Fukushima - It's Not Over

[lenny]

2) if a nuclear reactor has 3x the safety infrastructure of a coal plant, that does not make up for doing 10x the damage when things do go wrong (numbers are complete ass-pull).

I admit that if backed into the AGW corner, this might still be a bullet we could decide to bite, because uncertain doom is better than certain doom.

Which leads to irrational behaviour more frequently:

A) uncertain doom vs certain doom

or

B) localised visible sudden doom of a few today (not me this time) vs slow global doom soon, but not for anyone anywhere today

?

Is the general public's greater fear of nuclear more a visceral reaction to actually seeing the effect of an "incident", or because individuals have thought through the implications of each path and tend to find nukes more frightening?

 

[elgarak]

One wonders if he reads what he writes?

ALL technology carries risks.[...]

Coal is exceptionally destructive.....[...]

QFT.

I live in a town that, for over an century, existed by mining hard coal (anthracite). The mine is shut down by now.

Very close by are huge areas where brown coal (lignite) is strip-mined. Mostly for supplying power plants.

The amount of destruction of the latter is mind-boggling.

 

[Diogenes]

...
I remain unconvinced on the safety issue.

I remain unsurprised.

...
(numbers are complete ass-pull).

and therefore useless.

...
3) there is no convincing solution to the inherited liability of nuclear waste.

(to you)

4) focusing on a high-risk, high-inherited liability technology is unnecessary when safe, sustainable alternatives exist, are being rapidly improved, and have been shown to be able to meet reasonable demand.

This trumps all the previous ones...

"high-risk" by your definition. I'd love to see, most especially solar, rapidly deployed and supplant fossil fuels within the next few years. Germany appears to be making fantastic progress in this regard. Wind, though, still has some ecological challenges to reasonably surmount specifically in regard to bat populations and bird, though the latter to a lesser extent (to my current understanding).

Since I can only speak to the reactor designs that I learned and knew well I can state from experience that the only way to have a catastrophic accident would be through intentional sabotage or battle damage. Even the Chernobyl design had inherent safety features that were intentionally overridden by operators seeking a shortcut to complete testing they were doing. I can't know what they were thinking but they sure as hell forgot about xenon preclusion.

 

[Floyt]

and therefore useless.

Don't be obtuse. Second number larger than first one. And I'd like to see you argue that a random incident that successfully slips past the safety net in a reactor has less damage potential than an equally random one in a coal plant.

(to you)

Oh? Have at it. I'd love to see a good answer to this. To my knowledge, all that can reasonably be done today is a reduction in physical volume of a given unit of waste. You still remain stuck with (now more concentrated) radioactive landfill.

"high-risk" by your definition.

Which I maintain is more reasonable than one that thinks human error is completely avoidable, and that natural disasters will have the courtesy to keep away. As in:

Since I can only speak to the reactor designs that I learned and knew well I can state from experience that the only way to have a catastrophic accident would be through intentional sabotage or battle damage. Even the Chernobyl design had inherent safety features that were intentionally overridden by operators seeking a shortcut to complete testing they were doing.

Yes, human operators doing dumb ****.
(Apart from the puzzler of whether that earthquake fell under sabotage or battle damage.) [ETA: Eh, ignore. Not your type of reactor, I assume.]

I'd love to see, most especially solar, rapidly deployed and supplant fossil fuels within the next few years. Germany appears to be making fantastic progress in this regard. Wind, though, still has some ecological challenges to reasonably surmount specifically in regard to bat populations and bird, though the latter to a lesser extent (to my current understanding).

I agree. Note that Germany only got to even try that once we kept the center right and the associated nuclear lobby out of office for long enough to set nuclear phaseout on a path of no practical return. Sugar-coated propaganda for nuclear power enormously lowers the chance of the alternatives getting a fair testing.

I am an ecologist and have had some involvement in two projects assessing the effect of wind park developments on bird populations. We have found the issues to be real but very manageable (don't put generators in the middle of a migration path or in the habitat of excitable nocturnal flyers, use suitable blade designs and be smart about the lighting).

 

[Diogenes]

...
I am an ecologist and have had some involvement in two projects assessing the effect of wind park developments on bird populations. We have found the issues to be real but very manageable (don't put generators in the middle of a migration path or in the habitat of excitable nocturnal flyers, use suitable blade designs and be smart about the lighting).

Not surprising. I find a strong anti-nuclear sentiment amongst my ecologically-focused colleagues.

 

[Floyt]

Not surprising. I find a strong anti-nuclear sentiment amongst my ecologically-focused colleagues.

They are probably aware of some issues you aren't, just as the inverse is true.

 

[macdoc]

They probably buy the codswallop from the anti-nuke crowd.

Floyd I still don't think you grasp just how physically small high level nuclear waste scale is and how disastrous coal mining and use is.

You have been blinkered on it.

I've had way more radiation via cancer therapy than any risk from any nuclear accident. Open air explosions of HBombs put way more radioactive material into the environment than any power generation accident or not.

If reactors had originally been pointed to power generation alone instead of dual roles as weapons supply it would be a very different world in terms of nuclear power.

 

[Diogenes]

They are probably aware of some issues you aren't, just as the inverse is true.

Generally they know next-to-nothing about radioactive materials but admit it.

ETA: And, seemingly, only the people newer to the field wholly embrace microsatellite work for population studies.

