Americans Favor Moratorium On New Nuclear Reactors 964
An anonymous reader writes "While a drop in public support for nuclear power would be expected after an incident like the Fukushima reactor crisis, the nuclear disaster in Japan has triggered a much stronger response among Americans. When Japan — the nation that President Obama held up as an example of safe nuclear power being used on a large-scale basis — is unable to effectively control its considerable downside, Americans are understandably leery about the same technology being used even more extensively in this nation. And safety concerns about the existing nuclear plants also deserve serious attention."
So uh (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing a large nuclear disaster has made people wary of nuclear power.. now that's just shocking!
All seriousness though, between the American media fear mongering and the fact that there is actually something to be afraid of, this isn't too surprising.
I still personally think that nuclear power is the best bet. I imagine (and this is an uneducated opinion) all the junk coal and oil plants pump out under regular circumstances is probably going to kill more people than the japan nuclear crisis over the long run, and alternative energy just isn't close enough for people to wait.
Re:So uh (Score:4, Interesting)
I still personally think that nuclear power is the best bet
For today probably, in the long term certainly not.
Re:So uh (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true. People don't realise it but when you are thinking about energy policy, you are making a 50-year bet. So now the bet looks something like that:
- there will be no oil
- there will be lots of coal
- there will be uranium
- there should be wind and sun
but also
- geothermal might become practical
- carbon sequestration might become practical
- solar cells might become more efficient
- most cars will be electric
- global warming is a threat
- oil/gas producers are not always nice nations.
So demand in electricity will go massively up as oil is phased out. But you don't want to release too much CO2. Biofuels are probably not a good idea. So you are left, now with two possible strategies:
- use coal as a stopgap for renewables/fusion
- use nuclear as a stopgap for renewable/fusion
- maybe gas is an option. If you don't mind dealing with bloody tyrants.
If you believe in climate change, you will go down the nuclear route. Unless you are so committed against nuclear power that coal is the only option no matter what (Germany, a very, very green country battles against carbon caps in the EU, because they know nuclear is politically toxic and coal is their only option -- in my opinion this is crazy stupid).
Of course you must develop all alternatives as much as you can. This is the only long-term solution, but in energy, this means 40 years. And elections are every 4...
Re: (Score:3)
I think your parent was alluding to the current trend of using land that would otherwise be used for food production being used for fuel production. I agree with this sentiment, but not that biofuels are not a good idea.
Growing oil algae in saltwater ponds in the desert is a great example of a biofuel that not only doesn't take land away from food, it doesn't even use a food crop.
Re:So uh (Score:5, Insightful)
The food issue isn't one of production but of (lack of) governments.
A lot of those starving people in Africa are living in what used to be THE (not just the, THE) breadbasket of the continent. Why are they starving in what should be the most productive areas of Africa? Because they'll get killed trying to farm the land or they were killed and some group that has no idea how to farm has been given their land.
Fix the governments and you fix the food problem.
Re:So uh (Score:4, Informative)
WEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLL not exactly
sure, the plants used to make the biofuel take in carbon, and then release it when the processed product -- biofuel -- is consumed..
but there's a lot of processing and transportation to get to that point, nevermind the carbon footprint of growing the stuff -- fertilizers, pesticides, planting and harvesting. all those things output co2 -- all those things consume energy. biofuel really doesn't actually produce much energy, if at all, when you take the totality of the picture into account
Re:So uh (Score:5, Interesting)
Coal releases more radiation in an average year then a nuke plant, releases more small particulate matter that causes lung disease, releases CO2 that correlates with global warming, and has killed far more more miners then have ever been killed by all nuclear power incidents combined.
Here's Seth Godin's simple post of the number of deaths per terrawatt hour of different generating technology:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/the-triumph-of-coal-marketing.html [typepad.com]
I work in computer security, and do risk assessment for a living, so I recognize the biases on this issue as similar to those in my day job. Coal related deaths are slow and silent(usually, though think of the number of mining related incidents you've heard of in the past year), nuke plant accidents are big, noisy, and unusual. Our biases are to be afraid of big noisy unusual things like nuke plants and terrorists, while ignoring the obvious things that are actually likely to kill us like auto accidents, heart disease, and to a much smaller extent, coal generation.
I live about 11 miles from a nuke plant, which happens to be the largest spent fuel holding facility in the nation. I bought this house knowing that, and and if there was a coal plant that far away I probably wouldn't have bought this house.
I'm totally in favor of them building 2 more nuke plants close to me as is planned. I'm also in favor of review of the safety systems of the older plants. Nuclear safety designes have gotten much better than they were in the 80s when construction stopped.
which kind of nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fusion is a great long term proposition, even if we never learn how to make a reactor other than the one we are orbiting, but I think we will. The thorium won't run out before we figure out fusion. But right now we need to be worried about if fossil fuels will run out before we get the thorium reactors built, not whether they will be prone to the same incidents seen in 30yr old reactors essentially designed as nuclear weapons refineries.
Best Bet? (Score:4, Informative)
Thing is, with nuclear, you don't want a bet, you need a sure thing, at least in safety. GE has lately been pointing out about the Mark I reactor design, that they've run for 40 years without a major mishap. That's with 23 in the US, and how many others abroad? Let's pretend in total there are 40 of them. Then of 40 Mark I reactors over 40 years only 6 have partially melted down! If we project that out to a century, there will only be a 37.5% failure rate for this design. What, you say they won't run for a century? But the NRC has recertified the plant of this design in Vermont for another 20 years, and issued that after the Japan meltdowns. Surely if they can recertify it now, they can do it twice more.
