Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 262 posts

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#21

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#22

Post by burgerbrain »

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…

Consider how many people die around the world mining coal, or breathing coal ash.

I'm sure their families are just as unwilling to listen to people talk about coal being safe as you are unwilling to listen to people talking about nuclear being safe. The difference? There are MANY more of them.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#23

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#24

Post by euromix »

by the way, the plutonium has a half life of 24000 years and 0,001 gramme is the lethal dose for human. there is 300 kg in the reactors in japan. that is 300 000 000 lethal doses active for the next 24000 years. I dont think there is anything comparable in coal / gaz / oil industry

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#25

Post by niels_olson »

TGJ wrote: post #2

While the safest, the waste will be with the Earth for a long time to come. Longer than any corporation will be around, or government agency. There has to be a clear cut plan to deal with the waste of nuclear power that accounts for it's life span, and possible natural disasters. Currently all waste is stored at the power plants and the only current plan is to encase the waste in concrete. But where to go with that c…

Yukka mountain, anyone? Oh that's right, the shrill keep blocking it out of shear, willful ignorance of the either the local or global realities.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#27

Post by waterlesscloud »

michaelchisari wrote: post #18
danenania wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is that reason, exactly? When Banqauio kills 171,000, Bhopal kills 10,000, and 30,000 people die every year from coal pollution, why exactly don't we give energy production methods like that the kind of scrutiny we're giving Fukushima?

Because Bhopal had nothing to do with energy production? And are you claiming Bhopal didn't get massive media coverage? Because it did.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#28

Post by michaelchisari »

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…

The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. Nobody who points out the relative safety of nuclear power wants us to build more Mark I BWR's. My interest is in Travelling Wave Reactors and Thorium Molten Salt Reactors.

But the problem is, when people freak out about Fukushima, they don't say "Hey! Mark I BWR's aren't safe! We should shut down those designs!" They go after Nuclear with a wide brush, and instead we're stuck with more gas and coal dependance.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#29

Post by phlux »

What is difficult to reconcile is that we all know that nuclear meltdowns are catastrophic events, that the resultant fallout/radioactive contamination is utterly horrible.

Yet it seems that we dont build reactors with the types of failsafe systems that truly are needed should meltdown occur.

Obviously this reactor is old, and was not built during a time when we really knew what a meltdown looked like in real life. After Chernobyl, and now Fukishima, I think we really really really need to look at what the failsafe systems, containment, backup cooling and other system requirements really need to be.

Should we build reactors only in D.U.M.B. like facilities? Should we build them in old open-pit mines, such that they could be entombed properly.

Have we put enough research into containment facilities such that their structures will not melt?

I know that these faciliies have multiple backups, but clearly even then we can have situations where they dont work. Yes, this was a trifecta of incredibly fantastic circumstance, but it still happened and we are now dealing with a shitstorm.

Watching the documentary last night about how the earthquake dropped the coastline of japan upto 1 meter in elevation resulting in the sea-walls being 1 meter less than the tsunami - and the fact that clearly we know that tsunamis would occur there - placing a 6 reactor facility ON THE COAST LINE seems pretty damn stupid at this point.

It's like "Nuclear energy is the safest energy there is, until its not!"

I am all for nuclear -- but its current incarnation is rife with the traditional corrupt bullshit that plagues all other human endeavors; politics.

Why do we not have a global energy task force whose singular job it is is to plan, produce and protect the worlds energy?

If we had an organization whose sole charter was to produce energy, and was funded based on the economies of all the worlds countries - and energy was metered out to all countries in a responsible way -- we could be much further along to becoming a unified space-faring race....

/rant

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#30

Post by michaelchisari »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #27
michaelchisari wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that reason, exactly? When Banqauio kills 171,000, Bhopal kills 10,000, and 30,000 people die every year from coal pollution, why exactly don't we give energy production methods like that the kind of scrutiny we're giving Fukushima?

Because Bhopal had nothing to do with energy production? And are you claiming Bhopal didn't get massive media coverage? Because it did.

I know, Bhopal was a chemical processing plant. But it was a massive disaster, that killed thousands, and nobody came out of that saying we should never process chemicals.
Post reply on HN