How many major nuclear disasters have there been in the last, say, 50 years? Three mile island and Chernobyl are the two big ones that everyone knows about, and considering that people are saying that this is the third largest [EDIT: actually the second largest, at this point], I take that as an endorsement of nuclear power. As compared with coal, oil, natural gas, and so forth, which function by spewing pollutants into the environment continuously, during normal operation.
Yes, I would be thrilled if we switched entirely to solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric power sources, but nuclear power isn't anywhere near as disastrous as the people strongly against it would like us to believe. It's also not as safe as a lot of people would like to think, but, by and large, it is fairly safe.
You've got a good link there, but the wrong anchor. The anchor you are looking for was #Failure_hazard, and possibly a better link would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam#1975_Flood . 26,000 dead in the flooding and 145,000 dead due to subsequent epidemics.
If some of you anti-nuclear types get frustrated that I and others are not rushing out to forswear nuclear forever and ever amen, it's not because we don't understand the risks. It's because we don't ignore a death just because it happened in a non-radioactive flood or a non-radioactive coal mining accident and didn't involve any OMGRadiation!!1!. Nor are deaths caused by nuclear issues magically worse than being killed in a flood or a coal mining accident. Dead is dead. Someone who wants to be seen caring waves around their fashionable concerns and waits for congratulations from their peers; an engineer who wants to care considers the costs and benefits of the whole system, and doesn't simply assume either is zero without evidence. Regardless of how bad this particular crisis may become, it still nets out that people are dying every year because we're too cowardly to look at nuclear head on and use more of it and less of the even-more dangerous other technologies we are using, so that we can feel good about our irrational fear of OMGRadiation!!1!.
The problem with hydro is that you can't build it where you need the power (unless geography - or real estate - is uncannily nice to you)
Most of Brazil depends on a single hydro facility with endless miles of aluminum wires crossing the southeast part of the country. If anything serious fails there, the country pretty much stops.
Renewables like solar, hydro, biomass, and wind have their place, but you don't generate solar during night, you may want to spare your water during a drought, you may need to eat the biomass and you may have days without wind. Nuclear too has its place. Technology is a tool we should wield with reason, not passion.
It should be noted, though, that solar thermal plants can indeed generate electricity during the night, by collecting heat in reservoirs to later produce steam, be them water or molten salt[1] heat reservoirs.
I generally see people talking about how safe the new reactor designs are, and how it's a tragedy that people are so afraid of nuclear that they won't let them be built. The reactors in Japan are 40-year-old designs. You can't compare them on the same level. It's like saying that people in favor of nuclear power claim that Chernobyl never happened because 'safe nuclear' == 'never was a reactor that was unsafe ever built.'
Add to that the fact that the other reactors there have stood up to a 9.1 quake with about 600 aftershocks -- ranging from mild to "I'm a pretty decent disaster all by myself" -- A sizable tidal wave and numerous fires with hydrogen explosions.
This could definitely have been far, far worse by now.
You might be surprised to discover that a 40 year old life is fairly standard in nuclear power plants[1], in fact some countries hope to keep their plants active for closer to 60 years. At close to $7B+ investment in just the building phase of a modern nuclear plant and close to 7-10 years construction time per plant[2], the limited lifetime of the plant does start to become a concern in the financial sense though.
I'm not balking at the age and saying that the place is 'falling apart.' I'm saying that they were designed 40 years ago, and that it's possible that we've learned things since then and can build better plants (starting at the design phase). I'm no expert though, so I'm making no claims.
>Well, we're seeing them being proven wrong yet again. How much more proof are they going to need? How many more nuclear disasters is it going to take?
You've had one and a half. TMI had no ill effects on health, Chernobyl was caused by Soviet incompetence, and Fukushima is the result of an earthquake 7 times more powerful than it was designed to survive. Compare that to the damage caused by oil spills alone.
No power source that is economically viable on a large scale is 100% safe, including nuclear. They do their damndest, but sometimes it fails. There were some design flaws in Fukushima, namely the placement of the backup generators and the height of the tsunami barriers, but the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years. It looks like the containment vessel on the #4 reactor has been breached, and that's very, very bad. Still, the only people injured were those injured by the hydrogen explosions, not by radiation. There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers.
Is this event bad? Yes. Could it be another Chernobyl? Probably not. Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did.
