand people, maybe a hundred thousand, will work in Fukushima under extreme circumstances to keep the site stable and clean it up the site for the next five decades. Robots die regularly after a short time inside the reactors. Humans get a year worth radioactive exposure in a few hours. Where to get all the people needed to work there?

We have experience to dismantle functioning reactors. Here we have damaged reactors with damaged fuel...

Very little effects... I don't think so. The effects were much more severe than the industry thought. They were thinking that most of the reactors would operate again, by now.

World-wide reactor projects were seeing delays. Companies have a hard time to survive. All these are effects of a single earthquake/tsunami on the nuclear reactor industry. It's a huge financial catastrophe for the nuclear industry and the countries financing it.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#132

Post by AstralStorm »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #58

An irony I've noticed recently is fans of nuclear saying: "Coal is killing people, if you say anything bad about Nuclear then you are killing people" and then turning round and attacking other, non-coal alternatives like wind, solar or even natural gas. Initially I assumed these were actually coal supporters doing some devious concern trolling to delay the roll out of alternatives that are viable in the short term bu…

While wind and solar are great and we need more, there is not enough of it unless major international cooperation for building huge plants in good locations is involved.

(0) https://www.withouthotair.com/

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#133

Post by douche »

mpweiher wrote: post #68
WalterBright wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chernobyl argument Consider airliners. Airliners have been around for 80 years, and get substantially safer every decade. This is a statistical fact. Every crash is used as a learning experience and designs, procedures, and training is adjusted as a result. There's no reason to believe that such does not apply to nuclear power stations.

One of the biggest problems with nuclear is that we aren't building new plants.

Outside of submarines and aircraft carriers, that is. We seem to have those pretty figured out.

You'd think that nuclear propulsion would be a natural choice for the biggest of the enormous cargo container ships that are currently burning millions of gallons of dirty, dirty bunker fuel instead.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#134

Post by cjrp »

lostlogin wrote: post #63
blowski wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert on Chernobyl or power generation. But I think Chernobyl was the result of under-investment and poor management, whereas many of the deaths from coal are an unavoidable consequence of burning coal. Hence, you can say nuclear is safer as long as it's managed well.

Where is it managed well?

The UK seems pretty good at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#135

Post by Turing_Machine »

vidarh wrote: post #107
ekianjo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hydro means dams and dams can cause a number of accidents if they are not properly maintained.

Specifically, hydro was the cause of the worst single power generation accident of all time: 171,000 dead when the Banqiao dam failed. Before anyone assumes that will never happen again: There are fears over multiple large dams, including Mosul, where a failure worst case could kill a million. If we're lucky Banqiao will be a one-off, but large dams are massive risk factors because they need ongoing maintanenance for…

Look at the geography and population downstream of the Three Gorges Dam in China for an extreme worst-case scenario.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#136

Post by themaninthedark »

Symmetry wrote: post #123
wapz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the mortality rate of wind and hydro calculated? Is it from engineers being killed during maintenance/construction? It feels like those two would have a mortality rate or something similar to "a house."

In addition to the factors unique to dam failure, large construction projects will statistically result in dead workmen - at least over multiple projects.

Nuclear is a large construction project as well.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#137

Post by mpweiher »

lispm wrote: post #131
mpweiher wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and despite the technical failings, the political failings and the corruption, the effects were comparatively benign.

Right, it will cost only a few hundred billion dollars, maybe a trillion, to clean up the effects from the earthquake on the nuclear power plants. The country lost most of their nuclear power plants in a single day. It takes years, if not decades to bring them back online - partly. 50 plants. Each worth, say, ten billion dollar (current worth and future earnings - just an estimate). That loss alone goes into the hund…

Right, what you describe are largely the effects of the overreaction, as I was describing elsewhere.

There was no actual need to shut down the other plants, etc.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#138

Post by vidarh »

nnq wrote: post #121
vidarh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large proportions of coal plants spew uranium particles into the atmosphere. That's the radioactivity I worry about. > Also, I'm always fascinated of the "Chernobyl was unsafe, today reactors are safe" argument. The exact same line was fed to us when Chernobyl was state of the art. And yet the death toll of Chernobyl turned out to be a tiny fraction of what was feared, and a blib compared to the death tolls from coal…

> collapsing damns [...] kill during normal operation Thank god I don't live anywhere near a dam designed to collapse as part of normal operation.

The "during normal operation" referred to the coal plants, which should be pretty obvious.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#139

Post by mpweiher »

glenneroo wrote: post #114
vidarh wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.

> For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused... Are any projects doing that or planning to? As far as I have read, it's still only a plausible theory but has yet to be implemented.

France has been reprocessing for decades. Other projects were stopped for largely political reasons. Waste disposal is a political problem.

Re: Nuclear plant shutdowns tied to coal pollution, decreased birth weights

#140

Post by Turing_Machine »

msvalkon wrote: post #103
rurban wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear killed a lot of people already and will for the next thousands of generations. There is still no proper prospect of how to get rid of that poison. That's not comparable to any other technology. That's why nuclear energy needs to demolished and banned.

Sounds like a terribly biased argument. Why would it kill for _thousands_ of generations?

It wouldn't. The OP has fallen victim to the "long half-life = bad" fallacy.

A long half-life means that the material is less radioactive. By definition.

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