So, what are the risks involved with moving spent fuel rods from the nuclear plant to the final storage facility? Do we trust Joe Trucker not to fall asleep on Colorado’s I-70 and run his semi off a cliff? Do we even have a final storage facility yet?
Just how rational is it to keep making waste that’s toxic for many many times the entire written history of human kind? When y’all are done arguing about accidents, maybe intent can be addressed. Just how hard would it be for 1,000 people with 1,000 machine guns to attack a nuclear plant and try to make a total mess?
</hijack>
Do well regulated State militias have the 2nd Amendment right to own and possess nuclear weapons?
Disclosure: I’m in favor of using nuclear power as an alternate to fossil fuels. However, I think our future has to be with solar energy. I also believe that someday we will be able to harness enough solar radiation to supply all our needs, just a matter of discovering the technology to do so.
Again, compared with the risks of everything else, rather low. Keep in mind that rather little nuclear waste is high-level stuff - most is low-level. Mostly it is stored on-site, another situation which needs to be compared with the risks of moving it to a central location.
No, we don’t just trust anything. The stainless steel casks that are used weigh fifty tons and are made out of stainless steel. They have been in a couple of accidents, and have never ruptured or released any radiation. Of course, they have been tested by things like ramming them with a locomotive at 100 mph and dropping them onto steel spikes and burning them in fires at 800 degrees and so forth.
We did - Yucca Mountain - but that moron Harry Reid opposed it, and that clown in the Oval Office would rather waste a half billion on Solyndra rather than invest in proven technology.
Er … 50 tons just for the container … weight limits on most Interstates is 34 tons gross. Special permits can be issued with a variety of restrictions, like 10 mph max speed, detours around certain bridges, double lane widths.
[scratches head] The elected Senator from Nevada opposed storing nuclear waste in Nevada … why does this make HIM a moron, or are you calling the voters in Nevada morons for not wanting the nuclear waste?
However, if your point is that all these problems have solutions, them I’m agreeing with you. As I remember, the Yucca Mountain site was pretty much the best, and it has failed. Now if the best option can’t get approval … no option will get approval … that means we’re going to storage the waste on-site forevermore.
My point wasn’t that they never occur, but that in any given place (even Japan), they’re extremely unlikely over any reasonable time frame that a power station might be operational.
Again, the insurance analogy is a good one- you insure for situations you expect, with a certain degree of cushion. You don’t insure (or build) for situations that are extremely unlikely during the time frame in question at the location in question.
For a point of reference, in the past 1000 or so years, there have been 4 magnitude 8.0 or greater earthquakes in the region, including the 2011 Tohoku one.
This is what I mean by such events are certain and you mean they are unlikely. On the Pacific Rim there have been 4 9.0 to 9.5 earthquakes during my lifetime. They generate enormous tsunami waves of up to 125 feet in 1896, and a landslide tsunami has, within my lifetime, generated a wave of 1500 feet. This does not count volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes or other shit I can’t think of now.
These events happen regularly on the planet called earth.
The idea that there is no adequate alternative is also a load of hooey. Far more renewable power is built every year than nuclear power, and that will increase. For Germany and Denmark, they will be replacing all their nuclear power in the coming years with wind and solar. Do the laws of physics work differently in Europe? No.
The insurance analogy is an excellent one. No insurance company in the world will take on the risk of issuing an all-risk policy to a nuclear plant with limits sufficient to compensate all the people in a 30 mile exclusion zone. Not a one. Not even Lloyds of London.
And even taking this into account, nuclear power is far less risky and safer to human life and the environment than the present-day alternatives.
If so, (and you haven’t provided a cite), sounds great. I applaud this. This isn’t possible everywhere. And it won’t happen overnight. In the mean time, nuclear power is a safer and less risky option then the present-day alternatives.
And as has been pointed out several times, solar energy is not only more expensive, it also pollutes. And of course, if greenhouse gas emissions are a concern, Germany’s record is not reassuring.
These are not all risk policies with adequate limits that would cover nearby homes and clean up efforts. I specified all risk because it has no limitations on cause.
Shodan’s quote:
The citation in question begins to show the limits of the coverage, try to make a claim under a policy and you will be left like the people of Fukushima.
To make an analogy, you have $30,000 per person and $60,000 limits on your auto insurance. While texting you careen onto a crowded sidewalk and kill three people and terribly maim five others, including paralysis.
