As Japan shuts down nuclear power, emissions rise

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Glad to see that not all Germans are anti-nuclear nutcases. I wonder if the German (and Japanese too, as Sakhalin has lots of gas IIRC) anti-nuclear movement has been heavily funded by the Russians, in order to increase sales of Russian gas.

Here's a poster I designed attacking the German nuclear phase-out, which compares Gerhard Schroeder (chancellor behind the phase-out) with the former Soviet-puppet dictator of East Germany.




No, solar power sucks because sunlight doesn't actually contain very much energy in the scheme of things. The world's largest solar photovoltaic facility is Spain's Hoya de los Vicentes, which occupies an entire square kilometre of land. Even under optimum conditions, it's power output is a measly 23 megawatts, about the same as just one of a Boeing 737's two engines. To replace conventional power stations with solar panels you'd need many thousands of square miles of the things in total!

Energy density is the reason why coal is better than wood, why oil and gas are better than coal, and why uranium, plutonium and thorium are better than all combustion fuels.

We waste thousands of square miles on worse, less useful things, anyway.

I am tired of this simplistic crap.

Do you happen to have a good comparison between Chernobyl and the accumulated of all those accidents?

Do gas explosions render the house's proximity inhabitable? Do coal mine accidents affect civilians not working in the mine?

I mean seriously, Chernobyl sucked. It really, really sucked. And as good as nuclear power seems in theory, the old timey excuse that Soviets did not regulate their usage correct has gone obsolete the minute a tsunami showed us that no amount of regulation can stop a natural disaster causing a second Chernobyl. With Fukushima we got lucky (or did we? Cause that stuff has not ended yet).

It also shows how probabilistic analysis is terrible for this thing. We do not harbor an infinite amount of nuclear plants , so merely multiplying the probability to failure by the expected losses in case of failure does not work great.

More people die every year from coal mining accidents and because of the damage it does to your lungs than have died from nuclear accidents. How many civilians have died the Fukushima disaster? Exactly zero. How many people in Japan died from the tsunami? Thousands. The tsunami is was actually a much worse disaster than the nuclear accident, yet people are content to talk about how bad the nuclear accident was but not the tsunami.

Several hundred of the clean-up workers were exposed to radiation at Fukushima. The coolant systems failed and the pools were the radioactive waste were stored went dry. Time will tell how many of the clean-up folks will die of cancers induced by exposure to radioactivity. In Chernobyl several hundred of the worker who built the sarcophagus around the reactor remains died of cancer caused by the radioactivity. It is almost a sure thing.

ruveyn

No, however gas explosions tend to kill quite a lot of people. If the same restrictions were applied to a coal plant as to a nuclear plant then it might interest you to know that every coal plant in the world would be closing due to the amount of radiation that is released when the uranium in the coal goes up the chimney. Yeah, it's measured in parts per million but a coal plant burns a lot of coal and for the amount of electricity produced a coal plant produces a couple of orders of magnitude more radiation into the enviroment.

Also, dams failing tend to kill a lot of people if your looking at renewables (since dams are the only practical way of storing electricity)



Chernobyl was a disaster, however most people seem to think that the entire thing blew up, irradiated millions and left the surrounding area a barren wasteland. That view seems to be based on what anti nuclear protesters wish happened, since the Chernobyl plant was actually producing electricity until 2000, when it was finally decommissioned 15 years after the "Chernobyl disaster". The UN studies of the actual impact of Chernobyl have indicated that the death toll and number of people who have actually been exposed to clinically significant amounts of radiation are far less than you would think. Additionally, people have been living in the exclusion zone since the accident (against the law) and none appear to have died of radiation poisoning.

I don't think that the Japanese "got lucky" with Fukushima. That the plant did as well as it did despite being hit with an earthquake considerably larger than it was designed to cope with, followed by a tsunami larger than it's defences were designed is a testament to the engineering that went into it. Personally, I think that the biggest lesson to take away from it is that disaster planning should be more pessimistic than it was in Japan.



