Nuclear weapons also use a controlled reaction if they work correctly. If they don’t work correctly the result is a nasty small meltdown not quite as bad as a power plant melt down. But since you are a nuclear engineer, you knew that and can confirm it. A far as mother nature is concerned, the differences are speed and amount of fuel (and sometimes the ratios of uranium isotopes and/or plutonium.
If given the choice of two places and times to live full time, which would you choose:
Ground zero at Hiroshima a year after the atomic bomb hit.
Ground zero at Chernobyl 10 years after the meltdown.
You must choose one. I would also choose one, and I bet I’ll be seeing you in Sept 1946 in Hiroshima. And so would anyone else who knows anything about either.
Irrelevant nonsense. This has nothing to do with any real-world concerns or discussion about the safety and practicality of nuclear power. Scare tactics like this are unfortunate and foolish. Coal plants have done far, far more damage to the world’s environment than Chernobyl and all other nuclear accidents.
In the real world, nuclear power is not perfect, but its risks are far, far less than coal plants, both to human life and both the environment. There are no perfect options, and nuclear power should definitely be in the mix.
If by that you mean the percentage of mass of uranium converted to energy in a nuclear explosion, [you are off by a couple of orders of magnitude](Enough with the analogies, let’s get to the scientific facts: **please explain why, other than speed of the reaction, this is a different physical phenomenon. **).
Nuclear waste and any kind of waste is bad for earth period
you claim nuclear waste isn’t a problem,that’s funny…
who claims this,is either big liar,or brainwashed puppet.
Correct education,training,expertise,how ever you wanna put it
Nuclear power creates pollution that cannot be controlled
no matter what,not fully. The fact is, nuclear power shouldn’t of
harnessed to create energy at the first place,
crisis or no crisis,easy fix always bites you in the a-s-s.
Wind,solar energy: 0 pollution >a no brainer<
oh and forget about mentioning the financial issue of it,
cause if i need to choose from what is more profitable or
clean energy,i’ll choose clean energy what ever the cost,
cause money means shite when you don’t have a planet
where to live.
Greetings and welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board. I hope you’ll enjoy your stay here. Feel free to browse from all the fora and to post in whatever threads interest you.
One thing I should point out, however, is that abuse - insults and such - of other posters in not permitted outside of our BBQ Pit forum. The above quoted part of your post doesn’t quite reach that level. However, had you directed it to a specific poster it would have earned you a warning from myself or one of our other Great Debates moderators. Too many warnings and you might find your ability to post here in question. No one wants that.
Again, enjoy your stay. I hope you’ll become a longtime member of the SDMB.
Chernobyl was due to criminal incompetence; Fukushima to a perfect storm of catastrophes. So you could say events at that level are unlikely to occur. But Chernobyl has had a decades-long impact and is still only contained, not cleaned up. Fukushima isn’t even completely contained yet. One such disaster globally every century would be a problem.
It has everything to do with it. Make a choice and stop appealing to your own “expertise”.
Either the Chernobyl and Fukushima exclusion zones exist, which they do, or they don’t. You cannot hand wave them away. Prior to their existence, even more nuclear engineers swore up and down that such could never happen, there were no dangers, any risks were non-existent or so small as to be “irrelevant”. Familiar word, as it is the exact same one you have used. Exactly.
How about we members of the public decide for ourselves exactly what the risks to our lives and property are and we stop accepting the word of nuclear engineers that there is no risk at all and they won’t explain it at all.
I’ll still pick Hiroshima. In fact, I’d pick Hiroshima 70 years later over living within a mile of a supposedly safe operating US nuclear power reactor. Because the risk is less.
More nonsense that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to say. Bad things have happened. Nuclear power is not a perfect option. In our non-perfect world, it is still one of the better options. Far, far safer and cleaner than coal, and far, far more able to provide realistic amounts of power for current usage than wind and solar.
I strongly oppose any nuclear engineer who says there is no risk at all. That would be very foolish. I stand with you in opposing this straw man.
You’ve done a fine job of taking down this non-existent argument. Well done in your straw-man deconstruction.
That’s a big IF. People are known to produce faulty designs, and when saying “modern reactors are very safe”, one shouldn’t forget that (and don’t forget that sometimes we mess up with thing deliberatly too).
The risk might be low, but the consequences are amongst the most disastrous you can think of. And when you say “middle of France”, in fact they generally build in densely populated areas, not 50 kmw away from the closest house. There’s one 50 kms of Paris, for instance. So, what if there’s a new Chernobyl here? You relocate permanently the 10 or so millions of people living in the area? And I don’t think saying “Russian reactors were crappy and Russian engineers undertrained” is an apt answer. As I said, everybody is perfectly capable to fuck up. The surgeon operation on your brain as the guys designing or running power plants.