This is a design over which 3 top GE engineers resigned in the 70s, saying it was unsafe. The AEC at the same time considered ordering all Mark I plants shut down, but declined to because of the political implications for atomic power. And that containment vessel that's been leaking in the Japanese Mark 1s? In the US they're routinely packed with 5 times the spent fuel they were engineered to hold safely, while in Japan they are only at 2-3 times engineered capacity.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Re:So uh (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor [wikipedia.org]
that's just one, that i particularly like -- there's PLENTY of new reactor designs that include a 'kill switch'. there's a bunch of different ways of doing it, too, either with control rods that are suspended above the reactor and if power fails, fall automatically, or in the IFR in the case of loss of power the liquid sodium would naturally heat up, which sucks more neutrons out of the fuel rods (not exactly but near enough for nontechnical crap yeah..) -- basically, if things go wrong, the coolant being used actually becomes a big ol' control rod when it gets too hot and stops reactions, naturally without any human guidance. Oh, and the coolant system is designed so that during loss of power, the coolant (liquid sodium here) will continue to circulate and cool things down for quite a while (and hopefully long enough to avoid a shutdown, but failing that the coolant will get hot and the core reactions shut down).
Seriously, we've got 40 years since TMI was built -- we've got this shit figured out. You don't KNOW about it because "the public hates nookyoular!" and politicians shut it down. constantly. clinton killed the IFR, last I heard GE was shopping some drop-in reactors of a more advanced design than we had back in the '90s.. to the Chinese. Basically just a big ol' box that you drop into an existing coal power plant -- remove coal furnace, replace with nuclear furnace, leave existing steam turbines in place
Re:So uh (Score:5, Informative)
According to New Scientist, coal kills about 13,000 Americans per annum. In a chart in their most recent edition, coal is by far the most lethal power source per billion GWh generated.
Re:So uh (Score:5, Insightful)
The statistical comparison to fossil fuels is completely off the scale. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill 1 million people each year (primarily by inducing lung cancer - basically the same mode of death as the majority of the deaths attributed to Chernobyl). That's like 250 Chernobyls every year. Yet people want to hold off on nuclear plants because "they're too dangerous" when the only viable alternative is more coal plants. It's madness.
And for the folks who say that average statistics aren't important, you have to look at what the worst-case potential devastation is, the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure [wikipedia.org]. Chernobyl was pretty much a worst-case nuclear accident (active core completely exposed to the environment accompanied by a fire and a government which disregarded the safety of nearby residents), and Banqiao was much, much worse. So by those folks' reasoning, we should be getting rid of hydro in favor of nuclear.
Basically people interact with water, hunger, and disease every day, they're not freaked out by the prospect of death by dam failure. Radiation on the other hand is something they don't deal with every day (or at least they don't think they do, as they eat a banana split on their granite counter-top after getting home on a transatlantic flight from Europe). The mere mention of the R-word even with no deaths attached completely freaks them out.
Re:So uh (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find disconcerting about the whole thing is not so much that a given 60's era reactor design didn't cope all that well when exposed to atypically gigantic earthquake and tsunami conditions; but that plant HQ has, apparently, been slimy and dubiously transparent about their somewhat cavalier risk management practices for decades, they've only just had it bite them public-ally.
The "zOMG, nuclear power always causes 3-eyed rats and flipper babies made of pure cancer!" brigade is out to lunch. However, unfortunately enough, the "nuclear power has the potential to be safe; but its operation always seems to end up in the hands of penny-pinching scumweasels who do their best to fail to live up to that promise." is more history than hypothesis.
Until the engineers manage the historic leap of creating a design that managers can't fuck up, certain concerns will remain entirely valid(to be fair, most of those concerns validated, often with grotesque callousness, on a daily basis in other forms of power generation, just ask a coal miner...); but it is true that nuclear designs tend to underperform their theoretical engineering maximums for reasons that come down to frankly untrustworthy management.
Re: (Score:3)
What I find disconcerting about the whole thing is not so much that a given 60's era reactor design didn't cope all that well when exposed to atypically gigantic earthquake and tsunami conditions
Indeed to the contrary, it worked well. And the plant management, whether you consider it competent or not, is dealing with the problem.
but it is true that nuclear designs tend to underperform their theoretical engineering maximums for reasons that come down to frankly untrustworthy management.
I imagine the real reason is that the theoretically engineering maximums were too optimistic.
Re:So uh (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with Anrego here.
As a psychology major with, of course, an interest in sociology and human behavior in general, I don't really watch the "news". I watch the behavior of the presenters. I notice the emphasis that's added to certain words or syllables, the unnecessary dramatic pauses, the music & sound effects that are used, the flashy graphics, etc etc.. and then I think of the general uneducated public that's watching this.
It breaks my heart in a way, to be honest. Our (or "U.S." for those elsewhere) media, and interest groups, are riding on the coat tails of the very real tragedy. Then turning on themselves (eg the "human shield" tripe) between the FUD.
That's to be expected, I suppose, but it's why I turned (long ago) to the Internet to get real news. Thank goodness for international news sources and multi-lingual support.
Of course the general public is afraid of tsunamis and 9.0 earth quakes and vague, unnamed super disasters.
We need more high capacity power plants, and we need people to stop rejecting everything that's not a magic cure-all silver bullet because that's NEVER going to exist.
I've written this before my first cup of coffee this morning, so my apologies if this doesn't come across quite as clearly as we would all like. Now I have to get ready to go. You folks have a great day.
Re:So uh (Score:4, Insightful)
The best bet is actually to start saving and lower consumption over all.
That may be the best way, but I wouldn't bet on it ever happening. A solution that relies on people to conciously deprive themselves of something for the good of everyone is bound to fail in todays society.
Re: (Score:3)
tell me again why you trust people ever at all again to do the right thing
Because society is based on trust, and while we are free to be cautious, no matter what, we will have to trust someone. You'll either be trusting the alternative energy people, the coal people, or the nuclear people. Maybe read more about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society [wikipedia.org] and then tell me again why I can't ever trust anyone at all again to do the right thing.
better spend in alternatives
I've read a reasonable amount on this, and I've yet to hear anyone suggest any alternative power, that could be done today, and be used to replace t
Re:So uh (Score:4, Interesting)
Shit dude, I did not know that!
Hey, you need to go and update the article Energy in Germany [wikipedia.org] and its sources.
Besides that, you might want to read up on Electric power transmission [wikipedia.org] which was T.Boone Pickens biggest problem.
You also might want to read up on other differences between these 2 countries. Such as Germanys population density of 229 people per square kilometer, versus the United States 33 people per square km.
You might be interested to know that Germany imports most of its energy from Russia.
You might be interested to know that the US is the largest producer of wind power.
