Global Warmers Promote Dark Ages, Permanently

[Sword_Of_Truth]

As to Chernobyl, yes, it shows that nuclear power can be done wrong. However, I don't think anyone is suggesting that we build a bunch of fundamentally unsafe in design sixty year old Russian plants, never do needed maintenance on them, staff them with untrained coal miners (not even joking, seriously who was most of the staff at Chernobyl), and run idiotic 'let's see if the cooling turbine which has to run constantly to avoid a meltdown can restart on it's own momentum' suicide tests during shift changes with many of the safety systems that were in place purposefully shut off. Even then, you'd need a Chernobyl level disaster every three weeks just to keep up with the cancer deaths caused by coal power plants alone.

Using Chernobyl as a comparison is just fear mongering and is like using the Oklahoma city bombing to show the dangers of any type of plant fertilizer being used on corn.

Yes, nuclear power has danger and can be done very wrong like all power. That's why continued tight regulation and safety checks are needed. No one is arguing that nuclear plants are perfect and easy, but that they are the best and needed right now. The argument is that they are so much better than any other current competitor that the downsides, even if you assume the exaggerated downsides are true, are worth it by more than a small margin.

EGG-ZACTLY! A-frakking-men, brutha!

I gotta run. Gotta do more shilling for nuclear* at the Science Teachers Conference. Be back later.

*Officially, the position of the Canadian Nuclear Society is that we take no official position. Our mission is to assist educators and the public in acquiring correct and accurate information and letting them make up their own minds.

 

[MG1962]

I didn't say you did. I don't think anyone does. Yet in an indirect way, we do support these technologies. We do it because the 150,000 people a year we lose due to coal pollution pales in comparison to the millions we'd lose if the infrastructure supporting many of our modern conveniences and advances in public health and sanitation were to disappear.

Okay fair enough - For as much as I dislike the cost/benefit for nuclear power, I loathe coal fired energy sources with a passion. And in truth if the oppotunity came along I would replace them with nukes in a flash

 

[lomiller]

Bravo Sierra. He never said that, i'd wager a nickel on it.

Looks more like quote mining. As we have seen some people believe it’s a god given right of western countries to give their companies subsidies in the form of free CO2 emissions. Because they currently receive far greater CO2 subsidies, in the short term western countries will be suffer more from implementation of free market principles to CO2.

Unlike the people who oppose limits on CO2 I have confidence western economies can compete on a level playing field without these types of subsidies, but it won’t happen as long as we continue to try and protect them from open competition.

 

[Hindmost]

It's my understanding that a Chernobyl-style disaster is not possible with modern reactor design; am I wrong about that?

The answer is flexible. It can happen, but it would require multiple failures and is not really credible.

chernobyl went prompt critical...due to its positive void coeficient and othe aspects of its really poor design. Prompt critical is what one tries to achieve when building a nuke weapon--and keep out of a commercial reactor. Wiki has a reaonable explanation--see link below. The key is that reactor power multiplies exponentially because the neutron population multiplies very quickly...on the order of nanoseconds for a generation. In a very brief period, reactor power can multiple to very high levels. When the heat produced by all fission "follows," the reactor will melt and whatever water will be instantly boiled yielding a steam explosion that is quite extreme. In the SL-1 reactor, the entire reactor vessel set a high jump record of nine feet.

Commercial LWRs are protected in many ways...low uranium enrichment and essentially no method to ''add" enough reactivity to cause prompt neutron chain reaction. However, if all the rods fall out of a BWR or all the rods jump out of a PWR, a prompt critical reaction could occur. It would make mess. These are not credible problems as it would require multiple failures. I have to say, I don't know if it would breach containment.

glenn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_critical#Prompt_critical_accidents