Let's remember the post-Fukishima gloating by pundits such as George Monbiot that naively deemed Fukishima a validation of nuclear power.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuc...
Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
131–140 of 265 posts
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#132can someone explain why they are accumulating so much extra water? surely they can just reuse the already contaminated water in the tanks? obviously there's good reason, just curious why.
Well if they're actually leaking that much water every day, then they'd probably not have a way to recapture it. If they did, it wouldn't be a leak.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation. But here's the thing: we have already had two "nuclear accidents of any significance": Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Neither of those came even remotely close to "turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation". Nor will Fukushima. Yes, it's very bad for people near the plant, and for fishermen in…
Yes, but I'm not a miner. Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant.
The amount of radiation that comes out of a coal plant (mainly from Cesium 151) on a yearly basis far exceeds that of a nuclear power plant in its lifetime.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea is really old . In the Code of Hammurabi, a builder whose building collapses and kills someone is killed. If the building kills a son, the son of the builder is killed. Simply having it around as a cultural trope ain't gonna do it. I'm talking about a voluntary pledge that assumes the force of law. Turn it around: if an engineer thinks he can build a perfectly safe nuclear plant, why shouldn't he pledge his…
1. Why do you think this was an engineering failure and not a business/implementation failure? For instance, in that famous pedestrian bridge collapse (a pedestrian walkway in a hotel in I think Kansas City collapsed shortly after opening, killing and injuring an absurd number of people), the bridge was designed correctly, but a deviation from the design in construction led to a fatal flaw. 2. What do you consider "p…
You're thinking of the Hyatt Regency (now Sheraton): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
It was not as you describe; the original design was absolutely not correct. The original design was additionally so difficult to implement in reality that one of the manufacturers of the structural parts proposed a design change - one that made the flaws of the original twice as bad - that architects approved without any actual review.
I've been there several times, since it's a popular spot for conferences - looking up at the doors to nowhere in the lobby atrium is haunting.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#135I think there are similarities between the nuclear power debate and the GMO debate. In both case, I think it's stupid to be fundamentally opposed to the technology/research itself. But in both case, the industry is so fucked up (lies, too close ties with control authority, ...) that I don't trust them at all. It seems to me this is partially a failure of our current economic system, where the incentives for the indus…
I can think of one thing, and no one will swallow it in our society: The engineers who work on nuclear plants must pledge their lives for its safety, and ritually kill themselves in the event of an incident. I'm perfectly serious, in that it's within the human experience and it would work. I also suspect our world society can't wrap its head around that kind of medieval pact, and I'm not even sure I want to live in t…
Engineers usually aren't the ones to make funding and budgeting resource decisions. Engineers killing themselves when a plant fails does little if the failure is because they couldn't get budget approved for replacement parts, or if the decision is to continue operating the plant when the tech is beyond its original operating life, or deciding to fund the seawall height at a safety factor of 50% above a 50 year tsunami records, or 300% over 2000 year tsunami records...
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
running the risk of turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation. But here's the thing: we have already had two "nuclear accidents of any significance": Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Neither of those came even remotely close to "turning our children's children into walking bags of cancerous mutation". Nor will Fukushima. Yes, it's very bad for people near the plant, and for fishermen in…
Yes, but I'm not a miner. Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant.
>Coal is much less dangerous for those who live near the power plant
I don't believe so. Toxicity and Emissions of a coal-fire power plant does severely affect those in the neighborhood. Studies show that radiation dose is comparable. As and Se are found to have higher concentrations in soil samples.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mistakes aren't deterministic, they are largely probabilistic. While ritual suicide might make the victims of an accident feel better, they are ultimately unproductive - there are many classes of disastrous errors that have nothing to do with negligence. Not to mention also, even in incidents with a preventable cause, it is exceedingly rare for there to be a singular cause. Chernobyl, for example, was the culmination…
Things like nuclear meltdowns are black swan events, with a multitude of causes and guilt. I'm not advocating ritual suicide, but I think it's worth noting that in the case of Fukushima, there is an easily identifiable single root cause to all the current problems: the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami. If they had been on h…
> behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami.
They made a 20 ft sea-wall. I guess nobody thought it would be overrun. I suspect now any future seawalls will be made with a good factory of safety.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining? You're only concerned about the risks that impact you personally? That doesn't seem to be a common attitude: if it were, nobody would have complained about the Deepwater Horizon spill except people who lived on the Gulf coast. (And nobody would complain about nuclear power except those who had to live near a plant.)
>Does that mean you're not concerned about the deaths from coal mining? No, it doesn't. It's a difference between risks taken willingly by the people who benefit from the outcome, and risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit. And it's obvious that it was meant that way. Don't be deliberately obtuse.
risks imposed on people who don't have a choice and don't stand to benefit
Huh? People do have a choice to move if they don't want to live near a power plant. And the plant is making the electricity they use, so they do benefit from it.
(That said, plenty of nuclear plants have been killed because the people who would have lived near the plant protested.)
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, so the lifetime output of the plant is 188 GW-years. Most estimates for the expected cancer deaths due to radiation are around 120. The evacuation itself caused 46 deaths due to disruption in medical care and suicide. That means that Fukushima had .88 deaths per GWyr. That's 1/3 the death rate of coal according to an EU study, but twice the death rate of coal according to another study that looked at a different…
What a great answer to your own great question. So depending on the accuracy of the estimates - which may be drastically low, but also should be spread amongst the plants currently running without incident and their likelihood to continue that way - nuclear could end up being far more damaging to human health than coal for an equivalent amount of energy.
Well, the .88 deaths per GWyr is just for Fukushima. If you're talking about all nuclear power you have a lot of reactors that didn't have any problems but also Chernobyl, which was really very bad. So the global number is actually .1 for nuclear in general, historically. In the long run I expect both nuclear and coal to get safer.
I would say that in general we shouldn't be blind to the fact that nuclear power has serious problems, but we should also be aware that coal and oil have even more serious problems. In the long run we ought to be thinking of ways we can get by on renewable energy.
Re: Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe'
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things like nuclear meltdowns are black swan events, with a multitude of causes and guilt. I'm not advocating ritual suicide, but I think it's worth noting that in the case of Fukushima, there is an easily identifiable single root cause to all the current problems: the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami. If they had been on h…
> behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami. They made a 20 ft sea-wall. I guess nobody thought it would be overrun. I suspect now any future seawalls will be made with a good factory of safety.
I guess nobody thought it would be overrun.
But why would you even take that risk? Not to mention that tsunamis can easily reach 100 feet in wave height; I'm not sure you could build a seawall that could keep one out.