Nuclear power

[Sengkelat]

I’m on the fence about nuclear power.

On the one hand, in operation it’s very, very clean compared to fossil fuels.

On the other hand, an accident could be very messy. (I’m not entirely convinced by the “reactors that can’t melt down,” etc; we’ve all heard that sort of claim before; the Titanic was unsinkable, etc. I di believe that they’re much safer, and that’s good, but I still believe that there will always be a sequence of events that could cause bad things to occur)

And the waste from nuclear plants lasts a long, long time. Even if that time can be reduced to 400 years, that’s still a hell of a long time.

Still, nuclear plants have a small footprint and generate huge amounts of power. That can’t be ignored. They do seem to be the best option right now. I mean, aside from active energy conservation, which we all ought to be doing.

Oh, in answer to jrfranchi, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in southern California was built next to the Hosgri faultline, but the faultline wasn’t discovered until 10 years after the plant was built. I’m not sure if that make it better or worse.

[What_Exit]

@Sengkelat

Oh, in answer to jrfranchi, the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in southern California was built next to the Hosgri faultline, but the faultline wasn’t discovered until 10 years after the plant was built. I’m not sure if that make it better or worse.

Is it still operating?
I think I will give them a little credit. I actually thought if the story was true that they built it on a fault, knowing it was there. :eek:
That was so scary, that I suspected story to be UL.

[Quartz]

How much leakage was there from Three Mile Island?

[Barbarian]

@jrfranchi

You don’t need to clean of snow or dirt. The snow melts off very quick as long as a slope of at least 20 degrees.

That may be the case in New Jersey, but **Sam ** lives in Alberta, where the only reason you get snow melting off a roof is because the contractor stiffed you on insulation. Or a chinook is blowing through.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@jrfranchi

Isn’t the bigger danger with Plutonium keeing it secure so it cannot be used as a component of a weopons.

This is a widely accepted threat that is mostly myth. Breeding for plutonium results in a mix of the weapon-suitable Pu[sup]239[/sup] with the unweaponizable [sup]240[/sup]Pu, [sup]242[/sup]Pu, [sup]244[/sup]Pu. These isotopes are not chemically seperable, and highly expensive and laborious gas diffusion/centerfuge methods would be necessary to isolate it; this is beyond any concievable means of terrorists or even major governments. In fact, in US breeding and processing of material for weapons-grade plutonium involves removing [sup]238[/sup]U frequently during the process to prevent it from releasing neutrons during decay and transmuting [sup]239[/sup]Pu to the unstable and neutron-absorbing (and reaction dampening) higher isotopes rather than seperating it out in the end.

The material is toxic, to be certain, but the dangers of toxicity are overstated. The primary danger from small amounts of plutonium is from its high rate of alpha particle emission. While alphas (essentially, cationic helium) are “weak” and can’t penetrate the skin the way beta particles and gamma rays can, they are extremely ionizing and when injested can cause massive chromosomal damage in short order. However, it should be noted that we’ve detonated several tons of plutonium-based weapons into the atmosphere until the Atmospheric Test Ban, which didn’t result in any massive die-offs. Hell, if even took the cast and crew of The Conqueror, film in an area directly adjacent to a nuclear test site twenty-odd years to start dying off. A conventionally detonated radiological “dirty” bomb is nothing to sneeze at, but the hypothetical terrorists in question could far more easily acquire radioactives from a number of legal retail sources such as gas lantern mantles and fire and carbon dioxide detectors, not to mention the poorly controlled medical radioactive wastes which are created by the ton.

Stranger

[Barbarian]

@jrfranchi

You don’t need to clean of snow or dirt. The snow melts off very quick as long as a slope of at least 20 degrees.

That may be the case in New Jersey, but **Sam ** lives in Alberta, where the only reason you get snow melting off a roof is because the contractor stiffed you on insulation. Or a chinook is blowing through.
As for nuclear, the public really needs to learn how much waste we’re talking about. I’ve been led to understand that a typical CANDU reactor generates about 4 cubic meters of waste a year, which is a piddly amount. You could stuff that into a Honda Civic and the driver could then just drive damn thing to the middle of nowhere…

[What_Exit]

@Barbarian

That may be the case in New Jersey, but **Sam ** lives in Alberta, where the only reason you get snow melting off a roof is because the contractor stiffed you on insulation. Or a chinook is blowing through.
As for nuclear, the public really needs to learn how much waste we’re talking about. I’ve been led to understand that a typical CANDU reactor generates about 4 cubic meters of waste a year, which is a piddly amount. You could stuff that into a Honda Civic and the driver could then just drive damn thing to the middle of nowhere…

Ok, Sam’s right might not be a good idea in Alberta or even Bismarck but it will help in large areas of USA, Europe & Australia and some of Canada.
Would be good for any equatorial country.

