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Merged nuclear power safe?

r-j said:
It's like asking if dynamite is safe.
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Dynamite is perfectly safe. You can set it on fire and it won't detonate (in fact, that's how bomb disposal squads get rid of dynamite, by burning it). It takes a blasting cap to detonate dynamite.

It's only old dynamite that poses a risk. That's because the nitroglycerin it contains can "sweat" out of the material and pool in the bottom of the container. It's that pool which poses the danger as raw nitroglycerin is very easy to set off. And if that nitroglycerin pool is detonated, it may explode with enough force to trigger the detonation of the dynamite.
 
Christian Klippel said:
Groups, who are either pretty much clueless or are just lobbying organizations, are coming up with all sorts of nice looking plans, telling us how easy it is to go 100% renewable by 2050. Reading them makes me want to puke. They come up with really silly ideas. Like, hey, lets build a _massive_ amount of new windmills. Only 2% of all our land needs to be plastered with windmills to satisfy our demands! Nowhere do they think about were all these windmills should come from, how they should be errected, connected to the grid, maintained, etc. Others say, hey, we don't need new places for windmills. It's enough to replace all the old ones with new ones! Yeah, sure....
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The two most funny thing I heard in the last two or three days : some tv channel (pro 7?) having a reportage on the wonder of self generated electricity using gas generator and saying private people could build more of them (but not insisting too much on the price, efficiency comapred to industrial gas generator or ,FSM forbid , nulcear, or even not mentionning CO2 effect of having million of home on such generator...).

The second one was touting windmill and then presenting a battery technology as if it was an EXISTING solution, and only VERY BRIEFLY saying at the end of the reportage "this is a plan/study nothing concrete yet".


Germany is for the LOLZ. (insert "electrified" kitten picture)
 
bikerdruid said:
nuclear power safe?

like i said about 50 pages back.......apparently not.
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LIVING is not safe. Especially if you live dfeep in the wood away from any first responder (hospital, fire, police).

One things this thread learnt me is that people like you want to have an ABSOLUTE risk to be zero for nuclear, but are willingly go into non-zero risk activity.

If you have nothing to contribute than your "nuke is not safe , nuke is not safe" then you should consider going back to your electricity usage by not typing on the internet. Those elctron don't get transposed in the server on randi.org for free.
 
Aepervius said:
The two most funny thing I heard in the last two or three days : some tv channel (pro 7?) having a reportage on the wonder of self generated electricity using gas generator and saying private people could build more of them (but not insisting too much on the price, efficiency comapred to industrial gas generator or ,FSM forbid , nulcear, or even not mentionning CO2 effect of having million of home on such generator...).

The second one was touting windmill and then presenting a battery technology as if it was an EXISTING solution, and only VERY BRIEFLY saying at the end of the reportage "this is a plan/study nothing concrete yet".


Germany is for the LOLZ. (insert "electrified" kitten picture)
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As you may know, my wife is German and very much anti-nuke.

I get to "enjoy" a lot of ZDF TV programming on this issue.

German media treats nuclear like it treats racism. Some viewpoints are taboo. Some viewpoints are considered correct and are constantly at the forefront. other viewpoint are absolute taboo and are only touched upon briefly and just to set the stage.

(I'm not arguing for racism to become acceptable. But racist viewpoints are considered immoral and thus never seriously considered on national television. Nuclear energy just seems to have the same status).

Equally strange: the media's take on renewable's.

The narrative is this (simplified):
"Those reactors are old and dangerous, the people are against them.
Plus, we've calculated that we don't actually need them. we have plenty of energy."

(apparently Germany was running seven nuclear reactors just for laughs).

"We'll switch to wind and solar, Hurray!"

And here is the weird thing: the question of feasability is never asked.

I have yet to see a program that asks the question: "Is that actually technically possible in the real world?"

There is something really unsettling about that. It's like taking a motorboat to the middle of the Atlantic on the assumption that by the time you run out of gas, you will be able to just switch to solar.
Maybe they are right and a program of massive reduction in energy use, combined with renewable's is possible.
But it is never explained in detail.

Remember when we all got on board of financial products that could not be explained in detail? You see my point.
 
Aepervius said:
LIVING is not safe. Especially if you live dfeep in the wood away from any first responder (hospital, fire, police).

One things this thread learnt me is that people like you want to have an ABSOLUTE risk to be zero for nuclear, but are willingly go into non-zero risk activity.

If you have nothing to contribute than your "nuke is not safe , nuke is not safe" then you should consider going back to your electricity usage by not typing on the internet. Those elctron don't get transposed in the server on randi.org for free.
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ah now i see what Eddy Dane meant further down. Some viewpoints are taboo. Some viewpoints are considered correct and are constantly at the forefront. Here it is just the other way around. :rolleyes:
 
DC said:
ah now i see what Eddy Dane meant further down. Some viewpoints are taboo. Some viewpoints are considered correct and are constantly at the forefront. Here it is just the other way around. :rolleyes:
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Perhaps I should have added this to my previous post.