 

[DarthFishy]

Back of the envelope calculation based on the graph from the first page:

The 1 hour exposure talked of in the OP article = ~70 years of normal background radiation.

Still less than the lowest dosage required to obtain radiation poisoning.

For whatever its worth

 

[geni]

Back of the envelope calculation based on the graph from the first page:

The 1 hour exposure talked of in the OP article = ~70 years of normal background radiation.

Still less than the lowest dosage required to obtain radiation poisoning.

For whatever its worth

The complication is that it is water rather than say glass. Means you have to start factoring the risk of inhalation and ingestion. The other issue is while the single leak isn't a massive issue its from a type of tank they have rather a lot off which means that they now have to worry about a whole bunch of other leaks.

 

[Cuddles]

B) localised visible sudden doom of a few today (not me this time) vs slow global doom soon, but not for anyone anywhere today

Sadly, even that isn't really accurate. It's actually:
B) Localised visible sudden doom today vs. global visible constant doom today that people just kind of ignore.

For example, see my previous post here (isn't it weird how the same silly anti-nuclear claims keep coming up again and again). In the couple of months before I wrote that post, one small part of the coal industry in just two countries had killed more people than civilian nuclear power has in its entire existence. Or we can look at larger scale effects and see how well coal compares to nuclear there (spoiler: not very well):

It doesn't matter what nuclear power may have done in isolation, what matters is what it has done in comparison to everything else. Acid rain has destroyed huge tracts of farmland and forest, and completely sterilised large bodies of water. Smog has made major cities virtually uninhabitable without constant use of facemasks. Slag and mine tailings have created large wastelands that not only prevent living and use of the land, but occasionally fall over and wipe out whole villages. And that's before we even get started on what rising sea levels and climate shifts might end up doing.

The problems caused by fossil fuels are not minor, and they're certainly not kept quiet. People just seem to completely ignore them because, hey, nuclear is a scary word. Who cares about the tens of millions of people dying young because routine use of coal and oil with no accidents have made the atmosphere unbreathable in their homes, when we can instead worry about how the occasional accident decades apart might give a few people a barely measurable increase in their background radiation dose.

I'd love to see, most especially solar, rapidly deployed and supplant fossil fuels within the next few years. Germany appears to be making fantastic progress in this regard.

Indeed. And that's why their electricity bills are the highest in Europe, and that's despite huge government subsidies. Solar power has its place, as do most renewables, but it's rather amusing to see people promoting solar in the same thread where people complain that nuclear needs subsidies.

 

[geni]

Since I can only speak to the reactor designs that I learned and knew well I can state from experience that the only way to have a catastrophic accident would be through intentional sabotage or battle damage.

Err have you ever worked on a real industrial site? The ability of people to cause unexpected problems is impressive.

 

[Diogenes]

Err have you ever worked on a real industrial site? The ability of people to cause unexpected problems is impressive.

"real"?

If my participation in the refueling activities of the 2 D2W reactors aboard the USS California (CGN-36) doesn't count as "real industry" then I'm not sure what will.

Have you ever worked at a real nuclear industrial site?

 

[geni]

"real"?

If my participation in the refueling activities of the 2 D2W reactors aboard the USS California (CGN-36) doesn't count as "real industry" then I'm not sure what will.

Hmm public private sector split probably. Certianly attempting arguments like "Can you tell me how many workers have died from radiation exposure? " would get you fired around here.

Have you ever worked at a real nuclear industrial site?

Yup.

 

[Diogenes]

Yup.

...and?

You're going to regale us with tales of loss of RAM, personal dosimetry screw-ups, incident and accident reports?

 

[Diogenes]

..."Can you tell me how many workers have died from radiation exposure? " would get you fired around here.

I'm sorry but I find this claim spurious. I have a pool of current civilian nuclear workers I can ask; they're ex-nukes.

Unless you're not talking in the United States, that is....I have zero knowledge of how the UK runs things.

 

[Aepervius]

Yes, and 1.25 million deaths from car traffic per year. So I assume we should ignore those coal-related fatalities, because they are clearly just laughable in comparison?
This one-upmanship is sophomoric. People are treating a dangerous technology in a cavalier manner and then try to hide their ****-ups. That deserves to be publicized and condemned. That there are even more damaging processes going on that are being ignored even more blithely does zip to detract from that.

No, we are comparing in the SAME industry (energy generation) how some radiation left out on regular basis are ignored (coal) but a very small amount is touted as the end of the world as we know it (nuclear).

You on the other hand one upped us with an utterly unrelated death cause. You might as well cited heart attack.

 

[Aepervius]

Hmm public private sector split probably. Certianly attempting arguments like "Can you tell me how many workers have died from radiation exposure? " would get you fired around here.



Yup.

That question would not get you fired in France. I have no idea where you are working but you should consider going to a country where safety question are not ground for firing offense.

 

[geni]

That question would not get you fired in France. I have no idea where you are working but you should consider going to a country where safety question are not ground for firing offense.

It wasn't the question but the way it was used as an argument. It promoted the position that if there weren't deaths it didn't matter. For some reason the british health and safety mob take a slightly different attitude.

 

[geni]

I'm sorry but I find this claim spurious. I have a pool of current civilian nuclear workers I can ask; they're ex-nukes.

Your removal of context is noted.