No, everyone got your use of sarcasm. We all realized you don’t actually believe reactors can’t melt down. The problem is, you’re using sarcasm to belittle an argument no one with actual knowledge of nuclear power ever made in this thread, a claim no one involved in actually dealing with the crisis has made, and a belief completely unrelated to the actual statements of those of us in this thread who aren’t talking out of our assholes.
In short, your “humor”, much like your arguments here, is fucking retarded.
Possibility? This is Japan we’re talking about… I’d say it’s a downright certainty.
But don’t worry. The same radiation that causes that little lizard to mutate into a Godzilla will also result in a random dolphin becoming a Flipperzilla that can shoot cosmic rays from its eyes AND swim backwards on its tail while it laughs at you.
My point is you could spend money on everything possible contingency, and still have a bad outcome. I’m not disagreeing with your above assertion, I’m just saying that system complexity can be a source of a lot of minor heartaches all the way to the one or two catastrophic “acts-of-God” that no one could have known or predicted. But human nature being what it is, we need to “blame” somebody in order to bring resolution for the “cause” of it. Most of the time, it’s justified. In a few cases, OTOH it amounts to scapegoating.
Let me give an example: By adding a “safety” systems, you can increase the chance of a system failure, because they safety systems themselves can interact with the system you’re trying to protect in ways you cannot anticipate. For example, (I can’t produce the cite at the moment) it was decided that a previous core reactor design had a problem with the cooling channels clogging up with debris from the bottom of the reactor. This would lead to core rods getting bent out shape which made refueling a more of a pain in the ass. So it was decided to attach a plate to the bottom of a nuclear core to keep debris from being suck up through the cooling pipes of the reactor core. Great idea! Prevent a nuclear infarction, of sorts. Except the mechanism for holding the plate corroded away, got sucked up, blocked all of the cooling passages en masse and damaging most of the rods in the core.
You have understand gonzomax that’s the nature of the beast that we know as the complexity of systems.
This is not a theoretical question for me, BTW. My parents live downwind of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near Avila Beach, CA. The plant is rated for a 7.5 (Moment? Richter?) This area of California is riddled with faults and one, called the Hosgri fault is about 10 miles offshore from the plant and is theoretically capable of generating a 7.5 (ouch). They found another about mile offshore conveniently called the Shoreline fault capable of a 6.5, just recently (last year, I think). When a quake hits Diablo Canyon more likely than not, a chain of events will occur that they did not anticipate. Hopefully, that doesn’t lead to a loss of life and/or property, but I know that its possible and until the plant shuts down, that’s the risk everyone takes knowingly and unknowingly.
Explosions are very over-rated. So what if it won’t explode? That isn’t like it isn’t a huge, huge, huge clusterfuck. It release contamination that must be contained at the general taxpayers expense.
I get it that of course it is a good thing that the heat from the reaction is used to create steam used to drive a turbine to get electrons flowing. There are less risky and less expensive ways to do exactly that.
And now someone tells me it was only designed for a 7.9 earthquake? In fucking Japan? Well, we now know that Japan can have at least a 9.0 to 9.1. I’ll speculate that Japan can have a 9.3 or more. The quake was hundreds of times more destructive in power than the Haiti quake. The Japanese of all people on earth are more prepared for earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet their smart people fucked up on this one. Hubris is in. And has anyone met an engineer in real life? Are there any more arrogant head-up-their-ass-know-it-alls who are more fucking clueless as to human nature than engineers? I know lawyers are bad, but at least any seasoned lawyer knows that human beings are by and large screw ups.
And I’m not particularly against nuclear power. I’m all for seeing how the pebble bed works, despite it’s track record. But it isn’t put into general service because it is not profitable enough. It had an accident, incident, discrepancy or whatever you want to call it, but the design seems to me to be a bit safer.
And as much as I think the US Navy is filled with screw ups, I think every single large navy ship should use nuclear as fuel, despite its dangers. Oiling a fleet of ships in wartime is just mindlessly stupid. It requires enormous expertise to have so many reactors, but with internet connections we can probably hire retirees from the nuke service to remotely help out the newer crews. And the risks can be buried 20,000 feet underwater. Not that that is without problems too.
Engineers are a necessary evil. Like lawyers. It’s important to know the limitations of the individual that you have at hand. But everything and engineer makes human failings or mother nature will take down. It’s all been downhill from Imhotep.
When people have trouble telling your sarcasm from your dead-serious contributions, and also have trouble telling either of those things from the ravings of a drunken lunatic, you should probably put down the liquor bottle and take a nap.
Very poor dodge. You weren’t responding to someone’s straw man, the first mention of nuclear explosions was by you. So either you thought reactors could go all mushroom-cloud or you hysterically started shrieking about nuclear explosions for no apparent reason as you knew it had fuck-all to do with anything.