I'm very pro nuclear. But in these forum these seems to be a taboo on detailing the dangers of nuke tech.

I don't have a technical background, so I'm not competent to debate this point. But it is certainly the feeling I get from some posters here.

Not regarding the overall safety of nuclear. But definitely regarding the incident in Japan.
 
Eddie Dane said:
Perhaps I should have added this to my previous post.

I'm very pro nuclear. But in these forum these seems to be a taboo on detailing the dangers of nuke tech.

I don't have a technical background, so I'm not competent to debate this point. But it is certainly the feeling I get from some posters here.

Not regarding the overall safety of nuclear. But definitely regarding the incident in Japan.
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in not very pro-nuclear, pro-nuclear is already enough for me :D

But i agree, well it sure is not yet as problematic as on German TV, there you have debates about nuclear and not a single one is pro nuclear, only different degrees of anti nuclear.
Here in TV debates they still take care they have both, pro and anti and experts.

Also Information released by the gov institution monitoring radioactivity don,'t spread panic, merely report what they messure and set in contrast to natural radiation we already get.
 
Rolfe said:
However, much of the reason for the number of deaths at Chernobyl was the delayed response by the authorities.
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What, you mean all 68 of them? For all the comparisons to Chernobyl trying to scare people about how terrible this is, people rarely seem to realise how bad it actually wasn't. As already noted several times, a lot more people have died just in the last few weeks due to coal power than have died in the last 25 years due to Chernobyl. The economic effects were fairly bad, but the actual health and environmental effects that are the focus of the Fukushima fearmongering just weren't as bad as people make out.

Fukushima isn't less bad, as an incident, just because the authorities acted to minimise the risk of fatalities.
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No, Fukushima is less bad an an incident because it's less bad as an incident. No catastrophic meltdown or explosions, far less radioactivity released, most of the radioactivity going to the ocean rather than spread across populated land, and so on. The fact that it also hasn't killed anyone is just one point among many showing just how much less bad Fukushima is than Chernobyl. Chernobyl which, again, actually killed very few people.
 
DC said:
in not very pro-nuclear, pro-nuclear is already enough for me :D

But i agree, well it sure is not yet as problematic as on German TV, there you have debates about nuclear and not a single one is pro nuclear, only different degrees of anti nuclear.
Here in TV debates they still take care they have both, pro and anti and experts.

Also Information released by the gov institution monitoring radioactivity don,'t spread panic, merely report what they messure and set in contrast to natural radiation we already get.
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The German TV approach is as follows:

Interview a nuclear expert via video conferencing and as questions like "So, how bad can this get?"
Let him answer and move on to a longer interview with a nuclear expert from Greenpeace.
This turns out to be a man in his thirties with a pony-tail who basically tells you that only autocratic regimes who totally disregard their population can implement nuclear.

This is the part of the show where I yell at the television: "France! You lying hippie sack of excrement! France! it's right there below Belgium!"

Then they move on to interview a man who's credentials are probably best summed up as: some guy with an opinion.
He's against nuclear because he thought about it and concluded that in case of a Chernobyl like accident, Germany would never have so much manpower that they could just send to their deaths to work in the disaster zone.

Sigh.
 
Aepervius said:
The two most funny thing I heard in the last two or three days : some tv channel (pro 7?) having a reportage on the wonder of self generated electricity using gas generator and saying private people could build more of them (but not insisting too much on the price, efficiency comapred to industrial gas generator or ,FSM forbid , nulcear, or even not mentionning CO2 effect of having million of home on such generator...).
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Well, that's actually not that new of an idea. It's a small "Blockheizkraftwerk" (Cogeneration). The idea is not only to produce electricity, but also heat for the home(s). And yes, it's a rather stupid idea if it has to scale up in quantity. Efficiency is simply not as good as it would be in bigger plants.

Aepervius said:
The second one was touting windmill and then presenting a battery technology as if it was an EXISTING solution, and only VERY BRIEFLY saying at the end of the reportage "this is a plan/study nothing concrete yet".


Germany is for the LOLZ. (insert "electrified" kitten picture)
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You think that's crazy and worth some lolz? Well, go ahead and search for "popp ringwallspeicher" and be prepared for some really crazy stuff. The ides is to build a ring-shaped, concentric dam. That is, one big, round basin at the bottom, and in the middle a 200 meter high "mountain" with another pool on top of it. Pump the water up, let it flow down to generate electricity. Put some windmills and PV panels there as well. Size? Many square kilometers. Decades of construction time. And several of them, none the less!

