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Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

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Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#101

Post by acidburnNSA »

jacquesm wrote: post #45
acidburnNSA wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting. I'm in the nuclear industry and would like to try to address some of these issues if you don't mind. 1. Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. It is effectively totally sustainable and even renewable on a 4+ billion year time frame, even without breeder reactors. But really, breeder reactors will become a thing when uranium gets e…

> Uranium in seawater is replenished by erosion through streams at a rate faster than we could ever burn it. Isn't there a substantial energy cost associated with collecting that Uranium? The same goes for gold, there is a huge amount of gold in seawater and yet, nobody has been able to extract it in a way that left money on the table after the process had run.

Great question, and one that I don't have a quantitative reply to on hand. The thing with uranium is that it is so unimaginably energy dense that with the success we've seen so far in seawater extraction technology, it's hard to imagine the energy required for extraction being anything but minuscule in comparison. Obviously there's a limit of concentration where this becomes not true but my understanding is that we are not near that limit.

Here's a summary of some recent work on seawater uranium extraction: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

And here's a special edition of Industrial and Chemical Engineering dedicated to the topic: http://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15#UraniuminSeawater

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#102

Post by mirimir »

Glauc wrote: post #78
mirimir wrote: post #2

In states near the Nevada test site, senior government officials evacuated before test series, with their families. And Kodak was notified in advance, so they could avoid using fallout-contaminated paper to interleave with their X-ray film.

While interesting, what does chernobyl have to do with nuclear weapons testing?

The common thread is governments lying to their people about radiation releases.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#103

Post by mseebach »

fusiongyro wrote: post #98
mseebach wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. The majority of deaths from the Banqiao Dam burst was from subsequent epidemics and famine. The 11 million displaced also weren't exactly spending three nights in a hotel, then going home. The construction of the Three Gorges (2012) dam flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, as well as 1,300 archaeological sites, and caused relocation of 1.24m citizens -- this is permanent and was done entirely on…

Water is less scary than uranium. I agree with you, but it seems to be futile to convince people because there's just more movies about the harm of radiation than deaths by flooding. They keep rebuilding New Orleans and living in coastal Florida too.

There's a chicken-and-egg situation here -- people are never going to get comfortable with nuclear while politicians are leading the FUD-charge.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#104

Post by mseebach »

7952 wrote: post #95
mseebach wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's hard. But it's not like we've never done it before and that operating nuclear power plants is this weird theoretical endeavour. Or, put in another way: the hardness isn't why we're not doing it.

I don't agree. A lot of countries have been open to new nuclear developments. In the UK for example there is a supportive government, and schemes are even quite popular locally due to jobs. Yet the commercial and political risk is still huge. Despite the legacy of nuclear schemes it is still difficult to get schemes of the ground. And those kind of issues are in a large part due to the unqiue challenges that nuclear…

Despite those unique challenges, the French built 56 reactors in the 70s and 80s. GDP had quadrupled since then, while those unique challenges haven't gotten bigger -- but they have been amended with 40 years of rabid FUD. That is the challenge, and as long as politicians are repeating the FUD, it's not going to get easier.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#105

Post by mseebach »

troebr wrote: post #99
mseebach wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France, a rich, functional, liberal, western democracy, is more or less uncontroversially nuclear powered to a very high degree. There are no more practical difficulties than any other large, important project. The only problem is politics.

I wouldn't say uncontroversially. There are political issues around what to do with aging nuclear power plants (see Fessenheim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant ) and whether to invest more. I don't know much about it, but nuclear energy was a talking point during the latests elections. Personally, I think it would be an enormous mistake not to invest enough to at least assess the feasibil…

More or less uncontroversially ;)

Especially compared to the fate of nuclear in most other countries around Europe.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#106

Post by Shivetya »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #31
mkesper wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer. “I know three women my age (between 30–40) who have experienced thyroid cancer. When one of them was surprised to get the diagnosis, her doctor told her they see women our age from the Soviet Union very frequently with the same. Not a coincidence.” — Z. K.

>You're not taking into account all the people who didn't die immediately but long before their time because of cancer. Neither are you, you're speculating that they must exist in high numbers. That quote doesn't show anything, that could be a coincidence and frequently is a vague term for a very busy individual. There has been a noticeable increase in thyroid cancer incidents in the area, but treated thyroid cancer…

and how many will die from starvation this year? Here's a hint, more than all those who died from nuclear accidents and dam breaks. You could total them all up and you might get to this year's starvation numbers.

The point is, there is no good outcome in a pissing match over what has the most negative impact when we routinely ignore any number of causes of death that we can be fixing but don't.

The threat to hydro is the reclamation of environment which tends to go unchallenged in many parts because of the feel good lobby.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#107

Post by x0x0 »

mseebach wrote: post #103
fusiongyro wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water is less scary than uranium. I agree with you, but it seems to be futile to convince people because there's just more movies about the harm of radiation than deaths by flooding. They keep rebuilding New Orleans and living in coastal Florida too.

There's a chicken-and-egg situation here -- people are never going to get comfortable with nuclear while politicians are leading the FUD-charge.

Yet we keep being told, "Oh no, it's safe this time. Really." and then Fukushima happens. Not to mention cleanup costs that started at $50B are now estimated to surpass $0.2T. I would be surprised if they don't double a couple more times before all is said and done, and that's fractions of a trillion dollars.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#108

Post by x0x0 »

vkb wrote: post #67
archagon wrote: post #6

Any chance there's a Russian version of this somewhere?

Editor here. These were originally written in English, so we have plans to translate to Russian, which might take a while since we only have one fully-qualified translator. Help is welcome! Shoot me an email (included in my profile).

fyi you can't see your email in the email field; you have to put it in about

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#109

Post by stickfigure »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #100
dragonwriter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person. The evacuation made necessary to avoid direct casualties from the nuclear incident killed 34.

I wouldn't say they were direct. That number is based on a comparison with a 1916 tsunami and earthquake death toll, and with around one of those thirty-four being under sixty that seems hard to calculate exactly.

All of this needs to be put in the context of a natural disaster that killed >15,000 people and leveled hundreds of thousands of buildings. The power plant really shouldn't lead the story here.

Re: Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl

#110

Post by justicezyx »

josefx wrote: post #82
justicezyx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China did managed population growth, guess what happened, no one is happy. I doubt human can overcome their own nature to step ahead and regulate population effectively.

Isn't population growth close to zero for most industrialized countries?

What's your point?

I am not blaming other countries being irresponsible in controlling population. I was saying simply control population is not as easy a social policy to carry out.

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