A goodly portion of Japan in Fukushima prefecture is still a nuclear meltdown disaster area.
They are talking about growing vegetables 60 miles away and how some leaking water is 6700 times over the supposedly safe limit.
I have many sads over how this has been handled. I have praise for FXMastermind from this thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=602177&highlight=fukushima&page=7 where he continued to beat down the nuclear apologists into a figuratively radioactive pulp, even though he was wrong on the special language the apologists used for their priesthood, turns out that he was essentially 100 percent correct that this was a first order nuclear disaster and they were 100 percent wrong, despite being experts. I’ll take a small bow myself as occasionally supporting FXMastermind in that thread.
300,000 homes lost. On the bright side, it might get a hell of a lot worse as the structure collapses, and then the nuclear power detractors would be even more right. Not that I really rather would have been wrong.
Damn nuclear power, damn cost cutting at nuclear power plant construction. Damn experts that are just stupid about the second law of thermodynamics.
Oh, and damn windfarms and their toxic wind spills. And fusion power from the sun harvested by solar plants. Damn. Damn. Damn.
Anyone else got an opinion on the wonderful nuclear power that will be so plentiful that it will be too cheap to meter? FX?
The question isn’t that nuclear isn’t risky and doesn’t have side effects, it’s whether or not those side effects and risk are worse than the ones from continuing to burn fossil fuels, because no matter how you slice it, there’s just not enough renewable energy sources around to power the world.
Also, for all of FXMastermind’s bloviation in that thread, here we are two and a half years later and what? There’s a little tiny part of Japan that’s an exclusion zone, and the rest is fine. Sure TEPCO and the Japanese government are still dealing with the aftermath and how to properly contain it, but that’s hardly unexpected.
300,000 people lost their homes. Yes, I suppose a rhetorical argument could be made that such an area is tiny, that there are other places to get seafood, etc. But I really, really, really miss that thread. Thanks guys for bringing back the good memories.
And the French. Those gastronomes par excellence are apparently never building another nuclear plant and shifting to renewables from 80 percent nuclear generation. I’m thinking that perhaps humankind, even the stubborn ones, have learned an affirmative lesson from Fukushima that we ignored from Chernobyl and TMI. And let’s face it, nothing really bad followed as a consequence of TMI, and even good, as it now means the public gets “too much information”.
Yeah, the engineering holy grails of our time. Don’t see them happening any time soon, though I’ve never quite understood the major challenges with Thorium.
I’ll give you an opinion: nuclear power is currently our best option to meet our energy needs when fossil fuels start to deplete. That may change if something new comes along, but until then we’d better keep building them to ensure we continue to learn the best way to make them as safe as possible.
I am way more concerned about what happens in 30 - 40 years time if we don’t have an alternative to fossil fuels than I am about the repercussions of Fukushima or indeed future nuclear incidents.
Out of interest, what’s your solution for the coming energy crisis?
Remind me again, how many have died in the Fukushima incident? How many in Japan have died in the 2.5 years since the tsunami due to fossil fuel usage? If nuclear is such a bad thing then you’ll have those comparisons to hand yes?
While I admit that technically this is a viable solution, I just feel it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi compared to mastering one of the fundamental forces of energy that could meet our day to day requirements whilst also enabling cool shit like space travel just has a certain
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to reject your suggestion out of hand. The laws of thermodynamics are well understood and quantifiable, and even allowing for the staggering levels of hand-wringing that we’ve reached you’re still looking at the tiniest fraction of current energy needs.
Of course if anyone ever managed to harness the energy of smugness, mock outrage or some of the other products of the OP we could well be looking at an abundance of power.
Remind us again, how much it has already cost, how much it’s eventually going to cost, how many decades and perhaps even centuries it will take to decommission the Fukushima plants, who is paying for it, and how many 100’s of thousands of lives have been permanently disrupted, if not devastated, the effect on the economy there, and the cost of polluting the ocean and making large portions of it unfishable?
How many nuclear projects or people? All the nuclear projects have died. Every last damn one of them. That’s a high mortality rate. You’d have to ask TEPCO and the Japanese government (like they will tell us the truth) how many have died (I believe an executive high muckity muck died of stress related to the incident) and lots or excess radiation is about. 6700 times the limit according to the article, but because you cannot tell which cancer in the next few decades will be caused by this, I gather you wish to count that as zero. Good to know your methodology is self-sealing. Screwing everyone who lost their homes over is the price of nuclear power.
Wind and solar. Both are competitive, will have lots of jobs for maintenance, are the fastest growing sectors and we will never run out. Energy storage? Yes, we will need it, but there are lots of methods for storage from cuckoo clocks to fancy batteries to air pressure and water reservoirs. Any of these methods will be far cheaper than nuclear.
And while I’m being sarcastic, I want to blame the hippies for Fukushima. If they hadn’t whinged about dangers of nuclear power, the designer of the plant, who wanted a stronger sea wall, would have got a stronger sea wall. But those damn hippies with their earth mommas and tree huggers ran the costs up by voicing their concerns so that executive pay packages would have been at risk if further safety measures had been taken.
Damn you hippies!!
One of my favorite canards is how fusion will break even in a few years. But they haven’t figured out how to harvest any of that energy. Meanwhile, fusion from the sun and gravity from the moon give us far more solar, wind and tidal power then we can ever use. Go sun! Go!
If we wait for only nuclear to “save” us, we will not be “saved.”
What is coolest about the huge increase in wind and solar is how the skinny neck tied, thick glasses wearing nuke-suckers will never see another new nuclear plant ever and their trauma and crying over the replacements.
Nothing bad should have followed as a consequence of TMI. Even after multiple failures and the worst possible expected outcome from a boiling water reactor (the type in use at TMI), the expected incidence of cancer was determined by experts to be “less than one”. While the reactor was destroyed and the operators failed to do their jobs properly, the built-in redundancies protected the people exactly as they were supposed to.
This is to be differentiated from Chernobyl, which resulted from a reactor with a known danger being manipulated by people who ignored every single safety regulation, and Fukushima, which melted down because of a natural disaster the likes of which had never been seen before.
One of these things is not like the other. And this is coming from someone who worked in the shadow of TMI for more than a decade and still lives within the evacuation zone. The only lesson from TMI is that too much information is as bad or worse than none at all.
Solar and wind together are projected to supply ~35% of US electricity by 2030. That’s only 17 years away- in 40 years we could generate a solid majority with them.
It isn’t just the US either- wind and solar plants are being constructed in South America, China, the Middle East, India- pretty much everywhere.