robby writes:
I am always happy to see someone else take the long view, although many not consider 1972 to be recently discovered.
I think this whole question will be moot in a few decades anyway, when fuel cells and solar become more common. It might take a while to unseat King Coal but we will when we realize how cheap hydrogen and oxygen are and how much nicer water is compared to hydrocarbon waste. Honda is already looking towards fuel cells to power their ‘next big thing’ car. Solar cells will catch on when we don’t need miles of them to power a city.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Anthracite *
**
[QUOTE The biggest problem with building a nuclear plant is simply public opinion. The vast, technologically illiterate public who get riled up over what Peter Jennings says on their TV (which never lies), and goes forth to drive public policy decisions based on their horoscope and “good horse sense” and an urge to “save the children”. :rolleyes: **[/QUOTE]
God, I know you know your stuff COLD Anth- I’ve rallied around you before on energy threads. This time? Sorry, we agree to disagree.
The major problems are a bit more insidious than public opinion. If I could LEARN to insert an active hyperlink into my posts ( help…), I’d find links to the time when the AEC became the DOE and the NRC. One of the key reasons behind splitting up the Atomic Energy Commission into the Dept. of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was politics. Plain and simple.
You have employees of a regulatory agency who are being so heavily influenced by the corporation operating a facility as to be almost ineffectual in the pursuit of their assigments- usually whistleblowing and keeping a sharp eye out. This may sound like I’m painting with a broad brush, but the sad fact is that one big explosion at a coal or gas plant could really wreck a neighborhood. One big explosion- or meltdown, to use that old chestnut from 1978, would wreck a state the size of Pennsylvania. Sound familiar?
I spent my later formative years learning more about this industry than I can divulge here. My father was the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Public Affairs Officer for Region 1. That included Three Mile Island Units 1 and 2. I listened at dinnertime…very carefully. Because it was his work- and because it was fascinating. There were almost always holes in the stuff I was told- he took his Non Disclosure Agreements dead seriously. However, one learned anyway. The stakes are so very high when dealing with radiation, opposed to much more stable forms of energy production.
It’s not just panic stories. It’s a serious need to balance the pure science- which works like a fuckin’ charm by the way- with the human factors of maintenance, overseeing- AND OVERSIGHT. Then, there’s politics. Remember, folks, a LOT of us think that Karen Silkwood didn’t die from a blow-out.
Anth, I just don’t buy that it’s the Media here. It’s a science that is pure and logical, and an application of said science that is a perilous thing.
As for the poster who posed the idea of a Home Reactor? Right ON- I would do my own safety checks. I trust ME to do them on time, and in a careful fashion. Power for 30 years? Hell man, cut my home feed and wire me off the grid.
Cartooniverse
P.S.- if you have a definitive cite to prove that Peter Jennings,and ABC News has lied during a broadcast about a Nuclear Power story, I would suggest that by all means, post it here and show the world.
Otherwise? Stop slandering. If we’re not allowed to post a song in it’s entirety here because of Copywright laws, then maybe slander laws deserve a nod here too.
I’ve worked a wee tad closer to Peter Jennings than you have, I’ll wager. He’s a careful reporter, and gets his stuff straight before he sits on set and talks off a Teleprompter. So, again- your cite with dead on perfect quotes proving that he lied, please? I would so very much like to read it.
Cartooniverse
Cartoons:
Why would you want to cut yourself from the grid when the power company is legally bound to buy any power you make but don’t consume? Well, that’s how it works around here, and it’s one of the reasons I’m gonna put up a wind turbine. YPUMV.
Tristan:
Yeah right. And we’ll all drive hovercars and live on cities on the moon.
Wow Hail Ants, WTFG man, you broke my sarcasometer…
Oddly enough, folks used to say the same thing about flying to the moon and people living in space… well, that’s occuring today (not quite in the way I would like, but we’re working on it) so who’s to say what will and won’t happen?
Personally, I don’t know for sure when, but I think the things that I mentioned will happen. It may be a long time coming, but just like Nuclear Power and asteroid mining, we will do these things (and much more!) when the time comes, simply because we have to!
Until then, we will use inefficient methods, and be held in thrall to the faceless ignorant masses, who believe everything they see on TV.
sorry, touched a nerve… California is in the middle of a big “power crises”, and I live about 20 miles from the only Nuclear Power plant shut down by public vote… the rods and everything are still there (no place to store them, and moving them overland is a PR nightmare) but it stays shut down due to public opinion…
I wouldn’t 
I’d just love to make my own juice. But you’re right, I’d gladly sell it back to ConEd.
Cartooniverse
I want you to read this carefully.
OK. I’m going to explain this step-by-step here.