You might be interested to know that the US is the largest producer of geothermal power.
You might be interested to know that the US is the largest producer of biomass power.
You might be interested to know a lot, as it seems you don't know much on this subject. Though, granted I didn't know that much about Germany, but it only took a few seconds to read about why it's not like Germany and faces its own problems.
Thanks for making me learn about Germany!
Re: (Score:3)
And on peak days, lots of wind and lots of sun, we do over 60%.
So? How much of that power does Germany actually use? This is the big problem with wind and to a lesser extent solar. It's a sporadic power source and hence, unreliable. Here, we have something like a factor of two difference between average power generation and maximum power generation. German can't just flip its coal burning plants on and off.
That much wind and solar means that Germany has to rely on external power production (such as nuclear and coal plants in France and Russia) in order to have a rel
Re: (Score:3)
One could spin the same question in the other direction:
So there was a reactor running in a zone known to be exposed to tsunamis, which was not even designed to widthstand a tsunami? And the first tsunami to ever hit it managed to take out the cooling power and the backup cooling power too with one stroke? And the third cooling system managed to keep going for how long? 1.5 hrs? We have a flawly designed reactor at a flawly chosen place. We have been so lucky that nothing happened for 40 years.
What happened? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What happened? Free enterprise happened. Deregulation happened. Cosy relationships between Industry and regulators happened. Marketism happened.
As more details emerge, one thing is becoming clear: This accident did not happen as a result of any tsunami. The tsunami merely kicked in the door of a rotten structure which swiftly collapsed. Cost cutting, poor safety, inadequate oversight, etc, etc; These are the real causes of the radiation leaks happening at Fukushima at present.Some very dirty laundry is bein
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
As more details emerge, one thing is becoming clear: This accident did not happen as a result of any tsunami. The tsunami merely kicked in the door of a rotten structure which swiftly collapsed. Cost cutting, poor safety, inadequate oversight, etc, etc; These are the real causes of the radiation leaks happening at Fukushima at present.Some very dirty laundry is being aired in very public view.
Wow, you're just full of crap today, aren't you?
This accident did happen as a result of a Tsunami. Giant freakin' wave of ocean water shredded the reactor buildings and destroyed the control equipment. Cost cutting, poor safety, inadequate oversight, etc, etc, are not to blame. All of the extra money thrown at the reactors, all of the additional safety features (which were by the way, far from poor), and all of the oversight in the world would not have stopped a nuclear plant that had just been through a NINE POINT FREAKIN' ZERO earthquake, followed by a TWELVE METER WAVE OF SALT-WATER SMASHING THE BUILDINGS from breaking. Seriously! Get a clue. Yes, deregulation for things like public utilities is bad - it never turns out well, but absolving the worst natural disaster in history of any guilt in the devastation it caused? You're delusional.
Re: (Score:3)
Quick addendum - I'm not saying that deregulation doesn't lead to problems (I did say it's bad). It does lead to reduced safety, increased costs, politicians and inspectors getting their pockets lined to ignore safety issues, and more. I'm just saying that even if those things had not been problems, this still would have happened, and claiming otherwise is just pants-on-head retarded.
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell me, since you don't come out and say it exactly but your post seems to imply that a public entity could run a Nuclear power station more safely. I don't think this is true because they will be subject to the same fiscal pressure a private corporation is.
Case 1: Chernobyl, was run by a communist government. They cut corners on the desing and materials used to build the plant, and finally on training and staffing to run it. The result was the worst accident in the history of nuclear power generation. Why did they cut corners? Well obviously they wanted to direct those resources elsewhere, it makes not difference whether it was to some officials pocket or to bread for orphans.
Case 2: New Orleans and Katrina. The Army Core of Engineers had informed the city government that the levies needed to be repaired in places and that they needed to be re-enforced and made higher in general. The local government was aware of this for years prior to the disaster. There was not even a project going to complete the work. Why? Because they were spending the tax revenue elsewhere (largely social programs).
If you put a public body in charge of plant maintenance they same thing will happen, managers will always place some perceived need of today over mitigation of some risk in the future. There is always going to be pressure to minimize the cost of operating these plants and its always going to push operation below the margin of safety.
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
All it takes is one accident, and you've got a disaster on your hands.
Eh? The reactors at the Fukushima no.1 complex were hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, THEN a 12m high tsunami, and THEN several explosions. So far, the only injuries from radiation have been two workers who received surface skin burns to their legs (on the severity of a bad sunburn) because they ignored their dosimeter warning alarm.
The Fukushima incident has shown that even with multiple massive accidents, even old designs hold up pretty damn well.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Insightful)
Cancer doesn't tend to kill you the moment the first neutron damages your DNA. It takes a while.
What, do you think the primary risk with nuclear power is that there will be an atom-bomb style explosion? The risk of a nuclear explosion exists (has happened on multiple occasions) but those are instant blasts of radiation that are localized, with very little physical blast damage.
But no, it's not about the instant deaths. It's the increase in cancer deaths and the billions of years of contamination of the nearby land, and the worldwide reach of the fallout that people don't like. If a wind farm gets hit by a tsunami in Massachusetts, you won't die of cancer in 20 years in Iowa.
Re: (Score:3)
If a wind farm gets hit by a tsunami in Massachusetts, you won't die of cancer in 20 years in Iowa.
I like the idea of not dying of cancer in 20 years in Iowa, but I still do not know how to create a tsunami in Massachusetts.... :-(
Re: (Score:3)
Cancer doesn't tend to kill you the moment the first neutron damages your DNA. It takes a while.
What, do you think the primary risk with nuclear power is that there will be an atom-bomb style explosion? The risk of a nuclear explosion exists (has happened on multiple occasions) but those are instant blasts of radiation that are localized, with very little physical blast damage.
But no, it's not about the instant deaths. It's the increase in cancer deaths and the billions of years of contamination of the nearby land, and the worldwide reach of the fallout that people don't like. If a wind farm gets hit by a tsunami in Massachusetts, you won't die of cancer in 20 years in Iowa.
