All French Nuclear Reactors Deemed Unsafe 493
hweimer writes "A new study by a French government agency, commissioned in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, found that all French nuclear power plants do not offer adequate safety when it comes to flooding, earthquakes, power outages, failure of the cooling systems and operational management of accidents. While there is no need for immediate shutdown, the agency presses for the problems to be fixed quickly. France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology."
Natural Gas from Russia (Score:5, Interesting)
The only alternative is coal. Nucular and coal is all there is. And coal is worse. Coal ash has more radioactive emissions than nucular plants, and arsenic and landslides too. There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
In Europe I believe the backup plan is buying more natural gas from Russia.
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it appropriate here to point out that the past tense should not be used in describing either the Fukishima or the Chernobyl incidents. Fukishima is a long way from being contained or even put into a "cold shutdown" state. It is known that Chernobyl's sarcophagus will fail, maybe in decades, maybe next year (there are too many unknowns, too much pure guesswork, in the projections to know what to expect).
At this point, the problems with understanding these situations appears to be as much chemical as nuclear. No one has done any serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium, that constantly changing compound that forms when fuel rods melt, puddle, and interact chemically with casing material, coolant and coolant contaminates, concrete and whatever was in the stone of the aggregate, ground water, water vapor from slowly cooking the aquifer below the corium, etc. We do know from the naturally occurring nuclear reactors [wikipedia.org] that aqueous chemistry is capable of concentrating nucleotides (and moderating neutrons) sufficiently to reawaken chain reactions in sites that had been dormant for geologic periods of time. Things will probably happen much quicker in these man-made corium deposits.
Just exactly how one would do serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium is left as an exercise for the student.
I hope you are joking and not just dim (Score:2, Interesting)
I see this comment a lot. It looks like the education cuts since Reagan left their mark.
One professional liar better known for writing books about classic cars writes a propaganda piece in a Oak Ridge Labs newsletter (Alex Gabbard: Soldier, Scientist and Author Extraordinaire!) and suddenly people think coal is more radioactive than the impurities of small amounts sand in it that actually contain those radioactive trace elements. Do the banana dose calculations and you'll see how many tens of thousands of tons of coal you'll need to match a banana.
Maybe it's homeopathic radiation!
The people that believe the crap about ash being nuclear waste should read to the end of the original source article. The "OMG Terrorists making nuclear bombs out of coal!" bit should show to even the dimmest readers it doesn't come within miles of serious science.
Re:Germany must be pissed (Score:5, Interesting)
[citation needed]
Their plan is to replace most of their nuclear power with renewables as part of a programme to develop the technology so that it can be exported. Having the option to buy power from France means they can get by with less spare capacity but in the medium to long term they do not want to be dependent on it regularly.
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:5, Interesting)
A hydro dam that breaks will NOT cause the water to shoot up stream. Sure it sucks for the people down stream and there might be a lot of people downstream but the risk is calculable and limited.
The Banqiao Reservoir Dam killed an estimated 171,000 people [wikipedia.org]
The Vajont Dam caused around 2,000 deaths [wikipedia.org]
The St. Francis Dam killed more than 450 people [wikipedia.org]
The Johnstown Dam killed 2,200 people [go.com]
This incomplete list lists 23 dam failures between Chernobyl and Fukushima. (Well, one of them was caused by the same tsunami/earthquake and killed more than the nuclear incident.)
So yes the risk is calculable and limited, it just happens to be that it fails more often and kills more people than nuclear power. I guess we are still gong to build more dams, because you know, it's not nuclear.
Re:Wait! I know this one (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:2, Interesting)
As usual both sides of this debate have cherry picked the absolute worst examples of nuclear, coal and hydro power. Yeah, China built some crappy dams that failed. The USSR built some crappy reactors that blew up. Merely comparing these two extremes is not very useful.
As even geothermal and solar thermal are largely ignored too. Those two are both clean, work 24/7 and are highly reliable.
Re:As the French would say... (Score:5, Interesting)
false: there are several sismic places in France, because of the growth of pyrenees and alps. There were huge eathquakes in pyrennes and alps with lot of victims during the 19th century. In Alsace, in Rhone Alpes, many nuclear powerplants are on sismic zones, and even the big ITER project is on a sismic zone. The calm of the underground activity is recent in France: the volcanos of the "massif central" were active just 6000 years ago.
Re:Wait! I know this one (Score:2, Interesting)
Even massive improvements in wind/solar will not change the fact they cannot supply base load in all conditions
Or improvements in energy storage. Calling solar energy a pipe dream is absurd and ignorant, virtually all the worlds energy comes from the sun in one way or another (except nuclear and geothermal, they came from another sun). Sure the energy industry aren't having any wet dreams about the profitability of solar energy right now, but whether big industry has a hard on or not is no measure of the viability of future technology. You would have called the internet a pipe dream too.
Geothermal is very big in France. (Score:5, Interesting)
false: the geothermal is very big in France: all the "bassin Parisien" ( about 30 million people) is a big hot water undergroung area. Some cities near Paris just heat their citizens with this. The big building in Paris " maison de la radio" is entirely heated with a thermal source at just 400/600 meters deep, since the sixties ! but this resource is unexploited. Other big geothermal areas: Brittany, bassin Aquitain, Alps, massif central...
Another unexploited very big ressource in France is "hydrauliennes" ( big watermills in the sea streams), because most of France is surrounded by coast with huge sea streams. Both geothermal and tidal/sea streams energy are 24/24 and 365/365 energies, with very few impact on ecology. But banksters prefers nuclear.
