Valid point.
If you are going to reduce the debate to nothing more than deaths/year, then nuke wins. What I and others have been pointing out is that safety and deaths/year vs. coal is just one part of the issue. When nuke goes tits up, the going rate is $200+ billion dollars, which no energy company can even pay, and very few governments can even pay. Besides that, there is the well cited and demonstrated cost of nuke plants even without any accidents or breakdowns or shutdowns because there was an earthquake or flood near some plants.
The current administration has already asked nuke operators to step up to the plate and they even gave them billions in loan guarantees. They’ve almost universally said “no.” Guarantee the entire cost, with no stipulations about its final cost or when or whether it’s ever built, and relieve us of all liability except a few token million when it goes down.
Right.
In other news, Officials: Virginia quake shifted nuclear plant’s storage casks
The nuke industry still hasn’t addressed what it plans to do with its waste except store it in situ, indefinitely/forever.
Even if Nevada decided to let the federal government build an underground storage facility there, as currently planned it wouldn’t be nearly enough to handle it all. I found this handy question and answer FAQ about Yucca mountain:
It is not even that Yucca is a boondoggle, but you have to transport hot nuclear waste from across the country to get there. Accidents could be terrible and foreign and home bred terrorist attacks would have choice targets.
Nonsense. The caskets sed to transport nuclear waste material are impervious to just about anything.
The amount of misinformation on this subject is amazing.
If you know anything about nuclear transport casks (or can invest five minutes in google-research), you’ve seen or can easily see videos of them getting broadsided by trains and whatnot, suriving with trivial damage.
By the way, with this recent bumping I reiterate that yes, I still support nuclear power.
[QUOTE=levdrakon]
If you are going to reduce the debate to nothing more than deaths/year, then nuke wins.
[/QUOTE]
Well then what should we debate? If you are going to call something hazardous it helps if you can actually quantify the hazard. Not speculative handwaving about possible dangers, but real quantifiable risks. Which you’ve been unable to do, resorting to vague rumblings of threat without actually trying to address this issue, despite having been asking about it in numerous threads.
So, realistically, how dangerous IS nuclear? If you don’t want to reduce it to a deaths per kilowatt debate (because I’m sure you’ve already figured out threads ago that you’d lose that debate) then what DO you want to talk about to quantify the risk?
And what they have countered with is an attempt to explain to you what relative risk is, and get through to you that EVERY form of energy generation has inherent risks, but that a society must weigh those risks rationally. So, again I ask you, what are the quantifiable risks from nuclear and how do they stack up relative to other forms of energy that can operate on the same scale? How do they stack up against other forms of energy that are marginal and can’t operate on the same scales? What metric do you propose to use, other than vague fear about low probability events that, even when they happen, cause purely local problems, and even then the problems are less than disastrous and the loss of life and injury relatively small?
Which has happened how many times? In 60 odd years of service? During that same period, how much has it cost the nations of the world who use coal when hurricanes, floods or other national disasters occur? How about we use that as a baseline for relative risk? Take all of the nuclear disasters combined over the last 60 years, calculate how much they have cost, then do the same calculation for coal. Which do you think costs more?
Then there were all those cites you ignored in other threads that showed that, actually over the life time of the plant, the costs per kilowatt kept nuclear in the ball park of everything but…yeah, coal. And that’s because coal doesn’t currently have loaded costs wrt the damage it does to the environment. Factor that in and nuclear comes out looking pretty well. But then you knew that, since I’m sure you read those cites in the past…right?
Yeah, because what has happened in the past is that a company will spend millions and time and effort, only to have the project halted by anti-nuclear lobbying groups and the courts…or delayed for so long that by the time the plant comes on line the company involved has lost so much money that it would be decades (or never) before they break even or regain a realistic ROI. Instead of guarantying loans, have the government guaranty that the plant WILL be built, without long drawn out rezoning hearings, protests, court cases and other myriad delaying tactics used by anti-nuclear groups rallying the locals to block or halt construction and you might see companies actually be willing to build the things again.
But then you knew this, since you’ve raised this exact same point before and been told the exact same thing in the past. Round and round we go.
From your cite:
Yeah, that’s a huge worry, no doubt. An unusual earthquake for the east coast managed to shift those casks between 1-4 inches with no radiation released.
