[QUOTE=billfish678]
OMG
Its worse than I thought. Its actually sucking radiation in from the surrounding areas!
[/QUOTE]
Got me. Yeah, that was pretty badly phrased.
-XT
Excellent response.
On the overall disaster scale the Fukushima situation scores very very low. As you can see, simply living in a coastal city in an earthquake zone is far more dangerous than living near a nuclear energy facility, even one that gets hit by a 9.0 quake and resulting 10m sunami.
Utilizing nuclear energy comes with risks. However it is much less risky than many other things we choose to do on a daily basis, like using automobiles.
Is this a contest to see who can make up the most outrageous shit?
If so, there is no doubt you are the clear winner of the thread.
-XT
Not if you still think nuclear power is safe. Then I have failed in my mission to bring the light of reality to the dark minds.
It is not safe but it is clearly less dangerous than living by the ocean in an earthquake zone.
OK you don’t know me at all, so that was humor. I’m not on a mission, and even if I was, it would be idiotic to think rational talk and logic would make a dent in a radiation denier.
But there might be someone teetering on the edge, somebody with a clear had and a skeptical mind, somebody who can think things out, not just blindly believe.
This horrific accident, followed by a clusterfuck of unimaginable size, which now has the situation about as bad as it can get before there is nothing but the running and the screaming … but let’s not try to predict the future of this crisis, it will play out before us no matter.
But what’s the bigger picture? Well, it’s not hard to see.
Every nuclear power plant, every reactor, it needs to be babysat, it needs clear headed people always on the scene, and it needs power. A lot of power, when it is shut down. Not just to keep the pumps going and the reactor cool, all the spent fuel has to be also carefully tended, with pumps and heat exchangers. And water. And security. And this will always be true, as long as the reactor has fuel in it, and the fuel rods are stored there.
With me so far?
So almost every reactor (not counting the French, who are smart enough to ship their radioactive waste to another country) has not only the reactor, but the spent fuel rods that need constant attention, of all kinds. And power. In Japans case, lots of fossil fuel power, because when the reactor isn’t going, there is no nuclear power. And all the reactors shut down when there is an earthquake. So it needs other plants that don’t shut down.
Or, lots of fuel, and generators. In any case, every reactor and fuel storage is a constant. You can’t walk away from it, and if anything happens to the people, the reactor, and the fuel will eventually become very very dangerous. Hundreds and hundreds of reactors, they all need to be guarded, and tended, and kept going, or it’s disaster. If the people who run it all die, then it’s disaster time. If they just all get real sick, it’s disaster time. If something kills them all, it’s disaster time.
If a natural disaster destroys the backups, it’s disaster time. If anything goes wrong, with the old reactors, it’s disaster time. Now of course a well running nuclear nation keeps the whole thing going, until it doesn’t.
In this case, it’s actually fortunate that the four reactors down the coast, just a little ways away, it’s really fortunate they didn’t also suffer the same tsunami induced fate. They also have all these fuel rods that have to be kept cool.
This disaster has made it clear on many levels that nuclear reactors are by design, a dangerous thing, that needs constant advanced care. Or, when things get bad, desperate soldiers with fire truck spraying water 24 hours a day. Just to keep things from melting down and burning up.
Am I against nuclear power? Not really. It’s great. Until things go wrong. And things always go wrong, you can’t avoid that. It might be decades from now, or it might be last week. But anybody who thinks you can design something that will never break, they are a fool.
So to answer the question, I no longer support nuclear reactors for power plants. And I am adamant that we need to replace every last one of them, but first get rid of the spent fuel laying about in pools of water.
It’s not a mystery that solar panels would probably be serving Japan much better now than nuclear power. If we put our minds to it, we can probably figure out how to create safe power, and do it cheaper.