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My comment on “Peter Jennings” is one I use often, and have substituted “Dan Rather” for. I believe I have used this hyperbole before here. It has nothing to do with him. I rather like Mr. Jennings (no pun intended with the “rather”)
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Read exactly what I said:
I did not say anywhere that Peter Jennings “lied”. I said the “TV (which never lies)”. This is a paraphrase I use which comes from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson,
…and refers to the fact that the average person takes exactly what is said on their TV, truth, lie, mistake, whatever - as the gospel truth. I have used this paraphrase several times here, I believe. I also said “they” drive their decisions based on their horoscope and … well, I hope you have figured it out by now.
The only “slander” here, by any measure, is what you just did to me in saying the following:
Yes, I think they do.
I’m quite sure Mr. Jennings does indeed try hard to get his “stuff straight”, but that is irrelevant to the issue here. My cite? OK - just as soon as you provide your dead-on perfect quotes that I said he lied.
I know the media has misrepresented energy issues - accidentally mostly, and probably in a large part because they have to “dumb down” the issue for the average American. I have caught them on all major networks, and as of three weeks ago even on PBS, on the News Hour with Leherer (sp), where a guest threw out that “Chinese coal plants have to burn 6 times the coal to produce the same energy as a US coal plant.” - which is an incredible statement to make, and is either a bold-faced lie or really shitty reporting. Or a simple mistake. But I digress.
You know, I was going to be civil about this. Especially since you have sent me a nice letter in the past. But fuck it. No one accuses me of slander and walks away laughing at me. Maybe my references were not clear to you, and my sentence was not the best form for you. You should have asked me what I meant, before accusing me of slander. But no, you either wanted to score points, or make your comment about having “worked a tad bit closer to Peter Jennings…”, or something else, I know not what. Take it to the Pit.
How dare you accuse me of slander - read my words more carefully next time, or if I have failed miserably at wordsmithing ask me. Or better yet, don’t read them at all anymore, and don’t talk to me anymore. I don’t need another person running around calling me a partisan liar. :rolleyes:
Once again - you could have done the polite thing, and asked me what I meant. You could have given me the benefit of the doubt. You chose not to. How sad.
Toons, I think you went over the top on Anthracite.
That aside, I’m wondering if anyone (ahem) knows what kind of pollution a coal plant produces? Someone very intelligent once wrote:
So, coal plants are definitely not entirely non-radioactive. Anthracite, do you know what other kind of pollution is generated by coal plants? I’d hope that lots of scrubbing of the exhaust goes on to make sure that most stuff doesn’t go up the stacks, but I don’t recall seeing any solid numbers on this.
How dirty is exhaust from a coal plant? Does any of the uranium or thorium (or other radionuclides) end up in the atmosphere for us to breathe?
I’d like to know how the pollution from a coal plant compares to the waste from a nuclear plant - barring accidents, at least you can bury the nuclear waste in one place. With exhaust from a coal plant, we all breath it. Not a problem if it is all H[sub]2[/sub]O and CO[sub]2[/sub], but otherwise…
What other waste does coal produce that is not usable? Fly ash goes into masonry type stuff (bricks, concrete), but what else is there? Is more fly ash produced than is needed? Is there anything that needs to be buried or otherwise disposed of?
Hey! I get to slander TV, because that’s where I work.
I’m a News Producer for a Television Station in Vancouver, BC, I’ve worked at TV and radio stations across Canada, I get to talk to (and work with) reporters in various types o’ media around the world, and see their raw work (as well as finished product).
Credentials established, I hope
Ok. Most reporters would run screaming from a quadratic equation, let alone trying to understand exactly how a nuclear reactor works, and why it is/is not dangerous.
It’s not a question of dumbing things down for the audience. I’d say half (I’m being generous here) of the people up on the screen have to have things dumbed down for them! It’s one thing to do crisis reporting (all those high-speed chases need very little analysis 
) but when it comes to an analysis of the underlying reasons, your average TV reporter is poorly equipped.
Case in point: Natural gas prices have jumped severely over the past year here in BC. The main reason is our nationalized energy company is selling gas to California as fast as it can be pumped… and raking in the revenue to boot. This has sent local heating bills skyrocketing, and it’s threatening to put several greenhouses out of business.
This blip in homeowner payments has been going on for 2 months… but I’ve only seen 2 TV stations actually attempt to explain why the price of gas has gone up… and even then they’ve only said “world demand is responsible”.
Pheh. sometimes I wonder why I work
To the OP, I think Rocket88 gave the best response.
I’ll just add a footnote that most population centers are also located near rivers & tidewaters. Thus, the extra conflict.
Nuclear Power is a subject on which I am decidedly ambivalent.
As a Ph.D. in Physics and an Engineer, I am impressed with the nuclear industry as a whole, and the capabilities of nuclear power plants. The OP about reactors on subs is right on the money – without nuclear power, in fact, subs wouldn’t be a practical proposition. They’re about the only high power source that doesn’t exhaust oxygen (try operating a sub for long on fuel cells). The subs have been using nuclear power for almost half a century now, with no obvious massive mishaps.
