As Der Trihs touched on, the Chernobyl design was massively, unforgiveably stupid, and only through combination with equally massive operational malfeasance was the scope and scale of that catastrophe possible.
The plant designs which we’re advocating would really require a disgruntled employee to have accomplices and explosives and a lot of planning in order to accomplish something close to what we’re seeing at Fukushima (very low releases of very short lived radioactive gases and a damaged but totally contained reactor core). A Chernobyl sized reactor accident would need much more than a disgruntled employee, and I’d venture that anyone who has the ability and equipment to cause such an event is dangerous enough not to need a nuclear power plant. We’re talking James Bond supervillain.
Who was it that used to post the videoof the jet plane hitting a mock up of a containment dome? IIRC, it was a doper whose dad had been in charge of the test, and was literally looking to see if a containment dome would withstand the strike. The plane simply crumbles into dust.
It would take a LOT to compromise the containment dome of a nuclear power plant, and, if I understand correctly, until that happens, any sabotage is going to be a huge, ugly, expensive mess, but not a danger to public safety.
Well, let’s see - the Fukashima complex was hit by one of the worst quakes on records anywhere, any time, the worst ever recorded in Japan, then had 30 feet of ocean dumped on top of it… you know the odds of THAT happening again any time in the near future is minuscule. On top of that, they survived the quake just fine even though it was greater than what the plants had been engineered to withstand. It was the ocean swamping the emergency cooling that caused the problem and that still took the better part of the day to start a meltdown, after which they dumped more ocean on top of it and completely killed the problem.
Meanwhile, refineries and petroleum storage areas are STILL burning out of control, pumping enormous quantities of smoke and toxic fumes into the air and probably setting other things on fire, to cause more toxic smoke. Smoke which can also make you sick, kill you, or cause cancer down the line.
You know, I actually feel better about nuclear power right now, and wonder why we don’t build the coal and oil fired power plants that robustly.
No, we can’t make anything truly “disaster-proof” because the universe can always just drop a giant rock from space on top of us, or blow the cork off Yellowstone or otherwise create problems which simply can’t cope with, but we CAN engineer to withstand 9.0 quakes and design things so that if something does go wrong the damage will be less rather than more.
As has been pointed out, no one outside the plants themselves have been harmed. This is not a Chernobyl. Even if the cores had completely melted down (which they didn’t) there’s a containment vessel directly below that will catch the mess and keep it out of the environment. More recently built plants have even more safety devices, including ones that require no power whatsoever to operate.
The easiest way to prevent another Chernobyl is don’t build that reactor design again. The PWR’s and BWR’s of the west just can’t explode like Chernobyl did. Worst case is the core melts and falls into a pit designed to hold it. It won’t blow up the core itself and scatter fuel around the local area.
Obviously, yes, you can get an explosion out of a PWR/BWR but it’s just an ordinary chemical reaction and the threat is poses to the environment is minimal and goes away in days. Everybody will be able to move back to their homes and keep their stuff. This won’t render vast swathes of real estate uninhabitable for decades.
The rest of the US? Pretty much most of the rest of the world is less seismically active than Japan. And has fewer volcanoes. And fewer typhoons. And fewer tsunamis. In a sense, Japan is the worst place to build a nuclear power plant, yet despite TWO major the disasters within an hour half the 40 year old, obsolete plants at Fukushima are STILL working and STILL able to cool down, and the two that were most troublesome will be contained no matter what.
As I said - why don’t we build all our power plants that robustly?
There is no “melt the power plant” button in a reactor complex.
There are numerous safety systems and backups to those systems. There are all sorts of alarms to indicate if something is amiss.
I seriously doubt a single person could initiate a catastrophe at a power plant with no one else noticing and stopping it before it got anywhere near bad enough to be a danger.
It’s the big read ‘so called’ button called the ‘atomic corrah’ (or ‘Atomic Core’ if you read the actual button). If you push it then you best finish the epic final fight with the blade wielding bad guy on the roof in 5 minutes or it’s curtains for you…
Last I heard the only person who died at the site was killed by a crane. I guess we should ban those, since the are obviously more dangerous than nuclear power plants.
My opinion hinges on the design and building faults from the 1970s. I’ve posted before about the San Onofre plant in which a reactor was installed backwards, and the Marble Hill plant that was found to have cracked welds and inferior concrete.
As long as things like that don’t happen, I’d be okay with nuclear power, although I’m still iffy on what to do with both the nuclear waste and the decommissioned reactors.
But if the Japanese plants can do as well as they have under an 8.9 earthquake, then I’d say that’s pretty damned good.
48 in the United States in 2010. There are no good official figures from China in 2010 (not that too many people in the industry believe them anyhow) but expect upwards of 2,000.
