Another article, a bit sarcastic: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/07/06/204331/france-imports-uk-electricity-summer-heatwave-puts-nuclear-power-plants-out-of-action/
1/3 of France’s nuke plants out of action.
SOLAR kills more people than nukes.
Seriously.
But people have to have a boogeyman and nuclear sounds scary.
1980 called. It wants its argument back.
Oh hey, let’s go all in with nuke 'cause some dummy fell off his roof installing his panels. Talk about being scared of boogymen. Pro-nuke folks are apparently actually afraid of solar panels. It might get me! Run away, run away!
Funny, PG&E didn’t factor death rates into their decision to not renew a waste of money. If California wants to hit its renewable energy targets it can’t do it with an old dinosaur nuke plant still going. That nuke plant was designed for a 40 year run and it got one. Now it’s more expensive than greener techs. They can use the money they save for even more green energy.
And yet the argument is still true.
Slee
Ah, so the math doesn’t backup your claims … therefore the math is wrong and not needed?
One thing I’ve noticed in this thread is that all the arguments against nuclear power plants presented are pretty much the same ones from 30 years ago, and as examples we’re offered 30 year old nuclear power plants. So, yeah, this makes a good case to decommission existing plants, but how does this translate to new plants? We have a blank piece of paper and 30 years for research and development to draw on. I’m not suggesting we’ve solved every last little problem, but I think we’ve solved enough to make any new plant shitloads safer than anything up and running right now.
Silly things like state-of-the-art computer systems, hell’s bells, when Three Mile Island melted down, I was using a Sinclair Z-81 with an entire kilobyte of core memory with the highly advanced system to sore data on a cassette tape … woot !!! I have no idea but I assume we know enough now to not tip the control rods with graphite, which was part of the problem at Chernobyl.
I’ve heard the conjecture that solar/wind/hydro cannot produce enough electricity to meet current demands, certainly not future demands. We can build enough nuclear power plants to meet this demand, but that’s just electrical production. We still have to burn fossil fuels to transport the food supply for 10 million people in New York City. Here in the USA, we’d be starting from complete scratch building an infrastructure to haul freight with electric trains. How long until we can haul a half billion meals per day that way?
Today, we can build nuclear power plants that are safe enough. The question is can we build them fast enough without short-changing that safety? Mitigating the damage from burning fossil fuels is fine, but we’re also going to have to adapt to that damage as well. The globe is warming, and it’s too late to stop it from happening.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Oh hey, let’s go all in with nuke 'cause some dummy fell off his roof installing his panels. Talk about being scared of boogymen. Pro-nuke folks are apparently actually afraid of solar panels. It might get me! Run away, run away!
[/QUOTE]
Your side is the one who constantly brings up the death tolls and overstates the dangers of nuclear, so it’s kind of ironic you’d take this tact. Personally, I’m more concerned by the rare earth elements and environmental impact of the full life cycle of solar, especially if we talk about really taking it from the marginal low percentage power system it is today to something that would be able to do, oh, say 5% of the US’s power needs…because not only am I unsure it could scale up to that level production wise, I’m unsure it could logistically either, since I’m not sure the raw materials are there to jump it up so much (or what the environmental costs of that would actually be).
That’s the ‘boogymen’ that the solar is going to save the world types never really get into.
See, I think you DO need to understand math. You are talking about temperature rises in very locally affected areas as opposed to temperature rises globally…and the global rise is accelerating. I’m sure it will be lost on you, but to put this into perspective, even if you have a local rise (and in your linked article it’s a 1.67 F degree rise, not 10 degrees of unknown units…probably too mathy) it’s minuscule compared to the .35 to .58 C rise that’s happened globally in the last 50 years and is accelerating.
Several posters have mentioned the rising costs of NP. These extra costs are due mainly to paying interest on construction loans and fines for not reaching timely construction goals when work has been stopped because yet another lawsuit has been filed usually by an environmental group. The disruption caused by the endless litigation surrounding any new nuke can hardly be imagined. Many hundreds of workers, dozens of companies are put on hold while the lawsuit works its way through the courts. Hundreds of millions of dollars must be serviced. Companies go bankrupt. The name of the game is delay to destroy. A secondary reason is cost due to increased redundancy of auxillary systems especially related to safety. No one can really object to most of the demands of increased safety but much of the main cost increase is totally unnecessary.
Early NP plants developed mainly in the US by several large companies and everyone had their favorite design. Every plant was quite different from every other so each was like starting with a blank sheet of paper and everything had to be designed, certified and litigated from the ground up. What is sorely needed in the future is a standardized design or three that could be scaled somewhat in size. It could be litigated once and for all and that’s it. It would decrease the final cost by at least 40-50%. No uncertainties as to completion date to calm investors who are now understandably unwilling to risk there money.
