And killing each year a large number of people, as a matter of fact.
If only somebody would invent a device that can measure radioactivity, or radiation, of the sort that would be emitted from a reactor. Then they could fly over the site and see if there is any danger.
Maybe someday.
They already tried that years ago with Enola Gay (or more correctly, Necessary Evil), only something went wrong and there was an explosion. :eek:
Sorry, former nuclear officer, but I have more expertise than you do and you don’t know what you are talking about. You know who else was a former nuclear officer (in the Navy)? Jimmy Carter, that’s who. And he was the malaise president. He visited Three Mile Island. And opposed a moratorium on nuclear plants after three mile island. Or was that imposed?
You say that it is impossible for a nuclear reactor to explode like a nuclear bomb. Isn’t the reactor the exact same reaction, just zillions of times slower? The thing is, once a reactor starts to melt down, you can’t just pull the reactor apart. Two billion years ago at Okai in Africa a natural reactor just happened to collect too much uranium too close together. Now, two billion years later, it is still hot. It was so hot that it caused genetic mutations in Africa that caused the genetic mutation of “intelligence” that is now in just less than geologic time scales wiping out most life forms on earth.
It is not necessary to evacuate anything. As many of the posters here have noted, a serious meltdown cannot happen in a modern plant, which this was 40 years ago when it was built.
I’m developmentally challenged. It is not politically correct to compare me to retards. They would get offended.
Look, stupid, Fat Man and Little Boy are not modern bomb designs. They were both prototypes. Modern state of the art hydrogen bombs would not cause destruction on anything like the scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Modern designs are so safe that we can expose the anti-proliferation super spies with impunity (do I mean immunity) just 'cuz we wanna punish their spouses. Human nature being what it is, modern designs are always perfectly safe, catastrophes are only caused by old designs that are already in place: the new designs that are designed to fix the problem that caused the last catastrophe will always prevent that last catastrophe, and unanticipated problems, like a 9.0 earthquake in Japan near a Japanese reactor can be fixed in the next round of designs. But a 9.0 earthquake will never again strike near a nuclear reactor because they are so rare that only 5 or six happen every century. Certainly we will learn to fix earthquakes in our next earthquake designs, and if not, then we can fix their frequencies, and if not that, then our definition of centuries.
All power to the super-pussies! The problem with windmills and solar panels is that when they go wrong on a really large scale, no more than a million bucks or so is lost and the government can’t spread that loss to the taxpayers at large and remove part of it away from the uber rich that took the risk. If the investors have to pay the consequences of a disaster, it just isn’t worth it without a government bailout. In short, solar and wind can fail because they are not too big to fail.
See, wind isn’t safe either. And you can get melanoma from solar. It’s fucking fusion! Do you realize that if all the money the US government spent on fusion research was put into large photovoltaic panel farms that it would still be generating some electricity today, rather than wasted in NIF and tokamak research that has never put a watt on the grid? It would be socialized electricity! Gigawatts of it every fucking day!!!
Damnit! I was trying to be more hyperbolic than I might be. I invoked Godzilla for Cthulhu’s sake!
They tried it again on Bocscar and the same fuckin thing happened. Hasn’t happened since.
Ho! There are radioactive isotopes in the environnement? :eek:
Thanks for the info, I wouldn’t have guessed it alone. :rolleyes:
And that has exactly the same effect on people as a breached containment dome :rolleyes:
(Yes, I know it isn’t breached. Yet. But unless you are a psychic, you can’t know what will happen. Mostly everybody in this thread is pretending that absolutely nothing bad can possibly happen. That’s not a statement born of knowledge, but wishful thinking. In fact, not even that. You just take as a given your prefered outcome in order to be able to make fun of the other posters. It’s not “fighting ignorance” but gesturing. And acting like everybody else was an ignorant moron who can’t tell apart a fusion bomb, a nuclear plant, the sun, and radioactive decay in granite)
As you all know, the leaders of the Nuke plants will tell the truth and can be trusted.
So, have you considered changing your custom tittle to “Control Rod”?
And there isn’t a single independent group out there with easily acquirable equipment monitoring things.
Whether this is crackpot or no, I still want to know more. So this is a cite? request of the “Oh, really? Far out!” variety.
Yes, we can know it. Pro-nuke people have known that nuke is perfectly safe for 60 years. When something goes wrong, we can say it was an old design and that can’t happen with modern designs and that “those people” (Russians, Japanese, French) have “problems with theirs” implying that the laws of physics discriminate racially and ethnically and ignore that all designs in use today were once “modern” designs and aren’t any more, and repeat the same thing with the next round of catastrophes 10 years from now because by then all the once modern designs won’t be modern etc.
The laws of thermodynamics that if you concentrate huge amounts of energy in once place along with enough fuel with enough potential energy to continue that huge amount of energy for a whole decade do not apply. The rules of physics requiring energy to spread out and entropy to do unpredictable things do not apply if you attach the words “modern design” to the plans. Why? Because plans are just that: pieces of paper on where the potential energy is going to be. Once it is in place those plans are 10 years old (4 in China because they get shit done and just shoot hippies) and are no longer modern.
Google on Oklo – there were naturally occurring underground nuclear reactions there a couple of billion years ago. There is no evidence to indicate that it later affected human evolution.
Absent any solid evidence and operating stricty within my biases, I got two bits says the decision was based on “cost-effective” questions rather than “super-duper-extra-safe” questions.
I sure hope the enviro-pussies are wrong. I sure hope that this is all blown way out of proportion, and there never really was anything to worry about. Trouble with being a pessimist is, most surprises are pleasant, but there are so few of them.
And by the way what is it with you guys who have to make an issue of science and reason into an issue of machismo? “Enviro-pussies”? Make your case. If you feel compelled to scratch your big hairy manly nuts while doing it, it suggests a set of motives you probably shouldn’t be all that proud of. Testosterone poisoning is not conducive to reasoned decision-making. My cite for that is Human History, 30,000 BCE to date. You could look it up.
Okapi. He meant there was an Okapi that collected too much uranium and its internal molecules went atomic.
Yeah, we should all just revert to sarcastic one-liners that are devoid of any substance.
The thing is, it’s really early on here. There’s undoubtedly refineries, chemical plants, cars, etc. that have been washed into the ocean. That stuff is absolutely, positively going to have a toxic result. The nuclear plant thing, while indeed very troubling, still won’t measure up to all the rest, even if you apply the worst case scaredy-cat bugaboo factor. At this point, it’s ALL bad news, all of it. There’s really not much point in picking on the nuclear plant.
Well that’s a relief. They are going to dump the ocean on it. All is well.
Don’t panic.
We’re not reading the same thread, I guess.
You offer this without so much as a glimmer of irony, I take it?
Oh snap, Carrot Top?