It’s perfectly rational to ponder about the risks related to nuclear energy.
You are trying to assert things, not explain them. This forum is not “Great Assertions” There are some 400 to 500 nuclear power reactor plants in the world, and more on the way. If every 25 years or so we have a problem like Chernobyl and Fukushima per 400 plants, we are in deep shit, just counting the exclusion zones and remediation costs.
You keep asserting that this is fine and dandy, not perfect, but acceptable. Chernobyl and Fukushima are not acceptable to the people whose lives are destroyed. The kinds of risks from mining, manufacturing and operating wind farms and solar cells are acceptable to people.
What is not relevant to a debating forum is some person claiming qualifications coming in and asserting things. Explain the risks. Compare and contrast.
Are you okay with the TEPCO people buying up and operating the nuclear power plant near you? I’m not (it’s Diablo Canyon, vulnerable to both earthquake and tsunami). Is the reason you are okay with TEPCO or some other company exactly like that because earthquake and tsunami aren’t possible dangers due to it being inland and near no known “earthquake” faults? Huge earthquakes can happen anywhere. Chile, Japan and California are really the only places in the world even a little bit ready for large earthquakes, Japan being number one. And Japan was also the number one prepared country for tsunamis. The cities with 30 foot tsunami barriers that were ready for the tsunami? Turns out they weren’t. The idea that bigger earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan couldn’t happen was utterly fucking daft.
When I set the Hiroshima/Chernobyl challenge it was to illustrate that although Hiroshima is still radioactive a year later (and even today) it is trivial and acceptable by comparison to Chernobyl. That there are dangers of a power reactor that are far greater than living on the site of a nuclear bomb explosion.
When evaluating the risks, how many Fukushima or Chernobyl type meltdowns every 100 years can be anticipated?
This is beginning to sound like the 911 truthers explaining that there were no people on the planes.
The nuclear bomb killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki. And a good number of those death were related to the radioactive fallout and poisoning by the ones staying or going early to the affected area.
By contrast the worst most serious estimates on Chernobyl are about the disaster leading to about 6000 dead and that is including accidents related to the clean up and containment to the radiation poisoning or related illnesses that lead to death.
The Second Stone, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make about the speed of energy released. Yes, it’s true that bombs and power plants use the same reaction. Yes, it’s true that power plants release the energy more slowly than bombs. Yes, sometimes, for various reasons, power plants release energy more quickly than they’re designed to do, and that the consequences of this can be very bad. But it is simply not possible for a power plant to release energy at the same speed as a bomb, even in such circumstances, and the consequences are therefore much less severe.
And any scale of nuclear disasters which puts Chernobyl and Fukushima at the same level is a poorly-calibrated scale. The International Nuclear Events Scale is meaningless. It defines an event as a 7 if it’s “major”, and defines it as being “major” if it’s “major”. There’s no objective standard based on anything-- No numbers of Curies of material released, no casualty count, no area of needed exclusion zone, just “because we say so”. Not only was the Fukushima nuclear disaster far, far less severe than the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, it was also less severe than many other disasters to Japanese infrastructure due to the same tsunami and earthquake.
Nuclear power is preferable in many ways to petroleum. For instance, air pollution in China kills about 500,000 people every year. How does this weigh when compared to disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl? How about the fact that up to 200,000 people die early every year in the United States due to air pollution? Does this change the calculus on nuclear power?
I have not even started on the potential consequences of climate change in lives and on the economy.
So we are in 100 percent agreement on all of the above. Many in this thread deny that it is the same physical process. It seems virtually everyone in this thread except me seems to think that the aftermath of a Chernobyl or Fukashima is no big deal. That is wrong. It ruins vast swaths of land.
When the event goes wrong, and in that first hour, I’d choose Chernobyl or Fukushima over Hiroshima or Nagasaki. A year later, the other way around.
I think we can do a lot better than one every 25 years, but even if that’s the nuclear accident rate, that’s still far, far less damage both to human beings and to the environment than is caused by coal plants. Nuclear power isn’t perfect, it’s just better in many ways than the alternative. Most importantly, it’s safer both to the environment and to human life, even taking into account all nuclear accidents.
No I don’t. It’s not acceptable, and I think we can do a lot better.
Coal mining and operating coal plants have killed orders of magnitude more people, and caused orders of magnitude more damage, then all the nuclear accidents of the world.
Hilarious! Here’s an equally relevant challenge – would you rather live next door to a nuclear power plant, or live in a city that’s currently being bombed by nuclear strategic bombers.
I’d bet that if someone did a cost-benefit analysis over the long term, the costs for the occasional 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima would probably still be less than the cost of the various environmental problems from burning coal for the same amount of energy.
Of course, the cost seems higher, because it’s considerably more spectacular than the occasional case of cancer here or there.