Second part is mostly joke I understand but can you cite the 4 Cubic meter portion?
Stranger: great post with great detail. What would the danger be if the truck carrying plutonium waste fell into Lake or reservoir?

[Steve_MB]

@jrfranchi

You don’t need to clean of snow or dirt. The snow melts off very quick as long as a slope of at least 20 degrees.

If the temperature is below freezing, the snow ain’t gonna melt no matter what slope it sits on.

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@Sengkelat

On the other hand, an accident could be very messy. (I’m not entirely convinced by the “reactors that can’t melt down,” etc; we’ve all heard that sort of claim before; the Titanic was unsinkable, etc. I di believe that they’re much safer, and that’s good, but I still believe that there will always be a sequence of events that could cause bad things to occur)

There’s no such thing as a reactor that is immune to damage, but there are reactor designs (CANDU, PBMR) which cannot undergo runaway supercriticality and “melt down”. If they get too hot the geometry changes or rate of newtron capture increases such that the reaction slows down, thereby acting as a natural negative feedback that doesn’t require and mechanical or active processes. The problem with many older designs is that they do require actively pumped coolant systems and mechanical moderation apparatus to regulate the operation of the reactor. A CANDU, if left to its own devices, would just shut down.

@Quartz

How much leakage was there from Three Mile Island?

2.5 million curies, according to the Wikipedia article (other online sources seem to vary considerably) mostly in the form of radioactive vaporized coolant which drifted out over sea. The Three Mile Island accident was the result of a number of lax practices, poor contingency planning and training, and design compromises by the contractor.

Stranger

[Schuyler]

Up-front, I’m pro-nuclear in the sense that it’s the energy-production option that most closely meets our electricity demands given environmental constraints. For practical purposes in the short-term, in the US it’s either coal and other fossil fuels or nuclear (of course in combination with conservation measures). New hydro opportunities are limited, and there are pressures to remove, rather than build, new dams. Not to be trite, but for those that think solar and wind are economically feasible with limited ecological impact, try starting the permitting, EIS, and financing process - more power to you if you can make it work in both $ and sense.

I’ve worked in the clean-up effort at the Hanford site, in the area of waste characterization, and it really is a disaster. First, it was a weapons program undertaken largely during WWII and early Cold War, where production was given much higher priority than containment/disposal. Second, it just isn’t possible to please everybody with any given remediation plan. Things are progressing now, but there were a lot of years when it seemed like all that happened was more money, studies, and discussions. I guess this highlights the need to think about disposal/remediation when planning any new production/energy facility - the same problem plagues the coal-generation industry with respect to CO2 and global warming, but they have escaped the issue for so long because the waste products go up the smokestack and disperse.

Regarding Yucca Mt., my wife worked in the subsurface-transport modeling effort (flow of contaminants via the aquifer), and at the time I don’t recall this being a show-stopper. This doesn’t address stabilization, shipment, or operational issues, though. Think back to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl - both of these incidents could have been avoided by proper procedures, so it’s human-factors that will be the key determinant to long-term safety.

@Bryan Ekers

The U.S. Navy has had well-publicized nuclear problems, though, most notably the losses of the nuclear subs Thresher (in 1963) and Scorpion (1968).

Note: neither the Thresher nor the Scorpion were nuclear accidents. If you were getting at the potential environmental impacts from their lost reactor vessels, then that’s different.

[Sam_Stone]

Not only that, but when snow sticks around for a while, it tends to collect dust and dirt. Then when it melts off it leaves the dust and dirt behind as mud. This stuff has to be cleaned off a solar collector, and it will adhere even at steep angles.

Plus, solar panels become defective and need maintenance and replacement. Homeowners will attempt to do a lot of this themselves since it’s very expensive to hire pros. Many of those homeowners will not use adequate safety precautions, and a number of them will die.

If you are using human deaths and injuries as an excuse to stay away from nuclear power, you simply cannot ignore the fact that filling a nation with solar panels in high places will lead to a lot of accidents. A LOT. As I said, on average about 15,000 people in the U.S. die EVERY YEAR from falls.