Most of the "optimism" yesterday was based on what had actually occurred: the coolant had failed, #1 was flooded, and #3 had encountered the same problems. Both reactors had hydrogen explosions outside of the containment vessel that didn't compromise them. No significant radiation had been released.
Today is a different story. We'll keep an eye on things and see how they progress, but the optimism was based on the situation at #1 and #3, not the yet-to-happen situation at #2 and #4.
"the precipitating earthquake was still the strongest in 1200 years"
People keep mentioning this as if that matters. The fact is that it happened, and there's really no telling when future natural disasters will strike any given nuclear plant. All we know is that they can happen and that if disasters on this scale do happen, nuclear reactors are not up to surviving them.
"Reactor 4 is on fire, and is releasing radiation into the atmosphere, but on nowhere near the scale that Chernobyl did."
Yet.
But this disaster may be far from over.
"There's been a few people (~12) who suffered radiation exposure, I believe all plant workers."
That's not what I'm hearing. From a former nuclear industry executive and whistleblower interviewed recently on Democracy Now:
"they talk about 160 people that have been contaminated. That’s all they’ve tested. Basically, everything they’re testing is coming up contaminated in that inner couple of miles around the plant. You’ve got radiation being detected 60 miles to the north in a Navy helicopter, a hundred miles to the east on a Navy aircraft carrier. So, it’s not clear to me that that cloud is not looping around and affecting Japan."
As far as contamination goes, my information is ~12 hours out of date, so I won't argue that point. I will point out, however, that it's not the level of radiation that matters, but the specific isotopes causing it. Radioactive Iodine, for example, is particularly dangerous because it has a relatively long half-life and naturally concentrates in the lymph nodes. Shorter-lived isotopes, like N-16, will contribute to high radiation levels but not have any real health effects.
As for this not being on the same scale as Chernobyl, I doubt even a full, uncontained meltdown would be as bad as that. Chernobyl made heavy use of graphite, which burned for a long time, spewing long-lived fallout everywhere. Fukushima I uses a different design, with less inherent risk.
and Fukushima is the result of an earthquake 7 times more powerful than it was designed to survive
Actually the reactors came out of the earthquake quite well! It was that pesky tsunami taking out the backup generators to power the cooling systems that's really causing all these problems. And even then, new generators were brought in to fix the problem caused by the tsunami, but somehow nobody thought to check to make sure the new generators were compatible with the plant's power system before trucking them in. Oops.
It was a perfect storm. The plant shut down, as it should have, and the batteries operated properly. However, the tsunami submerged the diesel backups, and the rest of the power grid had been knocked out by the earthquake, so they couldn't use external power.
The mobile generators deal was a fuckup, plain and simple. I think, had they known what the price of failure was, they would have found a way to make it work. I think they were overconfident in the safety systems they had in place.
> how many more nuclear disasters is it going to take?
Indeed....please provide us with the list of nuclear disasters, it should be an easy exercise judging by the tone of confidence in your post. Just for fun, throw in some stats on deaths per kwh of electrcity.
PREDICTION: you will not respond to this, because there have been no nuclear disasters. And no one disputes that in practice, nuclear is the safest form of power statistically. If you want to assert that nuclear power is incredibly powerful and dangerous, that is one thing, but trying to pass off potential disaster as reality, is a but disingenuous.
You can't simultaneously accuse your OP of being disingenuous about nuclear power (which he is, and I agree), then claim there have been no nuclear disasters, because that is probably more disingenuous than the original claim. That's just not true.
Are we working with the same definition of the word disaster? Even bloody Wikipedia, which I'd hardly call the tome of truth, calls Chernobyl a disaster[1]. Human life, property damage (ask Belarus), worldwide fallout...you don't get to rewrite what disaster means so that nuclear power keeps an untarnished image. There has been at least one. Debatably -- and I don't care to get into it -- there could now be as many as three.
There's a parallel with airliner crashes. More people die every day on highways, but an airliner going down is a very serious thing because there are hundreds of lives suddenly ended. So it was with Chernobyl: due to a catastrophic failure of engineering, humanity, and government, dozens of peoples' lives suddenly ended. You can argue that tens of thousands of lives are now in jeopardy due to the radiological effects. That is a disaster, regardless of any pro/anti-nuclear agenda.
