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Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

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Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#571

Post by guscost »

Animats wrote: post #458

It doesn't kill many people, because even when there's a disaster, there's time to evacuate. But you lose an entire city once in a while. Major reactor disasters so far: - SL-1. Steam explosion due to control rod lifted too far during maintenance. Small experimental reactor, built in the middle of nowhere (Idaho Reactor Test Station) for good reason. Inherently unsafe design. - Three Mile Island. Meltdown due to cool…

Do you have a source about Fukushima containment failures? I've not heard any confirmation that primary or secondary containment structures failed at any point during or after the meltdown.

The latest reports seem to indicate that primary containment is intact at all three reactors. As usual, you have to read between the lines - these editors always seem to hate nuclear power, or love fear and chaos, or both:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Nuclear-fuel-likely-mel...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/melted-fu...

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#572

Post by pps43 »

rtx wrote: post #516
pps43 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar, wind, hydro do not affect the entire planet. Even burning fossil fuels might be ok, if combined with CO2 sequestration. But this is irrelevant. I'm just saying that you do a comparison, you need to take into consideration risks, too. Otherwise buying any kind of insurance looks pretty irrational.

Wind is bad for birds.

Ionizing radiation is bad for birds.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#573

Post by Spooky23 »

ianai wrote: post #481
Spooky23 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We would be in a better place with respect to greenhouse gasses. But we're also subject to long term disposal of waste products and high risk of pollution of groundwater, and other water sources. Some of those risks will be risks for thousands of years. The typical answers from nuclear proponents never cover what to do with the waste product.

You send it to Yucca mountain or you treat it for reuse like they do in France.

What was the opening date for Yucca mountain again?

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#574

Post by pps43 »

wbl wrote: post #470
pps43 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not how many people have died, but how bad the impact can be. Even if nobody dies, the need to evacuate a large city like New York or Tokyo because a nuclear power plant nearby underwent rapid unplanned deconstruction might easily wipe off all economic gains from the nuclear energy, and then some.

What's a worse accident then Chernobyl in terms of release? Evacuation is frequently not necessary as people willingly live in places with quite high natural radioactivity.

Only about 3.5% of radioactive material from one reactor was released (there were four reactors). Also no large city happened to be close enough downwind.

Some of the areas within 30 km exclusion zone still have levels of radiation too high for people to live there, and will remain high for hundreds of years.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#575

Post by dpark »

okreallywtf wrote: post #505
dpark wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind don't provide predictable power. Even places with high reliance on these tend to have an ongoing dependency on coal (or nuclear) to handle times when supply from renewables drops.

This has been discussed ad nauseam, we need 1) storage, 2) smarter grids (which we need anyways). Of course there will have to be investment but what better investment could there be? We get 1) jobs, 2) cleaner air, 3) to keep living and have future generations able to live as well or better than we did.

> This has been discussed ad nauseam

Then why are you claiming that you do not understand it? Yes, there are potential mitigations but there are major engineering concerns with large scale storage. You say that we can scale solar today but the reality is we can't yet.

Nuclear is sustainable energy that we can scale now without additional concerns about also scaling energy storage. That's why people are interested.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#576

Post by BinaryIdiot »

rsync wrote: post #504
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A failed nuclear power plant can indeed explode like a nuclear bomb and it is generally believed that explosion #2 (there were two major explosions) at chernobyl was the result of a criticality and analogous to "the explosion of a fizzled nuclear weapon." Your statement seems to oppose itself. Fizzled would not be like a nuclear bomb so I don't quite understand what you're trying to refer to here. There is a reason…

"There are a few orders of magnitude between "fizzled nuclear weapon" and a "nuclear bomb"." In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same. Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have) and that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect. I am not categorically opposed to nuclear power. I just think it's w…

> In magnitude, certainly - but the process (explosion resulting from criticality) is the same.

No, this is not true. The uranium isn't enriched enough to do this in a nuclear power plant. Check out your own citation above it's a great read.

