Yes, and Chernobel was a poorly designed reactor that was so poorly maintained as to give any western engineer nightmares.
Shortly after things began falling apart in the USSR, there were programs here about the soviet nuclear program - and some videos taken at the plants and interviews with some of their engineers.
Scary shit, I’ll tell you. Even simple things were in short supply. Most warning lights are laid out in multiples just in case one should burn out at a bad time. Things were so bad, that they couldn’t replace burned out bulbs. It got to the point were they didn’t have enough bulbs in some plants to have even a single complete set of lamps in place. The workers were telling of the different shifts moving bulbs from one set of warning lights to another as the supervisors had different opinions at to which were most critical.
A comparison of Chernobel and a West German nuclear plant is really no comparison at all.
I’ve certainly heard no such thing (neither here in Denmark). Possible Germany has had a rise in certain cancer rates (like every other western country) but I’d find any claim to trace this back to Chernobyl to be extremely suspect. Chernobyl was a local disaster of some magnitude, but not an international one by any reasonable measure. Also Chernobyl was a completely different kind of reactor type – with different safety procedures.
Actually, nuclear engineering is now on the rise after hitting a low point a few years ago. If I was in my office, I could look up the data on how many nuclear engineering programs exist in the US and what enrollments are, but as I remember the number of graduates each year is a bit over 1000 in the US. Almost all nuclear plants will have their lives extended to 60 years, new designs continue to be developed and nuclear science goes way beyond nuclear power plants. About half the people who are admitted to hospitals have some type of nuclear (radiation) diagnostic procedure or therapy. Radiation based measurements and tests are widely used in many industries.
Anybody here ever read “Chernobyl Notebook”? An English translation was given to me once, by a person I used to work with.
Who had been an actual engineer at Chernobyl (he wasn’t on-site during the accident, he was on Holiday in the Crimea IIRC). But he did have a lot of stories to tell…
And we’re even looking to the next 20 years. Nuclear power is going to be a round for quite a while even if we don’t build more plants right now. The nuclear power industry is even trying to help universities maintain their nuclear engineering programs because of the many universities cancelling or scaling back their programs. I think there’s only about 20 universities left in the USA that offer a bachelors degree in nuclear engineering.
No it isn’t. Risk analysis is a tricky business and many lies can be told with statistics. What are the cancer risks of coal mining? of oil and natural gas extraction and transport? of the combustion of these products? How many cancer cases would be caused by coal mining and attendant pollution if nuclear is abandonded? How many deaths and injuries due to mining and other fossil fuel extraction processes will there be if nuclear is abandonded? Even manufacturing those lovely solar panels involves some pretty toxic stuff. Everything kills people. Eliminating one risk usually creates another. It’s a complex trade-off that needs to be thought about more carefully than the usual Green approach which basically amounts to “radiation causes cancer”. :rolleyes:
Okay the Greens are the eco-friendly party (as I understand it). They are pro-windmill and anti-nuclear. Okay got that part too…
What I’m wondering is this… There is a plan to build test offshore windmills off the coast of VA… originally an ambitious plan it is being scaled back, in part because of ** enviromentalist concerns over the impact on birds ** . I guess my question is, how does the Green party reconcile the pro-windmill view against the danger these giant blades o’ death present to the South Germanic Gooshawk, or some such?
It’s not a spurious question (really, it’s not). I’m trying to figure out how they come up with their pro-yet-anti enviroment views.
I disagree. The accident was more than 15 years ago and still they are measuring raised radiation levels in mushrooms and wild animals in southern Germany. This thing was local as long as you concern the whole of Europe to be ‘local’.
a)This is NEWS? The decision was made years ago, after the current government took over from the conservatives. In the meantime, they have been reelected for another term. I only assume this pops up because the Stade reactor was recently taken off the grid, widely celebrated as the first step in abandoning nuclear power, despite the fact that economic reasons were at least as much a factor.
b)You are comparing apples and oranges. This is no question of whether the French or the Germans are right. The reasons the French pursue nuclear power goes way beyond electricity supply. In fact, a major reason the French invested big time into nuclear power to begin with was the fact that they were establishing military use of fission. As such, the motivations are entirely distinct.
c)Nuclear power remains excetional as an industry because they don’t have to show they know how to make sure they won’t harm anyone with their waste.
d)German companies are making truckloads of money with regenerating energy technology.
Except, of course, that you restrict carefully looking at things to risk analysis, whereas you consider it perfectly ok to engage in sheer demagogy bare of any facts when assessing political parties you don’t like. I would suggest actually informing yourself a bit more on people you slander.
Not to mention that you don’t actually carefully look at risk analysis, but rather engage in just as much demagogy.
While it is true, that the time it takes to decommission the plant really has nothing to do with payback time, I doubt the rest of your statement.
The problem is that on the net you’ll be able to find pages supporting your point, that the costs have been paid back, but they are run by nuclear power fans. Do you have any cite from an official/unbiased source that this is actually true?
