Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station - Wikipedia This is the Fermi Plant in Michigan. It has had demons in it since it was built in the 60s. It of course is completely unique in having trouble. We all know it is completely safe and proven technology.
Well…you should probably define who ‘we’ are, because frankly I don’t think ‘we’ includes you wrt actually knowing anything about nuclear power.
Yeah…‘we’ all know that it’s a proven technology. The Navy has been using it for decades with few problems. So have other countries. So have WE for that matter. When compared to other forms of energy in an apples to apples comparison it stacks up pretty well (to say the least). When compared in an obvious apples to brussle sprouts way as you have attempted…well, then it is less favorable.
-XT
So, your claim is that because an old type of design had a breakdown in the early days of building reactors, we should abandon them forever? By that logic, the first time anyone burnt themselves with the fire or ran over their foot with a wheelbarrow the idea should have been scrapped forever. Did you even read your link:
So no one hurt, no radiation released. Equipment was damaged and lessons were learned. Boy that is sure an effective argument that this is way to dangerous to exist.
Since zero injuries, no environmental damage is your limit, what power source passes your muster?
Jonathan
But…but…it’s had demons since it was built (in the 60’s)!! It COULD have killed hundreds…thousands…10’s of thousands…millions. It could have killed everyone on the planet! You can’t compare what it DID do with what it could have done…nor is it unfair if you you compare a power system that makes up over 20% of our total energy (closer to 30% IIRC) with one that makes up less than 1%…it’s a totally fair comparison.
-XT
This one in particular is not a nuclear power generating problem, so much as it was an idiotic manger and stupid employees. I can’t begin to understand how this even happened.
This is a good idea, except that you can’t just switch on a coal power plant when the wind dies down or when clouds blow in. Startup and shutdown are both considerably longer processes (Una, are you there?). You can start up and shut down natural gas plants quickly, which makes them a good complement to alternative energy plants, but we don’t have very many of those already, like we do with coal.
The real niche for wind and solar is applications which don’t care about instantaneous power, but only about power averaged over some relatively long timescale (hours or days). If the wind dies down for a while, it’s OK for my furnace (or air conditioner) to shut down for a bit, and let the temperature fall (or rise) a few degrees while I’m waiting for power. And if it takes four hours to charge my electric car, it doesn’t much matter whether those four hours are right after I get home and plug it in, or in the wee hours of the morning before I leave for work. If we built enough wind and solar plants to cover all of those non-time-critical applications (or rather, enough for the variability to cover those applications), it’d probably make a sizable dent in our fossil-fuel power needs, but it couldn’t replace the fossil fuels completely. If we’re going to kick our carbon habit, nuclear power is almost certainly going to have to be at least part of the solution.
The point is that those things can and do happen. Every single country with nuke plants has a lot of problems and a group of people who want them gone.
If they can save money by cutting corners they will. That is what corporations do. That is why I would prefer the government to build them and take care of them.
It sounds like your issue is more with “corporations” (and presumably, capitalism) than anything else.
And the government is quite capable of screwing things up, too, whether it’s energy generation or anything else. This is particularly if there is no effective third-party oversight, which is more likely to be the case than if private industry is being overseen. Government has also traditionally shown itself to remarkably inefficient when compared to private industry.
In general, I think it is preferable to have the market figure out how best to accomplish things in the most efficient manner possible. However, because the market is often insulated from the consequences of environmental pollution, I do think that strict government regulation is needed, particularly in cases where the potential to do harm to the environment is greater, as in the nuclear industry. For the most part, this is the current situation that we have for the nuclear industry.
You have also been linking to these random factoids you have apparently been digging up, showing the purported problems with the nuclear industry. Surely you realize that every energy industry has had its problems, from mining deaths to plant explosions to the recent massive coal ash spill in Tennessee.
FWIW, I actually operated two Navy nuclear power plants over a four-year period. I experienced exactly zero problems. The plants operated flawlessly.
My problem is reality. Corporations can and do ignore safety laws to save money. They will cut corners and fight any and all regulation. That is what they do.
It seems many see corporations as our friends who share our concerns about the world. I am just a realist. Coal power companies know damn well they could clean up their plants. They have been fighting in court for decades to avoid it.
You were in government plants. I would prefer the government to run them.
