Had, unfortunately. I profit took. I’ve also had interests in utilities that owned nuclear, which IIRC you would have seen if you read those threads. The nukes never went up in value. Windmills did. I am grateful to windmills. And I live across a river from a huge windmill farm near Rio Vista, CA
Happy to oblige. No conspiracy theory is complete without a few huge leaps in logic and a few incidents of overlooking the obvious. Like big earthquakes in Japan. Whodathunkit?
Latest from CNNs Liveblog:
One gets this message:
“This video is private.
Sorry about that.”
Another contextless statement. How many nuclear submarines are there? How many hours have they run? How do they compare safety wise to conventionally powered submarines? Unless I’m reading that link wrong, it shows that 10 people in total have died on nuclear submarines due to radiation over 60 or so years - 8 in the K-19 in 1961 and 2 in 1976. (You can’t blame fires that had nothing to do with the reactor on nuclear technology - it’s like blaming a car crash on the fact that it ran on gasoline). Is that a good safety record? It sounds like one to me, although I don’t have much to compare it to.
I mean, this is the thing - it says absolutely nothing about a technology’s relative safety to say it’s had an accident. It’s the cause, frequency and end result that tell you anything.
Well hell, I had no idea nuclear reactor accidents could cause nuclear explosions before levdrakon tied them together.
To the few of you that might have come across my user name b4 this may come as a big surprise or not – to those that don’t know me from a hole in the wall, well, feeling’s mutual.
Point being I readily admit to not being up on nuclear power and/or its ± factors.
That having been said, this thread plus a few Google searches have determinately placed me on the side of no one.
No need to thank me.
While I happen to be pro-nuke, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be anti-nuke, provided that you’re coming at it from a reasoned viewpoint (I respect elucidator’s viewpoint, for instance). Firing out strawman arguments like a lot of the anti- people in this thread, on the other hand, is ridiculous.
I feel so vastly more informed regarding RedFury and whether my generally positive impression of the poster has been reinforced or somewhat lessened by his participation in this thread.
I’ve decided that I enjoy all sorts of cheeses.
You’re welcome.
So, a couple hours of reading random crap here and on the internet and now you know all you need to know to take a position?
So it is not reasonable to be anti-nuke in opinion unless it is based on facts and logic that are correct? In that case it is unreasonable to have an opinion, or adopt the opinion of others, unless one is personally an expert. In view of the fact that we have been told that meltdowns are impossible since as long as I can remember, and meltdowns have in fact occurred, then nobody in the world has a successful track record as pro-nuclear because they keep happening. Clearly the people saying they cannot happen are mistaken and their expertise without any credibility because it does not match up with reality. Under your logic, nobody can reasonably be pro-nuke because it’s safety record shows that their expertise is bogus. The unpredictable happens. And will continue to happen. It’s a law of physics that things randomize and tend towards chaos.
The fact has been for 2,500 years that Socrates was right: we don’t know shit.
As far as we know right now, the Japanese reactors are going to be hot as long as Chernobyl’s reactor and it will cost unknown sums to contain them. That nobody is known to be dead today doesn’t mean that the costs of containment forever are acceptable. Each dollar spent on containment is not available for anything else. Why won’t anyone think of the children?
You mean as opposed to the burning/exploding oil refinery we saw on the news? Experts are also keeping their distance from that, since otherwise they’d be on fire. Should we shut down the petrochemical industry because refineries can burn down?
And the reactions that power me are the same kind of oxidation reactions that power chemical explosives, “just zillions of times slower”. That doesn’t mean there’s any danger of me suddenly exploding.
And so what? Those fallible humans are all we have to work with. There’s nothing to address, since corruption and error apply to every human endeavor and are not nuclear specific in any way.
Nuclear power is still the best alternative we have. Wind and solar aren’t even close to being up to the job, and never will be; there just isn’t enough wind and solar energy available, even if they were magically perfectly efficient. And they are more environmentally destructive than nuclear as well, thanks to the land you need to tear up and cover for them. Coal produces enough power, but is also destructive.
The realistic alternatives are nuclear power, or worldwide disaster of one kind or another.
Who told you that they’re not possible? I find it hard to believe that anyone actually did. I could say that someone told me that planes can’t crash, and then say that a plane crashing proves that no one knows anything about plane safety. It’d be total bullshit, of course.
We don’t know anything of the sort.
I missed this the first time around. While your point is correct, I would add that it isn’t the same kind of reaction in a bomb and a reactor. Nuclear bombs require conventional explosives to compress fissile material into a critical mass, and this has to happen within a specially designed container. As well, fission reactors use a different isotope of uranium than fission bombs. It literally, 100%, physically cannot explode like a nuclear bomb any more than I can flap my wings and fly.
It’s really, really hard to make uranium explode in a nuclear bomb. You cannot accidentally do it.
No, I didn’t tie them together. Some dork upthread did that to show off his strawman powers.
People were bitching about how those stupid ignorant people would love nuclear power plants if only they understood them and didn’t panic. I pointed out that when you live near a nuke plant and you just had a 9.0 earthquake and got swamped with a tsunami and you hear that the nuke plant is down and then you see cops in protective gear wearing hoods and masks and then you hear about the explosion and then you’re told to evacuate to 10 km, and then you’re told to evacuate to 20 km, which I think is getting close to 200,000 people - it’s pretty ignorant and insulting to make comments about how stupid people are and they would just go run up to that big lovable ol’ power plant and give it a great big hug and tell it you sure hope it feels better soon, if they weren’t so stupid.
Part of that point was gosh, I think these people have some experience with nuclear boo-boos. It’s a testament to them really, that they even have nuclear power in Japan. Hell, I’m pretty sure if something like Hiroshima happened in the States we’d have zero nuclear power plants in the US.
The reactor is dead and will never come on line again.
Which is not a statement contained in the post I replied to (nor is it something I - or anyone else, I would would hope - dispute. It is now a ex-powerplant, pining for the fjords). His statement was that as far as we know the reactor core will remain hot as long as Chernobyl. There’s absolutely nothing to indicate that at present.
You don’t really need to go inside a burning/exploding oil refinery to make an educated guess as to what’s happening. I’m being maybe a little facetious. A nuclear power plant isn’t directly comparable to anything except another power plant exactly like it. Still, if the scientists and engineers who run this thing have to wait outside and test the air and make guesses as to what’s going on inside, instead of having monitors inside that would be, at this very moment, live telling and showing the operators what is exactly going on, then I’m going to conclude these things aren’t nearly as well designed as their exorbitant costs would suggest.
Enrichment is the key word here. The Uranium is not enriched enough to cause an explosion in the nuclear sense; there’s just not enough fissionable material configured close enough together to cause a run-away release of energy quick enough to generate a blast wave. The density of neutrons is too sparse for that to happen. A meltdown and release of fission by-products, sure,
Reactor rods are enriched a few percent of Uranium 235. 90% enrichment is typical weapons grade.
Why don’t they build more back up cooling systems into it? Why not have 50 back up systems that all work in different ways and 25 of which are environment independent?
And the batteries on the diesel generators ran out? What’s that about?
If I go on a camping trip I take fresh batteries for my torch and have some spares nearby.
:rolleyes: Or perhaps - just perhaps - an 8.9 earthquake and tsunami broke a few things, and those internal sensors aren’t working.