Really, Google for it and have a hard laugh. Oh, and the "Bundesamt für Naturschutz" (federal office for environmental protection) is slowly waking up. They begin to realize that the sudden turn-off of the nukes is causing massive import of electricity generated elsewhere. From coal and nukes, of course. And they also begin to understand that such a massive push for renewables will cause a lot of environmental impact. Here is the article, in German.

And if you are done reading about the "Ringwallspeicher", but still need some more laughs, i can help you. Or better, GreenPeace can help you. They have a plan how to go 100% renewable easy-peasy! See here for the plan, and here for some, uhm, attempted calculations. Nothe their sources in the plan. Yes, GP itself! Or stuff done/written for GP. And the calculations provide quite some insight. For example that we are to use the same amount of electricity through the next 10 years. Fantastic, we are all saved!

Greetings,

Chris
 
Eddie Dane said:
Then they move on to interview a man who's credentials are probably best summed up as: some guy with an opinion.
He's against nuclear because he thought about it and concluded that in case of a Chernobyl like accident, Germany would never have so much manpower that they could just send to their deaths to work in the disaster zone.
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The goal in Japan is to limit each worker's exposure to 100 mSv. At that level of exposure there is a small theoretical increase in cancer risk, but you don't get radiation sickness. Only a few workers have received higher doses. Yet we still hear it described as sending workers to almost certain doom.
 
Eddie Dane said:
Equally strange: the media's take on renewable's.

The narrative is this (simplified):
"Those reactors are old and dangerous, the people are against them.
Plus, we've calculated that we don't actually need them. we have plenty of energy."

(apparently Germany was running seven nuclear reactors just for laughs).

"We'll switch to wind and solar, Hurray!"
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I have given that link already some time ago, but i'll give it again, because it's really worth it. Go to this site (entsoe.net) and register there. After you have an account, you can see what country in Europe imports and exports how much electricity to what other country. You can select a date and an hour to look at. You can also download the data for each day as an Excel file, or the data for one year as XML file. That way you can easily calculate yourself how much Germany has exported/imported before they turned of the nukes, and how much afterwards.

And yes, you are right: They did _not_ operate these nukes just for fun. France an Czechoslovakia is having a field day right now.

Eddie Dane said:
And here is the weird thing: the question of feasability is never asked.

I have yet to see a program that asks the question: "Is that actually technically possible in the real world?"
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Well, technically speaking, yes, it would be possible. But then, it's also possible that we fly people to Mars and bring them back.

The proper question is: How much will it cost, and how long will it take to get there? And it will be extremely expensive. After all, it's not just windmills and PV panels. The grid would need _massive_ updates. And i mean really massive. The windmills need to be produced and errected. We need lots and lots of storage, because we can have weeks long periods of no sufficient wind anytime. Especially in the winter, when we have no real sunlight for the PV's as well.

And because of the storages, we need a hell lot more of those windmills and PV's. Because once the wind is blowing again, there needs to be enough electricity to supply to the people _plus_ a lot extra to replenish the storages. For example, they want to use methane made from electricity as storage. Let's assume a really optimistically high value of 75% efficiency for the process of generating that gas from electricity. Then lets take a very optimistic 50% efficiency for generating electricity from that gas (actual gas plants are somewhat lower than that, say hello to Carnot). That makes 0.75 * 0.50 = 0.375 = 37.5% overall efficiency only for these two steps. Now we have transmission losses for the electricity to and from the storage. We need power to pump the gas somewhere. There surely will be leakages in the storages themselves. So we get an optimistic 30% overall efficiency with that method.

Now, lets assume we need 1 GWh during a day, and a hypothetical storage could deliver that as well during the period of one day. To fill that storage in one day, we need to produce 1 GWh for direct consumption, plus 3.3 GWh to fill the storage so that we can get 1 GWh back out of it one day.

And frankly, it usually is a better idea to be able to fill a storage a bit faster than the time it can be emptied. Because, after one day we might have enough wind only for half the time until the next wind-free day. So we want to have the storage refilled twice as fast. Which, of course, means even more windmills and PV....

It's really funny that no one ever mentions such things in the news. I mean, the numbers involved. Oh, and that you have only 10% "real" capacity that a windmill produces compared to it's nameplate capacity. So we have 0.3 * 0.1 = 0.03 = 3% overall system efficency. To compete with a regular gas/coal/nuke plant, such a system must be as low in building cost as 1/30th of the price per kW as said regular plants. And i doubt that they can do that.

Of course it's just an oversimplified calculation. But it shows the direction in which that all goes. It's absolutely not funny to think that through. It really is frightening. If their pipe dreams come true, we can be very, very lucky if we have to pay onle 50 Euro-Cent per kWh. It probably will be much more.

Greetings,

Chris
 
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