Personally, I think nuclear power from Uranium was the wrong approach and the only reason it was originally chosen over Thorium was that you could develop nuclear weapons from Uranium plants, but not Thorium. I would like to see a real effort being put into Thorium plants over Uranium, since they are fundamentally safe and don't really have a significant waste problem.

Fortunately, the spent fuel pool did not boil dry after all but that said, Tepco is making the job of moving the fuel out of there and placing it in the shared pool or dry storage a priority. They are building a crane now and plan to have it out of there by end of next year. Hopefully, nothing bad will happen before then. Workers at Fukushima should be taking precautions. They should have geiger counters to find out how high a radiation level is before entering. They can also take precautions like placing steel plates over some areas and staying in an area only a short amount of time. Also, many of the workers there are 50+, they figure why have people of childbearing age? The "bunny suits" and respirators they wear guard against radioactive dust but cannot shield against gamma rays at all. Some hot spots might be filled with water or sand or gravel.

I think that's an over-simplified view of nuclear reactor development. Our current reactors fission uranium-235 because that's the only naturally-occuring fissile isotope -- the other two possible nuclear fuels both require breeder reactors, which use uranium-238 by converting it into fissile plutonium-239, or use thorium by converting it into fissile uranium-233.

Here in Britain, most of our reactors use graphite moderator and CO2 coolant, and are indeed descended from bomb-factory reactor designs, but in the rest of the world most nuclear power stations use water-cooled and -moderated reactors. These are technologically descended from reactors designed for submarine propulsion.

http://atomicinsights.com/1995/12/press ... -subs.html

Speed the day. This probably will not happen in my lifetime (I am in my mid 70s) but a day will come when North America is paved over from coast to coast with thorium breeders and wave front reactors. The only thing we will be using oil for is as a chemical feed stock for complicated polymers. We will be free from the Curse of the Middle East and the Saudis can go drown in their oil. They will have to go back to breeding camels and screwing each other (instead of us).

ruveyn

and your point is??

in a liquid salt generator you dont have access to the uranium in any effective manner and it is inherently stable as any failure leads to cooldown and not a runaway reaction.

Oh, certainly that's over simplified, but I don't think it's necessarily wrong. Uranium reactors are simply the wrong approach to civil nuclear power. You can use them, and we have been doing for 50 years but they have a number of problems that Thorium based reactors simply do not have. Thorium fission is going to be the way forward, not Uranium.

I think most of the advantages of LFTR stem from the molten-salt concept, rather than the use of a thorium fuel cycle. After all, our existing light-water reactor technology can be modified to use thorium...

Molten salt is being considered as one of the Generation IV advanced designs. One problem I understand is that it is well, salty and will corrode just about any container. Perhaps later this century. India is also developing the thorium reactor. There are many problems with materials and such that need to be solved for these advanced designs.

For now, the new nuclear power stations being built are the Westinghouse AP1000 and the Areva EPR which are Generation III pressurized water reactors with enhanced safety features.

After Fukushima, I believe the boiling water reactor design may fall out of favor, though most of them in operation now are due to run for another 20 years.

There's the rub, though. We can't afford a major nuclear accident every couple of decades. Stupid and incompetent people get control of things, it's just a reality of the world. But I don't worry so much if they're running a wind farm. I worry only a little when they're running a hydro dam. I worry quite a lot when they're running a nuclear plant.

You have a point. Once the high tech installations move from the hands of first line engineer to the "suits" it is a downhill trip. The "suits" are more concerned with covering their hind quarters than in performing their functions properly. That is true for both the private world and the government world. There true enemy of social contentment are the "suits". They are incompetent, short sighted and swinish.

ruveyn

That's why it has to be controlled by regulations. It's all very well that engineers design increase safety measures but if we allow too much control in the hands of businessmen, they all too happy to cut down on safety minimize costs and increase profit.

Agreed. I think it's a function of organizational size. Once you hit a critical mass, everything goes bureaucratic and inefficient. If the organizations (private or public) running the plants could be kept small there might be less danger, but that's not the way of things - the way of things is consolidation into larger and larger organizations, whether in the private or public sphere.