Re:As the French would say... (Score:4, Interesting)
the east of France is also threatened of earthquakes since Basel, a border city in swizerland was once almost completely destroyed in 18..hundred-something and there are also power plants using the border river rhine to cool their systems
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:2, Interesting)
Fukushima reached cold shut down today. Read the news. And Fukushima, while horrible, is a far cry from what havoc Chernobyl was.
Re:Germany must be pissed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And that is the problem with nuclear (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with this is, and I have pointed this out numerous times here on slashdot, that the 4000 deaths for Chernobyl are not very realistic and are the very lowest number and estimation one can find anywhere. While also not very believable, I could just take the numbers of a few million deaths, that others supposedly observed. There are, for example, Russia estimates of nearly a million killed. So that one accident killed as many as your 2300 coal plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment [wikipedia.org]
In addition to deaths, radiation also causes lot's of non-terminal cancer, although the same may be said about coal.
What I really mean to say is: Don't get all your numbers from nuclear fan boys and realize that the picture is not even close to the black-and-white you portrayed here
Re:Wait! I know this one (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no geothermal. Don't look at geothermal.
Geothermal is not automatically safe any more than nuclear is automatically unsafe. In the USA, where we have the world's most geothermally active region on the planet, we have a geothermal power plant that is perpetually under production and over budget. Calpine's steam plant at The Geyers, CA, has also been the source of a superfund site; when one of the massive turbines gets encrusted with deposits coming out of the vent, they position them above a concrete pit and pressure-wash the blades clean. The water is permitted to evaporate off and the remainder sits in open ponds. When the pond fills up with this material, they cap it over with concrete. The material contains a lot of heavy metals including some radioactives. In the past, they used to just put the slurry into drums and then bury the drums. This naturally contaminated the local water and we had cows born with two heads and that sort of fun stuff. Not being especially interested in Brahmin ranching, the locals made a stink and eventually it was all dug up and reburied with a rubber liner which will eventually fail and cause the same problem all over again, for our descendants.
Unfortunately, the concrete layer cake of heavy metals and radioactives at the site is just waiting for some major seismic activity to break apart and become a hazard itself. And because of its layered nature, even if the slurry were reprocessable into useful elements (which it isn't, at least not cost-effectively, or they would do this instead of storing it) it will be horrendously hazardous and expensive to clean it up later.
Geothermal is cool when you're talking about a cute little geo tap used to heat some water with a heat pipe. It's not so cool when you're talking about power generation on a grand scale. There are not very many places well-suited to such a facility, so it can never produce a significant amount of our current consumption. And it is not inherently clean as many people think. About the only technology we have for power generation that doesn't necessarily have a massive impact is solar. We can install it where we want shade. Oh, and wind, now that we know how to build windmills that won't kill birds even if you put them right on a migration path like a greedy tool.
Re:As the French would say... (Score:5, Interesting)
On the topic of Three Mile Island - why do Anti-nukes even bring it up? It's a meaningless historical event - nothing bad happened at TMI (well, some investors lost their investment). I used to think TMI was "something" because people always talk about it, but I started looking into it, and I can't find anything scary or bad about TMI - it showed that even when there was operator error, and they did the exact wrong thing, the containment still worked, the meltdown was stopped on the floor of the containment, and the public wasn't harmed.
"The price of the energy input is free and unchanging."
The price of the land, Wind Turbines, and additional long-distance low-loss transmission lines is very expensive. When you look at the cost of the "input" of a nuclear plant, it's almost free too - the fuel is a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear power - it's the plants themselves that are so darn expensive (which is the same situation as wind).
If you actually compare the cost [wikipedia.org] of
Wind and Nuclear, Nuclear and On-land wind have similar costs (Wind is slightly cheaper according to the DOE estimates), while off-shore wind is much more expensive than either.
As for the waste, what are terrorists and terrorist supporting governments going to do with waste? You generally don't build bombs from nuclear waste, because it's a harder problem than building a bomb from enriched Uranium, or Plutonium bred in special purpose reactors (the plutonium in nuclear "waste" is "poisoned" by other isotopes of Plutonium which make it bad for bomb use; in theory, you might be able to seperate out the other isotopes, but enriching highly-radioactive waste is a very hard problem, from what I understand, and hard to hide from spy satellites).
"Nuclear power stations never leak and it wouldn't matter anyway because radioactive waste is not really all that harmful."
Your statement is so vague as to be useless. It depends on the type and quantity of radioactive material leaked - the small quantity of tritium which has leaked at a number of reactors (and which got quite a bit of press) really is a pretty harmless sort of leak. Tritium is very weak to begin with, the quantities of the leaks are pretty small, and it very quickly dillutes to completely harmless levels in ground water, rivers, lakes, etc.
Outside a few small hotspots in Japan, the increase in radiation level in most of the evacuation zone is still less than the background radiation at a lot of other places on Earth where people have been living for thousands of years.
But, the anti-nukes can't ever seem to grasp such nuance. Nuance is hard. Fear is easy.
As for those hotspots I mentioned, we now know ways to clean up those hotspots. There are techniques like phytoremediation and bioremediation which can potentially remove the Cesium using plants and have the land safe again in relatively short time.
That said, I think we can do better than current designs (though they have a really impressive safety record, despite Chernobyl and Fukushima). There are newer reactor concepts which can dramatically reduce the small remaining risks, such as passively cooled light water reactors (that is, reactors which stay cool without backup power), Molten Salt Reactors, and liquid metal reactors. I'm particularly a fan of Molten Salt Reactors - they appear like they would be almost perfectly safe in almost all circumstances. Liquid metal reactors I'm a bit more skeptical about, because the "most popular" design for such seems to use liquid Sodium metal, and Sodium is pretty flammable, so salts seem a wiser choice to me.