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Merged nuclear power safe?

ufology said:
Have a few nuclear plants for reaserch purposes out in the middle of noplace and use them to provide some power and medical isotopes and study advances in the next generation of power ... fusion.
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Fusion power is fifty years away... and has been for about fifty years now.
 
Furcifer said:
Nobody thought to ask "What if another building falls onto it and it catches fire and the fire is left burning for 6 hours?"

Same thing goes for Fukishima, nobody thought to ask "What if a tsunami hits and it knocks out the pumps"
The anti nuke crowd has it right to point out that no matter how well planned or designed something may be, human error or even nature has a demonstrated ability of finding the flaw and exposing it.

It get even worse when humans with their ingenuity set their minds to finding the flaws and exploiting them.

What the pro nuke crowd has got right is that even when these flaws are exposed we have a demonstrated ability to contain and manage them. 3 mile, Chernobyl, Fukishima, have done relatively little damage.

Long story short it's an acceptable risk. Accidents are going to happen, people are going to die, the land and air will be poisoned, absolutely. That's the price of doing business and that's nothing new.
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Actually that issue had been raised:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...years-ago-in-u-s-nuclear-agency-s-report.html

In a 1990 report, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for ensuring the safety of the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.

While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant in Fukushima prefecture, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.
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There are PDFs that one can find from googling around that, but that story seems a pretty fair summary.

Or indeed Greenpeace in 2007:

Earthquake, fire and nuclear leak in Japan

It's hard to call the residents of Kashiwazaki lucky. Hundreds were injured by the quake, at least nine have died, thousands are in emergency shelters. But, if any of the four working reactors had lost power to their coolant system, it could have gone much worse. From the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center:

Even after automatic shutdown, the fuel in the reactor core is still extremely hot, so it is necessary to maintain a continual flow of coolant. If it is not maintained, the fuel could melt, leading to the release of highly radioactive material into the environment. Under some circumstances, it could also result in an explosion.

Despite the potential seriousness of this fire, TEPCO failed to announce whether the transformer continued to operate, or whether the emergency generator started up.

According to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, TEPCO admitted its disaster response measures did not function successfully, and that there were only four workers available to extinguish the fire, which burned for almost two hours.
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I'm ambivalent about nuclear power. There have been some stonkingly bad decisions in the past - For example the idea of the UK building a nuclear power station on a rapidly-eroding gravel spit (Dungeness).

I am not sure if the energy usage in decommissioning, or preserving the site is always adequately factored into the cost-benefit equation.

I was also surprised when a schoolkid in the 1980s to see the UK's CEGB claiming that known Uranium reserves would only last a little longer than the known oil reserves at that time.
 
ufology said:
You can do the usual Wikipedia search, but heres the essential bit:


Fusion power is believed to have significant safety advantages over current power stations based on nuclear fission. Fusion only takes place under very limited and controlled circumstances. For this reason, a failure of precise control or cessation of fueling quickly shuts down fusion power reactions. There is no possibility of runaway heat build-up or large-scale release of radioactivity, little or no atmospheric pollution, the power source comprises light elements in small quantities which are easily obtained and largely harmless to life, the waste products are short-lived in terms of radioactivity, and there is little overlap with nuclear weapons technology.

j.r.
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...and it's only 20 years away.

Don't get me wrong, I, too, want to see fusion soonest. It's been on the docks since I was ten; at 18 I read a story in SciAm about how lasers were going to implode little deuterium pellets in a water bath. In that time fission power has gone through 4 or 5 generations, each one safer and with higher efficiency. I'm now 63, and we still haven't yet made break-even with fusion. It's inevitable, I agree, as long as the scientific/engineering establishment remains cohesive enough to continue tinkering away.
 
Furcifer said:
Same thing goes for Fukishima, nobody thought to ask "What if a tsunami hits and it knocks out the pumps"
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I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

I'm pretty sure that not only did somebody think to ask that question, but they even bothered to answer it by building a tsunami-proof wall to prevent exactly that possibility.

I mean, complain all you like about TEPCO's failure to build a ridiculously high wall to prevent a ridiculously huge tsunami. But it's insulting and ignorant to claim they didn't plan at all.
 
theprestige said:
I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

I'm pretty sure that not only did somebody think to ask that question, but they even bothered to answer it by building a tsunami-proof wall to prevent exactly that possibility.

I mean, complain all you like about TEPCO's failure to build a ridiculously high wall to prevent a ridiculously huge tsunami. But it's insulting and ignorant to claim they didn't plan at all.
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You missed the and part.

You seemed have missed the whole point actually, it's not that they didn't plan it's that there are things you can't plan for.

And as with anything, when accidents happen people die, that's the cost of doing business.
 
Furcifer said:
You missed the and part.
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I assure you, I did not. Build a wall between the tsunami and the pumps, and the tsunami won't knock out the pumps.

Question asked, question answered.

You seemed have missed the whole point actually, it's not that they didn't plan it's that there are things you can't plan for.
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Forgive me, but you stated that they didn't plan, not that they couldn't plan. Besides, the evidence is clear that they could, and did plan.

