The Japanese are having some trouble keeping a few of theirs from failing catastrophically, which indicates we aren’t able to build disaster-proof plants. Is the danger of meltdown still worth the benefit of clean(ish) energy in your opinion? The places where nuke energy would benefit us the most, namely dense population centers, would be the worst place for a meltdown to occur.
Yes. So far in this catastrophe no one has actually died and what radiation has actually escaped has been fairly low level.
Meanwhile, how many people died mining coal this year?
This might have something to do with the earthquake that happened recently. Kinda shakes things up a bit.
I would have thought disaster-proof would be like bullet-proof. This actually means bullet-resistant.
I don’t have numbers but I would have thought the amount of deaths from all nuclear power when compared to deaths from coal/oil/other major fuel source (over the same time period of course) would be lower.
You do know that we can build them in out of the way places (though I think Japan is populated in most places) and then transfer the power where it is needed?
Yeah. We have to at least utilize nuclear to get us to whatever the ultimate technology is for clean and safe power.
Yes, as long as we continue to keep our eyes (and R&D dollars) focused on making the three phases of electricity (production, transmission and usage) more efficient, cleaner and safer. Shit, the USA already has more nuclear plants than any other country in the world, and its still not enough to satisfy our huge demand.
Production: keep refining technology for current coal-fired plants, build more nuclear plants with the most modern and safe processes and materials as possible, continue to push the envelope on renewables and areas like solar and wind, hydro, etc.
Transmission: The grid needs upgraded, badly. I’m out of my league here but don’t we lose a lot of electricity just via power line travel? Can that be upgraded with different materials, processes, etc? I’m sure someone smarter than me can expound upon how we can transport electricity more efficiently than we do now.
Usage: This is another area that the USA needs to continue to address. Everything from LEET building standards, higher-efficiency light bulbs, ANYTHING that researchers can reliably develop going forward to wring more use out of our current levels of production would be extremely helpful.
Absolutely. The reactors having trouble at Japan are of an outdated, 40 year old design, and were hit with conditions they were never designed for, yet still haven’t killed or injured anyone who wasn’t a worker at the plant site. More modern reactors elsewhere in Japan handled the quake much better. Meanwhile, I recall seeing footage of an oil refinery burning out of control just after the quake, yet nobody is saying we should shut down all oil refineries.
I think there’s a couple of things worth pointing out.
Firstly, the Fukushima Daiichi plant wasn’t the closest plant to the epicentre. The Onagawa plant was closer, see MSN. The (slightly) more modern plant coped with the earthquake and tsunami, and we build them even better today.
Secondly, the Fukushima Daiichi plant actually coped with the earthquake just fine. It shut down automatically, the diesel generators fired up and started emergency cooling. It was the tsunami afterwards, flooding the diesel generators, which has caused the problems. All the hardware inside the containment functioned as it should.
Thirdly, despite reports of meltdown and two seperate hydrogen explosions, every release of radioactive material so far has been deliberate and controlled. Steam from ultra-high purity water has been repeatedly vented to lower the pressure, and while this is techically a release of radioactive material, ultrapure water is only very mildly activated by the neutron radiation it’s exposed to. The steam released was slightly radioactive when it came out and that radioactivity would have decayed away to nothing within a few minutes.
The issues now are (1) the ultrapure water has been topped up with seawater, which is a lot dirtier and so will be activated more by the neutron radiation and (2) some fuel rods appear to have been damaged with their claddings ruptured, allowing fission products to contaminate the cooling water. Venting steam is now much more of a big deal. But on the brighter side, the reactors have been shut down since Friday and are generating much less decay heat. Further venting will be limited or even unneccessary.
Absolutely. Nuclear remains the best option in regards to safety and cleanliness for large scale power production as of yet.
The issue with nuclear power isn’t really about how safe we can build the plants. The containments of the Japanese reactors are intact. If the reactors underwent a full meltdown and formed a puddle on the containment floor, they are designed to contain that. The containment floor is known as the “core catcher” and the refractory concrete will simply take the heat. At that point the containment will be filled with more concrete to entomb the core, and we don’t worry about it for the next hundred years. Additionally, modern 3rd gen reactors have passive emergency cooling that doesn’t need any pumping power at all. Some 4th gen designs don’t even need emergency cooling - they’ll be able to just take the heat without damage. We can build them extremely safe.
