Given that the general public (and plenty of folks here on the SDMB) seem to be virtually immune to absorbing or understanding even the most basic of nuclear/radiation science I’d go with yes its hard 
Learning to run a nuke takes a long time. At Darlington in Ontario, the best and brightest conventional generating station operators are trained for seven years before they are fully qualified to operate the nuke side of a generating station. In other words, it takes a fairly long time to both build nuclear stations and to train the operators of nuclear stations.
Even the normally calm and detached CNN is starting to hint that there might be a serious problem with the damaged nuclear plant.
Yep 7 years is kinda a long time - but on the timescale we are talking about, its not that bad. It’s not like that sort of thing can’t be planned for right?
Wouldn’t you start to look towards your operating staff as part of the building plan? It’s what I would be doing. Then of course there will be (some) available staff from plants that get retired right?
In anycase it just bugs me when people say stuff like “but there aren’t enough staff” - well the solution is pretty simple to that. Recruit and Train. It’s not like fully formed nuclear plants are going to be falling from the sky that need operators RIGHT NOW or they will go into meltdown.
The problem isn’t that in theory you can build modern plants with multiple redundant safety systems in the best places staffed with the best trained and prepared staffs. In theory that would minimize risks. But the plants have limits to how much safety the investors will invest in, and there will always be pressures to increase profits by reducing staffing, training, regulations and testing. There is an enormously strong movement in the US and other Western countries to always reduce costs and increase profits. Zero fault operations are very expensive and that will never change in terms of preparation and people hours. Top that off with the waste stored in pools and no long term disposal prospects. These costs are not going to be born by the investors in 100 years or 1000, etc.
Neither are the long term costs of global warming.
An extremely important part of the design was to include super subject matter experts in the design team, such as as folks with experience in operating the nuke side of other CANDU stations, and subject matter experts such as folks with experience in operating other types of reactors, both civilian and military. Future operators were trained from the outset.
I think it’s a fair point to say that in that particular case I’m being a bit pessimistic, but I think for good reason. I believe that good engineering design starts from pessimistic assumptions, not from best-case scenarios.
But the bigger point I was making was that some wind advocates talk about the cost of wind by basing it on the cost of wind in the absolute best areas, then they talk about the amount of area available for wind by extending the suitable areas down into the truly marginal cases. That’s not really fair.
The reason wind doesn’t scale all that way in terms of cost is that the best sites get used up first, and there just aren’t that many of them. If they then get used as proof that wind is cost-effective and that causes major investment in wind farms in areas that are more marginal, the estimates won’t hold and a lot of bad investments will be made.
It’s certainly true that you can build wind farms in class 3 wind locations. What’s not true is that you can develop wind power in those regions for the same cost per megawatt as you can in the best regions. I sincerely doubt that wind will be reasonable in cost in such regions except perhaps in exceptional cases where everything else about the wind farm works out perfectly.
Like you, I’m a big fan of wind power. I think it’s a perfectly viable energy source. I think it’s got a big future for coastal cities using offshore wind farms, or for coastal states like Maine. It also may be a good solution for some prairie cities in good wind locations.
Here in Alberta we have a pretty cool example - the area around Pincher Creek is in a natural venturi from a pass in the Rocky Mountains, and enjoys high speed sustained winds. It’s also near Calgary, so we built a large wind farm there, and the power gets sent to Calgary where it is used to run the Light-Rail Transit system. That’s just cool. Alberta is a leader in wind power, and we get about 4% of our power from wind. That’s not too shabby.
I love driving through that pass, because i get to look at all the ridges lined with wind turbines. I think they look beautiful. Sleek white towers providing clean renewable energy. Wonderful.
However, I’m a realist. Just because a power source works well in one location doesn’t mean it’s the answer to the world’s power needs. The truth is, the future is going to contain the same kind of mix of power sources as we have now - the best we can hope for is to decrease the percentage of dirty power supplies and increase the percentage of clean power. It’s not an either-or situation - the choice isn’t between wind and nuclear, or solar and coal. Rather, we need to figure out what the optimum mix of sources are, given the realities of global warming and the limits of the various supplies of non-renewable energy fuels.
So instead of 10% nuclear, 1% wind, .1% solar, and 10% hydro, we might be able to get to 10% wind, 5% solar, 40% nuclear, 10% hydro and 35% fossil fuels. Then maybe over the longer term we can slowly replace the fossil fuels with a mix of the clean sources as technology improves.
We need to stop attacking nuclear, and wind, and solar, and recognize that we’re going to need all of them. All them have their benefits and drawbacks, and there’s room in our future energy plans for all of them. And we’ll need all of them.
In Japan, you don’t attack nuclear power. Nuclear power attacks you.
I think this is a valid point. The biggest problem in Japan occurred at (I think) reactor #4, which had been shut down for maintenance at the time. The entire core had been removed and was sitting in one of the cooling ponds when the tsunami hit.
It may be that there have to be safety improvements made in the handling and storage of material immediately after it is removed from the reactor.
n00b, no. Stupid, yes.
I don’t think he is good at special effects (FX) either.
Francis Xavier
According to your buddy, gonzomax, CNN had reported core radiation being released a few days ago. Of course, you’re both morons, and liars, so I take everything you say with a heaping pile of salt.
Point of order: The Gonz is not intelligent enough to tell fact from fiction, saying he’s lying is a bit like saying that your puppy is lying when you come home to find a puddle of dog urine in the kitchen and the puppy doesn’t cop to it.
Iodized salt?
:dubious:
In fairness, the media hasn’t always been careful about what they refer to as “core.” We’ve got two sources of radiation here: core, and pool. Radiation isn’t just emanating from subspace or something. Where do you suppose it’s coming from?
Electric cars that were charged with wind energy are indeed, wind-powered cars. Texas already has excess wind capacity it can’t even sell. Wouldn’t it be nice if that surplus wind power were charging things or being stored somehow, instead of going to waste?
San Francisco has been running hydro-powered city buses and trolleys for years. How do they fit a hydro dam in the back of a bus??? Hint: they don’t.
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San Francisco has been running hydro-powered city buses and trolleys for years. How do they fit a hydro dam in the back of a bus??? Hint: they don’t.
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Did you notice the little bars running up from the trolley and bus to overhead electric lines in the pictures in your cite?
It would be, if the electric cars capable of making a major market expansion into the personal transport market actually existed and were affordable to the average car buyer. But they aren’t, yet, and they might never be. We need a breakthrough in battery technology at least before they are even in the ball park.
-XT
So you’re saying cars need to run on gas. What on earth is nuke power going to do to help that? What’s your nuke plan for our transportation energy problem? Nuclear cars? Bring it on. Lemme see. Cites please!