On the other hand, there have been serious problems with power plants on land. Even worse, the government and the nuclear industry have hidden things or weaseled around them. “There has never been a nuclear accident involving harm to a civilian in the United States”, or some such statement, which weaves its way around the mishaps that have occurred. I don’t have the details on most of these at hand, but I have no doubt you can find details on them in the anti-nuke books or websites.
The general industry response is to say “Well, people are just confused about nuclear power. They have associations with the bomb, or with the harmful effects of radiation. They don’t realize that a power plant can’t blow up.” I used to think that, too. But there were legitimate concerns about the safety of many reactors that were unrelated to their likelihood to blow up. Ralph Nader’s group was instrumental in pointing many of these out, and there have been others since.
As for the innate safety of nuclear power plants, the obvious riposte is “Chernobyl”. It’s easy to say that this shouldn’t have happened, and I agree with you. The scary fact, of course, is that it did, and the problem of Chernobyl still hasn’t been resolved – the structure is crumbling and still contains extremely radioactive material. This is the core of public apprehension – we are assured by the industry that everything is safe and all possibilities covered, but there is still no provision for treatment of such disasters, or even of nuclear waste. After almost half a century there has not been a final resolution of what to do about the high-level waste building up in the cooling ponds of plants. Assurances that something will be done won’t salve the anxieties of people who still remember the Exxon Valdez and Exxon’s responses to the situation.If you want to see how bad the problem of waste disposal can be, look up “Chelyabinsk” on the web, or get Zhores Medvedev’s book “Nuclear Disaster in the Urals”. Medvedev isn’t a fear monger. He has defended his purpose in writing the book. Nor am I anti-nuke. My point is that the industry has to clean up its act, and not simply blame its difficulties on popular ignorance.
Hi douglips! I’m going to try to answer your question by opening a new thread in GQ here, re-quoting your question, at lunch today.
One thing about nuclear safety and coal safety.
In another thread months ago, a person posted about the “large number of deaths due to trucking of coal each year on America’s highways”. Yes, in the Midwest but especially in the East, a large number of plants receive a significnt amount of coal via truck. “Rubbish”, was my first reaction, “I’ve not heard of such a thing.” So I asked around work with coal transportation experts, and went out on the web (NHTSA, DoT, et al) and tried to find references to back my Mighteous Flamesup[/sup] I was preparing.
Well, I never made that flame, for two reasons:
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No one seems to have any concrete information on the number of deaths due to coal truck accidents per year, however,
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What information is available seems to indicate it runs in the neighborhood of hundreds of accidents per year, with more than 43 fatalities reported in one year alone! (not specifically posted since information is admittedly very sketchy on this subject)
I was stunned - I had no idea it was so high. It is much higher than the number of coal miners killed per year in accidents.
Just as one, single, focused thought - I wonder how even just those fatalities due to coal trucking accidents compare to the fatalities per year associated with nuclear power generation.
Some may be surprised to see me present negative info re: coal power. Yes, I like my coal and coal power plants. But facts are facts, and it’s dishonest not to look at all of the impacts.
Anthracite quoth:
I for one am not surprised. Thank you for your even-handedness.
A good idea. I have opened a new thread here, so that you don’t have to quote me yourself.
What happened to GAS-COOLED nuclear reactors? I remember reading about one such design-it used ceramic-coated uranium pellets as fuel, and the core of the reactor was non-meltable graphite. The reactor was cooled by helium gas, so no radioctive water leakage. Such a reactor could operate at very high core temperatures for years, at high efficiency.
Seems like a good idea-dwere these just too expensive to build? These would not have the problems of water-cooled reactors.
A questions and a statment.
A) What is the difference in construction, execution, and type of nuclear powerplant in a Sub and one in Nebraska??
It seems like they can be opperated saftly as long as the people opperating them and manufacturing them know what they are doing. So what I’m saying is…it would appear to me…the people in charge of construction and opperation might not have the same level of training as people in the military. Would this be a correct assumption?
I don’t have exact numbers to back it up, but I once did some research on different approaches to power generation, so what I know is based on some facts.
The exact trade-off between fossil fuel generation (mainly coal) and nuclear power depends on a difficult decision. Power generation from coal/fossil fuels currently has a fairly steady detrimental effect – in air pollution, accidental death/health problems for miners, and the slight amount of toxic waste. Nuclear power, on the other hand, carries a undetermined amount of high risk, with a lower amount of steady risk (Mining health risks appear to be lower than coal[sup]*[/sup], but there’s less data available). While new designs can prevent most power plant accidents from affecting local populations, workers are at risk; moreover, the long-term risk is real but again undetermined. Nuclear waste in the ground may remain dangerous for 1000 years or more, so even the small amount so far produced is a risk for future generations.
So the problem is low-moderate damage with high probability (fossil fuels) vs. undetermined damage with very low probability, plus future undetermined damage for nuclear generation.
panama jack
[sup]*[/sup] I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that uranium mining is more strictly regulated than some coal mining, which is an older industry. If everyone were brought to the same standards, there might be more parity, but fossil fuels’ impact due to air/water pollution is still very large, so my statements stand.