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Darla
It was Oyster Creek in the aftermath of Sandy. And a less serious incident at Indian Point.
Fukushima Follies
- Thread starter Taichiliberal
- Start date
Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
My, you are a parrot aren't you? Are you that fucking stupid as to think that the building and operating costs of a nuke power plant DON'T find their way to the local taxpayer? And how "safe" is it when plants like Indian Point are venting gasses and water into the nearby eco-system? Oh wait, the NRC just raises the bar every time Indian Point is nailed with a violation.
Don't take my word for it, DO THE HOMEWORK YOURSELF. (if you're intellectual cowardice permits it).
Wind, solar are cheap and efficient ways to GREATLY reduce this country's dependence on fossil fuels. But dupes like you just close your minds to that.
tekkychick
New member
Seems like every nuclear accident (or close call) is "a unique event" "it will never happen again" ...
Coal kills people too, with the emissions. It's not as dramatic as a nuclear plant, but a lot of people a year die from the emissions (number varies from source to source; saw one that said 24K people in the US die a year; this one says 170,000 worldwide - https://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/pollution-deaths-from-fossil-fuel-based-power-plants )
That's not counting the miners who die. So not saying it's safe either.
But a nuclear plant that has issues in Detroit or near New York City has potential to kill millions in a very short period of time. And even without accidents, we have the issue of what to do with the waste, which will be radioactive for a very long time - not only can it kill people, it can screw up the environment.
And sorry - I don't buy the "it only happens in extreme circumstances" because let's face it, things are getting more extreme year after year. And even when they aren't extreme - Diablo Canyon in California is built on top of one fault and is near another. Initially, it was only built to withstand a 6.75 earthquake. IN CALIFORNIA? it's now been upgrade to withstand 7.5 earthquake, but depending on the type of quake - and given that we get quakes stronger than that - I'm not getting that "warm fuzzy" feeling about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
I hope Diablo is safe. I hope the safety systems work. Because if it's not ... could be a mess one day.
And that's not even counting the human error factor.
We sure do need sources of energy that are cleaner than coal and safer than either coal or nuclear. What if you took whatever it is costing to build that nuclear plant in Detroit that you mentioned and poured it into solar and wind? Bet you'd get a heckuva lot of power, and it would be safe and clean.
Cancel 2016.11
Darla
Exactly, things are getting more and more extreme every year. We are f'd in the NE because of rising sea levels, and that's why I believe it's a matter of when an Indian Point pops, not if. I hope it's after I retire to my little spot of heaven far from here, but I have a lot of years to go yet.
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Do you seriously think that they don't have standby diesel generators? They had them at Fukushima but they were swamped by the tsunami. Third generation nuclear plants like the AP1000 do not require external pumps as they have a Passive Core Cooling System which uses multiple explosively-operated and DC operated valves which must operate within the first 30 minutes. This is designed to happen even if the reactor operators take no action.[SUP] [/SUP]The electrical system required for initiating the passive systems doesn't rely on external or diesel power and the valves don't rely on hydraulic or compressed air systems.[SUP]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#cite_note-Schulz-1[/SUP][SUP]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#cite_note-Nuclear_Energy-13[/SUP]
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Wind and solar are incapable of providing a consistent baseload, both have to rely on backup systems to provide reliable supplies. People who know no better often cite the German experience with solar however as this Der Spiegel article points out it is also unreliable and expensive. Germany has to resort to importing nuclear electricity from France and the Czech Republic. I might also point out the Germans who are supposedly so green are building a new generation of coal fired stations.
http://www.spiegel.de/international...ermany-s-blind-faith-in-the-sun-a-809439.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19168574
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tekkychick
New member
And so it goes - THAT plant had diesel generators (which were on the ground instead of the roof so they got swamped) but OUR Plant is different.
Every time we have a plant accident, we learn something new.
Valves never stick? explosives never fail to go off?
