Do a barrel roll!
Well while I was waiting for an answer I watched a video, purporting to be “the real facts behind popular myths” , which starts off with - “Some say nuclear energy is ready to make a comback; some say it’s still too dangerous. How do you know which to believe?”
It’s short, and contains not only nonsense, but nonsense at such a level of absurd, in this case I am not even sure how Brian Dunning can actually have read the script with a straight face.
Yes, it’s actually the same Brian Dunning that does About Skeptoid
Oh no. Brian, Brian, how could you?
This sort of thing pains me. Seriously.
Let’s start with the whopper, the big mistake. The same sort of mistake a lot of people seem to make, they carry this myth around them like it’s some sort of talisman, to ward off thinking.
The Chernobyl disaster. Poor Brian thinks that the disaster was due to, and I quote, “They wanted to try a dangerous experiment”. Which is comical if you knew what they actually were doing.
He also hand waves away TMI as “a valve broke”, like that was all it was.
His level of denial is over 9000
He actually says that the Chernobyl reactors were “obsolete and decades old”, when in reality the first reactor started up in 1977. Reactor 4, was completed in 1983. The accident, at reactor 4, happened in 1986.
So he takes a three year old, second generation reactor, and describes it as “the oldest reactor operating, decades obsolete”. This tool actually says that in the video.
But that isn’t even rant worthy.
Since I’m not wasting my time with watching anything you link, I’ll merely note that while Chernobyl was commissioned in 1977, the RBMK *design *was both obsolete and decades old, dating from the early Generation II designs in the mid-1950s.
But then again, everyone in this thread who’s had anything intelligent to say has agreed that we OUGHT to be decommissioning Gen-II reactors and replacing them with modern III+ or IV designs.
In 2010, there were at least 11 RBMK reactors operating in Russia. That ancient (and supposedly very dangerous) Russia style reactor. Like the one at Chernobyl.
But then again, everyone in this thread who’s had anything intelligent to say has agreed that we OUGHT to be decommissioning Gen-II reactors and replacing them with modern III+ or IV designs.
And of course regulating and inspecting them actively.
Ordinarily I’d say that goes without saying, but let’s face it–we have a lot of idiots masquerading as government regulators (in all energy categories–I know for a fact, for example, that the government didn’t get serious about the defense implications of wind power until very recently, despite the obvious fact that a bunch of gigantic hunks of metal moving at speeds of 80-200mph is going to play merry hell with any type of radar you care to name. Specifically: defense, weather, and air-traffic-control. Weather radar, for example, just shows a funky moire pattern when it hits a wind farm of any respectable size, regardless of what the weather is–thunderstorms? Tornadoes? That much less visible/predicable if they’re behind the wind farm.)
Actually it goes with saying. it is not being done. It has never been done. We just don’t want to slow down the money machines.
I believe that was my point. Except that it doesn’t just apply to nuclear. Take the deaths in the mining industry, or the radioactivity pollution from coal, or the fact that until this year no one was even thinking about how wind farms completely jam up the weather radar we rely on for tornado tracking/warning, or that people were pushing solar and are pushing biofuels that don’t reach energy parity.
Now you are ranting about wind power?
I’m informing Gonz about the fact that government oversight generally sucks regardless of the power generation source. Also, you’re still an idiot.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/12_05.html
Of course this was obvious a month ago, but hey, you can’t blame a big company for being liars, and refusing to tell anyone the truth about something like this.
And remember, coal is still the real danger. Not 6 reactors leaking radiation and burning and shit like that.
So, does this retroactively absolve you of lying about it three weeks ago?
Don’t hold your breath for pictures of dead Japanese. They will never see the light of day.
Going back in time, it turns out that the tsunami didn’t just destroy the generator fuel tanks, flood the important rooms, and damage the reactor buildings, it also destroyed the salt water intake system.
And that is why even with back up batteries, and diesel generators flown in, and everything they tried to do, they never had the ability to cool the reactor water, because the salt water loop was destroyed beyond repair.
The reactors were doomed as soon as the tsunami struck. It’s turned to a real tragedy, in the classic sense.
This cite says they MAY increase it from 5 to 7. I don’t see anything about it on the IAEA website.
-XT
The Japanese government’s nuclear safety agency has decided to raise the crisis level of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant accident from 5 to 7, the worst on the international scale.
The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency made the decision on Monday.