The Fermi plant is down the road from my house. They have had endless problems and have never been operating at full power.
One mantra on this board has been private industry runs things better and more efficiently. That ignores the problem of cutting corners to save money and understaffing. I suppose the Karen Silkwood story taught us nothing.
And the same type of things can happen with any type of power production. What we need to look at is the harm vs good for all types of power. Many of us have looked at in depth and come to the conclusion that nuclear benefits outweigh the risks in comparison to other forms of power right now. If someone designs an efficient fusion generator tomorrow, my opinion may change, but we have been 10-20 years away from fusion for my whole life.
What frustrates me (and probably others) is that most anti-nuclear voices don’t seem rational. They seem scared of the unknown. Over scared of the new, and blasé about the old. They, and you, sound like someone who is convinced that they will die if they get on a plane, but has no problem driving the freeways at rush hour every day.
I don’t think you will find anyone who wants no regulation or oversight. I would even welcome the government coming in and building the first few plants just to get the ball rolling.
I operated three plants over 5 years and also had no problems. On the one hand, the Navy did not need to make a profit, but on the other, these power plants were not only mobile, but could operate while rocking and rolling over 30 degrees.
Jonathan
Your problem isn’t reality gonzo…your problem is you have an irrational fear and you are projecting. You are like a guy who won’t fly because he’s afraid that the evil corporations running the air line are more concerned with profit and so aren’t taking proper care of the air craft and it will crash and kill you. You aren’t interested in knowing that statistically you are more likely to swallow a tooth pick and die than be involved in a car crash. You are only fixated on your irrational fear and that’s all you see.
How many people have died in your neighborhood due to the Fermi plant in the past 40 odd years it’s been in operation? How many have been seriously hurt? Let’s see some figures.
-XT
I know this is an older post, but still, it makes no sense. What the poster is saying, essentially, is that because the proposed solution isn’t 100% perfect, we should maintain the status quo (storing the waste on site), which is far less perfect than the proposed solution. Talk about biting your nose to spite your face!
:smack: I figure that everyone probably got my meaning…but insert ‘plane crash’ for ‘car crash’. This is what I get for composing posts on a mobile device.
-XT
Of course even the status quo has YET to cause any problems, so there is more than one way to look at it, at least from a pro nuke standpoint.
Chernobyl.
http://familiesagainstcancer.org/?id=453 All of them poison the surroundings and change DNA to some degree. They kill slowly.
Which, as I understand it, involved an unsafe ( and illegal here ) reactor design, built without standard safety measures like a containment dome, manned by people chosen for political purity over competence, who disabled what safety systems it had and created an emergency on purpose as a test. If that’s your standard most technology should be outlawed, since that level of bad design and behavior would create a disaster with almost anything eventually.
So slowly, in fact that the people near them typically live as long as they do everywhere else. :rolleyes:
No, no, I think you misunderstand gonzomax there. He’s saying that Chernobyl is an example of a power source that passes his muster.
But seriously, we have three alternatives:
1: Seriously cut back on our usage of electricity, to the point that we wouldn’t be able to maintain anywhere near our current standard of living.
2: Get a significant amount of energy from coal power plants.
3: Get a significant amount of energy from nuclear power plants.
As research on solar, wind, and other alternative sources advances, we may someday have other options. But as things stand right now, those three are it. So I would like to ask gonzomax: Which of those three options do you advocate, and why?
http://michiganmessenger.com/12965/cancer-questions-grow-around-fermi-nuclear-plant Cancer rates around nuke plants are high. that is just the way it is.
I am willing to discuss the nuke plants with a logical person. But, they are not a proven safe technology. They are far from accident free. Every plant has problems and many are due to the builders and the people running them trying to increase profits. Energy should be under government control .
If the discussion is about the relative merits of nuke vs coal ,that is a better discussion. Coal plants are dirty operations. They are far dirtier than they should be. They are so strong politically that they have written the laws that govern them. The nukes will do the same.
By your criteria, neither are airplanes, automobiles, or stepladders.
What kind of nuclear “accidents” do you think are happening on a regular basis? In the U.S., Three Mile Island occurred 30 years ago. I remind you that the TMI accident killed exactly zero people, and the presidential commission conducted to investigate the accident concluded that “there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects.”
You do realize that the Chernobyl plant was designed and operated by the USSR government, right?