Well the problem with these kind of statements is that there is no quantification at all. I have no doubt that it’s possible with today’s very accurate equipment to measure radioactivity in mushrooms and deer and humans even - however the rub is whether it’s in quantities that’s anything to worry about. It’s also possible worldwide to measure radiation from all the atom bombs being blasted off in the 50’s and 60’s – do you also classify them as a worldwide environmental disaster? Except for the year following the Chernobyl disaster, and for some very specific categories, I have never heard of any health warnings that mushrooms or wild game should be avoided – however in Faeroe Island, where my family is from (and a place quite without any industry of it’s own), there have recently been made quite high measurements of lead and other heavy metals in school children, also in Denmark people are now advised to only eat fish once a week and pregnant mothers not at all because of the high level of metals. Both very likely to be at least partially the result of coal-powered electricity plants.
Sorry, but this is pure and simple trying to weasel your way out. Fact is that elevated levels can be detected today. Fact is you claimed it was a local disaster at the time it happened.
And I am not quite sure what danish polution has to do with German policy. Unless you suggest that German emission standards are set in Denmark?
Well, WinstonSmith here is a press release from the bavarian Department of the Environment (in german).
Now, these guys are not exactly known to be very critical of nuclear power (or any other environmental issues). Yet they acknowledge that there is still an elevated level of radiation in mushrooms and animals. The levels are not considered to be health damaging, but measurable and clearly connected to Chernobyl.
So, yes I maintain, that this was a - if not global, but hemisphere wide disaster (just for the fun of nitpicking).
I don’t want this kind of shit to happen again!
Think about this one: If there are some idiots at NASA who manage to crash their space ship on Mars because they are unable to convert their inch to metric units, why is it then so unlikely that some other highly paid and excelently trained idiot takes some wrong decisions in running his nuclear power plant?
What a load of crap. First of all I never said I didn’t like the Greens! I’m actually pretty sympathetic to much of their agenda and this is not some typical right wing rant against them. If anyone is engaging in demagoguery it is you since you don’t actually present any real counterarguments.
Here’s the point spelled out in simpler terms in case some people missed it. You need 100GW of electricity. You had, say, 30GW of nuclear power. You shut down those plants in an attempt to reduce cancer risks. You now need to generate that power somehow. But that proposition itself entails risks like those I mentioned. My post was simply to point out that the post I was responding to, and the Greens in general on this issue, are oversimplifying things. As for “actually doing risk analysis”, that’s not something I have time for. I certainly expect poilicy makers whose decisions affect many people’s lives to make time for it though. So thanks for muddying the waters and contributing nothing but overheated rhetoric there Ollie.
Once again for OliverH. Apparently I didn’t make myself clear. I said and still maintain that Chernobyl was a local disaster, and even though it’s very possible that some remnants of the disaster can be detected in Germany this in no way translates into any reasonable definition of disaster – unless you can show me that those remnants are indeed threatening the health of a large number of people. So what we have is a local disaster and something that perhaps can amount to a regional worry.
I try to restrict myself to areas in which I have any actual knowledge. I make no claim to have any detailed knowledge on the situation in Germany – however I think that should it be a problem in Germany it ought to be a problem in Denmark. Actually a worse problem in Denmark, since, if I recall correctly (which I may not), Scandinavia was the region outside Soviet that was worst effected.
To what? To counter something, there would have to be some arguments. All you had was slander, calling the usual green approach ‘radiation causes cancer’. Never mind that one of the ‘green’ deputy secretaries in the German ministry for environment and reactor safety is a physicist, and that the ranks of Green members of parliament include chemists and engineers.
I don’t think that you are in any position to complain about overheated rethoric, nor about people oversimplifying something. So far, that has been all you have been doing in this thread. Or did you want to claim that ‘greens in general on this issue are oversimplifying things’ is a particularly differentiated view?
But yeah, probably it is me who is muddying the waters.
Coincidentally, cancer risk during operation is the least of the reasons why those plants are shut down.
Effected by what? Coal plant emissions? Because that’s what you were talking about in this context. Coincidentally, I live in an area of Germany in which whole city quarters still have blackened walls from before tight emission standards were enforced and before coal mining and steel production declined in the area.
We must have different definitions on what constitutes a disaster. How can it be a disaster if it’s not health damaging?
I don’t know that the Bavarian Department of the Environment should be especially uncritically of nuclear power. But looking into what they actually said here I read (Teutonic challenged here so I might not get it entirely correct): “While it’s still possible in isolated cases to detect radioactivity in mushrooms and wild game, however you’d have to eat 100 tons mushrooms a year to even go about normal exposure. And that in general the remnants from Chernobyl amount to less than 1% of radiation from natural sources.” So yes, it’s detectable, but why on earth would you classify it as a disaster? I’d venture with so small amounts than not a single German has died from anything resulting from Chernobyl. There are about 10.000 other things in Germany that’s more threatening to the average German.
Well neither do I (or anyone else for that matter). I think windmills are great, but they only go so far to solve the problem – and it’s not really a realistic that they, or any other existing green technology, could be are able to take up the slack if nuclear plants are closed down. So what we have is a politic that results in increase use of coal or oil (or imported French nuclear generated power). And both coal and oil have many known environmental shortcomings. It’s not really intelligent policy to say you close down nuclear plants from environmental concerns if you do not take into account the consequences of such a decision.
Of course it’s possible another disaster can occur, but like Zoidberg says – we have to make a fair evaluation of the different risks involved in producing the energy we need.