> Your notion that nuclear plant accidents do not cause explosions (they have)

I never stated this. In fact we talked about the explosions at chernobyl above in this comment chain.

> that those explosions cannot be similar to atomic bombs (they can be) is incorrect.

Define similar.

The explosions were not similar in that they were not explosions using uncontrolled fission material to cause a reaction in enriched uranium.

They were similar in that an explosion occurred that tossed up lots of fission material, similar to what a nuclear weapon would do when exploded but uranium did not itself explode.

> especially when the well known details of the highest profile nuclear accident are in opposition to your claim(s).

The two well known disasters, chernobyl and fukushima, were very, very old power plants. Fukushima, as far as I can tell, was not fully updated to any of the standard designs in the past 2-3 decades (only retrofitting here and there).

Given that I'm not sure what you are referring to or how those two accidents are in opposition to any of my claims.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#577

Post by boomboomsubban »

lispm wrote: post #520
Turing_Machine wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was more or less a prototype. No one uses power reactors to produce plutonium. It just isn't done.

Another example is North Korea: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/taechon.htm

The second paragraph concludes the reactor was built for nuclear weapons development, I don't see how it can be considered "another example."

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#578

Post by BinaryIdiot »

MR4D wrote: post #459
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never mind that nuclear weapons have the possibility of making our species extinct. Likewise for nuclear power accidents. Please elaborate. How can nuclear power plants make our species extinct?

A better phrasing would have been, "In a similar fashion", but I've answered it below as well. A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary protein.) A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a devastating effec…

> A bad nuclear spill into the ocean of significant extent would kill our food supply pretty quickly. And if not "kill" it, it would definitely make it inedible. (Roughly 1 billion people depend on fish for their primary protein.)

I don't think this is anywhere near remotely possible. Radiation has terrible penetration into water as it is so water is a fantastic radiation shield but even so if you wanted to poison the water with enough radiation to kill off even a tiny amount of the food supply you'd...well I don't know the calculations or even how to do them, honestly, but I'm pretty sure you'd need orders of magnitude more uranium than we've ever mined (and it would have to be enriched, too).

> A bad nuclear spill into the atmosphere (think a large Chernobyl) would have a devastating effect on human health as well.

Hmm, I think to cover enough of the atmosphere you'd need a really, really huge nuclear explosion. I'm not sure how else you'd do it and even then most estimate of the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons wouldn't be able to kill off all humans (though it's a considerable chunk if I remember correctly).

> Basically, the point I was trying to get across is that nuclear power has extreme tail risks that things like solar won't.

Yeah, it's riskier than Solar. Everything is, honestly. Even wind. But we also have a high chance of dying in a car crash and that doesn't stop people and the risk of a nuclear failure, especially in a modern plant, is almost zero. It's far less risky than coal mining especially if you extract the uranium from sea water (though I don't know how easily it is to enrich without mining but then again I'm not a nuclear expert at all).

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#579

Post by manicdee »

nnfy wrote: post #472
rsync wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly." As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared. This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.

Thats borderline ludditeism. We can't detect CO or even CO2, should that stop us from using fire?

Humans can detect CO2. An elevated level of CO2 makes you feel out of breath. Reducing O2 has no impact other than you pass out.

If you use fire, the "invisible" risks are oxygen deprivation or monoxide poisoning. You will be quite aware that something is wrong when there is too much CO2.

Re: Out of all major energy sources, nuclear is the safest

#580

Post by QuarterReptile »

dragonwriter wrote: post #568
godelski wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average time from final designs to shovel in the ground is about 10 years. So already your tech is obsolete by the time you start building. I do agree there should be TIGHT regulations, but there certainly is a limit. Also, it has a lack of subsidies, compared to the other sectors.

> Also, it has a lack of subsidies, compared to the other sectors. It has significant federal R&D and liability-related subsidies, as well as other federal and, in several states, state-level subsidies. Nuclear is by no means deprived of subsidies.

And a stream of potential employees flowing, fully-trained, out of the military.
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