According to Key World Energy Statistics 2010, only 5.7% of the world’s energy come from nuclear source, despite it being more sustainable than fossil fuel. Part of the reason is probably resistance due to fear of nuclear disasters.
Is this fear rational? Is 5.7% a reasonable number given the tradeoff of advantages and risk here?
Is fear ever rational? How far away from the reactors are your going to live? Are you going to be upwind or downwind? How bad a meltdown are you prepared to risk?
Risk management puts risk, on a basic level, on a square grid with four quadrants. One axis is likelihood of the bad event happening, the other axis how bad the event is when it happens.
Fukashima and Chernobyl were both really bad events that will cost their taxpayers probably tens of billions of dollars to reduce the damages from and do some clean up. On the bright side, they happened half way around the world from me, so my radiation exposure to both those incidents is truly trivial. But it sucks on the inverse cube rule as you get closer and closer.
Most SDMB members have reasoning processes and behaviors that are highly suspect when it comes to nuclear power. However, FXMastermind will boil it down for you that nuclear power equals bad. He will be along shortly.
When a lot of energy potential is concentrated in one place, it will tend towards chaos and seek a lower energy level. This is called the second law of thermodynamics. It is the most reliable law of physics ever discovered. (Think Murphy’s law.) If you have a 50 ton cube on concrete on a cable in like a cuckoo clock weight, you can raised that block up and down and attach the cable to a generator and generate electricity from the potential when it is raised and the kinetic when it is actually falling back down. That is a lot of energy. But the chemical reaction from slowly burning 50 tons of coal to power a steam generator is many orders of magnitude greater than that, and maybe the fire gets away from you burn it in a few minutes and maybe starts other fires. The potential for damage is much greater. Put 50 tons of uranium in a pile (a reactor and they aren’t that big) and you actually have millions and millions of times more potential energy. You don’t just pile up the reactor grade uranium, you place it very carefully, just so, and it reacts at a controlled rate, heating water to steam, turning the turbine. Fuck up that careful placement of uranium (think Homer Simpson or Mother Nature here) and what might have taken 10 years to use the fuel can all “burn” (that is react) within minutes, hours, days, or weeks, producing tremendous heat destroying all your careful safety measures. A nuclear bomb, like at Hiroshima, has highly refined fuel, only about 15 kg of it in that case, that all “reacts” within a fraction of a second. Energy reactors do not have such highly refined fuel, but do have many tons of it. It is supposed to react over a period of many years, not quickly.
He’s also an AGW denialist, so take it with a grain of salt.
Uh… you do realize that for a nuclear explosion, you need highly refined uranium, right? You could pile on as much unrefined uranium as you want, the worst that will happen is that it will get very, very hot and basically melt through anything around and beneath it.
Anyways, I think the fears about nuclear *disasters *are horrifically overblown. Sure, they’re bad, but the number of failsafes in place in a modern nuclear reactor make the likelihood of a meltdown extremely low. Just to be clear, the Fukushima reactor was hit with an earthquake and a tsunami, and flooded. That’s kinda what it took to bring it down. A reactor in, say, the middle of France? There is virtually nothing that *could *cause a meltdown there, as long as the thing was built correctly.
I can’t speak with regards to waste or profit, though.
Full disclosure – I am a nuclear-trained, engineer-qualified former Navy submarine officer.
Nuclear power, when done with proper training, proper engineering, and proper oversight, is safe. Full stop. The US Navy has operated hundreds of nuclear power plants with no major nuclear accidents. The same goes for storing nuclear waste in the long-term; when done with proper training, proper engineering, and proper oversight, the storage can be completely safe.
And there’s more. Coal-fired plants, in addition to causing far, far more pollution, also release far more radioactive material into the environment, as compared to nuclear plants. Coal-fired plant-accidents kill far, far more people than nuclear plant accidents.
The problems for nuclear power come into play when there is not proper training, proper engineering practices, or proper oversight. When done right, it’s completely safe.
Now, if war breaks out…
(Seriously, of course, if war breaks out, the problem of a few submarine reactors sinking to the sea floor, whether breached or not, is going to be a really tiny matter in comparison to the major exchange of missiles…)
Overblown in proportion to the cube of the distance from the meltdown. I’m thousands of miles from TMI or Hanford. The level of clusterfuck and OMG increase by the power of 3 as you linearly approach the problem.
The French have very good oversight of their reactors, not the laisse-faire approach to safety that the US has adopted. (Qui, I make la petite humor.)
There are eight nuclear submarines on the bottom of the ocean. List of sunken nuclear submarines - Wikipedia There has been at least one coolant incident with a US navy nuclear submarine that was not reported. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/30/us/navy-accused-of-hiding-nuclear-accident-on-sub.html The US Navy is not in the habit of accepting blame for anything, such as the Iowa explosion, much less nuclear problems.
K-19: The Widowmaker starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson dramatizes an incident where most of the crew survived. A riveting movie.
And there was a meltdown at a Canadian research reactor, Chalk River, that had the fix overseen by a U.S. Navy officer that volunteered to be lowered down into the reactor to get well over a thousand times what is now considered a safe does. This incident is generally among those covered up. U.S. Navy Lt. James E. Carter, Jr. took his turn with other trained Canadians and Americans to actually go into the reactor. All these men are heroes and truly brave sons of bitches. Lt. Carter went on to become the most reviled American alive by Republicans during the period of 1977 to 1981 when he served as President of the United States, the American people replacing him with fictional hero Ronald W. Reagan.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/05/milnes.carter.nuclear/
So, iiandyiiii, who am I going to rely on? You, or former President Jimmy Carter when it comes to expertise in nuclear power?