Oh - and wind? If you go up a few hundred feet, it's really consistent. Read a really cool article in the New Yorker about putting basically kites up high to get the wind energy and shoot it down to the ground over a wire. VERY COOLO! And for the days when it isn't windy; ok, then we burn some coal or have some other backup. We're still learning the best way to do wind and solar. But just CLOSING DOWN the old Fermi II plant in Detroit cost 3 billion - just to close it down! http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/fermi2.html
To build the new one - what? 10 billion??? That gets you a lot of wind/solar
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Well that is precisely why there are multiple backup systems, for heaven's sake. It would be nice just for once to deal with somebody on the left who has even a smidgin of an engineering background. I will ask you one question, how many wind turbines would you need to replace even one 2Gw nuclear power station?
tekkychick
New member
Yeah, those back up systems worked REAL WELL in Japan....NOT
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Well actually they worked remarkably well considering that it was subjected to 9.0 earthquake and immediately followed by a 14 metre tsunami, an event that hasn't happened for 1000 years in that part of the world. The basic problem that I see is that many people are incapable of assessing risks in a logical objective manner, over 15,000 people died from the earthquake and tsunami but all some people want to concentrate on is the nuclear reactors.
How many deaths occurred at or near Fukushima nuclear power plant because of the reactor meltdown, radiation, or repair operations? None, and none are expected to either. No worker has received more than the allowed dosage. Two unfortunate workers were drowned when the tsunami hit. And one died on 14th May 2011 from myocardial infarction (heart attack).
If anything, the situation shows how safe nuclear power is. Consider that forty year old plants were hit with an earthquake five times the strength they were designed for and yet they still shut down safely. The generators came on like they were supposed to when grid power was cut. Then the tsunami hit and the generators were wiped out. However, the battery backup still worked for the designed eight hours. The problem happened when no new generators could be put in. Even so the problems have been minimal, media scare mongering for ratings not withstanding.
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How the Fukushima disaster taught me to stop worrying and embrace nuclear power.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd March 2011
You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.
A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting(1). Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com(2). It shows that the average total dose from the Three-Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I’m not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn’t work. Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It’s not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren’t popular either. The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for both storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50 or 70% perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nukes, while beyond that point, nukes have smaller impacts than renewables.
Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impacts on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion. But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week(3). What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.
At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources(4,5). It’s hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales; it’s not much use in Birmingham.
And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.
Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution. The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain: wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad as well as most seatrout and salmon(6).
Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-Century equivalent of today’s biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his new book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11 million tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11 million acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated(7).
Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25 million tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption(8)) and nothing else(9). Even with a much lower population than today’s, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.
But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power(10,11). Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast(12).
Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/03/21/going-critical/
www.monbiot.com
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 22nd March 2011
You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology.
A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting(1). Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com(2). It shows that the average total dose from the Three-Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I’m not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn’t work. Like most greens, I favour a major expansion of renewables. I can also sympathise with the complaints of their opponents. It’s not just the onshore windfarms that bother people, but also the new grid connections (pylons and power lines). As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren’t popular either. The impacts and costs of renewables rise with the proportion of power they supply, as the need for both storage and redundancy increases. It may well be the case (I have yet to see a comparative study) that up to a certain grid penetration – 50 or 70% perhaps? – renewables have smaller carbon impacts than nukes, while beyond that point, nukes have smaller impacts than renewables.
Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replaces current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impacts on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion. But expanding the grid to connect people and industry to rich, distant sources of ambient energy is also rejected by most of the greens who complained about the blog post I wrote last week(3). What they want, they tell me, is something quite different: we should power down and produce our energy locally. Some have even called for the abandonment of the grid. Their bucolic vision sounds lovely, until you read the small print.
At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources(4,5). It’s hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worthless. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places; partly because turbulence caused by the buildings interferes with the airflow and chews up the mechanism. Micro-hydropower might work for a farmhouse in Wales; it’s not much use in Birmingham.
And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways – not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply.
Some greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the industrial revolution. The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain: wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad as well as most seatrout and salmon(6).
Traction was intimately linked with starvation. The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-Century equivalent of today’s biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his new book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11 million tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11 million acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated(7).
Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25 million tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption(8)) and nothing else(9). Even with a much lower population than today’s, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown.
But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power(10,11). Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast(12).
Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/03/21/going-critical/
www.monbiot.com
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It is manifestly apparent that most people just do not have a clue about radiation, hence this handy graphic from xkcd is incredibly useful and illustrative of the relative doses from various sources. I love especially the fact that the radiation from the potassium in the human body in one year is nearly four times that received at Fukushima Town hall in the two weeks after the accident. It certainly puts into perspective all the hysterical bullshit fed by an ignorant media to a gullible general public.
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
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Another way to put it is eating three bananas a day for a year is the same as the total amount of radiation received at Fukushima Town Hall in two weeks. Hey Rune, Taichi and Tekky Chick we'd better ban bananas as those babies are lethal!!
Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
In your own words, "....Do you seriously think that they don't have standby diesel generators? They had them at Fukushima but they were swamped by the tsunami."
As I told you before, NATURE DOES NOT ALWAYS PLAY BY THE RULES MANKIND ENVISIONS! And how long can those back up generators last before they need refueling? And what if THEY are damaged via a hurricane? What if there is massive infrastructure damage that prevents refueling trucks from reaching the plant?
And PUH-LEEZE spare us all with this wishful thinking of "3rd generation" bullhorn....because the nuke industry goes kicking and screaming into the night before even admitting that there is a problem with the current designs that are on line. So why should we the public trust future excursions....when they STILL have not put forth a workable way to decontaminate spent fuel rods and other wastes?
See, nuke wonks like you keep trying to ignore or play down the historical facts that it's been divine providence that has adverted MANY nuke power plant disasters in the last few decades....noted in how you IGNORED my response to your straw grasp about Westinghouse and China. But as I told you before, if you want to risk your life and family with this bullshit, go right ahead and God be with you.....I'm just asking NOT to be included.
Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
Another way to put it is this: why don't YOU and your loved ones MOVE to the area surrounding Fukushima and partake in the seafood and such from the nearby waters and farmland NOW. Come back in a year or so and let us all know how that worked out after a visit to the doctor.
I just can't stand wonks like you who LIE by telling half the story and/or ignoring other information when it threatens the God almighty dollar and ego of your nuke power worship. Well, here's a guy after your own heart that you could shack up with. Mind you, if he develops ANY type of tumors or cancers in the next 5 years or so, I'm sure he, like you, will blame everything else BUT the elevated levels of radiation he lives with. Better him (and you) than me, jack.
Matsumura Naoto, Japan Tsunami Survivor, Has Highest Radiation Level In Country But Will Not Leave Village
Posted: 03/11/2013 3:22 pm EDT | Updated: 03/11/2013 3:22 pm EDT
http://www.vice.com/read/radioactive-man-japan
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Look man, I like you personally but you haven't a clue about the relative risks from radiation and are beholden to the bullshit that is fed to you by an ignorant media and environuts with an agenda. That chart is accurate and highly illuminating but there are many that refuse to believe the truth no matter how it is explained to them. I read that article from that 'esteemed' scientific publication Vice and it said that the dosage he was receiving amounted to 2 microsevierts per hour. Flying from LA to New York exposes you to 40 microsevierts, should flight attendants be banned from long distance flights as it is too dangerous? A mammogram is 400 mSv should those be banned as well? Brazil nuts and granite worktops would have to go as they are just lethal!!
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Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
My ONLY gripe with you is your insane, fundamentalist adherence to the nuke power clap trap....when you KNOW God damned well that ANY long term exposure to ARTIFICIALLY ELEVATED levels of radiation do NOT bode well for the human body. Period.
Again, you IGNORE the nuances and details surrounding the information I give you, and then try to downplay the seriousness by parroting this idiocy of comparing doses of artificially elevated radiation levels to natural background radiation.
Give me a fucking break, because YOU are not that stupid and neither am I. It is your willful ignorance regarding FACTS that don't support your nuke power dogma that gets on my nerves....coupled with this absurd condescending attitude of yours. The chronology of the posts shows YOU to AVOID FACTS you don't like....well, here's another one:
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2013/02/fatal-fallout-dr-gary-null-exposes.html
And on another note:
Too Cheap to Meter: The Top 10 Myths of Nuclear Power
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rose/too-cheap-to-meter-the-to_b_835730.html
Airstrip One
Completely Effed
TC, are we 100% behind the science that prolonged exposure to radiation is what causes the illnesses?
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Here is an interesting website I found about the radiation statistics for Hiroshima. What is fascinating is the remarkedly low number of cancers that could be attributed to exposure to radiation. If you look at Question 2 and the Summary of cancer deaths in atomic-bomb survivors, 1950-1990, it is really very surprising. I know this is will not convince the die hards as absolutely nothing can, but there you go.
http://pketko.com/Hiroshima/radiation.htm#faq2
tekkychick
New member
Depends on the amount of exposure... different amounts cause different kinds of illness.
Nice chart here
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/health_effects.html
And this might have been posted earlier - new research that we might be able to tolerate more than previously thought
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/prolonged-radiation-exposure-0515.html
having said that, until we know what to do with the waste - which is radioactive - I'm still not in favor of nuclear plants, especially considering the potentially deadly consequences of the intersection of human error and nature's unusual events.