However, if a coal plant in Massachusetts _doesn't_ get hit by any accident, you just might die of cancer in Iowa.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is pretty typical of how most people analyze things. Unfortunately, it's wrong, as it doesn't take into account opportunity costs [wikipedia.org].
You can't compare the consequences of nuclear power to a world where there are no cancer deaths, no radioactive "contamination", and no worldwide "fallout". Getting rid of nuclear power would not result in such a world because nuclear provides a significant portion of the world's electricity. Get rid of nuclear power and the need for that electricity would still remain. To do a proper comparison, you have to consider what the alternative choices are. Right now the only viable replacement for nuclear power is coal. Oil is too valuable as a transport fuel, gas is difficult to capture and transport, hydro is pretty much tapped out, geothermal seems to be stuck, and I wish solar and especially wind could provide base load but they can't. So the primary alternative to nuclear is coal.
Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive uranium and thorium. Consequently, coal plants pump more uranium into our atmosphere as part of their ash than our entire nuclear industry uses as fuel. Coal emissions are estimated to kill 1 million people each year worldwide, primarily through lung cancer deaths. They are (now) largely responsible for the mercury contamination of our oceans which makes certain fish too dangerous to eat. And the emissions from a coal plant in Massachusetts spread throughout the entire world, just like the fallout from a nuclear accident.
So it isn't simply a matter of avoiding nuclear because of its dangers. It's a matter of using nuclear because it's considerably less dangerous than its primary alternative - coal.
Similarly, if you're going to consider every little negative consequence of using nuclear power, you have to do the same for wind. No the wind turbine in Massachusetts won't kill someone in Iowa if it's destroyed by a hurricane. But to replace a single 3-4 GW nuclear plant's annual power generation with wind, you'll need to build about 7,000 turbines (2 MW turbines * 25% capacity factor * 7000 turbines = 3.5 GW). Each turbine needs about 100-200 tons of steel [google.com], so all-told you'll need ~1 million tons of steel. To provide that steel, coal needs to be burned to melt the iron (either directly or via coal plants producing electricity) and provide the carbon to turn it into steel. Consequently, the coal emissions needed to build those 7,000 turbines in Massachusetts will cause people in Iowa to die of cancer in 20 years.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Informative)
You made me curious.
The standard steel production process takes .6 tons of coke coal per ton of steel produced. http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/coal-steel-statistics/ [worldcoal.org]
And a 3.5 GW coal plant burns about 1.4 million million tons of coal a year.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/question481.htm [howstuffworks.com]
So building your wind mills will take at minimum the same amount of coal as running a coal plant for 6 months, just for the steel. I just thought that was interesting.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ten thousands (maybe even hundred thousands) of people were evacuated for a long time (will they actually ever be able to get to their homes in their life?). I call this a disaster too.
Re: (Score:3)
Just not well enough.
Re: (Score:3)
No, it was not hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The earthquake was roughly 150 miles away.
Are you completely insane or what?
Would you care to stay up to date which what is going on in Japan you would not write such bullshit.
Your parents point is completely valid. A single event, the tsunami, caused 3 reac
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what would happen if such disasters had hit a dam or a thermal gas/coal plant...
The massive environmental devastation that resulted would once again be hushed up and glossed over by the majority of the media, just like these [celsias.com] ones [popularmechanics.com] were [wikipedia.org]. Of course, they didn't even have a 9.0 earthquake or a tsunami, just some incompetence, bad safety protocols, and much looser restrictions on how they store and treat their toxic waste products.
Re:What happened? (Score:5, Informative)
No it does not remain dangerous for billions of years. We had a word for things with half lives measured in billions of years: "stable". Something with such a long half-life will have very little radioactivity.
Re: (Score:3)
You can say this about anything.
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of super-men do you expect to design, build, run, secure, and maintain these plants? All it takes is one accident, and you've got a disaster on your hands.
The kind of supermen who have run hundreds of plants for decades without major incident. All it takes is "one accident", which aside from Chernobyl, hasn't happened yet.
The fuel itself is dangerous, and remains dangerous for billions of years.
While technically right (after all, the end decay product for most uranium is lead, which is a toxic metal without a half-life), it is a remarkably ignorant statement. The radioactivity of a rod drops dramatically just in the first few weeks out of the reactor. Then as I understand it, most of the remaining radioactivity is in isotopes with half-lives of decades to centuries. For the projections for Yucca Mountain, they expected containment for ten thousand years to be adequate to get rid of most radioactivity from nuclear rods.
But there's no need for containment on the time scale of billions of years. No plutonium isotope will last that long. And you'd see a large drop in uranium 235 (which after all has a half-life of about 700 million years) and even a notable drop in uranium 238. My bet is that someone would recycle the nuclear rods in the next few centuries rather than leave us with a pollution problem.
Re: (Score:3)
The fuel itself is dangerous, and remains dangerous for billions of years.
No it @#(*& doesn't. Why is it dangerous? Because it's radioactive. If it's radioactive. YOU CAN USE IT FOR SOMETHING.
It's too dangerous to "use it for something".
Right now we had some retarded moratoriums on fuel reprocessing. For as huge of a push as we make for 'recycling' we don't recycle nuclear waste.
Perhaps you could expand on how you "recycle" uranium and plutonium in such a way that reduces its radioactivity? All you can do is increase the rate at which it decays, which is a dangerous (and depending on how fast you increase the rate, highly destructive) process.
Unless you are aware of a method by which you can remove excess nucleons from an atom without an accompanying release of radiation. I'm sure the Nobel committee would be eager to hear from you.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not too dangerous to use for something because the radioactivity is very useful. The US has archaic laws that prevent spent fuel in the US from being processed. France has no such laws, produces a large percentage of their power from nuclear and has very little unusable waste. Oh, you probably want a citation [wsj.com].
Re:What happened? (Score:4, Informative)
When he talks about recycling, he's not talking about reducing the radioactivity of uranium and plutonium - you want those to be radioactive. He's talking about removing the neutron poisons and fission products from the fuel elements, and returning the fuel to the core for more energy production. A nuclear reactor only uses about 1% of the fuel in an assembly before the reaction is no longer sustainable due to neutron poisons. This allows you to get at the other ~99%, increasing efficiency and reducing waste.