The world has far more Homer Simpsons than it does Hyman Rickovers. In the US, the vault doors to nuclear missiles are stuck and unrepaired for years. The nature of budget cutting and taking profits and doing as little as possible is in our DNA in the US. The level of vigilance required to operate all reactors safely at all times for decades on end isn’t something we are trained to do. Sons of bitches like Rickover are mortal and get pushed aside by penny pinchers and the jealously ambitious incompetent as inexorably as the the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The question isn’t if the nuclear reactor is safe, but for how long is it safe and can we sustain that level of safety for the 30 year life and then decommissioning (20 more years) of the reactor. Nobody familiar with human nature would think so.
Incidentally, I’d love to be wrong about this and have lots of safe nuclear reactors with power too cheap to meter. But reality is a bitch.
We had this conversation before, Carter is not against nuclear power; so as I said before, I do trust him a lot.
http://www.aep.com/newsroom/newsreleases/?id=1213
He is indeed concerned about the safety and against the reckless use of nuclear enrichment outside the USA that is not limited or controlled, you are confusing that and his opposition to the neutron bomb as meaning that he is against nuclear power. You are wrong.
And (I have been given to understand) considerably more expensive than the way it’s typically done at the commercial level.
Former reactor operator (enlisted), here.
Given the sheer size of the ocean, even in the absence of a nuclear exchange, even a few breached reactor vessels on the sea floor would not really have a significant impact on the ecosystem as a whole.
(Again, so I have been given to understand.)
On a 1-10 scale, if Fukashima and Chernobyl were a 10, what was 3 Mile Island? An event in our (relative) backyard?
Two of them were US subs, and neither sinking was related to a nuclear accident. Further, the ocean environment has since been monitored at the cite of each sinking, and there is no significant release of radioactivity. My point stands.
The release of coolant is a PR disaster, but not even close to a nuclear one. Nuclear coolant, even in very large amounts, has pretty low amounts of radioactive material. This was not a significant event as far as release of radioactive material.
Nothing from that quote counters anything I stated. Jimmy Carter doesn’t oppose nuclear power. This quote isn’t even particularly relevant to this issue at all. Jimmy Carter agrees with me (or, more accurately, I agree with him). Nuclear power is a different issue than nuclear weapons.
The risk exists and can be managed. Coal plants provide far, far more risk, both to the environment and to life, than nuclear reactors – even including disasters like Chernobyl!
Nuclear is not a perfect option, but when the pros and cons are looked at, it seems pretty clear to me that it’s at least as viable an option as coal.
Your statements so far show a skewed understanding of the reality of nuclear power – especially your repeated conflation with the issue of nuclear weapons.
Yes, it’s more expensive. Navy reactors are also significantly more enriched than civilian reactors. But doing it safely on land is cheaper (and safer and easier) than doing it safely at sea.
You honestly don’t think there is such a thing as a rational fear? What about a smoker who fears lung cancer? Not rational?
Have the cores breached yet? If the reactors are still contained, then, sure, there wouldn’t be any release of radioactivity. But what about when the containment erodes/corrodes? Has that happened? If not…what is likely to happen?
I’m actually very much in favor of nuclear power – although, of course, I’m really hoping to live long enough to see fusion on a large scale. Until then, I think fission is a very sensible interim source.
I confess to being a little afraid of it, but not to the alarmist extent of some people and groups. (I let my membership in the Union of Concerned Scientists lapse over this issue. I was on their side in opposition to nuclear weapons, but broke with them over nuclear power generation.)
The cores (at least for the US subs) have not breached, and the surrounding waters are periodically monitored. It’s my understanding that, in a hundred years or more, the cores will eventually start to corrode into the ocean. This will be very gradual and will not result in a significant release of radioactive material at once – essentially a very slow flaking/dusting of tiny pieces of the core. This should be easily absorbed, and releases much less radioactive material then, say, an average undersea volcanic eruption.
These cores are designed so that any disturbance results in the control rods “scramming” (slamming down) into the core itself, which shuts down all reactor activity but some residual decay heat.
Well, one is nuclear fission in a standing nuclear pile and the other is nuclear fission in a pile assembled in the slightest fraction of a second. I’d suggest that your not knowing the exact differences and exact similarities means your claim to be nuclear qualified means you didn’t operate a reactor, but did something else on the submarine. Maybe you were the sonar operator.
It is not rational to smoke. Fear is an evolutionarily developed mechanism designed to initiate a fight or flight response. Sitting around chain smoking and fearing getting cancer one day is not rational.
Sorry, but the evidence is clear that your declarations attempted to misrepresent what Carter said and iiandyiiii was correct, they know the difference and the issue here is that you attempted to remove those differences in an effort to seed more FUD.
I didnt say to was rational to smoke. I said if you are someone who is addicted to smoking, wouldn’t the fear of lung cancer be a rational fear?
Nuclear fission is nuclear fission. How fast the energy is released from how much fissile material is the difference between a weapon and a power plant. The power plant reactor is designed to release the energy slowly to make steam. It’s potential energy is absolutely enormous. The idea that naval nuclear power is safe is simply not true, as the Soviet navy has proven on multiple occasions. The US Navy has not had a nuclear meltdown, but the idea that there are never any problems short of a meltdown is mere propaganda. These problems, if left unattended, or mishandled, could lead to a meltdown. And as I’ve demonstrated, they are not reported.
Nothing here contradicts what I showed, you are wrong about Carter and iiandyiiii. You are repeating a tired conflation about nuclear power with the issue of nuclear weapons.
The main point I made stands too, I do indeed trust Carter when he tell us about nuclear energy being a very important part of our development.