It's About Time!!

You mean like the ignorant people that would sweep incidents like Chernobyl under the carpet. Advancement does not irradicate risk, it merely lessens it.

 

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That's a CHEAP and non-intellectual shot !! I expected far better of you.

Chernobyl was a shoddily-built installation operated by half-trained engineers. It was designed and operated as a recipe for disaster. You cannot find such an engineering abomination ANYWHERE in the world today OR in the future (with the possible exception of Iran - who knows what those religious fools will build).

Edit: And there have been NO other incidents ANYWHERE like Chernobyl - that was another cheap shot at trying to distort the truth. It was a singular event.

 

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what about long island (i think) in the US which brought us the term "china syndrome"?

 

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sorry that should be 3 mile island. Oh and BTW read only, when the insentive for companies is to "lessen costs" it will always encorage "shoddily-built installation operated by half-trained engineers", THATS the profit motive. Further more the insentive will be to go bankrupt BEOFE you have to take into acount the cost of cleaning up the site.

 

Again, you have no idea what you're talking about. Three Mile Island was almost a non-event. Even decades later, there's no indication that the fairly small leak caused anyone harm. Didn't know THAT, did you??

And the word I think you're looking for is "incentive" - not something that looks more like "insensitive." You make it ABUNDANTLY clear that you have NO idea what's involved in the application/approval process nor the continuous monitoring and inspections that go on during and following construction.

In other words, all you are doing is waving your arms and jumping up and down with NO basis for what you're even saying.

(Typical.)

 

sure read, its only because of goverment regulation which any saftey is enforced, i compleatly agree. Yet there are lots of people around here (US citizans) who are against any goverment "interfearance" and who want less and less public servants. You combine that with a project which has to be maintained for years after it has shut down and you have the potentual for anything. Thats ignoring the fact that nuclear waste just keeps building up and is radioactive for 1000s of years, there is already a huge section of Australia (Woomera) where it is illegal to get out of your car while driving through because the dust is radioactive. Why? because of the olympic dam uranium mine. Now translate that to any city area and actual PROCCESSED uranium and you have a HUGE problem. Just the expansion of the mine is predicticed to threaten Adelaide and Melbourne with radioactive dust storms and again thats unrefined uranium

 

You still demonstrate NO working knowledge of modern reactors. For a good example, consider that they provide about 70% of the electrical power needs in France. Care to tell me just how many French citizens have been harmed by those facilities? (And I couldn't help but notice how quickly you dodged the real story of Three Mile Island.)

Again - typical.

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i dont concider luck to be good mangement, yes i read the stuff on 3 mile island and yes acording to one study there is no increase in cancer (another disputes that but anyway). However that wasnt through skill, it was through luck. The saftey systems (both human and mechanical) FAILED and that failure could have had massive conquences. Yes you learn from mestakes and improve systems but when the conquences of a failure are catstrophic you dont nessarly have the luxury of making mestakes to to make improvements. Whenever i hear people say "oh it could never happen" i think back to that famous UNSINKABLE ship, oddly BOTH of thos 2 ships (the titanic and its sister ship whos name i cant recall) SANK.

 

Isn't that also true of fossil fuels? The pollution they produce. The fuel they consume from specious sources.

I'm with Bill Gates.

~String

 

You're still not bothering to think that was LONG, LONG ago - and even then no one was hurt. Don't you suppose we've learned a LOT since then?

And why are you dodging the realities of France??? And while your at it, please show me some record of ANYONE being injured by all that "radioactive waste" that you're so concerned about!!! Can you?? (Hint: no, you can't.)

 

It's a nice reach-around to the Republicans.

 

Or. . . to the entire country, which could well be weaned off of fossil fuels through nuclear energy.

Okay. It's a start. I'd like to see the wind farm built too. . . but that's another topic.

~String

 

Not much chance - too expensive, too many other unsolved problems of all kinds (from fuel supply to terrorism opportunity to waste handling), too big a bureaucracy involved.

And the same corporate interests pushing it are making money off of coal power - they aren't out to trade in a cash flow like that one.

Meanwhile, nuclear power is the most expensive, most dangerous (economically, politically, physically), least reliable, and least durable of the major alternatives to coal.

 

All of the above is mostly just propaganda - brought to us by our now recognized in-house "propaganda minister."

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James Lovelock, British scientist and originator of the Gaia theory says he would love to own some nuclear waste to heat his home....in the form of canisters submerged at the bottom of his swimming pool.

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Coal combustion actually releases far more radioactivity than nuclear power...which btw kills astronomically fewer people than driving a car.

 

That's a very good point and one that I had forgotten to mention - thank you!

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Well now that you've got past the name-calling, can you maybe deal with the content?

Of the shovel-ready alternatives to coal - conservation, geothermal, hydro, wind, various heat-capture solar, even natural gas or the like - can you (say) find one that costs more than nukes? Decommissioning and waste disposal included, but cleanup of disaster omitted (no upper bound).

Can you find one with a shorter projected lifespan, current technology assumed?

Can you find one more dangerous in all those facets? More likely to break down significantly?

and so forth.

As far as safety goes, I think the most likely risks are auxiliary - terrorism and proliferation such as we see now in Iran, economic dependence on the unprincipled and venal - but even considering straight accidents: you guys are free-market believers, so you would accept the market rate of insurance as one reasonable measure of the risk, right? So what would it cost to insure a nuclear power plant against accident, against all the liability of an accident, do you think? We know that the governments involved have capped and limited such liability, and we know that without such protection against that cost we would not have a single commercial power plant in the US right now, but what would it be do you suppose?

Consider: the nuke at Red Wing, MN, was originally touted as being so far overbuilt for safety that it was even earthquake proof up to (IIRC) mag 6. But we know that it does sit on a fault, a place where midcontinent earthquakes have occurred. That fault system, further south, went off in the 1800s and produced a mag 8+ quake - moved the Mississippi River into a new channel, in places. And we know that the storage pool for the waste, an added feature, is more vulnerable than the original plant. And we know of course that the entire Mississippi River is downstream, with no real barriers before the Gulf. And we know the land north is still rebounding from the glacier.

So what would it cost to insure that plant, against earthquake alone?

 

The kind of reactor used at Chernobyl was based on using graphite as the moderator. The high melting point of graphite was the only reason a melt down was possible even in theory. (graphite has a melting point almost the same as diamond).

American reactors use water as the moderator. Meltdowns are infinity impossible, because in the worst case, the water would evaporate away and the reaction would immediately stop. (It can't continue without a moderator.)

Uranium is only 5 times as plentiful as gold, so yeah. If we put it in space, it would never come back to haunt us. We could even put it on the Moon without any negative consequences. (Because the Moon has no atmosphere or flowing water, and therefore no means to spread waste around in the event of a leak.)

the #1 and #2 producers of Uranium world wide (and largest reserves) are Australia and Canada. I can't remember in which order. Compare that with oil dependency (ie. dependency on Saudi Arabia and Iran).