Yeah…it’s all the nuke industries fault, ehe? They are the ones who stopped the work being done on a central storage facility. Probably why the federal government is having to pay them fines now, considering that they all put in large sums of money for something that was delayed, stopped, delayed and killed (several times) by…oh, wait! It was actually the anti-nuclear lobbying groups riling up the folks in Nevada that killed the central nuclear storage initiative and has now cost the country many billions of dollars, with more to be paid to the evil nuclear industry in fines indefinitely, or until Yucca Mt. or some other repository is re-opened/opened so that we can pour MORE money down the pit as we go through the rinse, repeat cycle again and again!
Gee…wonder why those damn nuclear industry guys won’t build new nuclear plants even though Obama et al guaranteed them funds?? It’s a puzzlement…
So, what you are saying here is that a repository that was supposed to be completed an in operation by the 2000’s but was delayed and halted doesn’t have enough capacity (if it was ever restarted, and construction begun again, and, I dunno…finished maybe) in 2011? Who’d-a-thunk it! 
So, what do you think we should do then Lev? Seems a bit of a catch-22 to me. Don’t want to store it on site (earthquakes and tidal waves, terrorist wombat attacks and space alien invasions), can’t finish a central repository, aren’t allowed to recycle…what does that leave? Wish it away? Kill the nuclear power industry an…oh, wait! We’ll still have the waste. Well, kill the nuclear power industry, then COMPLAIN about how stupid they were that they didn’t have a plan for the waste, while ignoring the fact that they did have plans, but that their plans were continually submarine’d by anti-nuclear lobbying group! Yeah…THAT’S what we should do!
-XT
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
It is not even that Yucca is a boondoggle, but you have to transport hot nuclear waste from across the country to get there. Accidents could be terrible and foreign and home bred terrorist attacks would have choice targets.
[/QUOTE]
Since the accidents part has already been taken care of, and without getting into too many details, the DOE actually has a para-military guard force for when it transports nuclear waste. They don’t just send the stuff out with some truck driver and hope it gets to the other end. I actually have some friends who’s company has a contract to evaluate, equip and train the DOE military types, and from what I’ve heard they are as good as any special forces troops in the US (in fact, a lot of their guys WERE special forces, SEALs, GB’s and the like).
The thing is, gonzomax, that people (even…gasp…The Government) have actually thought all of this through, in detail, and planned out various contingencies. They have tested the casks, as has already been noted, but crushing them, dropping them from various heights, setting them in burning jet fuel for hours on end, and everything else that could conceivable happen to them. They have a large and extremely modern communications system in place to transport nuclear waste (it might surprise you that they are doing this already, for other kinds of waste), and they have a well trained and well equipped military force to protect the shipments.
What they don’t have, sadly, is any place to actually ship the waste TOO. You might want to consider that the next time you toss around the word ‘boondoggle’, as you contemplate why that is…
-XT
Heck, if you’re a terrorist who already has enough firepower to break open a cask, why bother? Just use it to go blow up a school or a mall or something.
Well, I’d say the state of Nevada has a vested interest, since they’d be the destination of all the waste. This PDF draws different conclusions based on the real life Baltimore rail tunnel fire:
Let’s assume terrorists with years to plan manage to figure something out. Let’s further assume we discover the planet moon Pandora and secure a reliable supply of unobtanium to construct casks that are actually “impervious to just about anything.”
Who’s building and testing them, how much is it going to cost, and who is going to be paying for it?
Can we assume that further testing and refinements were done after your 2003 PDF, or did time stop then? According to this:
According to your cite:
For anyone interested, my cite goes through some of the high level testing that Sandia did on the casks.
-XT
So don’t transport them through tunnels. Would that be a major problem?
Heck, just earlier today I drove a military truck across the island of Montreal and, because I was carrying flammables, couldn’t take the Ville-Marie tunnel. Nuisance, but not a deal-breaker.
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
So don’t transport them through tunnels. Would that be a major problem?
[/QUOTE]
My guess is it depends on whether they are using rails or roads. There might be less options if they use rails if they want to avoid tunnels. I would doubt it’s a major problem, or one they haven’t considered and made contingencies for.
As with everything on this subject, the problem is assessing the actual risks and looking at ways to alleviate or mitigate them. Anything and everything is a deal breaker if you go with the most improbable scenario and take it to the most extreme imaginable outcome. We’d never do anything if we thought about everything in those terms. Want to build bridge? Well, have you considered what would happen if the bridge caught on fire for 12 hours straight? No? Well, can’t build that bridge until you take that into consideration. What about if there is an ice age and the bridge freezes at negative 200 F? What about if a plane crashes into it? Oh, you thought of that? Well, what if it’s a really, really BIG plane? How about if space hamsters hit it with titanium droppings from space? What about if they are space elephants??