Wind is good. So is about anything besides these nuclear reactors. It’s just not worth the cost. You can still try to say nuclear was cheaper than anything else for Japan, except now it isn’t. In the long run, nuclear isn’t cheaper. It’s just that the bastards who run them have put off the expensive part of the whole thing till later.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
Not if you still think nuclear power is safe. Then I have failed in my mission to bring the light of reality to the dark minds.
[/QUOTE]
Nothing is ‘safe’. Life isn’t ‘safe’. Nuclear energy is safe-ER than many other risks we take every day. Tell me…probability wise, what’s more dangerous? Driving your car or living next to a nuclear power plant? Probability wise, what’s more dangerous…climbing a ladder to do some maintenance on your house or working in a nuclear power plant? Probability wise, what is more likely to kill you…eating a standard American diet, or being in that 20 km radius of the ongoing nuclear emergency in Japan?
If you answered with the nuclear option (heh) on any of these then you don’t understand relative risk. Take Chernobyl, since it constantly gets brought up in these little discussions. How many people died? Well, it ranges from several hundred to several thousand…to maybe 10’s of thousands if we get into the Dim Mak deaths. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that 50,000 people died there though, since that’s a nice round figure. That would include all of the deaths in Russia, Europe and Outer Mongolia, plus a few in Antarctica and on the Moon…and it would be over the span of several decades. Possibly a century or so. Now, tell me…how many people die every year in the US from car accidents? From heart disease? From the flu? From falling off ladders while trying work around the house?
All of those things have greater death tolls PER YEAR than Chernobyl (the worst nuclear accident in history) from the second of the disaster until today. And that’s using overblown figures from some of the whackier anti-nuke sites. Even if you made the figure a hundred thousand…hell, even if you made it a million…all of the things I listed, if you took them over an entire decade would have higher death tolls.
And this ‘disaster’ in Japan, if it gets as bad as it can get, isn’t going to come close to that. You see, they have already evacuated the area. If every worker there dies tomorrow you are talking at most a hundred or so. Let’s be generous and say that tomorrow they all get blasted with magic evil radiation and all die, and that there are a thousand people working there. So, a thousand DRT. And let’s say that everyone within that 20 km radius also dies, and that there are 10,000 people there and they all die magically tomorrow as well. You still wouldn’t get up to the numbers of dead from the other aspects of this disaster alone…namely the gigantic earthquake and tsunami and the after effects. I was reading earlier that they are still digging out people trapped in the rubble, and that there are many without adequate food, water, shelter or medicine…that in some areas people have had no substantial help yet and are still making due. Can you understand what that means? How the nuclear aspects of this pale in comparison to all the other stuff that’s going on…pale except to the news media, who have focused almost exclusively on this one aspect?
Can you grasp how ridiculous it is to point to this as some sort of proof that nuclear energy isn’t safe? I mean, it takes one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history, a 40 year old power plant with an even older design (that never was one of the safest designs out there), a freaking tsunami…and the plant still hasn’t failed, and the ‘disaster’ is still below the radar of death by tooth pick at this point. Even if you live in the area there you are still many times more likely to die from exposure or lack of food/water/shelter (or another freaking aftershock) than you are to die from radiation for the gods sake.
Seriously people…get a grip.
(Ok, rants over…I now return you to the regularly scheduled anti-nuke rantage and chicken-littling)
-XT
All 441 reactors around the world (that does not include military reactors) have to be constantly watched, regulated, tended and guarded, by trained people, 24/7
While this disaster has been about the power plant itself, the flooding and the horrible design, if something happens to the people, for what ever reason, any nuclear power plant is worse than a thousand hydrogen bombs, in terms of the radiation it can pollute the earth with.
Every single one of the 441 reactors, and all the spent fuel sitting there next to them.
A hydrogen bomb might have a hundred kilos of plutonium. A regular old power plant might have over a thousand tons of nuclear material. Maybe much more.
And all of it can burn, and pollute, and a some point, as we have seen, it may become impossible to stop it.