Why on Earth would we need to? Are you aware of coal power plants which have created this level of danger after being hit by an earthquake/tsunami/hurricane/?
And pretty much no one, anywhere, is building oil-fired power plants anyhow.
I recommend you read Chernobyl Notebook, which you can now find translated from Russian and is often available for free online. My copy was a hardcopy given to me by an actual Engineer at Chernobyl, who had a lot of stories to tell. The design was flawed, badly, but the real situation which led to the disaster was a human one. One can argue that humans shouldn’t be able to cause a disaster, but…well, I don’t know how valid that would be. People break shit.
This is the power generation discussion equivalent of the knucklehead who comes up after a major plane crash and says “So, you still going to fly to X on your vacation? No thanks, I think I’ll drive. Huh huh.” like somehow the very rare and spectacular occurrence of a plane crash somehow makes long distance driving safer than a plane crash.
Nuclear energy’s safer than coal and fossil fuels, even if the accidents and loss of life are more spectacular, and it’s still the best bet.
I don’t support nuke power plants. I am ambivalent about them, and will continue to be so as long as properly disposing of nuclear waste remains an issue.
But unless something serious happens in the coming days, I agree with those who say that the Japanese plants have dealt quite well with the problems that a major earthquake and it’s aftereffects have caused.
And so while I wouldn’t say I support nuke power plants, I am not more opposed to them now than I have been in the past.
…and yes I support nuclear power, but goddamn it, people need to get serious about hardening backup power systems. Here in the US and from what I’ve seen at power plants in Europe, Asia, and South America, backup power is treated as almost as an afterthought, an annoying capital and O&M expense which doesn’t return anything to the investing company (sort of like hardhats). I would assume the Japanese probably feel the same way. This must change.
I know the industry has black-start backup power systems which can run submerged, and they can also elevate them well above any conceivable storm surge or tsunami; I’ve seen them. If nothing else, moving forward there needs to be a serious improvement in backup power systems for a black or brown situation.
The disaster is not over, and there is a tendency for the numbers to go up on disasters over time. So I am adopting a “wait and see” attitude. However, should Japan get out of this with nothing more than a release of (relatively) mildly radioactive steam (1000 times normal background levels according to the US Navy, which does not strike me as that freaking mild, but apparently it is) then I think this will be a HUGE win for the nuclear power industry. This is a worst-case scenario if ever there was one, and getting out of the worst-case scenario with no Chernobyl-like results would be a great demonstration that we know how to design safe nuke plants. But I would not say the nuclear industry is out of the woods yet.
You can be sure the spokesmen for the Japanese plants are telling the truth about the problems they are facing. They would never lie to the people.
Of course sailors on the Reagan are getting exposed to the completely contained radiation.
Una, can you give an estimate on how much radioactive material is released by a coal fired plant on a yearly basis? How about during an accident like we are seeing with the burning refinery? I know that there is a lot of trace radioactivity that is released during these kind of events, and I would like to just compare the radiation release by the two different technologies.
I do agree that they need to make backup power a priority, and that we need to deal with the waste better, but nuclear seems like a better deal with risk, pollution, and sustainability than coal and natural gas.
People are being a bit too sanguine about what this says about nuclear power. Sure, this was a really bad and unlikely series of events, and it was also one of the worst and oldest plants in Japan. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s not in a good place right now, and viewing nuclear power most generally it’s exactly the one you’d expect to be dangerous. If you threw in some human error, we’d be talking about a genuine catastrophe, one that could cost many lives.
That said, the discussion shouldn’t be whether nuclear power has risks–it obviously does. But it should be about comparative risk. And we’re not given a choice between nuclear power and magical fairy power; it’s a choice between nuclear power and fossil fuels.
Something to consider: take all the emissions of radioactive isotopes we can expect this year from the generation of power, including those from this disaster. The vast majority of them still come from the burning of fossil fuels (all these are, of course, in relatively minute quantities and not really a significant threat to human health).
Toss in the fact that a hypothetical marginal thousand nuclear plants added today collectively have a very small chance of killing thousands (let’s say 1%, which is probably generous to critics), and compare this to the fact that a comparable number of coal plants are almost certain to kill hundreds of thousands at the margin. When framed this way, the nuclear power question pretty much answers itself. Even Chernobyl, which was several orders of magnitude worse than the current situation and simply could not happen even in our worst nuclear plants, is estimated at having caused 4000 excess deaths by the UN and IAEA; this, though terrible and tragic, is dwarfed by the potential number of excess deaths that will come from use of fossil fuels in the next century.
So my takeaway from the disaster is that we should look into decommissioning or retrofitting older plants and work to build new ones of a safer, more modern design.