And as with anything, when accidents happen people die, that's the cost of doing business.
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Agreed, but I'm really not sure what you're getting at here.
 
theprestige said:
I assure you, I did not. Build a wall between the tsunami and the pumps, and the tsunami won't knock out the pumps.

Question asked, question answered.
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There was no contingency plan for when a tsunami hit and knocked out the pumps.

theprestige said:
Forgive me, but you stated that they didn't plan, not that they couldn't plan. Besides, the evidence is clear that they could, and did plan.
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Again there was no contingency plan.


theprestige said:
Agreed, but I'm really not sure what you're getting at here.
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The sentence is self explanatory.
 
ufology said:
I dare anyone who thinks nuclear power is safe to help themselves to a nice plate of Fukashima Sushi or Chernobyl Borscht.
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I dare anyone who thinks solar power is safe to go in orbit for a few days without sunblock.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you have a point ?

Let me put it another way: are cars safe when you're in a deadly car crash ? Your post displays not even the slightest amount of thought.
 
Furcifer said:
The sentence is self explanatory.
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Sure it is. The implication is that a lot of people died, which is, so far, wrong, or that a whole lot of people might have died (or might still die). I think the latter is low odds, but sure, lots of people could have died, if the "impossible quake" occurred (it did) before the reactors were retired (it did, but it was a near thing), the reactors were damaged by it (they weren't), or the cooling failed (it did) and couldn't be backed up (couldn't), and the reactor vessels failed (they haven't, as far as we can tell) and the hot reactor mass causes some kind of immediate unexpected calamity (which it hasn't); merely getting into the water table could be a problem, even a major problem, but not one that would cause major loss of life. Sometimes that accident far out on the statistical tail does occur, and the chances get slim, but so far (aside from Chernobyl) it all has worked. And make no mistake, this is far, far out on the tail.

Risks are inherent in the technology; when you handle great power you move in dangerous corridors, and yet that is what the people on Earth are demanding. Coal has been documented to kill tens-to-hundreds directly, thousands indirectly, each and every year, and the technology is 300 years old.
 
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Furcifer said:
There was no contingency plan for when a tsunami hit and knocked out the pumps.
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This I'm not very informed about. Are you? It seems likely to me that there was in fact such a contingency plan, but it depended on timely access to resources that were rendered unavailable or inoperative by the preceding earthquake.

Again, this is only what seems likely to me. Are you well-informed about the extent of TEPCO's contingency planning, and the extent to which the disasters exceeded either the planning or the available resources?



Again there was no contingency plan.
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Contingency plan for what? Disasters that exceed the capacity of available disaster-recovery resources?

And even then, it seems clear to me that there was a contingency plan: Mitigate the risk as much as possible using all available resources, form a damage control team of qualified people, and work to solve the remaining problems.

Other than the usual failures of regulatory compliance and due diligence that plague every human enterprise, what contingency plan was lacking?



The sentence is self explanatory.
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One sentence, but two distinct thoughts:

"And as with anything, when accidents happen people die,"

and

"that's the cost of doing business."

Regarding the first thought: Technically speaking, not all accidents are fatal, or even potentially fatal. For example, once while drunk I had an accident while voiding my bladder. I assure you, no lives were risked, though I confess the hotel cleaning staff earned their pay the next day. Ah, youth... But I digress. As with anything that risks human life, when accidents happen people may die.

Regarding the second thought: Might as well say "that's the cost of bringing heat and light to millions of people"--something that would happen even in a socialist paradise with no "business" involved.

So I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

It seems like overall, the people responsible for Fukushima planned appropriately for the known knowns, hedged as best they could against the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, and adapted to an unfolding situation beyond the scope of their initial plans and resources. They encountered an Excession, and coped with it extremely well, wouldn't you say?
 
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Two things: #1 A most dangerous way to boil water
#2 Why won't ANYONE insure the builders of said reactors??
 
Truly awful headline:
Radioactive Cesium Is Found in Tokyo Water

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Wait, how much did they detect?
Cesium-137 concentration registered at 0.14 becquerels per kilogram . . . The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan sets a safety limit of 200 becquerels per kilogram for cesium-134 and cesium-137.
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:rolleyes:

Less than 1/1000th the legal limit and yet you wouldn't get a hint of that from the headline.
 
There's no free lunch in large scale power generation. There will always be some inherent danger in the process. We try to make them as safe as economically possible, but "economically possible" is widely a interpreted term.

It all boils down to what risks you are willing to put up with to get what you want.

True you are more likely to die in car accident than a nuclear accident, it's just that a nuclear accident is far more devestating to a larger portion of the geography than a car accident.

It's like comparing mandarins to pummelos.............look it up.
 
PTweedle said:
Two things: #1 A most dangerous way to boil water
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In terms of casualties caused, it is the least dangerous way to boil water.

Boiling water is itself dangerous and any means used to bring water to boiling is also dangerous automatically.

PTweedle said:
#2 Why won't ANYONE insure the builders of said reactors??
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Another common misconception, also untrue. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, nuclear reactor facilities are insured up to 375 million dollars. If an incident requires a greater payout than this, there is a secondary fund of 11.6 billion dollars that is maintained by the nuclear industry as a whole.
 
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