When Mr. Wasserman has some evidence to support his claim that TMI resulted in deaths, let me know.
But I guess I will have to mention an example of what is an alarmist to put things in perspective.
James Lovelock, that one of the Gaia Hypothesis, claims that we are headed to 8 or more degrees in temperature rise and that we will have to move to the poles to survive, not before billions of people die. Of course he is put almost in the same discredited area as deniers are by the serious researchers.
Short of having a nuclear plant engineer stand next to me it’s impossible to weigh in on Harold Denton’s reasoning. However, I’m looking at 4 reactors and all 4 of them are in trouble. 1 of them has a breach in the inner core. It could be a fluke but his estimate of 90% was in the ballpark.
I would expect multiple redundancy and these reactors only had the backup generators to help them. Jesus, if you look at the chain of volcanoes in Google Earth it draws a line straight through Japan.
I’d love a plate tectonics person to weigh in on what the effect of an 8 foot shift means to the other side of the Pacific Rim. That rubber band in California has got to be stretched pretty tight. I don’t think it’s an accident that there have been major activity all along the Asian side.
Even after the disaster and the fall of communism (That the disaster also helped cause) Russia continues with its nuclear program.
Also the Japanese knew about Chernobyl, and still saw a need to continue.
Read the thread. We are questioning the design. Do you think every car and airplane design is equal? Do you think every coal plant design is equal? The last nuclear plant built in my state turned into a coal plant with magic pixie dust because they fucked it all up. It was just cheaper to build a coal plant.
This. Put me down as still in favor of nuclear power. But I admit it squidges me out a little, and I agree with the comment above. Once you start looking at the cold hard facts of nuke power and leave the emotionalism aside, nuke doesn’t really look all that bad overall.
Yes. When you’re a little country without coal reserves and you want to gain some energy independence then nuclear power was Japan’s only real option.
Gonzo in a discussion you are supposed to respond to people who respond to you. When you get barraged by relevant questions that you have no clue how to answer it may be time to sit back and learn for awhile instead of trying to teach by repeating the same knowledge and logic challenged posits. You should take the time to learn the positions of intelligent people who disagree with you instead. There is no one in this discussion who does not understand your (incredibly poorly thought out) position.
I’ve just been watching English-language Japanese news on: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv
Apparently the workers’ evacuation order was lifted an hour after it was given. No confirmation anywhere else yet.
MSNBC confirmed that a few hours ago.
Problem is that the confirmation is buried in an update of the “workers evacuated” article.
I’m beginning to wonder, could the alarmist headlines there and elsewhere will be left up because that way they attract more eyeballs? Nah, it can not be. :dubious:
I, too, would like to thank you for trying. I, for one, appreciate it.
Yo, gonzo, does post 199 sway you in the slightest? You realize we will never, never, ever be able to convince the masses to give up power, even if their neighbors were burning to death in a nuclear reactor core catcher. Not all of them. Not enough of them. Do you really want to give up on nuclear? Would it matter if I proved to you that their is no way in hell that we could switch over to renewables in the next 50 years? Really, does post 199 have no impact on your stance here?
The people who really believe in nuclear power, who support it, they need to go stage a protest outside the Japanese power plant. Right now. Defend your nuclear plant! Show the world how safe it is.
Oh don’t worry about that 30K evacuation zone. A protest at the edge of the zone would still be effective.
Then you should be posting from the bottom of a structurally compromised coal mine.
Yes.
The need for nuclear power plants comes from your (and everyone else’s) appetite for unlimited cheap energy.
If you (and everyone else) was smart enough to support sustainable energy and even a more sensible energy policy for industrialized societies, the nuke plants would not have been necessary.
But, noooo… you want your pizza delivered in 30 minutes, like any other glutton on the planet that also doesn’t think they should bother to vote, so they let politicians leverage this level of environmental destruction for their own benefit.
The nuke plants are not at fault. You are… (and everyone else).
I do not believe in coal. Nor use it in any way. Coal is bad.
By opposing nuclear you support coal.
Thanks. Found it. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42084187/ns/world_news-asiapacific/
Well I’d say 3 out 3 reactors are having trouble, since reactor 4 was shut down (and probably empty of fuel) when the earthquake hit. The building of reactor 4 has had an upper level fire which may have spread radiation from the spent fuel pools, but events at reactor 4 have little to do with Denton’s comments.
The three reactors that are in trouble are having issues with removing the residual energy from their shut-down cores. That’s it. Denton’s claim was allegedly that containment failure was 90% likely in an accident. The context and exact nature of his claim wasn’t presented, but I doubt he was talking about steam being periodically vented from intact containments, which is what has been happening at reactors 1-3. Do you have a cite for a breach of an “inner core”, which I presume means the pressure vessel?
I think they grasp it just fine, it never was about the technology, it was the lifestyle that nuclear can support. The original contention was that atomically created electricity would be plentiful and would only be billed in small increments, just to say its billed or something like that.
Now we have folks saying , no, electricity is a commodity and pay per play. Increase the amount of nuke plants and sooner or later your going to have a surplus of electricity and rates would be marginal. In their eyes, this is bad. So between the suits who want to make everything a comodity and a combination of nimbys and the salad folks, its been almost impossible to decom existing plants and build newer designs in a cyclic manner.
Declan
Exactly. The vast majority of people are not going to give up the benefits of modern industrial society, and that society takes lots of energy to sustain. Which at this point gives us the choice between coal or nuclear. The alternatives aren’t up to the job.