The issue isn’t the odds. The odds are good. It’s the stakes. What happens if everything goes wrong and a whole core is both exposed and spread out over a large area? Well, we’ve seen it in Chernobyl and it was bad. So we have to decide how good we need the odds to be before we risk that happening again.
If 40-year-old plants can survive a 9.1 earthquake and subsequent devastating tsunami and still only be releasing a very small amount of insignificant radiation to the environment, I’ll take those odds. (Of course, it remains to be seen what the final environmental impact will be from this event, but at the moment it’s looking like “not too bad, actually.”)
I think the issue, is the alternative. If it is not going to be nuclear, then it is going to be coal. And I’d much rather take nuclear, with the odds and the stakes, than I’d take coal, where the stakes are at least as high and the odds 100%.
I’ve never been much of a nuclear advocate but I don’t see having the entire freaking island move eight feet to the left followed by a significant portion of the Pacific Ocean arriving on the site to be an argument against it intrinsically. They did okay, considering the extreme circumstances, and next time they’ll do even better.
Absolutely. Nuclear power has become such a boogeyman, when, as has been pointed out, other forms of power harm many more people every year. In addition, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of the US is far, far less seismically active than Japan. The odds of a major earthquake like the recent one, let alone one followed up by a huge tsunami, are virtually nil for large chunks of the country. And, again as has already been pointed out, the Japanese plants, even the ones in danger, have performed remarkably well considering what they’ve been through.
Which only happened because of the incredibly stupid design, which you don’t see elsewhere because it is, well, stupid. Chernobyl simply is a bad example to judge nuclear power on, since the same condition don’t apply elsewhere.
Quite true.
Moving away from coal fired power plants isn’t going to be simple or risk free, but the alternative is unsustainable even over the cultural short term (for example, the productive years of those currently entering the workforce). Solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric won’t get us where we need to be for carbon-neutral energy production.
Even moving to electric vehicles won’t help much if our power comes from coal. “Clean coal” is a fiction. “Clean nuclear” power is also somewhat untrue, but only in terms of waste and production of nuclear components, not in terms of carbon emissions from the production of power. Both of those problems (fuel cell manufacture and nuclear waste containment) have technically clear mitigation avenues; it’s only the politics that are difficult.
Absolutely.
The Japanese power plant that was 40 years old is hit with a series of disasters (including a freaking 9.0 scale earth quake…one of the 5 or 6 largest in recorded history and lasting over 2 minutes) and while having some serious issues still manages not to melt down and poison the entire world. I’d say that given what happened it actually did pretty well, though I bet that future nuclear power plants in Japan (as well as buildings in general) will use this new disaster as the benchmark for planning.
Nothing is ‘disaster-proof’…you build based on what you think the disaster might be and still be affordable to construct and then you build in a bit extra as a fudge factor.
Yes, especially considering the fact that afaik none of these plants melted down in Japan, nor did they release a lot of radiation into the environment…and, of course, considering the scale and magnitude of this disaster.
And why is the energy only ‘clean(ish)’?
Which makes it all the more remarkable that this 40 year old power plant, hit with an earthquake on such a scale didn’t melt down, ehe? Newer power plants would have even less chance of a melt down (the pebble bed design basically CAN’T melt down at all, even if they lose all their coolant). Perhaps if the anti-nuclear neo-Luddite types would get the fuck out of the way and let us build new plants to replace the old ones we’d (and the Japanese), I don’t know, be MORE secure for a disaster than relying on designs that are so old.
-XT
Still okay with nukes. To be honest, I’m more confident than I was before.
I do not relish bringing this up for fear of ‘giving people ideas’, but, we have not experienced the nuclear industry equivalent of David Burke yet, and I am unsure of what a suitably motivated disgruntled employee could do.
This angle was not operative in the Chernobyl disaster, but to me, Chernobyl illustrates what one or a small number of individuals might do.
{Oh, to clarify, David Burke was responsible for the crash of PSA 1771}
I think we have over 100 nuclear plants already and I think they are mostly centered in densely
populated areas.