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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

#241

Post by dspeyer »

nitrogen wrote: post #144
dspeyer wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about hydro on natural waterfalls? No space lost. No dam-failure risk. I don't think every rainy mountain is fully tapped. True, they aren't everywhere. Maybe some of the power-intensive industry can move to them.

Fortunately people tend to like waterfalls for their aesthetic value so much that they would never allow industrial processing or power plants near them. I would like to see calculations on how much theoretical power could be obtained from all sources if there were no limits, i.e. every river dammed, every waterfall harnessed, every atom of uranium split, every atom of silicon and necessary rare earths turned into so…

Doesn't seem to be a problem and Niagara (2.5GW) or Snoqualmie (54MW). Both are still popular with tourists (obviously, Snoqualmie is not on Niagara's scale in either power or tourism, but I include it because I imagine there are a lot of Snoqualmie-sized waterfalls yet untapped, and probably no Niagara-sized).

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#242

Post by Groxx »

VladRussian wrote: post #20
DarkShikari wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've drank milk and eaten meat contaminated by poisonous chemicals from coal power plants for your whole life. Not a single person has died yet from the Fukushima disaster, yet millions of people have died from ailments caused by coal power plants. Why is that kind of contamination just fine? I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima. Perhaps we should f…

why to promote that false dichotomy - either nuclear or coal. There are other options, better nuclear designs, natural gas, wind [ which is baseline type of energy if towers are high enough ], solar - we have so much desert on Earth, and start seriously develop nuclear fusion [ as its development has been practically stopped for the fear of proliferation ]

Because while it is a false dichotomy, people's reaction to both are real and extremely unbalanced. We're used to coal, so people don't fear it as much as we should. We hear "nuclear" and get cold war propaganda popping up in our heads.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#243

Post by Groxx »

billybob wrote: post #200
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…

Doesn't uranium get mined? How safe is that?

It takes a few orders of magnitude less ore to power a nuclear plant for X time periods than it takes to power a coal plant. Even if they're equivalent in danger, you're still comparing whales and minnows.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#244

Post by Natsu »

VladRussian wrote: post #192
Natsu wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> develop nuclear fusion [ as its development has been practically stopped for the fear of proliferation ] Wait ... what? Are you saying that nuclear fusion (and not fission ) poses some kind of proliferation risk? Proliferation of what, exactly? Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets? Hydrogen? Deuterium?? Tritium??? Helium???? Or are there some reasons to worry that the neutron flux from the reaction would be used to ac…

>Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets? this 2, laser driven inertial confinement and tokamak, don't pose a significant proliferation risk even/when they are successful. Unfortunately this 2 is also least promising as the decades of experiments have clearly shown. As a result, there is no rush of investments into them. The proliferation risk is creation of relatively compact, say, in the first generation, up to transport…

I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb. Quite the opposite: one needs to keep the reaction under control, so keeping it small makes things easier. I suppose, in theory, it's possible, but I doubt it.

If you have a citation for where Sandia says there are proliferation risks, I would be interested.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#245

Post by Natsu »

Tichy wrote: post #182
Natsu wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those accidents are mining accidents alone. It ignores black lung, for example. For the other thing, if that's the actual reason they're locating plants there, I'm against it, for whatever that's worth.

What are you trying to say? I just pointed out that the numbers form the pro-nuclear article are to be taken with a grain of salt. You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good. Do the black lung people even die because of it? If not they shouldn't count, just as the cancer patients don't seem to count as long as they don't die in a timely manner.

> You can always do creative accounting to make look good what you want to look good.

Yes, that's why I'm trying to make it clear what all the numbers represent. I believe that you're correct, for example, with China's coal miners having about 4x as much accident risk as US miners, but I think that's still limited to accident risk. I don't remember if Wikipedia explained which figures it was comparing very carefully.

> Do the black lung people even die because of it?

http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray02042010.html

"As dangerous an undertaking as coal mining is, there’s no comparison between the risks of cave-ins or flooding or explosions, and the risks of contracting this deadly disease. In the last decade alone, 10,000 miners have died from black lung, compared with fewer than 400 from mine accidents."

See also: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-overview#a0199

"The ICU mortality rate for patients with coal worker’s pneumoconiosis with their first episode of respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation was 40%, and the in-hospital mortality rate was 43%."

