Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#31

Post by maigret » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 10:36 AM UTC

geuis wrote: post #23

maigret wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.

Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry. Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable. More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting l…

Please note that I have not said that earthquakes are not something they took into account, I've said beside earthquakes, terrorist attacks and anything, there is also an additional risk that no one can calculate. Every engineer knows that prevision has its limit. So it's all about inner danger. In case of an earthquake, a barrage could also break and make huge damages. What such an accident would not do, though, and what an airliner accident would also not do, is damaging big areas during decades in unknown ways.

Of course they are risks, but if you look at the Rasmussen report, it tells a meltdown is likely happen all 20000 years per reactor. We have around 430 reactors over the world, so this event should happen every 46 years. It seems that this calculation is optimistic at best (if you don't take all the partial meltdowns into account) https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_meltd.... So I think we might need to reconsider nuclear energy - at least have a public debate on that topic.

Also, using capitals don't serve your argument.

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#32

Post by hencq » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 10:39 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #12

mkramlich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not cool to penalize my karma for a reasonable and honest comment trying to preserve site quality.

I can't downvote your comment, nor did I want to. I'm only posting this here because the English language media has been slow with their coverage and this is an exceptional situation.

Add to that the chance of one or more of the commenters here actually knowing something something about nuclear plants seems far greater than on one of the mainstream news channels. Thanks for posting.

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#33

Post by maigret » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 10:41 AM UTC

rosser wrote: post #25

maigret wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.

I'm trying to cobble together some statistics on the safety of nuclear power, but unfortunately, the IAEA site is slammed presently (wonder why...), so I'm left with assembling them by hand, from Wikipedia. If anyone out there can point me at a better source for this data, I'd be most grateful. As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer…

You can have a look at another (rough) estimate I did on my answer to geuis. I agree with you, and as I stated in my other answer, things like barrage breakings (due to an equivalent earthquake) can be also devastating for civilization. What I think would be useful is to have a public look at the track record of nuclear and compare it's impact with other energies. Nuclear power is going to stay for now, and that's probably necessary with the current state of the technology, but do we really want to invest so many billion in it for the next 100 year? Is really nuclear our safest bet against climate change?

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#34

Post by dmfdmf » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 10:43 AM UTC

maigret wrote: post #14

waterlesscloud wrote: post #4

I was a pretty solid supporter of nuclear power, but if Japan can't make it safe, I don't believe anyone can.

This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.

You are just demonstrating your ignorance. The reality is that the only choice to power industrial civilization is fossil fuels or nuclear power. Even if this accident results in a core melt, in the large sweep of history, it will hardly slow down the transition from oil to nuclear power.

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#35

Post by rosser » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 10:44 AM UTC

maigret wrote: post #31

geuis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry. Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable. More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting l…

Please note that I have not said that earthquakes are not something they took into account, I've said beside earthquakes, terrorist attacks and anything, there is also an additional risk that no one can calculate. Every engineer knows that prevision has its limit. So it's all about inner danger. In case of an earthquake, a barrage could also break and make huge damages. What such an accident would not do, though, and…

And what is a "melt down", but an accident at a reactor that causes damage to the reactor core. Nothing more. If a reactor core is damaged every 40-odd years, that's a pretty small price to pay for the terawatts it supplied during that span.

Yes, sometimes other things happen, and the damage goes beyond the core. That's deeply unfortunate, and I feel for the people affected. But "melt down" is one of those loaded terms like "death tax" -- it serves more to create an image of unimaginable dire consequence in the lay mind than support informed debate.

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#36

Post by bitsoffreedom » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 10:44 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #21

maigret wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German politicians voted runtime extensions for many nuclear plants. Many plants in the world are just old, because regularly rebuilding plants would make real green energies much more interesting. I think such a disaster on the environment justifies stopping using nuclear energy, even if it means more constraints on energy price and availability. If I look at the German nuclear energy discussion, there is a lot of g…

Germany isn't known for having earthquakes. Please don't be alarmist, there will be time to debate the policy issues later.