You see this all the time in the early 9/11 threads. Why did the buildings fail? Weren’t they supposed to be able to withstand a hit from an air plane?? Well, why wasn’t it able to withstand a hit from a bigger air plane…were the architects incompetent?? What do you mean fire…buildings are supposed to withstand fire! Well, why wasn’t it designed for an uncontrolled burn after having the fireproofing stripped? We need better standards to withstand bigger air planes and stand up to those kinds of fires!
And on and on. It’s never enough. Look at what happened in Japan. The reactors were designed to withstand a 20 foot tsunami and up to an 8.5 magnitude earth quake. They actually DID withstand the earth quake (which was over 9.0), but the tsunami was 48 feet instead of what it was designed for. No doubt, they were stupid with their tertiary power backup scheme, but you just can’t design something to withstand every single possible disaster scenario, because someone will always think of something worse…or nature will throw something worse at you. Design for a century event and mother nature will laugh at you and throw something at you that hasn’t happened in 800 years…or a thousand…or 10 thousand…or 100 thousand. Have you designed your containers to withstand a Chicxulub level event? No? Well, they aren’t safe then!
-XT
If you reduce a debate to fallacies, nobody wins. The question is “Still support nuclear plants?”, which is a fallacy of course. Just as if somebody started a topic called, “Still oppose the dangers and foolishness of nuclear reactors for power plants?”. It assumes a conclusion then asks for you to talk about it as if you “did support them”, and has the huge disaster changed that?
Which is absurd.
Yes, but no nuclear supporter wants to discuss money, real world issues, they want to talk about coal and how solar and wind can never work. Because for some unknown reason they find the most dangerous and expensive solution the best. I can’t figure it out.
Which is exactly why the US didn’t become some huge nuclear giant, with a thousand reactors running. It’s not just the waste, the danger, the terrible risk, it’s also a sitting duck for any sort of war, to have reactors and spent fuel sitting there near your major population centers.
Everyone knows now how easy it is to destroy a multi-reactor power plant. Just take out the cooling system, the rest will happen no matter what. Hell, just take out the dam upstream, or downstream, and you lose the reactors as well.
And the cooling system is not inside a huge armored containment structure. In fact, the vents are right out in the open. Conventional explosives could ruin the cooling system in seconds. Take out the generator fuel tanks as well and you got multiple meltdowns and explosions within a day.
What country would risk that in a time of war? Or when a natural disaster happens?
The recent earthquake was close to the limits for the Lake Ana plants. If an unexpected large earthquake happens to the northeast US, it could easily cause beyond catastrophic nuclear disasters.
I’m just telling you why I am now no supporter of nuclear power for civilian power plants.
Also it as expensive as hell.
[QUOTE=FXMastermind]
If you reduce a debate to fallacies, nobody wins.
[/QUOTE]
Yes…yes, I see it now. If you can’t win a debate and attempts to shift focus and change goal posts doesn’t work, then the best thing to do is call it a fallacy and say that nobody wins! It’s genius!
To paraphrase Inigo Montoya…you have a truly dizzying intellect. So, asking the seemingly simple question of ‘Still support nuclear plants’ is actually a fallacy? Interesting. And it presupposes a conclusion (well duh) that people who would answer it supported nuclear power before, and asking them if they still do after what happened in Japan is a fallacy because, by gum, they should never have supported it in the first place! And your dizzying conclusion here…it’s not a fallacy, nor does it presuppose an answer, right?
Interestingly enough, money has been discussed many times in these threads. And, again, interestingly enough, the relative dangers have been discussed from about every angle you could imagine (you wouldn’t actually HAVE to imagine, if you bothered reading through the threads first)…including deaths per kilowatt. It’s interesting because, when the facts are actually brought up, the anti-nuclear types generally change the subject for a few pages, then come back to this same question again, once they figure everyone has forgotten all about it.
It’s no mystery as to why you ‘can’t figure it out’ though. Possibly if you actually read what people write, and consider the cites they give, you might have a better chance of figuring it out. Or, perhaps not…but it would be worth a shot.
Ah…that’s interesting. So, the US never built thousands of reactors because they didn’t want to risk the Russians nuking them and causing a problem? That’s…fascinating logic there. I suppose that having the Russians nuke a nuclear reactor WOULD be rather bad at that.
