Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity • Hacker News Board

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#231

Post by pdonis » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 4:17 PM UTC

veidr wrote: post #91

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.

Yeah, but they are lobbying to we allow industry to build new plants without a fundamental and transparent rethinking of the safety issues, and with various proposed schemes to limit or eliminate corporate liability. (Is that really the best way to ensure safe designs and operation procedures?) The reactor designs are newer, but we also need newer designs for management and disaster prevention/response. Even with the…

Um, the root cause of the problems at Fukushima had nothing to do with the design of the reactors. The root cause was that their backup diesel generators, which were to supply power to the reactor control and safety systems in the event of a shutdown, along with their switchgear, were sited behind a seawall that got overcome by the tsunami. If the backup generators had been sited properly, this whole fiasco would never have gotten started; the reactors would have shut down safely, end of story. I'm actually amazed that the reactors have held up as well as they have in the face of having no cooling water over a significant part of the fuel rods for this long.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#232

Post by pdonis » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 4:27 PM UTC

btmorex wrote: post #81

michaelchisari wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're making the argument that we more closely scrutinize 40 year old designs, you'll find no resistance here. But the problem is that using Fukushima as an argument against nuclear, is like using a car crash as an argument against transportation.

My point is they were either wrong or lying. Both possibilities are pretty worrying.

They were wrong because they didn't take into account the possibility that backup power would be unavailable for so long. The backup generators and their switchgear were sited very poorly--behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami.

Please note that I'm not saying the reactor designs themselves weren't old and out of date. They were. But that wasn't the root cause of the problems. The stresses that these reactors have withstood due to the lack of backup power are far beyond any safety specification they were built to.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#233

Post by anabis » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 4:27 PM UTC

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…

Unless you are under 1 year old, you _can_ drink milk and water. You are overreacting.

If you are female and pregnant, that overreaction can be justified, but otherwise you only have your overreaction to blame.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#234

Post by burgerbrain » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 4:39 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #204

asharp wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a non sequitur. Look up the first nuclear pile experiments and you'll find out just how primitive you can be and still produce a functioning nuclear reactor.

Sorry I don't speak latin? In any case, of course storage of waste has to factored into the cost? I don't see how it is relevant how easy it is to build a reactor. Guess what, it is even easier to start a fire, which produces a lot of energy, too.

Do you claim to not know spanish when people say they are going out for burritos?

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#235

Post by lispm » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 4:48 PM UTC

asharp wrote: post #216

lispm wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have now found out a little bit about the energy density of Uranium. It has little to do with how dangerous mining is and what the consequences are (exposure to Radon, contamination of drinking water, ...). Fact is, here in Germany we have been mining for coal for decades. It has a lot of negative impacts on nature. It is still going on. But it is slowly phased out against political opposition. Uranium mining OTO…

Can you show that the rate of fatality for uranium mining is more then 13630 times the rate of fatality of coal mining per kilogram (or cubic meter)? (Including secondary effects of both) At the end of the day, that specifically is what we are trying to find out.

Maybe you. Not me.

I found already out that all Uranium mines here in Western Europe have been closed, mostly because of environmental issues and because they are not economical.

I can see every day that millions of people live near coal plants and coal mines - here in Germany. There is is a large movement to shut down coal plants and end coal mining. But that movement still has some miles to go.

These are facts.

Your calculations based on energy density are useless. Nobody wants to live near a Uranium mine contaminating ground water. No matter how much energy Uranium provides. In more densely populated areas like Europe this is hopeless.

The existing Uranium mines are almost all located in areas where not the consumers of nuclear electricity live.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#236

Post by gaspard » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 4:57 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #229

gaspard wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys keep amazing me. Do you forget that nuclear plants produce tons of waste that has to be kept far away from any life form for thousands of years ? Do you know any written language or sign or whatever that is 10'000 years old and which human people can understand and use cautiously ? Nuclear waste is going to be the worst legacy we give to our children and grandchildren. They will hate us for this. And, even i…

Follow the link in the Wikipedia page to the article on reprocessing. It solves both of the issues you raise: it greatly extends the time the fuel lasts, and it greatly shortens the time that the remaining waste is dangerous. The only reason this was even an issue in the US (it isn't in other nuclear-using countries) is that the Carter administration banned reprocessing because of misplaced concerns about proliferati…

I don't believe reprocessing means "no waste" but anyway, that's just half of the problem: what will we do in 50 years ?

And how do you reprocess the lives of the 200'000 people who had to leave after the nuclear accident in Tchernobyl alone ? Tell the fishermen by Fukushima to go reprocess their lives because some over-confident engineers thought they mastered what they were doing.

Nuclear power is just like the "green revolution": pure megalomania by people too afraid to consider alternatives like... a less power greedy way of living.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#237

Post by Tichy » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 5:19 PM UTC

burgerbrain wrote: post #234

Tichy wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I don't speak latin? In any case, of course storage of waste has to factored into the cost? I don't see how it is relevant how easy it is to build a reactor. Guess what, it is even easier to start a fire, which produces a lot of energy, too.

Do you claim to not know spanish when people say they are going out for burritos?

I don't know, but I know that I'd like a burger right now.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#238

Post by dhughes » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 5:33 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #84

dhughes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CANDU reactors are safe, in fact they have a hard time getting anything to happen on a good day. If something went wrong the worst that would happen is the reactor would stop working.

Stopping reactors is not the problem, those in Fukushima did stop properly as the earthquake struck. The problem is dealing with the decay heat aftewards.

I think that's what's good about CANDU, we were so poor here in Canada it was designed using separate tubes which makes it possible to remove entire fuel bundle tubes without requiring the core to be de-pressurized, it's kind of a modular core from what I've read.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#239

Post by jbert » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 6:09 PM UTC

russss wrote: post #212

jbert wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out if interest, the way I'd try and design a fail-safe solution would be to have meltdown trigger a shutdown. Picture a bunch of large, heat-proof (ceramic?) test-tubes, with their bases apart but their openings together. Put that underneath the core - then if it melts and drops down, small pieces of it flow in different directions - until you've got a sub-critical amount in each one - so the fission reaction stops.…

The issue at Fukushima isn't criticality, though. All the reactors were safely shut down seconds after the earthquake hit, and no new fission has occurred since then. The problem is that even a shut-down reactor core generates significant heat due to the decay of fission by-products, and that's what caused the problems. That said, there are other reactor designs which are more inherently safe.

> The problem is that even a shut-down reactor core generates significant heat due to the decay of fission by-products

Ah, thanks. I hadn't appreciated that.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#240

Post by pella » Sun, Apr 03, 2011, 6:11 PM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #122

billmcneale wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

full book:

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment: (PDF; 4,3 MB) http://www.strahlentelex.de/Yablokov%20Chernobyl%20book.pdf

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_...