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Fukushima

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Re: Fukushima

#81

Post by hydrogen18 »

mackwic wrote: post #53
simoncion wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is true that coal is not the only non-nuclear power generation mechanism, it is -by far- the most common in the US. It is also true that > When you hit a nuclear plant with the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami, and then it explodes, it still kills fewer people than an average coal plant does every single year when everything goes perfectly.…

I suggest you to learn a bit about power grid engineering. Basically, the fact that we can't store electricity means that when you power on your toaster, somewhere a power plant has to increase its power to compensate. But the nuclear power plant takes up to 2 days to startup. It's not sustainable for the daily life where consumption change every hour. That's why there is the need for more agile power plant, where fu…

Who are you convinced we can't store electricity? Pumped storage for storing potential energy has worked long before we even had electricity.

Sure, the whole process of storing electricity is lossy. Thermodynamics guarantees it. But the point isn't to try and store enough generation capacity to meet our demand. You just need enough storage capacity to deal with the peaks.

There is of course the argument of "pumped storage isn't practical for meeting all of our peaking demands". Of course it isn't. Neither is nuclear suitable for meeting all of our baseline demands. They are both just tools available.

Re: Fukushima

#82

Post by TeMPOraL »

facepalm wrote: post #48
TeMPOraL wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I suppose the GP is implicitly taking into the account following facts: - there are no other energy sources that are a) green, and b) can scale up fast enough to replace fossil fuels for base load; - we're running out…

Of course there is the option to use less energy. That's just silly. If you are an American, go to any other country to learn how to get by with less energy (ie smaller houses that require less heating, smaller cars that use less fuel, less commuting to begin with, smaller fridges,...).

In theory, there is such an option. In practice, no one will take it, because why should they? It's both a coordination problem and a short/long-term values problem. How do you convince an average Joe to reduce his quality of life now in order to secure some abstract better future later; a future, that will come to pass if and only if every other average Joe and Jane does the same? You can't, unless you're a god.

And that point itself is irrelevant anyway. I too recommend watching that TED video[0] 'pdkl95 linked. The first world can try and reduce their energy consumption all they want, while there's the remaining 2/3 of the population that is industrializing itself right now, who will need more energy for things like transportation and healthcare and washing machines and food production and entertainment, and that need will offset whatever we can save.

And while we the first worlders have privilege of worrying about climate change - after a hot meal and a hot shower, dressed up in clean clothes that were washed and dried by machines - most of the world won't care. They want their hot food and hot showers and washing machines now, to have time to go to school and to read books to their children. They will seek power sources they can get.

All this makes current anti-nuclear advocacy outright dangerous to survival of technological civilization[1]. We should be pushing nuclear for baseline and renewables on top for peak loads, and slowly phasing-out coal altogether (and maybe pouring some more money into fusion research as well). We should be doing it right now, gaining more experience with building and maintaining safe nuclear plants, so that maybe developing countries could even skip coal altogether and go straight for nuclear+solar. But instead, we got a lot of people irrationally afraid of nuclear power, thus endangering their own survival.

RE going to another country - I live in Poland, so I do have a perspective on how to live on less energy than an average American, though we still use a lot of power here.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing...

[1] I initially wanted to write 'mankind', but humans are a resilient species and will no doubt survive even total civilizational collapse. Yes, there will be a world of humans. But it won't be a world any of us would like to live in. I like my pizza, showers, Emacs and an air-conditioned office, thank you very much.

Re: Fukushima

#83

Post by fulafel »

pdkl95 wrote: post #36
facepalm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume that coal is the only alternative to nuclear power (there are not only other energy sources, but also the option to use less energy), and that there is no way to use coal in a cleaner way. I leave the judgement up to you, just wanted to point out some confirmation bias in your convictions.

> the option to use less energy Do you wash your clothes by hand, with water heated from solar? No? Then why are you suggesting that most of the women in the world should continue spending their lives doing such menial activity? This idea that we need to use less energy is one of the most short-sighted examples of western cultural privilege that I've ever seen. The amount of energy the average person has available to…

This would be a good argument if a high portion of a comfortable lifestyle energy consumption went to washing machine-level improvements to living standards. Instead energy is so cheap in first world countries that we waste it and use 10x more than we need.

The washing machine might eventually show up in the charts once we cut out enough of the big items from energy wasting cuplrits. Even then most of the electricity consumption goes to heating the water, but it doesn't even register enough to warrant hot water intakes in washing machines. Or heat exchangers in waste water systems for this and shower/dishwasher.

(You don't want to waste electricity on water heating when you could heat it with solar, CHP or waste water recovered heat)

Re: Fukushima

#84

Post by tobltobs »

Nuclear power is not only safe, it makes the world an even safer place. Look at the number of car accidents in the fukushima area, close to zero.