Also look at the treatment tab. Basically, the only treatment is preventative: change jobs (at least get away from the dust!), stop smoking, vaccinations for common lung infections, etc. Oh, yeah, you get put on oxygen, too. It doesn't help your dead lungs, though.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/297887-treatment

Just a warning, but the pictures in part of that emedicine article are pretty gross.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#246

Post by Natsu »

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.

I would advise Googling such things, but just so you know, "non sequitur" means "it doesn't follow" in Latin.

He's saying that what you said doesn't make much sense as a reply to that other post. Indeed, I'm not quite sure what your point was, there. If it was a joke, I missed it completely.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#247

Post by _urga »

asharp wrote: post #193
_urga wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition of "safest" is not entirely true. They are "safe" in the sense that the probability of a catastrophe is 1 in 10,000 years (that is the statistic). But they are exponential orders of magnitude more deadly, with the consequences thereof lasting for tens of thousands of years, when that 1/10,000th year comes around. With 500 nuclear power plants operating, we can expect a serious nuclear catastrophe ever…

I do not believe that is his definition of safe. I believe he is using the standard definition of safe, for a power source, which is expected deaths/Twh.

Deaths per TWH is no real measure of safety at all when it comes to nuclear. Accidents affect not only human beings but the environment and indeed entire continents and the ecosystems thereof. Even today when they hunt wild boar in Germany many of the boar are found to have been irradiated as a result of Chernobyl, and hazardous for consumption. These events cross borders. It would be foolish to attempt to comprehend their relative significance in terms of death counts.

Applying deaths per TWH to nuclear is naive. It's an abstraction that in no way reflects the underlying reality, and which leads the general populace into mad ambivalence. It's the kind of rhetoric you hear on Animal Farm. This idea that some deaths are better than others. In fact, it's a question of asymmetric risk with outsized consequences. If you learn anything from Ben Graham or Warren Buffett, it's that that's not the kind of game you want to be playing, unless you're really smart like LTCM. You don't want to have anything to do with it, especially not if there is human mental apparatus, governments, and contractors involved. There are too many variables you cannot control, and they are not captured by deaths per TWH.

The second thing to learn from Graham and Doddsville, when dealing with asymmetric odds is that history is no reliable guide to the future. What happened last year or the year before, is no indication of what may happen next year or the manner in which we can expect it to happen. That nuclear catastrophes have historically not been catastrophic (according to the author), is no reason for the author to believe that they may continue to remain so.

Yet the Washington Post article has based its argument on the premise that you can even measure deaths per TWH. You cannot count deaths directly and indirectly related to a nuclear accident. We have learned that much from the history of these accidents, and it would be ignorant and insensitive to claim otherwise. Take for instance Chernobyl, does the author truly believe that only 50 people have already died as a direct and indirect result? Even the most conservative numbers reported (deaths actually incurred) are higher, and show significant variance between sources:

"Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously; the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000 while a Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more. A UNSCEAR report places the total deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

From those to whom much as been given, much will be expected.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#248

Post by _urga »

jarek wrote: post #219
_urga wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I'd try and design a fail-safe solution would be not to design it in the first place. No one is forcing us to build these things. But government contracts are lucrative and contractors exist.

No one is forcing you. A lot of people just think refrigeration is awfully nice to have.

We will all be called to account for every careless word we have spoken.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#249

Post by phlux »

asharp wrote: post #99
phlux wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how is nuclear fuel transported from wherever is it manufactured to the reactor? Why cant that process be implemented to transfer the fuel out of the reactor?

If memory serves, the problem is that it is politically impossible to create some area to place the waste fuel. ie. it would be much safer to move the spent fuel out of the reactor, however there is nowhere for it to go to.

I am talking about taking it out of the damaged reactor and into a sound containment/cooling unit.

That is far better politically than letting it sit in a damaged structure leaking radiation everywhere.

Sometimes nations need to STFU about politics and get shit done.

Re: Nuclear Power is Safest Way to Make Electricity

#250

Post by Tichy »

Natsu wrote: post #246
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.

I would advise Googling such things, but just so you know, "non sequitur" means "it doesn't follow" in Latin. He's saying that what you said doesn't make much sense as a reply to that other post. Indeed, I'm not quite sure what your point was, there. If it was a joke, I missed it completely.

OT mentioned all the side costs of photovoltaic power, waste materials, pollution and so on, while stressing the simplicity of creating nuclear power.

So my remark simply was meant to draw attention to the waste products of nuclear power. Is it not logical to throw it into equation for nuclear power, too, if you throw it into the equation for photovoltaic power?

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