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Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

#151

Post by natnat »

mort wrote: post #130
billybob wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will…

"I'm not an environmentalist" What exactly do you mean by this? I don't understand how someone can make such a bold denouncement about something as crucial the system that keeps us alive...

I think it's something like saying, "I'm not a feminist, but I think women are people too.". Environmentalism, like feminism, tends to be associated with a lot of fringe people who believe crazy things, even if the mainstream of the movements are totally reasonable things. A lot of people see organizations like the Earth Liberation Front or whatever and thing that's what environmentalism is about, when it's really just about giving a shit about something we all need.

Re: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

#152

Post by xiaoma »

bahadden wrote: post #17
potatolicious wrote: post #7

... I'm not one of the "OMFG LOOK AT THE NUCLEAR ANGEL OF DEATH" people, but can we wait for this crisis to reach some resolution before we make loud proclamations either way? The main information that concerns me right now is that there appears to be a consistent radiation leak of 400 mSv/h at the plant. While not Chernobyl by any measure, this is quite a bit of radiation, considering one's yearly dose limit is 1 mS…

"considering one's yearly dose limit is 1 mSv total." In Ramsar, Iran the background radition is around 200 mSv/Y (compared to a worldwide average of 2.4 mSv/Y) and _according to wikipedia_ this "high level of radiation does not seem to have caused ill effects on the residents of the area". Call me confused. Is the 1 mSv/Y total one of those made-up safety guidelines?

Possibly. The largest human study ever done on the effects of chronic low-level radiation found them to be beneficial.

The researcher involved proposed a radiation hormesis model, in which the body adapts to the destructive effects of radiation by upgrading its self-repair response. US regulatory groups adhere to a linear no-threshold model in which all radiation, regardless of how weak it may be, leads to cumulative damage. It's not a resolved issue however. The French Academy of Sciences & National Academy of Medicine, for one, cited the study linked below in an argument against the LNT model.

http://www.scienceboard.net/community/perspectives.122.html

Re: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

#153

Post by john61 »

khafra wrote: post #131
john61 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is to save energy. There is still much to gain with advanced technology. For example we drive all day with vehicels that have an overall efficiency factor of 3%. Huge waste is going on. It's a shame.

If there were ways to save large amounts while maintaining economic output, people would be doing them and making massive amounts of money from the savings. There are ways to achieve a mean world GDP, or at least a standard of living similar to ours at a much lower rate of single-use resource consumption, but we're at a local optima. Civilization is a greedy search algorithm.

It's a matter of price. Labour ist very expensive and high taxed. Therefore you can get rich by developing technology saving labour. On the other hand energy is cheap, so there is no economical incentive to save energy. Image an opposite pricing. I bet we would have carbon cars weighing 300 kg and with 1l/km fuel consumption. Technologically possible today but not economically.

Re: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

#154

Post by bluedanieru »

lukeschlather wrote: post #107
bluedanieru wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It killed 31 people more or less immediately . Thousands of cancers are linked to it.

How many cancers would you wager could be linked to emissions from a coal plant of comparable energy output? What if there was a tsunami and it blew up? What if we took the average number of fatalities per gigawatt-hour generated for coal and compared that to the worst-case ever scenario for nuclear, Chernobyl? Does anyone have these figures? I think we could all really use them to put this whole thing in proper pers…

I'm right there with you on this. I live in Tokyo and I still hope they build more reactors in Japan after this (no more GE Mark 1s though, please). There is no question that nuclear power is cleaner and safer than any fossil fuel-derived power-generation technology.

Just correcting an error/omission.

Re: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

#155

Post by lukeschlather »

beefman wrote: post #116
lukeschlather wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many cancers would you wager could be linked to emissions from a coal plant of comparable energy output? What if there was a tsunami and it blew up? What if we took the average number of fatalities per gigawatt-hour generated for coal and compared that to the worst-case ever scenario for nuclear, Chernobyl? Does anyone have these figures? I think we could all really use them to put this whole thing in proper pers…

Coal mining killed more than 6,000 people in China in 2004 (a typical year). Early deaths due to air pollution from coal combustion are measured in the tens of thousands per year in the United States. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0809178 Chernobyl was the worst possible nuclear accident. It caused between 50 and 5000 early deaths. As a major industrial accident, it was only average. It pales in compariso…

That's still basically an anecdotal argument.

Re: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

#156

Post by billybob »

natnat wrote: post #90
billybob wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an environmentalist, but as a technology person, I'm extremely skeptical of claims that nuclear power can be safe, however well-designed the reactors are today. It's hard enough to tell whether my web server will be able to handle next year's traffic. Nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for thousands of years. How can anyone say, with a straight face, that they have a plan for that? All of us will…

Before saying that nuclear power isn't safe enough, consider where we get most of our electricity from today: coal. Coal may have been around a long time, but it is far more dangerous than nuclear power. The fly ash produced by coal burning often contains substantial concentrations of uranium (not too bad) and radium (very bad), as well as all sorts of other toxic but non-radioactive chemicals like lead. Although the…

Excellent point. :)

Re: Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now

#157

Post by paganel »

GHFigs wrote: post #81
paganel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What people are you talking about? These: http://streaming.tepco.co.jp/tepco_people/index-j.html From here: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/g3zel/breaking_ex...

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be concluding from this. The first link is just a list of profiles/interviews with various employees of the company (the newest being over a year old). Strictly speaking, it's possible that some of them are the same people working at the site at present, but this is a company with (according to the site) over 15,000 employees. That nobody on Reddit even bothered to run the site throu…

> I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be concluding from this.

A day after the reddit comment the NyTimes had a front-page article on them: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16workers.html . The general tone of the article and of the people commenting on the article was that of "sacrifice", i.e. people putting their lives on the line for the benefits of the greater community.

Updated:

More about it from here (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/japan-tsunami/news/article.cfm?c_i...):

> David Richardson, a professor of epidemiology at the university of North Carolina who has studied the long-term health risks for nuclear plant workers, told the BBC those at Fukushima would receive in an hour the same amount of radiation a US nuclear worker is exposed over an entire career.

To a non-specialist like me that sounds like "sacrifice".

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