You can have billion dollar coverage for nuclear accidents, but that isn’t going to be enough, now is it? Nor are risks like terrorism being covered at all. The public is left holding the bag, not the owners, not the insurers. The citizens of Chernobyl and Fukushima will be getting cents on the dollar.
iiandyiiii do you have any cites or responses to anything? Or are you inventing it all?
cite? Not understanding that the nuclear reaction with weapons and power reactors is the exact same physical phenomenon makes me doubt this claim deeply.
cite? please explain Fukushima and Chernobyl and six Soviet/Russian subs on the bottom of the ocean due to reactor problems. Plus K-19.
You treat the Soviet and Russian subs as if they were fictional. They were not. Describe what they did improperly with citations. All witnesses dead? Kinda of a problem for your argument and the burden of coming up with cites that you impose on others. The burden of coming up with cites is only something you impose on others, is it not?
So “scramming down” didn’t fail in any of those Russian subs? You can’t know that. But cite if you do.
This isn’t sufficient. Cite and explain it, otherwise you are, according to your own standard, just making it up.
No. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. They are both controlled with respect to speed, one being fast, and the other very slow. While a power reactor can’t go off like a weapon, the weapon damn well can meltdown if ignition isn’t correct. They are different ways of controlling nuclear fission for different purposes. Where did you get the idea that they are “quite different physical phenomena?” Provide cites.
Cite? Everyone has noticed that you won’t compare the dangers with living at ground zero Hiroshima and Fukushima. That is a concession that a power plant aftermath is more dangerous. Unless you have a cite?
Not perfect? Underplaying it much? Ask the people who used to live next to Chernobyl and Fukushima. Life ruining for hundreds of thousands. Nuclear power on a for profit basis should definitely not be in the mix.
No, they are rational worries and concerns that go unaddressed by pro-nuke types that downplay the dangers as “not perfect”.
Only much less severe for immediate loss of life. The property loss is still permanent, and for a vastly larger area.
What you personally think, while I’m sure laudable in some circles, is not the point. It isn’t acceptable to fail once every 25 years and to hope we can do better is not enough. The people living in Fukushima hoped and thought that it wouldn’t be as bad as it was.
You keep going on about coal. I’m not for coal power at all. I’m for wind and solar. So stop it with the straw man. Nobody in this thread is for coal. Although I suppose Una might show up.
That isn’t acceptable to me. Noted that it is to you. Proper engineering practices is a very squishy phrase. I also note that actual experience shows far more than one every 100 years. It shows one every 25 years with real world engineering practices with about 400 to 500 reactors. The expectation that engineers be close to perfect is not in keeping with our knowledge of human nature.
Still haven’t quantified them (wind and solar), have you. And remember, nobody is promoting coal in this thread.
Umm, no. Fukushima and Chernobyl are unacceptable as in I don’t want my tax dollars given to Mr. Burns to run his nuclear plant as cheaply as possible by Homer, Lenny and Carl.
What we are talking about is how to invest our tax dollars for the future. More nuclear or more renewables. If the US government spent the same effort and dollars on wind and solar that we do on nuclear, over time we could expand and replace our sources. It would require lots of turbines and solar panels and some large methods of storage, but there are literally dozens of effective ways to store energy.
So you guys have given up on crapping on my tsunami heights, which were initially from memory. I’d thought the megatsunamis of 1500 feet could only be done in a basin, but scientists think it could happen similarly all the way across an ocean, which I’d forgotten. There are at least one instable volcanic landslides waiting to happen in both the Atlantic and Pacific. The Atlantic one is either the Canaries or Azores, and the Pacific is one of the Hawaiian islands. We do not know when they will happen. We do know that they will. The 600 foot tsunami estimate for NYC seems about five times high to me, but how am I to argue with scientists who have done the calculations?
cite for wind solar, remember nobody in this thread likes coal or ever did.
Keep telling everyone that.
Across the river from me, I can see it from the top of the hill near my house, is the Solano County wind farm. I rather like it. It’s frickin’ huge and is the future of electrical generation.
Public utilities in California, where I live, are allowed to raise and lower electrical charges only on application to the Public Utilities Commission of the State of California. PUC for short. It is a monopoly and they are not allowed to charge whatever they want. What the shareholders have to take out of earnings distributed as dividends the costs of screw ups. Unlike when an oil refinery has a fire, the oil company can try to pass on the cost to the consumers rather than the shareholders. That is how it is supposed to work. PUC rates and rate-setting is far more complicated than nuclear physics.
Also … Chernobyl was the best thing that could happen to the area … I fully expect the area around Fukushima to become a beautiful oasis of life … it’s only silly humans who are hurt.