To put that in perspective, The Chernobyl Disaster killed 31 people immediately, and there have been 10 deaths from thyroid cancer definitely attributable to the accident. In addition, some 1800 cases of cancer have been thought to be at least partially attributable to the disaster, and no doubt as the population ages there will be more. This is a tragedy, no doubt. But is it any greater than maybe 50,000 people a year dying from falling off of roofs, and maybe hundreds of thousands suffering broken bones and other injuries?

And how many deaths are attributable to fossil fuels? How many mine workers die? My mother had a friend who was a coal miner, and he used to mark time by disasters, as in, “Let’s see, what year was it that we went to the lake? Well, Bill was still alive, so it was before the collapse of '75. Steve was dead though, so it had to be after '72…” Incidentally, he died from cancer at a young age, thought to be from exposure to carcinogens in the mine.

Coal mining accidents kill about 50 miners a year. It’s believed that somewhere between 1500 and 4000 miners currently working have black lung, despite major efforts to implement dust containment and protection equipment in the last couple of decades.

I’m not saying that we should stop coal mining. I’m saying it’s important to put risks into perspective. Concentrated power is dangerous, no matter how you generate it. Holding nuclear to a standard of, “No accidents, no deaths” is a standard that no other form of power production can meet. Nuclear has the best safety record in terms of people killed and environment damaged than any other form of concentrated power we have.

[What_Exit]

@Steve MB

If the temperature is below freezing, the snow ain’t gonna melt no matter what slope it sits on.

Not true. I actually have a solar system. here’s the deal. The snow sits on the panels. The Sun shines through the snow and heats up the panels. The Heat from the panel reaches a certain point and all the snow comes tumbling down like an avalanche. Actually scary the first time it happen and has some potential danger.
I would hate to see a in fall on a frail older person. It would probably cause major damage. To a heathly adult it would be like having a large bucket of snow dumped on your head.

I’ve had the solar heat and snow slide off scenario work within 2 hours of the snowfall stopping. There was 6 inches of snow and it was 22 degrees F.
With small amounts of snow (up to 3" it melts off quickly and without the house shaking boom)

[js_africanus]

@Johnny L.A.

So: Are you pro-nuke, or anti-nuke? Why? How would you counter the arguments of the other side? If you’re pro-nuke, do you think that we should use it instead of solar or wind power?

Pro-nuke. It has its risks, but most things do. Fossil fuels kill people right now through pollution and nuclear power would help amelieoriate that.

To be honest, I’ve never really heard any counter arguments worth responding to. NOTE: I’m just giving my Humble Opinion, so I didn’t actually read any posts but the OP; I’ll do that later.

I wouldn’t advocate any source of power to be the only source of power. If wind, solar, or any other power source has a place where it’s best, then that’s what should be used.

[Sam_Stone]

@Stranger On A Train

• How much leakage was there from Three Mile Island?*

2.5 million curies, according to the Wikipedia article (other online sources seem to vary considerably) mostly in the form of radioactive vaporized coolant which drifted out over sea. The Three Mile Island accident was the result of a number of lax practices, poor contingency planning and training, and design compromises by the contractor.

Stranger

Here’s what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to say about it:

Detailed studies of the radiological consequences of the accident have been conducted by the NRC, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services), the Department of Energy, and the State of Pennsylvania. Several independent studies have also been conducted. Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a full set of chest x-rays is about 6 millirem. Compared to the natural radioactive background dose of about 100-125 millirem per year for the area, the collective dose to the community from the accident was very small. The maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem.

So the people living near the plant got less than 1/6 the radiation they would get from a single chest X-ray. I’ve had several chest X-rays in my life.

Right at the boundary of the site, the radiation exposure would have been slightly less than the average background radiation received in a year.

To put that in even more perspective, a standard television emits about 0.5 millirems per hour, so standing right at the gates of TMI during the height of the accident would have given you about as much radiation exposure as the average person gets from their TV in a few months. And for the people living in the local area, if they watched 3 hours of television coverage of the accident they got more radiation from their TV than they did from the accident.

And there are many, many other sources of radiation in our lives. All told, the average American gets about 350 millirems of radiation exposure from various sources in a year. So being right at the plant during the disaster would have only added about 1/3 of a year of normal exposure. And annual exposure rates can be much, much higher. Airline pilots get 350-500 millirems of additional exposure to radiation per year due to the high altitude they fly at - like being at 3-5 TMI accidents every year. And it gets worse - residents of northeast Washington get about 1700 millirems of radiation a year due to naturally occuring levels of radioactivity in the region. That’s 17 TMI accidents per year!