Removing the trans-uranics and fission products allows you to separate the high-level wastes that decay much faster (tens to hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands) from the usable fuel assemblies that can undergo critical assembly to be useful again. Also, it gives us access to lots of materials useful for medical imaging and radiotherapy.
Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing [wikipedia.org]
America's Aging Nuclear Plants (Score:5, Insightful)
With something like 20% of the US's electricity presently coming from nuclear power and *all* of those reactors approaching or already past their lifespan, all those Americans need to decide what exactly they want to replace them with.
Re:America's Aging Nuclear Plants (Score:5, Interesting)
Something better?
You know, maybe the problem isn't that there's something unsafe about nuclear power, but rather there's something unsafe about letting private industry run nuclear power. Now that it's coming out how there were "cost-cutting" measures taken with the cooling systems in Japan which directly led to loss of containment and that safety measures in some cases were completely ignored because "it was too expensive", I think this is a very instructive moment for us.
Maybe, when it comes to the really big stuff, like nuclear power and maybe the entire energy system of a nation, it's inherently unsafe to put it in the hands of private industry. Health care comes to mind as well. Maybe the best thing we can do is take the profit-motive out of it.
Re:America's Aging Nuclear Plants (Score:5, Informative)
Also if you've ever been exposed to anything to do with engineering, there's always cost cutting. You know the entire incident in Fukushima could have been contained if they built a giant lead dome over the city too right? But that option was knocked down as too cost prohibitive. But on a more serious note there's always an extra redundant system that could have been put in, the design scope could always have included securing against a mag 9 earthquake instead of the magnitude 7.9. There's always room for an extra quadruple redundant cooling system, but in the end cost cutting does feed in the ultimate ability to build a project. If we build anything to withstand everything it is often no longer economical to build it.
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Aww, jealous that you couldn't blame government faster?
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You know, maybe the problem isn't that there's something unsafe about nuclear power, but rather there's something unsafe about letting private industry run nuclear power
Look at what they did with two space shuttles when cost was no issue and they paid $10K for every fastener.
Any engineering project that gets beyond a certain size inevitably becomes a farce, because the simple laws that govern us (stupid primate behavior) begin to dominate the system. I see it all the time in both public and private sectors, always always always - that the wrong people claw themselves into management and make bad decisions.
Re: (Score:3)
Thank you for taking the bait.
Are you saying that nuclear energy is as complex and inherently dangerous as manned space flight? If so, then we definitely shouldn't be doing it.
Since we don't have any data on "private industry" pioneering manned space flight, there's no way we can compare now, is there? How do you know there wouldn't have been half a dozen shuttle disasters if private industry and the
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The people I don't mind. It's the corporations that are the problem. They are single-minded golems that only know how to feed themselves.
I'll trust a person every time to an entity that is designed only to profit. People have altruistic motives like the engineers in Japan who went back to try to fix the reactors while knowing that they'd be dead men walking. A corporation cannot do that. It cannot choose to sacrifice, to take less in
Re:America's Aging Nuclear Plants (Score:5, Interesting)
Replace? That's funny. The operators are going to run these plants until they fall apart, because they *can't* replace them. Then we'll have some real fun.
Vermont Yankee, which has been the source of detected radioactive tritium leaks, has had it's NRC license extended by another 20 years last week because it provides 35% of the State of Vermont's energy, and amounts to almost 72% of Vermont's power generation.
It is also a BWR plant like the ones in Fukishimia, built in 1972. It is currently running at 120% of it's original licensed thermal capacity under an NRC-licensed Extended Power Uprate.
Yeah, we don't need to build new stuff - we'll just wait until the 40-year-old stuff completely falls apart and cannot be repaired.
Number (Score:5, Insightful)
While certainly worrisome, please keep in mind:
* Nobody has actually died from this incident yet. (Versus regular deaths in coal mines, etc.)
* The incident can be learned from and other reactors can be improved accordingly. (Again versus the situation in many coal mines, etc. which are unlikely to see any further improvement.) In fact, many claim the risks of these particular reactors were known but not acted upon, something which can be handled with stricter rules.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Something else to consider is that this is not a nuclear accident. This is not the result of poor design, protocol, or process.
It is the result of a fucking 9.0 Earthquake, which is almost unimaginable in its intensity and destructive power.
Re:Number (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the result of a 15 meter tsunami.
Remember, the plant weathered the quake just fine and its backup systems were running UNTIL the tsunami came along. This is really the bit that makes me facepalm over all the moratoriums on nuclear plants that are going on.
Yes, Germany, tsunami's are a huge problem for you.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, they said that nothing could ever happen to a western reactor, those are safe, and then something unexpected came up.
Now you say that Germany is safe from tsunamis, but something else might happen, that is also unexpected. And then it will be a huge problem considering how densely populated Germany is.
You see, a catastrophe is always something that was not expected. Otherwise it wouldn't be one.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately they also tell me that the standards of the time included being completely resistance to a magnitude 7.9 quake not one that was 30 times stronger like the one that hit.
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Poorly informed people, lead by sensationalist news stories, when asked leading questions, will give obvious answers.
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Wind / Solar along with NAS batteries -> http://www.ngk.co.jp/english/products/power/nas/index.html [ngk.co.jp] - really could handle our base load. Certainly the percentage that we in the US use nuclear for.
Not only that, we should be looking at new computerized internet electric meters, and laws that would require utilities to pay fair market value for electricity produced by small private generators. Little 5KW vertical turbines everywhere. Then, just put huge battery installations where the old coal plants are, and we are on the road to green energy.
Not today obviously, but it would grow. And new nuke plants would just not be needed. At least Uranium water/water plants. Thorium / Pebble Bed Reactors might be an option for the future.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but if you think Wind/Solar can be used for baseline power, you're on drugs.
You have NO idea exactly how huge the battery capacity you're suggesting is. Nor how expensive and high-maintenance such an array is. And if you're adverse to the environmental impact of a few tons of recyclable nuclear waste, how adverse are you to the environmental impact of a few megatons of battery medium?
Please put some thought into what you're trying to suggest.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
With sufficiently massive and widespread deployment of wind/solar, they *become* the base load,
This right here shows that you don't even know what base load is.