A situation like the one in Fukushima can occur whenever the power supply to a nuclear power plant is cut off. A similar situation occured in Sweden's Forsmark plant in 2006:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#37

Post by maigret » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 10:49 AM UTC

JanezStupar wrote: post #27

maigret wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German politicians voted runtime extensions for many nuclear plants. Many plants in the world are just old, because regularly rebuilding plants would make real green energies much more interesting. I think such a disaster on the environment justifies stopping using nuclear energy, even if it means more constraints on energy price and availability. If I look at the German nuclear energy discussion, there is a lot of g…

You don't know what you're talking about. At this point of history we NEED power and there are only two power sources with high enough availability and low enough cost. It's either thermo plants or nuclear plants. Everything else wont cut it. And turning off the lights won't do a shit to alleviate possible lack of energy if we stop using nuclear. Your PC ain't consuming that much power, we need power for industry. So…

I may have reacted too emotionally, but one of the point am I questioning is whether keeping old nuclear reactors is safe (I should probably have given more background on the German discussion). We may come to the conclusion that replacing them by new reactors could improve the overall safety. Of course that is going to cost money, and then we might find out that we are building us a debt that is not paying in the long term.

The fact is that some countries use nuclear power a lot, some other almost not, and that nuclear power only produces a minor part of the world electricity and energy. Probably a part we could gain back by investing in efficiency.

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#38

Post by maigret » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 11:07 AM UTC

dmfdmf wrote: post #34

maigret wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a proof that nuclear energy is not green, not safe, and should not be used any more. Nuclear plants can't resist direct airliner impact or big earthquakes or anything that the engineer didn't think about.

You are just demonstrating your ignorance. The reality is that the only choice to power industrial civilization is fossil fuels or nuclear power. Even if this accident results in a core melt, in the large sweep of history, it will hardly slow down the transition from oil to nuclear power.

So you think that graph is wrong? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:EIA2007_...

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#39

Post by ericd » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 11:10 AM UTC

maigret wrote: post #31

geuis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merde, HN needs a redesign. I didn't mean to upvote this comment, sorry. Nuclear energy is like commercial airlines. Its a very safe kind of power, but sometimes there are accidents. Its unavoidable. More to your point, saying that a 747 hitting a cooling tower is a reason to abandon nuclear power is asinine. I the entire 100+ years of human flight, there have been exactly TWO instances of commercial planes hitting l…

Please note that I have not said that earthquakes are not something they took into account, I've said beside earthquakes, terrorist attacks and anything, there is also an additional risk that no one can calculate. Every engineer knows that prevision has its limit. So it's all about inner danger. In case of an earthquake, a barrage could also break and make huge damages. What such an accident would not do, though, and…

No form of energy is entirely clean or risk free. To say that any risk of a relatively large accident is unacceptable is unrealistic. Look at what the use of oil caused in the Gulf of Mexico, let alone the environmental damage caused by the normal use of oil as a power source.

Short of a breakthrough on fusion or something else exotic, nuclear power with modern designs is by far the best hope for decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels, and only with reprocessing (also unpopular) could it bear the burden for very long while being economical. It's a tragedy that this will be used as an example for why it should be locked away in a closet in the coming years. Believing that efficiency and saving can solve our energy problems is pretty naive, and taking away from the debate of the matter at hand.

Re: Explosion at Japanese nuclear plant, fuel may be melting - Officials

#40

Post by ericd » Sat, Mar 12, 2011, 11:26 AM UTC

maigret wrote: post #33

rosser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to cobble together some statistics on the safety of nuclear power, but unfortunately, the IAEA site is slammed presently (wonder why...), so I'm left with assembling them by hand, from Wikipedia. If anyone out there can point me at a better source for this data, I'd be most grateful. As a preliminary indicator of my findings, I've gathered start-up dates (and shut-down dates for reactors that are no longer…

You can have a look at another (rough) estimate I did on my answer to geuis. I agree with you, and as I stated in my other answer, things like barrage breakings (due to an equivalent earthquake) can be also devastating for civilization. What I think would be useful is to have a public look at the track record of nuclear and compare it's impact with other energies. Nuclear power is going to stay for now, and that's pr…

Realistically, we need an alternative that is as cheap as or nearly as cheap as the dirty energy production methods if we want it to take off. Nuclear is the only clean energy source that comes close, and it's likely to remain that way partly because of fundamental reasons. Things like solar, wind, etc. simply don't have the energy density to be viable replacements, with the possible exception of large scale solar deployments if one could reduce the material cost of panels, increase the efficiency, and find a way to store excess energy for the dark periods.

For a very readable analysis with a good amount of rigor, I highly recommend the book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, available free here: http://www.withouthotair.com/