This is getting so silly. When my car stops working hundreds of thousands of people don’t flee for their lives.
I would say on the nuclear apples and oranges scale, we are now approaching a critical 9.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
So to answer the question, I no longer support nuclear reactors for power plants. And I am adamant that we need to replace every last one of them, but first get rid of the spent fuel laying about in pools of water.
[/QUOTE]
Good luck with that. You’d have to get the entrenched anti-nuclear nutters to stop all protesting every time they try to move it somewhere. Do you have any idea how many billions the US spent on Yucca Mountain? And how many additional billions it’s going to cost the US government directly, and how much additional it’s going to cost the public in terms of both treasure and risk? And it’s as dead as last years fish right now…billions down the toilet, and with nothing to show. And this is a great victory for the anti-nuclear movement. They stopped Yucca Mountain! Woohoo! Er…now what? Well, now the spent fuel sits around in pools onsite, and will probably be entombed with the reactors (somehow) once they get decommissioned.
As for shutting down all of the nuclear power plants (or even all of the older nuclear power plants…which is a joke in the US, since that’s all we really have, at least designs wise)…how are you going to do that? How will you replace the lost capacity of 20 odd percent of our generated power? Oh, you could do it over time (if you built a butt load of coal plants), but it would cost…well, I’m not sure, but billions at least. Probably 10’s of billions. Possibly hundreds. And what will you do once they are shut down? You still won’t have any place to store the spent fuel after all…if you tried to revive Yucca Mtn or even look at building another one somewhere else you are going to set off the anti-nuke folks again, and they are going to make you spend 10’s of billions of dollars with no pay off in the end, since they will kill it as surly as they killed Yucca Mtn, unless there is some sort of sea change in attitude towards the problem (which, given my experience with Americans isn’t likely to happen after this horrible ‘disaster’ in Japan…the anti-nuke attitudes are going to be reinforced using the same BS arguments in this thread).
-XT
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
This is getting so silly. When my car stops working hundreds of thousands of people don’t flee for their lives.
[/QUOTE]
And yet, you didn’t answer the question. The only thing silly here is that either you don’t get it, or you are being disingenuous. Which is it? Inquiring minds want to know…
The funny thing is that it IS an apples to oranges comparison…all those things I listed are MUCH more dangerous from a probability perspective than nuclear energy. Hell, even if you used just the data from Chernobyl or (hell, AND) what’s happening in Japan right now it’s apples to oranges…you are much more likely to die driving your car to work tomorrow than to die due to exposure to nuclear radiation even if you live right next to the plant in Japan (of course, if you DID live right next to it you are probably already dead, because a massive tidal wave most likely already killed you).
-XT
You didn’t answer the question.
Your fixation on this word, in conjunction with your application of it to groups of people who clearly include other posters in this thread, is out of line.
Back off. Tone it down.
[ /Moderating ]
(Note that words based on “idiot” are not explicity prohibited in this forum, but you are waving it around and pointing it at other posters in a way that is not conducive to civil discussion.)
What pray tell is one of the most dangerous things a person does in his life? Driving a car. Not apples and oranges. Apples and hand grenades.
I have seen a lot of car accidents. None that radiated a coast, killed a lot of workers at once ,cost mega millions to try and keep from radiating even more people than it already has and made a huge amount of land uninhabitable for generations to come.
Answer my questions from way back in post #415 first.
Unless you drop it down a deep hole, or bury it under a mountain, you still have to guard nuclear waste, to keep people from taking it! It’s the most insane shit to have around.
And I haven’t even started on all the nuclear weapons. Now there’s a bunch of dangerous stuff.
But, humans are good at doing stuff. The real problem is getting other humans to stop doing stuff.
As for replacing the power plants, well as hard as it may be to comprehend, a lot of countries don’t have any nuclear power plants. We don’t want them to have them either. How do they even live with out a bunch of nuclear power plants?
Wait, I’m falling into the idiot zone here.