You also don't understand that wind/solar cannot be depended on for always-on power generation. PERIOD.
Solar panel and wind farm facilities are space prohibitive and have operational windows drastically affected by local climate.
Solar/Salt facilities are highly dependent on local climate and also space prohibitive.
Hydro-based power in this country is about as far along as it's going to get. As it is also hamstrung by factions of the environm
The Bad PR is Unfortunate (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
How do you handle the nuclear waste they produce?
What are you doing when the reactors go out of service?
And what is the worst case scenario of that technology?
How about nuclear tests? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about nuclear tests? (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile, on this side of the pond (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you sensationalist news! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. Due to the news media's disgusting exaggeration of the event, , and the 60+ years of "all radiation = bad = kill you dead", a bunch of people who don't understand a thing about nuclear power generation from the 60's, let alone modern reactor technologies are going to browbeat the power industry into the least effectual, most expensive forms of power generation. And it'll be the power industry's fault when power prices skyrocket. It'll also be the power industry's fault when these sources of power fail at maintaining baseline power levels.
Way to fucking go. Decision by committee of imbeciles.
Postcard from Future (Score:5, Funny)
Until we get the solar thing figured out, they recommend nuclear power; just try not to use 40-year-old reactors that are built on the ocean and within 150 miles of a major faultline.
Re: (Score:3)
That will change (Score:4, Interesting)
How much uranium is there anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read contradictory statements regarding this topic.
If the stuff is going to become scarce in 150-200 years or so (these estimates are at current consumption levels but do they really know for sure I doubt it) then I really don't see the point in developing another dead end infrastructure. Esp one that while can be very safe, rarely is in practice (for the usual nontechnical reasons - save money, cut corners, unwisely build in an earthquake zone, ad nauseum).
I mean sure - that's great for us as individuals (until an earthquake strikes that is), but for once let's not foist a new set of problems on our grandchildren.
Thorium, and Breeding. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I decided to try to start learning about nuclear power a little over a year ago, driven mostly by concerns about waste disposal, and safety.
One of the things I've learned is that current reactor designs only use a tiny, tiny percent of fuel potential of the Uranium - basically, about 1 percent.
So, one option is that we keep using the current fuel cycle for another 150-200 years, then when Uranium gets scarce, we start using breeder reactors, which 'unlock' the fuel potential of the remaining 99% of the Uranium which remains in our 'spent fuel' and 'depleted uranium' tailings.
With breeder reactor technology, after extracting 1% of the energy for about 250 years (we've already been using reactors for over 50 years, so the clock has already started), we should be able to get something like 99 * 250 years times more energy (assuming energy consumption levels remain about the same; that's a dubious assumption, but provides at least a good starting point; it also assumes the breeders can consume the full 99% of remaining U-238, which might not, in practice, actually be true - there might be some 'losses' in the process, but we should at least be able to extract a large percentage of what remains).
So, that might be something like 20,000 more years worth of power from that Uranium.
Then there's Thorium. Thorium is a metal which is 4 or 5 times more abundant in the earth's crust than Uranium is. Right now, Thorium is a mostly useless 'waste' product from mining operations extracting other rare-earth elements (like Neodymium which is used for very strong permanent magnets in high-tech equipment, including those little earbud speakers for your phone/mp3 player, some designs of electric wind turbines, hard drives [I think], or anything which needs very strong magnets).
Thorium would most likely be used in a type of reactor called a LFTR (most folks pronounce that as "lifter"), which is the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. A LFTR very efficiently burns the Thorium, extracting virtually 100% of the available energy, so we should have something on the order of 100,000's of years of energy supply using Thorium.
In the end though, we'll probably be using fusion power long before those eventualities. It's hard to say for sure, but I would think that at most, we'll only be using fission reactors for another 100-200 years anyhow.
A link for info about LFTR (Score:3)
I forgot to include a link I was intending to, in my previous post.
If you would like more information about Thorium reactors, check out:
http://www.energyfromthorium.com [energyfromthorium.com].
Better workers (Score:3)
Germany too (Score:3)
Speaking to people around me it's clear very few people actually know anything about nuclear power, outside of what they pick up in the 6 o'clock news. Most have no idea that there's even more than one type of reactor, much less that there's some pretty significant safety differences between them. It just amazes me that in an age where nicely summarized information on any topic is just a few clicks away people don't at least invest one or two hours of their lives to educate themselves before they form an opinion on something. If someone knows even just a little about pebble bed reactors, nuclear reprocessing, molten salt reactors, safety deficiencies in the old Mark I light water reactors at Fukushima etc, and they're still against nuclear power then I can respect that. Just make an effort, that's not too much to ask is it?
Re: (Score:3)
<sarcasm>Yeah, that pebble bed reactor in Jülich worked just fine, as did the one in Hamm.</sarcasm>
Government lies make this discussion difficult. (Score:5, Insightful)
I like nuclear power. I think it is safer than belching radioactivity into the air from burning coal. However, nuclear power has a long track record of official deception and lies that will make it harder to have a reasonable discussion about moving ahead with safe and zero carbon nuclear options in the future.
new and safe VS old and dodgy (Score:5, Insightful)
The alternative is to switch them off, and go back to using oil and gas from foreign sources and coal fired stations. While people *think* nuclear is unsafe, coal mining is *proven* to be unsafe. Just consider the number of miners killed every year.
Somehow, public opinion has managed to come up with the worst possible solution, by not thinking through the consequences of the soundbite press and media and knee-jerk decisions it promotes.
I am not in favor of restricting new reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
I am in favor of making the people that run them directly responsible for the consequences. They can't be allowed to profit and then go "aw gee what happened?".
The nuclear safety paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that opponents of nuclear power create a bit of a paradox by opposing *new* nuclear power plants:
By opposing the construction of new nuclear power plants, whose designs benefit from decades of experience gained with older designs, knowledge about their failure modes, ways to improve cooling with passive cooling systems, etc, you effectively act to keep older, less safe nuclear power plants in operation longer.
So, would you rather be living near a newer, safer plant, or an older, slightly less safe (but still, mostly safe - it took a massive earthquake and tsunami to take out those old Mk 1's in Fukushima) plant?
