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Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#121

Post by asharp »

VladRussian wrote: post #70
burgerbrain wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better nuclear designs Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors. On the other hand there are plenty of people suggesting that we not build new reactors. We aren't seeing an attack on old reactor designs, we're seeing an attack on the "other option" you listed.

>Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors. the real political and economical power is with the current nuclear industry which doesn't have other designs. Any permit to build if given in the next 10 years would result in a new old nuclear plant. Like any powerful established industry they protect their position with heavy regulations and wouldn't let any innovative outsiders in.

There are plenty of other designs, most of which get built as test plants, work nicely then never get built again due to political pressure to stick to "safe" designs.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#122

Post by gnosis »

billmcneale wrote: post #80
marze wrote: post #33

When I see a story like this, it reminds me that the events in Japan represent the biggest PR challenge the nuclear industry has faced in many years. Fifty billion dollars of nuclear reactor US taxpayer-backed loan guarantees hang in the balance. The industry has been working for the past few decades to rehabilitate the image of nuclear power after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and now they have to contend with vi…

Number of casualties from nuclear plant accidents: a few thousands. Number of casualties from coal mining accidents this past century [2]: 100,000. That's accidents in coal mines alone, not even counting lung diseases and similar. The fact that it takes a 9.0 tsunami after forty years of complete absence of nuclear accidents to bring this to the front page should be indication enough that nuclear is not just safer th…

"Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/26

Excerpts of the book here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.2009.1181.is...

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#123

Post by asharp »

RuadhanMc wrote: post #111

What about Wave Power? It's pretty safe and has a very minimal environmental impact, almost constant output and for the most part is hidden from eye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power Just listened to an interesting podcast about it on Late Night Live: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3176948.... Obviously this wouldn't work for landlocked countries or countries which don't have shores with a…

It's interesting, but from what i've seen of it (albiet not all that much), it has two major issues.

* It has a low power density, hence requiring large arrays of collectors/etc. this makes it costly to build at scale.

* It generally either takes up valuable land (land by the sea is costly), or it requires lots of engineering to try and build/maintain these things out to sea.

It is very cool tech though.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#124

Post by danenania »

jbri wrote: post #94
BasDirks wrote: post #92

You guys know about the problem of nuclear waste right? You've read plenty about it right? Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favor of nuclear power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about nuclear power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.

You guys know about the problem of climate change, right? You've read plenty about it, right? Because this whole "it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet" argument in favour of every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power is just a tiny bit short-sighted. If you make your software like you reason about every-feasible-alternative-to-nuclear-power, send me a note naming your products so I know what to stay away from.

Perhaps attempting to solve a major problem with something that also causes major problems isn't much of a solution.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#125

Post by gnosis »

WalterBright wrote: post #41
marze wrote: post #33

When I see a story like this, it reminds me that the events in Japan represent the biggest PR challenge the nuclear industry has faced in many years. Fifty billion dollars of nuclear reactor US taxpayer-backed loan guarantees hang in the balance. The industry has been working for the past few decades to rehabilitate the image of nuclear power after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, and now they have to contend with vi…

There are a lot of parallels with airliner design. From reading articles about the nuke plant design, I think they could learn a lot from aviation engineers about how to build safe systems.

I'm sure they know how to build safe systems. But equally important is whether they'll spend the money necessary to make them safe, or if they'll sacrifice safety in the name of profit.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#126

Post by asharp »

Tichy wrote: post #119

Not even one mention of solar power? Maybe the technology is not at its peak yet, but combines with saving a lot of energy, is it not an option? Let's not forget that a lot of money went into perfecting nuclear power, probably a lot more than into solar power. Comparing with coal deaths seems a bit like a strawman. Also I don't trust the way the victims of Chernobyl are calculated. Adding up victims from survivor sto…

Strangely enough it takes very little money, nor energy to produce nuclear power. It's very simple at its core. Have a look at the first research reactors and you'll find that you need basically no technology to produce reactors that produce useful amounts of energy.

On the other hand solar power, especially photovoltaics is stupidly complex. Photovoltaics requires semiconductor processes, arguably one of the most complex things ever reliably harnessed by man to create.

Saying that you want to power your computer from a solar cell seems green, until you think of all the energy that went into building that solar cell. All the waste materials, the toxic waste produced in fabrication, the pollution, etc. Then it seems decidedly less green then, say, plugging it in to the wall socket.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#127

Post by singular »

singular wrote: post #113

A major problem here is that people often conflate nuclear power plants with nuclear bombs - in people's imaginations nuclear power plants could go up like a bomb and are therefore very dangerous. The fact that this is impossible doesn't get in the way of people's general perception, unfortunately. Actually looking at the evidence provides a different story altogether - the XKCD radiation chart [1] being one of the m…

Hey - why the downvote? I know it sounds silly, but I genuinely believe that is a significant part of the general popular view of nuclear power plants, silly or not.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#128

Post by ck2 »

By the way, the destroyed nuclear plant, just like the BP disaster, had avoided government regulation via apathy and corruption in the monitoring process.

So regardless of the supposed engineered safety of any of these extreme measures, once you take out the oversight that is planned into these studies/reports, everything goes out the window.

Everyone needs to state in their claims what will happen when everything fails because no-one bothered to follow up and do what they were supposed to.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#129

Post by asharp »

jbm wrote: post #15
owls wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is cleaner than coal or oil. We just need to build stronger and safer reactors. Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought. I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physi…

Buy Fukushiman land. Raise your kids there. Feed them local produce. To thy own self be true. I am not defending coal or solar or whatever. I am referring to the closed attitude of the nuclear industry. There is a huge problem with nuclear defenders in Japan who don't eat their own dogfood. You'd think they would be happy to do so since the reward is huge (improved confidence) and the risk is only 20 or more years do…

Stating that air travel is safer then cars doesn't mean that I wish myself to be strapped upon an early glider and hurled off a cliff.

The fact that one such glider still exists and is apparently in use has no bearing to the current state of the art of aeroplane design. Similarly that one old, outdated and utterly inferior reactor can fail when provoked says nothing of the current state of the art of reactor design.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#130

Post by nitrogen »

danenania wrote: post #14
jbm wrote: post #3

Great. I can't drink milk, had to avoid water for a day or two, having problem finding relatively uncontaminated meat, 20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable and so on. I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima. Mod me down all you want. I will be happy to pay attention when someone purchases land at a fair price near Fukushima…

1,000 upvotes. Nuclear power is inherently UNSAFE . It takes a lot of hubris to claim otherwise. It harnesses intense fundamental forces of nature that we can never control without a small but inevitable risk of horrible damage and harm to unlucky populations. In controlling power of this magnitude, it is inevitable that there will be mistakes or freak events that allow this power to seep out of whatever is the lates…

Everything we humans do is inherently unsafe. Using the phrase "fundamental force of nature" as though it has a sort of supernatural power behind it isn't going to change that. Gravity and inertia are also fundamental elements of nature, which kill far more people than radiation. Do we refer to automobiles as "fundamental force of nature containment technology"?

The main problem with radiation is that it's invisible and poorly understood by the public, and has been overused in movies as a fear device. Why are people seemingly more afraid of radiation maybe killing a few people than a tsunami killing many thousands? Consider if Fukushima had been a nerve gas plant, which may not have as stringent of regulations as nuclear power.

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