I was speaking about disaster in an absolute sense, not a relative one. When you only have ten or so incidents to go by, then Chernobyl and three mile island are going to be called disasters, as far as nuclear disasters go. In terms of real disasters, when measured in human deaths, they are tiny footnotes in history, statistically irrelevant.
Hundreds of people die every year, just mining coal. How many people have died from nuclear power generators in their entire history? Disingenuous indeed.
There are a lot of relevant statistics in that document, such as the thousands of thyroid cancer cases directly attributed to the radiation exposure, not to mention the tens of firefighters that died saving the rest of the world. I would hate to live in your world, where there's a threshold of death to call something a disaster -- you are really minimizing the effects on hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) of people, simply because they haven't died yet or at all. How about getting uprooted from their homes and lives?
Just as I pointed out with my airliner analogy, the deaths from mining coal are over time, and many probably attributable to basic industrial accidents. Black lung has kind of been figured out, hasn't it? Five hundred coal miners didn't wake up on a Tuesday and die from coal poisoning, and as a result we're not talking about a disaster that needs investigation with coal power production.
I agree that nuclear power is statistically safe, but you are really skewing facts and doing a great disservice to less-educated readers about the (real) dangers of nuclear power, and calling it science elsewhere in this thread. This isn't a binary proposition -- something can be really safe and have the occasional Big Deal. Just like air travel.
Solar and wind are not always there when you need them, so you need some source of electricity that is. Current ways to store power (batteries, pumping water uphill) are too expensive.
Those are not comparable power sources. They cannot substitute for fossil or nuclear plants, because they are way too expensive and do not provide 24/7 power without even more expensive batteries.
Actually, thermal solar plants can produce electricity 24/7 just fine. They can store heat in water or (more efficiently) molten salt up in a tower and use it to later generate power at a reliable rate.
Spain is known to be investing heavily on concentrating solar power.
Those are great they just don't generate a lot of power though. The biggest one so far peaks at 60MW while your standard nuclear or fossil power plant generates 1000MW consistently. You'd need at least 20 of these to replace just one coal plant. That makes it what, 5 times more expensive than nuclear / fossil? Not even the USA can afford to go 100% renewable with a price like that.
"That makes it what, 5 times more expensive than nuclear / fossil?"
I'm not sure that's an accurate assessment, given that solar will probably become much cheaper as more solar plants are built.
And, as we're seeing with the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters, the real price of nuclear could be much higher than just the price of a power plant.
What would be your price tag on the lives lost in or ruined by these nuclear disasters? (not to mention the economic cost stemming from the areas being contaminated by nuclear fallout)
"Not even the USA can afford to go 100% renewable with a price like that."
Of course they could. They could start by giving fewer handouts to the rich in terms of bailouts and tax breaks. Then they could cut the military budget so that the US no longer spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. And they could legalize drugs, and get rid of the War on Drugs, cut spending on filling prisons with people who commit victimless crimes, etc.
All together that would make for many trillions saved (plus a handy profit on taxing legal drugs). Then the US could easily afford to go 100% solar (and probably much more), without any of the risks of nuclear.
I understand that there are many political reasons why none of these things are going to happen in the US any time soon (though some estimates put legalization of pot on 10 year horizon, when the baby boomers start withdrawing from the political scene, and as the younger generation is far less afraid of pot). But it's not like these things couldn't happen.
It's all a matter of political will.
If there's one good thing that's come out of this latest nuclear disaster is that it's starting to wake people up to the true dangers and costs of nuclear power. Hopefully they won't need many more such lessons before they get the point.
"Just for fun, throw in some stats on deaths per kwh of electrcity."
How many kwh of electricity is your life worth?
How many kwh or electricity are the nearly 1 million people who died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster worth? [1]
And I'd love to hear you show me a list of solar array or wind farm accidents that prove nuclear power is safer than either.
If Chernobyl or the Fukushima plants were solar arrays or wind farms, how much environmental damage and cost in human suffering would there have been were they to have been destroyed?
I'm looking forward to hearing you sing about how nuclear is the "safest form of power statistically" if the radioactive cloud from Fukushima ever winds up floating over your home town.
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[1] "Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences"
Solar array and wind farms kill people too. The by-products of mining and industrial production are often dangerous and result in disease. Solar cells in particular require lots of energy to create.