That said, I certainly think we should (and I'm positive we will) do extensive investigation and analysis of the problems at Fukushima Daiichi, find what lessons can be learned from that, and apply those lessons to both existing, and new reactors.
But it's worth repeating: opposing new nuclear will likely have the effect of keeping older nuclear online longer than it would if there were new nuclear plants built to replace the old ones.
Bleeding Obvious (Score:3)
I hate to state the bleeding obvious, but it seems that I must.
Why would you want more nuclear power? There is only so much uranium to be mined. It really doesn't matter how long estimates say the uranium reserves will last, there is still only so much to be had, and then what? Eventually, we'll run out of uranium, just as we'll eventually run out of oil and coal. Sure, we'll have more some day, if you care to wait millions or billions of years. Frankly, I don't have the time.
The best source of power beats us on the head every day, the Sun. We should be seriously investing in solar, wind, and tidal for power generation. These sources are not likely to run out for the lifetime of the planet, and that's a damned site better than relying on finite resources that take millions of years to replenish.
NOTE: There are more ways to use solar power than just photovoltaic cells.
9.0 Quake, Tsunami are what we need to fear (Score:3)
Not the nuclear reactors....
Here in the USA, we've been relatively isolated from most natural disasters, and most man-made disasters.
Think about it: How disrupted would your life be if planes were bombing the crap out of your country, and there was random gunfire in the streets all the time?
On the west coast, there's more of a building code, but let's face it. If New York City were hit by a 9.0 earthquake, nuclear reactors would be the last thing we'd be worried about. Loss of life would be in the millions if the quake hit during the day. There's not a single skyscraper in Manhattan built to withstand that kind of shock. Try an imagine 9/11, but laying waste to the entire island. There's what, 20 million in Manhattan during the day? You're looking at at least 10 million dead. From the quake.
Then if there's a Tsunami to follow, there could be another 10 million (at least) killed from that. Because DC, Baltimore, Phildelphia Newark, and Boston would also be affected. The Northeast has a lot of major cities within a close proximity, and absolutely no building code regarding quake management.
And yet Americans are worried about the reactor? Ignorance truly is bliss. Americans have NO CLUE about what's really going to kill them. We are a fortunate lot to live in a politically and geologically stable environment. But neither of those conditions are going to last forever.
YAY!!! Finally - no more coal! (Score:4)
If we're going to start making decisions on what kind of energy plant we build based on hos much radiation it throws off, doesn't that mean we'll stop building coal burning plants [scientificamerican.com]?
Re:Time for a serious effort on renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
moratorium, until we have at least a 20% wind power and 10% solar power in the energy mix.
What? Do you think that a truck rolls up and sets up the ACME Nuclear Power Station and they're rock'in? It takes years for a nuke plant to come on line. In the meantime, the solar and wind and whatever will have to be developed and implemented.
This just disgusts me. The ignorant public (who can blame them since all their info is from TV and shit websites) will keep nuclear on the sidelines for decades.
Re: (Score:3)
Why do you think nuclear shouldn't be on the sidelines? As it stands today, it requires tons of extremely toxic substances to be housed inside a super-heated pressure vessel. It seems like a recipe for disaster. There are safer designs that basically can't melt down (like molten salt reactors where the core is already liquid and liquid metal cooled fast reactors where fission essentially stops inside the reactor if it gets too hot) but they seem too expensive to be viable.
Re:Time for a serious effort on renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that mostly makes them expensive is the ten years of approval process and the five years of meetings you have to have with the NIMBYs to eventually get to build one.
The only way to convince investors to sign up for all that crap is to promise them a massive return on their money, ie. the debt repayment ends up costing you an order of magnitude more than the sum of the materials/labor needed to actually build it. See Economics of Nuclear Power Plants [wikipedia.org]
Still, you could be supplying the entire country with cheap energy for less than the cost of the banking bailout. Imagine what that could do for the economy...(as opposed to giving the bankers a taste for free money which will just make them do it all over again).
Re: (Score:3)
Because it's safer than what we do now.
http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/2e5d4dcc4fb511e0ae0c000255111976/comments/2e70ae944fb511e0ae0c000255111976 [ibm.com]
We favor solutions that spew millions of tons of crap in the air that indirectly kills a lot of people all over the world, or deep underground, over solutions that very rarely spew a little crap in the air and kill a small number of people right nearby. We prefer this only because one is dramatic.
Personally, given that we need t
Re: (Score:3)
Some of the safer designs are already here.
The ABWR's inside-the-turbine-building 20MW gas turbine backup generator would have prevented the extended station blackout that caused the problems at Fukushima.
The ESBWR (under regulator review) would not need any backup power - the most it would have required is a plain old fire truck after 72 hours to refill the isolation condenser pools. (Note: These pools are not directly in contact with any nuclear materials, so can safely boil.)
The Westinghouse AP1000 (un
Re:Time for a serious effort on renewables (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, if not a THICK layer of red tape, SSTAR [wikipedia.org] and HPM [wikipedia.org] type reactors could be deployed exactly like that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. There hasn't been a new nuclear installation in this country in more than 30 years, to my knowledge.
What should be banned is light water reactors. Those were NEVER a good idea for non-ship based reactors. Instead, we should be building hundreds of pebble bed reactors, whose safety systems neither have nor require moving parts, and can in fact be safely run for decades with no human intervention. Have a few breeder
Re:Time for a serious effort on renewables (Score:4, Informative)
All joking aside, I keep hearing about "pebble bed reactors" as being the Power thats Going to Save the World.
But it's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) that nobody on the planet has yet succeeded in building one that's actually worked, let alone a commercially successful one.
Re:Time for a serious effort on renewables (Score:5, Insightful)
In the meantime the coal reactors will keep on pumping more radiation into the air than a nuclear station ever would. And mercury, etc.
Re:Time for a serious effort on renewables (Score:5, Interesting)
Those would be the Canadian style reactors, which aren't physically capable of melting down. (Well, technically with a lot of outside assistance and deliberate sabotage, you could force one to melt down, but you'd probably die in the process.)