And to put it into further perspective, a typical coal plant produces TEN TONS of uranium and thorium in fly ash every year. And this is not considered a dangerous level. We even use the stuff to make cement. Again, we hold nuclear power to a standard that other industries could not hope to meet, even in terms of radiation released.

Cite.

[Loopydude]

Another pro nuke here. Can’t add much more than has already been brought up in excellent posts by folks like Stranger and Sam.

It’s not that nuclear isn’t bad. It’s that everything else is worse.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Schuyler

Note: neither the Thresher nor the Scorpion were nuclear accidents. If you were getting at the potential environmental impacts from their lost reactor vessels, then that’s different.

Well, yes, and it’s a perfectly valid concern, be it a submarine reactor possibly damaged when the sub collides with something, or a plant’s reactor possibly damaged when an earthquake hits. Neither is a fault of the nuclear pile itself, but of the surrounding structure.

In any case, I’m hoping for a project I read about in Popular Science (or Mechanics, or maybe Discover; I forget) about a proposal to build a reactor in Alberta’s far north and use its energy to run a huge refinery operation to seperate the tar sands, dramatically bringing down the cost of oil production in the area. The U.S. will buy all the oil we can produce and we’ll get rich off of you. Cool.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@jrfranchi

Not true. I actually have a solar system. here’s the deal. The snow sits on the panels. The Sun shines through the snow and heats up the panels. The Heat from the panel reaches a certain point and all the snow comes tumbling down like an avalanche. Actually scary the first time it happen and has some potential danger.

I would hate to see a in fall on a frail older person. It would probably cause major damage.

Oh.

My.

God.
Are you seriously advocating an energy scheme that would squish old people?! YOU MONSTER!!
Just kidding.

[sleestak]

@kelly5078

Very anti-nuke. I don’t take the word of engineers who say it’s safe. It’s their job to come up with solutions to problems, and an engineer who doesn’t believe in his/her ability to do that isn’t much of an engineer. But just because they believe in what they’re doing doesn’t make them right. But I ramble.

I think that nuclear power is dangerous, and potentially catastrophic on a number of fronts, all of which have been well covered in other places.

But I also think it’s coming back. The arithmetic of trying to meet the world’s future energy demands doesn’t make it without nukes. So I’m resigned.

Well, engineers aren’t the only ones who look at nuclear plant safety. My father, who isn’t an egnineer, ran the nuclear reactor safety division at Sandia Labs for ~18 years. My father has a PHD in math and a Master in physics. He was at Three Mile Island the day after the accident*. Everyone who worked for him had a PHD in math or physics with a 3.9 or higher GPA.

They study the heck out of these things. Want to know what would happen if a plane fell on a containment wall? Test for it. That is what the nuclear saftey guys and gals do. They don’t just engineer what they think is safe and call it good. They actually go test these things. The number of tests they run is incredible.

The big issue so far in nuclear power hasn’t been the plants, it’s been the people as Schuyler said. Now, people are never going to be perfect but it is possible to make the probablity of an accident really low.

The present system we use for most energy creation is a running accident, pollutants, deaths in drilling accidents, the occasional refinery explosion. Other energy sources have their own drawbacks such as the pollution caused in the creation of storage devices(batteries) or the interference with nature (Birds vs. Windmill. Hint, the birds don’t win.)

There are some issues with nuclear power. Nothing is perfectly safe. But every other possible solution has similar issues.

Slee

[What_Exit]

@Bryan Ekers

Oh.

My.

God.

Are you seriously advocating an energy scheme that would squish old people?! YOU MONSTER!!

Just kidding.

Worse part. I’m really anti-petroleum & Coal. I would like to see the world use all alternatives including Fission and please someday Fusion.

I just think the nuclear waste issue is being dismissed and not addressed by the very Pro-Nuke posters.
They have made many great points about Fission.
Some are being unduly harsh on Solar which cannot power the world it can only be part of an overall plan.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@jrfranchi

I just think the nuclear waste issue is being dismissed and not addressed by the very Pro-Nuke posters.

Well, that’s actually wrong. We are considering the issue and as long as nuclear waste is an unfortunate and inevitable byproduct of otherwise clean nuclear energy, it should be handled as carefully as possible and tucked away as safely as possible, rather than be used as a deal-breaker.