Re: Fukushima

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

inatreecrown wrote: post #35
ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

Get the facts straight: Fukushima is human failure. In the accident the neccecary cooling could not be supplied. As a result, people will die of cancer from the radiation. The tsunami is not human failure, and to say that living by the sea is human failure is another discussion completely.

It still doesn't matter. Not only nature had to "hit a nuclear plant the fifth largest earthquake ever recorded, then immediately follow that with a twenty foot high tsunami", that very earthquake and tsunami caused several orders of magnitude more deaths than the plant meltdown did (and don't forget there were several other nuclear plants that got shut down safely). It shouldn't really be brought up in the discussion of nuclear energy safety. It's not like Chernobyl, where someone screwed up and lots of people died. It's like noting that in 1945 someone driving through a village close to Hiroshima got blinded by the nuclear detonation and run over a pedestrian, and then using this to argue that cars should be banned.

Re: Fukushima

#86

Post by TeMPOraL »

xg15 wrote: post #61
brc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's before you compare death/injury per Mw produced. On that measure Solar power is more dangerous than nuclear given how many people die falling off roofs while installing or maintaining solar panels.

Really! And if you look at the illness/milliwatt scale, you can see that even the human metabolism itself is more dangerous than nuclear power. The fears are clearly overblown!

Well, even if that was so, it only goes to show how much effort went to make large-scale nuclear power generation very, very safe.

Re: Fukushima

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

hydrogen18 wrote: post #81
mackwic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you to learn a bit about power grid engineering. Basically, the fact that we can't store electricity means that when you power on your toaster, somewhere a power plant has to increase its power to compensate. But the nuclear power plant takes up to 2 days to startup. It's not sustainable for the daily life where consumption change every hour. That's why there is the need for more agile power plant, where fu…

Who are you convinced we can't store electricity? Pumped storage for storing potential energy has worked long before we even had electricity. Sure, the whole process of storing electricity is lossy. Thermodynamics guarantees it. But the point isn't to try and store enough generation capacity to meet our demand. You just need enough storage capacity to deal with the peaks. There is of course the argument of "pumped st…

It's not that we can't store electricity - we just can't store enough of it to turn renewables into usable tool for meeting baseline demand. We may be able to do that in the future, with battery technology improving and some clever shenanigans like using electric vehicles as grid storage - but we need something now, and there's no other alternative for doing it green than nuclear power.

Re: Fukushima

#88

Post by tempVariable »

inatreecrown wrote: post #35
ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

Get the facts straight: Fukushima is human failure. In the accident the neccecary cooling could not be supplied. As a result, people will die of cancer from the radiation. The tsunami is not human failure, and to say that living by the sea is human failure is another discussion completely.

Exactly. OP is throwing in a red herring into a discussion that isn't about it at all. Instead of detracting from what it is about, talk about what it is about - human failure to create safe conditions for people who live around that area.

While I am not an expert,- this is evident from what I read about on the Fukushima topic in the past written by other investigators. From what I remember, the lost cooling capacity caused by overwhelmed backup system could have been prevented if the rushing water could not reach it. I think it was GE and whichever other participating bodies there at the time that made the engineering and budgeting decisions to design it that way. In an earthquake prone zone, with danger of tsunamis no less.

Thanks to Arkadiusz for posting what is an actual list of facts as they are today, not what is filtered by layers of communication and media relation.

Re: Fukushima

#89

Post by jpatokal »

One angle I don't see often see mentioned: if you look carefully, you'll note that many of the buildings, furnishings, signs etc look a lot older than 2011. This is largely because Fukushima (and almost all of rural Japan along with it) has been severely depressed economically ever since the Bubble burst around 1989, so what you're seeing dates mostly back to the 1980s.

For comparison, here's a trip report from hot spring resort a few hours of north of Tokyo that looks almost as apocalyptic, but has been ravaged by nothing other than economics.

https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ugly-japan-2/

Re: Fukushima

#90

Post by notahacker »

brc wrote: post #49
ggreer wrote: post #17

I found the pictures fascinating, but the accompanying text marred my enjoyment. Considering the circumstances of the Fukushima disaster, the anti-nuclear sentiment really irked me. The Tōhoku earthquake & tsunami killed close to 20,000 people. The author completely ignored those victims. Instead, he focused on Fukushima, which will cause around 150 deaths from cancers. For every tragedy created by Fukushima, there a…

And that's before you compare death/injury per Mw produced. On that measure Solar power is more dangerous than nuclear given how many people die falling off roofs while installing or maintaining solar panels.

I'm assuming this stat stems from the famous blog article which rejected even the most conservative and widely-accepted Chernobyl death estimates and then calculated solar deaths based on the (unsupported) assumption that 1 in 6 roofing casualties were the result of installing solar panels...
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