Is your home off the grid? Have you really considered the compromises that have to be made to live entirely(electric, heating, cooling, transport) from wind and solar? It's not easy, it demands changes to all aspects of ones lifestyle and has a significant price.
"The by-products of mining and industrial production are often dangerous and result in disease"
How does that compare to the hazards of mining radioactive ore and the hazards from storing and transporting nuclear waste?
"Have you really considered the compromises that have to be made to live entirely(electric, heating, cooling, transport) from wind and solar?"
These compromises aren't necessarily all bad. For instance, if the impact to transport means that we'll have to live on goods made locally and not be able to commute as far to work, that could make for stronger, more pleasant, and more sustainable communities and economic systems.
"It's not easy, it demands changes to all aspects of ones lifestyle and has a significant price."
Does that price approach dying of radiation poisoning from a Chernobyl-style disaster? Or how about having your children be born with all sorts of mutations caused by radiation? Or of poisoning the environment with nuclear waste?
> For instance, if the impact to transport means that we'll have to live on goods made locally and not be able to commute as far to work, that could make for stronger, more pleasant, and more sustainable communities and economic systems.
Good luck getting the rare earths from China for all those green technologies if you have to get them from local sources. The one big US mine was shutdown. The reason?
"In 1998, chemical processing at the mine was stopped after a series of wastewater leaks. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water carrying radioactive waste spilled into and around Ivanpah Dry Lake."
But it's okay because, currently, we get all those rare elements from China, where you don't hear about the pollution and accidents. Of course, China is saying that they don't want to share with everyone else any more, so that may change soon.
I'd like to know just how many tons of rare earths we have to import from China to run wind farms.
And why couldn't solar panels be developed without them?
Why not put a few tens or hundreds of billions (a tiny fraction compared to TARP or how much the US spends on the military) in to research in to these technologies to make them less dependent on rare earths?
But, as for the availability of rare earths outside China:
"As China slashes exports of rare earth elements, U.S. mine digs for more"
"Molycorp Inc., which owns the open mine, plans to dig out about 40,000 tons of dirt a year by 2014, up 1,200% from the current rate of about 3,000 tons.
The Colorado company is boosting production to meet an insatiable global appetite for rare earth elements..
The mine, about 16 miles from the Nevada border, has one of the world's largest deposits of rare earth elements outside Asia..
The company is spending more than $500 million to modernize and rebuild the 2,200-acre facility. The project is expected to create hundreds of permanent jobs and eventually produce rare earths at cheaper rates than mines in China."
"China's monopoly of the supply of strategic "rare earth" minerals will end when the Australian mining corporation Lynas brings a massive new refining plant in Malaysia into operation later this year...
The company has invested about $230 million in a refinery covering about 20 hectares which in September is due to start processing about 11,000 tonnes of rare earth oxide a year."
I take it you didn't read the link I posted, or you'd have noticed that the mine that released all that radioactive crap was owned by Molycorp Inc. Yes, the same one you're talking about.
Wind can't do base load power, either. Maybe someone will work that out by, I don't know, storing the energy in a flywheel or something. But they haven't done so yet. It's also dependent on our solar energy budget (as is solar, obviously). Conservation of energy is a pain, but no one knows how to violate it yet.
Why not put a few tens or hundreds of billions (a tiny fraction compared to TARP or how much the US spends on the military) in to research in to these technologies to make them less dependent on rare earths?
How do you know how much something like that would cost to develop?
Can you quote anything more credible than "The Environment News Service"?
Come on, do you expect to be taken seriously? Make a reasoned argument, I'm willing to listen. If you can quote any sort of a credible science agency that claims Chernobyl actually contributed to major death, I would consider it.
Historically, coal-fired power plants have been much more dangerous for humans than nuclear power plants. I think the record shows that nuclear power is on the whole pretty safe.
Regarding proof: I don't think anything has been proven, yet, except that there have been a lot of powerful forces at work with this disaster.
There are way too many people on here who've been drinking too much of the radioactive koolaid doled out by the nuclear industry.
The general consensus here tends to be that nuclear power is wonderful and amazingly safe.
Well, we're seeing them being proven wrong yet again. How much more proof are they going to need? How many more nuclear disasters is it going to take?