Well sure. That’s probably why so many ‘multi-reactor’ nuclear power plants have been destroyed over the past 60+ years, rendering so much of the planet uninhabitable.
So true. Why would a country want to risk having someone nuke their nuclear power plants? Better to go with coal and have the enemy nuke the cities instead. Much better for the public.
As for natural disasters, it’s a shame so many have happened in the 60+ years that we’ve been using nuclear energy. It has rendered so much of the planet desolate and uninhabitable. A nuclear wasteland with guys in leather jackets and Gurkha knives roaming about in souped up hotrods trying to find gas and methane for their vehicles while fighting in huge cages to the death! It’s a sad, sad world, and all because of nuclear. sigh
Yeah, that’s good to know. I would have never guessed that you were against civilian nuclear power. With the caveats here, I assume you are all for nuclear power for military purposes?
-XT
FXM already has a thread where he can share his… well… “information.”
Indeed. Of course.
It really is. Because if there were caskets actually “impervious to just about anything”, the spent fuel could simply be put in them and stored for now in secure buildings, away from the reactors themselves. Fukushima would have had all the 30 years of fuel rods not sitting in the buildings, next to the reactor, but safely away from them.
(yes some was in dry cask storage, but the majority is still in the ruined fuel ponds)
So if you listen to the magic casket theory, the spent fuel and high level waste can simply be put in the amazing “impervious to just about anything” storage devices. Not left in a deep pool of water that needs constant cooling to prevent the fuel rods from burning.
You might think this whole spent fuel issue is ridiculous. Why is there even a problem? Just use the magic caskets and safely store the highly radioactive waste anywhere.
Problem solved.
Hey, if the black box is so invulnerable, why don’t they make the whole plane out the same material?
I have no problem with the question as so phrased, or as FX did:
I actually am on the optimistic side for a great variety of alternative sources and feel that they can compete well with nuclear in many markets. It is just a simple fact that they cannot replace coal all by themselves in any moderate term, let alone also replace the nuclear plants that are due to age out. There will be some significant segment of “need” that will not be solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tide, biomass, etc., for many many decades to come, even adding in efficiency gains and conservation.
Until renewables of all stripes have reached a point that they can do it alone, there will be that “need”. For that segment, however big we each believe it will be, coal or nuclear and why?
Coal has known extremely sizable death rates and global harms associated with its use. Usually not front page news but baseline. Nuclear relatively extremely few. So yes, in terms of deaths nuke wins by orders of magnitude. In terms of global harms, nuke wins by orders of magnitude. In financial terms coal wins, but not once the harms are monetized. Assume even some risk of a storage disaster that causes several thousands of excess deaths from cancer and makes some finite region uninhabitable for a foreseeable future. The safety and global harms prevented balance sheet is so skewed with the huge numbers of deaths and harms from coal that that risk would have to a sure thing to happen for nuclear to still not win.
Nuclear is not completely safe and is not “the” answer. I personally believe that in a fair competition in which the external costs are monetized a variety of renewables will grow dramatically; nuclear, in that fair competition, I think will barely keep its current share or power generation, replacing plants that age out maybe. Natural gas will increase some but the rise in demand will use it up quickly and drive up prices to where is less competitive sooner than that. And coal will still be cheap enough that it will win a fair amount of the time too, more’s the pity. The best we can hope for is to reduce it some by promoting all alternatives to it.
Nuclear is not completely safe, but for that portion of “need” that renewables won’t be able to meet during the next 50 years, it is by far the least poor option.
It is not just that nuclear is not completely safe, but that when it goes bad the results are horrendous and very long lasting.
AlJazeera today showed the new leader of japan. Nada, giving a speech in which he promised to get the Fukushima plant under control.
Germany has around 20,339 MW capacity from their reactors right now. (source)
In 2010 Germany had 17,320 MW capacity from solar. (source)
They want to shut down all the reactors due to safety issues. If they had spent the money on solar/wind they spent on the reactors, especially the huge costs of decommisioning, (as well as the hidden cost of the waste problem), what would their solar capacity be?
If nuclear really was the safe.clean, cheap option, everybody would be using reactors for most power production. You can’t simply ignore the huge safety/security issues involved.
Well you can, but it’s ridiculous. Comparing the risk to coal is also a fallacy. Real deaths and monetary loss due to pollution from coal doesn’t even come close to the real dangers, risks, costs and human tragedy unfolding in Japan right now.