Unfortunately, our public are just as stupid and uneducated as the American public, and are screaming and pointing at exaggerations of the problems in Japan, and claiming them as proof that all Nuclear everything is bad and going to kill us all, despite any actual facts they might encounter. There are people campaigning to have the Canadian Nuclear plants shut down before "an earthquake causes them to explode just like in Japan", despite:
1) They're on the freakin' Canadian Shield, the largest, most solid tectonic plate on the planet, and we just don't _GET_ earthquakes here past about a 3.0, and those are not centered here, they're from way the hell off at the edges of the plate, usually causing mudslides in Quebec.
2) The reactor design is completely different, and, as you mentioned, the control rods are kept in place by the electric power produced - thus, a failure results in immediate safe shutdown.
3) It wasn't the damn earthquake that broke the reactors. The earthquake didn't damage much at all there, except probably knocking a lot of things off shelves, and giving a few people heart attacks. The damage was when more water than is found in the great lakes got dumped on the reactor buildings and shredded them. Again, our reactors are not anywhere near the ocean, and the great lakes don't have enough water to do that kind of damage, unless you found a way to take the entirety of Lake Erie, and dump it all on the plant at once.
The worst part? People screaming about how dangerous nuclear reactors are, are actually the reason they're still as dangerous as they are. They lobby politicians to make new laws banning research into improving the reactors, and then we're stuck with 1970s technology producing tonnes of toxic waste, because an "environmentalist" screamed "WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" and got improvements banned/restricted. 'cause nothing says "I'm thinking of the children" quite as well as sticking them with a massive pile of radioactive waste that didn't need to be there, if it hadn't been for some moronic busybody declaring that things were bad.
Re: (Score:3)
If I understand the process correctly (unlikely), the control rods dampen the reaction and keep things generally under control in the reactor?
They do, and at Fukushima, they did.
The problem at Fukushima wasn't with the reactor core. The problem was with the spent fuel. Nuclear fuel gives off the majority of its heat at the moment of the reaction, but once it's spent, neutron emissions from the fuel continue to react at a very slow rate for several days after the initial "firing" of the fuel; about 6 or 7 percent thereof. It's *that* heat that was a problem at Fukushima.
This video [youtube.com] provides a good explanation.
Re: (Score:3)
Off course not. Especially if wind energy is only seen as a green excuse. When wind turbines have to run in sync with the "real" energy on the grid. As long as we do not take "alternative" energy serious, it wont be serious.
Holland has had an entire industrial period based on wind energy. In a time that aerodynamics were far less developed than now. If you see what can be done and has been done in the past, the "wind energy is allowed as long as we can plug in in without any effort" attitude is a real shame
Re: (Score:3)
I am no completely opposed to nuclear power, yet I find some statements defending it a little odd.
Many people die from complications of coal mining, etc.
I mean... do you think Uranium or Thorium grow in trees?
Re:"Catastrophic" means... (Score:4, Informative)
> The increase in background radiation will
> absolutely cause a raise in cancers
Increase in background radiation where? Do you have numbers to cite here?
> there's the matter of radioactive material put into
> environment
Details? Which isotopes are we talking about? Is it worse than your typical coal plant operating for a month?
> Radioactive elements can never be made safe.
That's just not true. For example, oxygen-15 makes itself safe in a matter of hours (half-life of 120s with decay to a stable nitrogen isotope). A large fraction of the radioactive release from Fukushima has been elements like that.
Now maybe what you mean is that long-half-life isotopes can't really be made safe. I agree; the goal would be to prevent them escaping the containment vessel.
> Solar, wind, and hydrothermal are much safer.
I'd _love_ to see numbers for this, on comparable scales.
That is, how safe or unsafe is your typical solar plant generating 0.8GW (which is what each of the reactors at Fukushima was generating)? How safe is your typical wind plant of that capacity? Whole-life numbers (i.e. including construction and maintenance) would be good. Problem is, no one actually tracks that stuff, so we don't have those numbers....
> that would otherwise plague a small area around
> the plant
Uh... you can't have it both ways. If pollution from coal plants (including the radioactive elements they put in the air) is localized to a "small area", how is that not the case for nuclear?
> But since the deaths from nuclear are primarily
> cancers
Citation please?
> The best you can do is mitigate the risks.
This is true for all power-generation setups. The only question is when in the life cycle the highest risks are. For photovoltaic solar, for example, it seems to me that they are primarily at the solar cell production stage and the related industrial accidents. For hydroelectric they're when your dam is operating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam is a good read). For nuclear there's the initial uranium purification or plutonium production and operating risks. But yes, risk-mitigation is the name of the game. That's how life in general works: walking down stairs is unsafe. People die from it all the time. We do it all the time, but we put in handrails and people who're particularly susceptible to the risk get single-floor houses...
Re: (Score:3)
The increase in background radiation will absolutely cause a raise in cancers, and there's the matter of radioactive material put into the environment that is different than simply a temporary increase in background radiation, and will also certainly cause additional deaths.
No it won't. This argument is based on the Linear no-threshold model which has been shown to be wildly inaccurate at low-levels of radiation dosing. The basis of the model is that they looked at the cancer rate of Hiroshima survivors who received very high levels of radiation exposure and assigned a value of N cancer cases per X amount of radiation exposure. Then because they had nothing to go on for low doses, the assumption was made that the cancer rate was linear, so you'd get N/4 cases for an exposur
Re: (Score:3)
No effects will last for "billions of years", anything with a half-life that long is considered a stable isotope! The longer the half life, the less radioactive something is.
Chernobyl is a red herring because it was an inherently unsafe fail-dangerous reactor design which no one anywhere else in the world was insane enough to produce.
Re: (Score:3)
Either you are extremely risk-averse, or you would have to also say that coal power is simply not worth the risk on any large scale.
Or oil.
Which is the worse disaster? The BP oil spill or the ongoing Fukushima emergency? Remember that the BP oil spill actually killed 11 workers and injured 17. Fukushima is ongoing and so hard to predict, but it sure looks like fewer people will die there. Also, look at the context - Fukushima was the result of a much larger tragedy. Perhaps 10,000 have died in a massive ear