Pffft. Doctors are a necessary evil…Cops are necessary evil…soldiers are a necessary evil… ad nauseum and ad hominem. You’re tired TSS, go to bed; I’ll crack brewski for you in your honor.
Bull! Every time something that looks remotely bad for nuclear power, you’re here to rant about it. You’re about as neutral as Snowboarder Bo on the issue (speaking of whom, I’m surprised he hasn’t shown yet).
Hey, I just found you folks outa the gazillions of comments on what is happening in Japan. You’ve added some humour, much needed ha-ha’s.
I will have to come back to this rant forum, it’s pretty cool - compared to the forums on the local board I visit often. Hailing from Port Alberni, BC Canada - where the heck are you/this place, lol?
I wonder if they had anticipated the explosion when they thought through the emergency cooling procedures that most likely ended up causing the explosion?
The scale is intended to be approximately logarithmic, from INES Level 1 to Level 7. Levels 1-3 are “incidents,” whereas Levels 4-6 are “accidents.” Chernobyl was Level 7 (Major Accident). Three Mile Island was a Level 5 (Accident with wider consequences).
Hallmarks of nuclear “accidents” are damage to the nuclear fuel assembly and human fatalities. You can’t really hide nuclear accidents. I’m certain that if a U.S. naval reactor ever had an actual accident, you would know about it. To the best of my knowledge, this has never occurred.
Who gives a fuck but you? If you want to believe that I believe there’s a Little Boy nuclear bomb inside the core, by all means believe it! You’ll sleep better or something.
They’ve already had an explosion. The Japanese called it a blowup. I’m sure you’ve seen it by now. How do you think these people are supposed to feel when they bought their homes and started raising their children there and were promised by the nuclear plant operators that everything that is happening right now, could never happen, and never would happen.
How many accidents that can never happen, have to happen before we accept that they do happen, and nuke plants are not the safest creations on Earth?
Let’s not forget they were supposed to be so cheap energy wouldn’t even be metered? The experts talked out their ass then, and it would seem they’re still talking out their asses.
Who, exactly, is going to pay to permanently seal these reactors and clean up afterwards? How many times do we have to go through this before we realize nuke is not only really expensive, it’s ridiculously expensive and operators will not build and operate these things unless they’re insulated from risk, while keeping the profits and skimping on safety?
Fraid not. Use the search function and check my user name and pebble bed. I am very down on the attitude that this is safe and let the market regulate it. That is a recipe for the kind of disaster that happened yesterday. I have zero faith in private enterprise using the free market to keep this safe and almost zero for the government. I am highly skeptical of the costs of safely disposing of the waste, which are thrust on the taxpayers, not the investors. Nuclear power built and run as if it were potentially very dangerous without changes and neglect over a half century is fine. But human nature is to cut corners. Building a nuke plant in Japan safe to only a 7.5 was just fucking stupid. If there is anyplace in the world that could have had a series of 9.0 plus quakes before recording levels were invented, it was fucking Japan. Japan is one of the most seismically active places on earth in frequency and intensity. Only engineers under the influence of accountants would assume that Japan could not have the strongest quake measured in modern times. That is human nature.
The strongest quake ever measured was 9.5. 1960 Valdivia earthquake - Wikipedia Many times stronger than this quake or the 2004 quake. There is no reason to believe that we will not have stronger quakes in the future.
The 1906 San Francisco quake moved land 18 feet in Point Reyes. Maybe it was a 7.9. We are a lot more prepared now, but a 9.0 would kill hundreds of thousands. Diablo Canyon is not designed to withstand such a thing. The Pacific Rim and Sumatra have had at least 4 9.0 or higher quakes in the last 100 years. Friday’s earthquake moved the earth’s rotation on it’s access 10 cm. Japan earthquake shifted the Earth’s axis by 10cm, experts say | Wales Online This was not exactly Fat Bastard farting.
And it’s hardly everything mother nature has to dish out. Combined with human error and hubris we don’t want to put our safety into the hands of people like John Boehner and his crew who just last week wanted to cut tsunami warning funds http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2011/03/11/gop-would-cut-tsunami-warning-funding because it taxes the rich too much. Do you really want that emotional weepy basketcase and his butt buddies deciding safety isn’t important every election cycle?
Above is a video of the explosion that cannot happen. Seriously, however, it is not the nuclear pile, but some other part of the plant. I am, however, assured that it is nothing to worry about and that the 12 km evacuation is just a precaution.
That video is the end of any possibility of new nuclear plants in the USofA.
Dude, you should have been here back when Gabby Giffords was attacked. These guys pimped it for pages, scoring the cheapest shots for the most superficial gain for their politics and primarily personal pleasure.