These mundane business factors should not be underestimated. Technical problems with design fade into insignificance compared with them. Of course there still remains the irrational fears of much of the public.
and what caused that Climate change, and is accelerating it?
I have nothing against nuclear power, but it surprises me that you think “the French safety designs” take care of the problems of seismicity. As I understand it, the French Nuclear Safety Authority is now requiring extra safety upgrades because their renowned “safe reactor” designs were deemed not to be adequate against seismic damage. (And France, of course, is seismically very quiet compared to California.)
Sounds like you may be projecting somewhat. AFAICT, what environmental groups are complaining about with regard to the new hydro plant is the proposed flooding of 55 square kilometers of the Peace River valley.
I’m not saying I personally wouldn’t take the hydro plant anyway, but it’s a bit irrational to suggest that environmentalists opposing a hydro plant have no reason for it except an arbitrary preference for solar and wind.
I did not mean to imply that they do.
I certainly would not build one near a fault.
The problem with that logic is that many of the otherwise most suitable places for a reactor are near fault lines, and there are relatively few places on the planet which can be said to be assuredly free from potentially high (if infrequent) seismic events. There is nowhere in Japan you could build a reactor that wouldn’t be subject to earthquakes, and few locations that are not on a coast. Even in the continental United States or eastern Russia, far away from the edges of tectonic plates, faults exist and occasional high magnitude earthquakes occur, and given the potential criticality of a catastrophic loss of containment event in a nuclear reactor it is necessary to construct them in a fashion sufficiently robust to prevent release and hazard with high confidence.
The failure of nuclear power to offset carbon emissions isn’t that we aren’t building pressurized and boiling water reactors like crazy to replace coal and gas fired plants, but that we haven’t been spending the last three decades advancing the technology of nuclear reactors and the nuclear fission fuel cycle to dramatically improve inherent safety (rather than relying on procedural methods) and abate the hazards and cost of long term fuel waste and expended fuel storage from our current once-through fuel cycle. This is not the pie-in-the-sky notion that many advocates claim; many of the technologies to support this have been demonstrated to a significant proof-of-concept level and are opposed by the nuclear industry because of the costs and alleged difficulties of implementing them even though the benefits vastly outweight the upfront investment.
Stranger
Sorry, I probably misunderstood you. In which case we agree that people who are frightened of nuke plants because of the Japanese tsunami disaster need something more than the French reactor-safety designs to reassure them.
The French ASN appears to be addressing the issue by requiring “all power plants to build a set of safety systems of last resort, contained in bunkers that will be hardened to withstand more extreme earthquakes, floods and other threats than plants themselves are designed to cope with. It will also adopt a proposal by EDF to create an elite force that is specifically trained to tackle nuclear accidents and could be deployed to any site within hours.”
Rare earth elements aren’t really rare. It’s certainly an issue, but it affects everything from your cell phone, computer and TV to the automobile and defense industries. It’s hard to think of many industries that aren’t affected by it. It’s a known issue. It’s hardly a “gotcha” for solar in particular.
No…we have many of them right here in the good old USA. We, however, heavily restrict the mining of said elements because of the environmental damage. Instead, they are mined heavily in countries where such niceties aren’t really that important. China, for instance. And THEY restrict the sale, deeming them strategic materials.
It’s only not a ‘gotcha’ if you handwave the realities away, and also the (local) environmental impacts…or you agree that those impacts are something you need to deal with, and accept higher costs (and smaller local environmental impacts). That’s the thing with reality…it doesn’t conform to rosy expectations. And solar has a lot of drawbacks (besides the reality that it simply doesn’t scale up, production wise, to meet realistic demands in a large country such as the US) that folks tend to disregard or handwave away, while being super critical of nuclear.
But I suppose we can just wait for another couple of decades until solar and becomes viable (though, of course, we are into tier 3 for wind, as most of the good spots are taken…or are NIMBY hot buttons). And we can continue to shunt nuclear aside, letting it dwindle away (in the US) to nothing. 10 little nuclear plants…9 little nuclear plants…8 little nuclear plants… …and then there were none. Same with hydro of course…we are tapped out, so those too will dwindle as the dams grow old and are decommissioned with no new plants made. We have tons of natural gas, and there is always coal, and that is going to be the reality…that and soaring energy prices, as folks struggle to make solar and wind work, with expectations that it will be a major energy producer if only we try harder and dig deeper and just believe…
Cool.
Two reactors supplying a large amount of the state’s electricity, and moving it around the state impressed me above. I would think that reactors could be located in geologically safe areas away from population centers. I don’t know how difficult it is to find such places. The only experience I ever had with faults was at the lunch table. There was a rumbling noise. My FIL, a geologist pronounced, “That was an earthquake.” Of course, the New Madrid is nearby.