41–50 of 126 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please spread your religious propaganda elsewhere. HN is a place to discuss, not to proselytize. Thanks.
How fitting that the lone voice of dissent in this thread would eventually be charged with spreading religious propaganda. Guess we should have saw that one coming!
> a testament to the potential dangers of nuclear power. A list to remind us of the real dangers of coal power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_i...
Ditch both.
(no, you don't avoid all deaths with hydro, wind or solar either; in fact hydro has historically been one of the deadliest power sources thanks to the Banqiao accident where a dam failure killed 171,000 - even excluding that, though, hydro is far from free of deaths)
EDIT: Since I was being a bit snarky: The point is last I heard the number of deaths from installation of rooftop solar is higher than the number of deaths from nuclear power plants for equivalent amount of energy. Nuclear gets the headlines because the nuclear incidents we hear about are big and scary and rare and get hyped up.
You don't get massive worldwide news coverage because some guy fell off a roof while mounting solar panels and died. But he's just as dead, and it adds up.
You can't ignore the small incidents if their rate is high enough.
Overall, you could have meltdowns on a regular basis and nuclear would still be one of our safest alternatives. Chances are it will also be one of the alternatives with the lowest environmental impact: Less radioactivity released than coal, by orders of magnitude; far less land area affected by development than hydro, wind and solar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the main issue is that no one wants to get anywhere remotely near it.
Clearly you wouldn't send people in there. Is there too much radiation in the room for robots with radiation-shielded electronics to operate?
A disturbing thought is that Fukishima is an even more dire situation. The Pacific ocean will never be the same. Which of the 507 other plants will be the next go into meltdown? I wonder how many of these disasters the planet can handle before it becomes inhabitable to all life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditch both.
For what magically safe alternative? (no, you don't avoid all deaths with hydro, wind or solar either; in fact hydro has historically been one of the deadliest power sources thanks to the Banqiao accident where a dam failure killed 171,000 - even excluding that, though, hydro is far from free of deaths) EDIT: Since I was being a bit snarky: The point is last I heard the number of deaths from installation of rooftop s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no physics education, I'm using common sense. They don't design bombs like they do core reactors. Bombs are intended to explode immediately, reactors are intended to help produce power for a very long time. But hey, I'm listening - show me a chart that compares the total amount of ionizing radiation released into the atmosphere by bombs dropped on Nagasaki & Hiroshima versus the amount produced already by the…
Please don't use 'common sense' and talk about how they design bombs and core reactors when you have no physics education. But hey, I'll humour you with as crude comparison as I can string together in a few minutes. This link [1] roughly compares Chernobyl to a Fat Man equivalent, which had a 21kT yield, or 0.021 MT. That's 0.003% of the total yield of all the atomic tests mankind has conducted (545MT total [2]). So…
I think this article is very well-written overall. However, there are still a point that could use clarification. > During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown. It did not work. Calling the incident a routine test greatly mischaracterizes what they were doing. This wasn't some sort of daily safety checkli…
Also, the experiment's requirement lead into the operators disabling almost every single safety mechanism. The automated systems disallowed the actions they were trying to do, so they disconnected most important security measures. Operating like that you can make even hydroelectric power station extremely deadly, and kill a lot of people.
So it's now almost 30 years after Chernobyl, so if I read this naively: > When this photo was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the Elephant’s Foot was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had. the Elephant's foot will currently have 1/1000th of the original radioactivity it had right after the disaster, and 10 years from now it will be down to 1/10,000th. At that rate it would be indistinguishable from…
Exactly. From a report on Chernobyl [0]: "Most of the decrease [in radiation] in the coming years will be at only the rate of the physical half-life of 137Cs." Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years [1], so if we use the number given in the article (10,000 roentgens/hour) the dose is apparently 434 million times background radiation, 23 microroentgens/hour [2]. It would take over a millennium to reduce Cesium-137 by a factor of 434 million[3]
That's the Elephant's Foot, though. Randall Munroe cites Chernobyl as having 6 millisieverts/hour on average[4]. That's 3000 times background radiation [2], or a 350-year wait before Chernobyl emits the same amount [5].
This is obviously a simplification, though. Plutonium isotopes were released too [0], which have a much longer half-life (thousands of years). It's possible those small amounts of plutonium will emit enough radiation to make Chernobyl have noticeably higher radiation levels than the background dose for much longer.
A final caveat: I'm not an expert or even a devoted amateur. Your question just sparked my curiosity. Although, this New York Times article [6] says scientists say it takes about 10-13 half lives for an area to recover, which is close to my 350 year figure.
[0]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/rp/chernobyl/c02.html. Search for 239Pu, not plutonium, to find the plutonium reference.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium-137
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgen_%28unit%29#Significanc...
[3]: http://po.st/3ckuGC
[4]: https://xkcd.com/radiation/
[5]: http://po.st/T2qoni
[6]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/weekinreview/20chernobyl.h...
Edit: Fixed math and added New York Times link. (Previously I based the Elephant's Foot calculations on 1,000 roentgens/hour.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hang on, do you think the fissible material from a bomb just vanishes? It is just hurled across a bigger area due to the fact that a bomb explodes. Exactly what level of physics education do you have?
I have no physics education, I'm using common sense. They don't design bombs like they do core reactors. Bombs are intended to explode immediately, reactors are intended to help produce power for a very long time. But hey, I'm listening - show me a chart that compares the total amount of ionizing radiation released into the atmosphere by bombs dropped on Nagasaki & Hiroshima versus the amount produced already by the…
That's a mistake. "Common sense", or the mental picture of "how things work" you've built up over a lifetime is utterly useless when it comes to nuclear devices. Things that common sense will tell you are super dangerous really aren't, and conversely things that common sense tells you should be safe are not at all safe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditch both.
and freeze to death in winter? not cook your food and eat it raw? walk/cycle for 3 hours to commute to work?
This is off topic but I always find statements like the above rather bizarre. Why must humans insist on living in places where the environment is hostile to human life?
I guess its because I grew up in a place where heating is very rarely necessary, without cooling of any kind and have spent most of the last three years traveling around countries where you could theoretically walk around naked all year if you so desired but I increasingly find it bizarre how attached people are to living in locations that are ill-suited to humans.