Deaths per unit of energy for various sources

Re:Deaths per unit of energy for various sources by blahblahblah on Wednesday March 16, 2011 @08:34PM (#2334586)

You can't accurately assess the total impact of the Chernobyl accident yet because the damage is still on-going and the exclusion zone will still be hazardous to human health long after you and I are in our graves. The presumption that knowledge of the nature of the danger and the geographical boundaries of the exclusion zone will be preserved and passed on to future generations for the entire duration that the area remains a danger to human health is rather dubious. History is riddled with examples of ancient civilizations whose secrets are lost to us. As members of the technical elite of our society, we tend to implicitly assume that knowledge will be preserved and technological progress will continue in an unbroken chain, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Technological "dark ages" have happened before in which much that was known was lost. How can we be certain that anyone will still know the location of the exclusion zones and be aware of the radiation risk 500, 1000, 2000 years from now? If we're honest with ourselves, we will admit that we have saddled future generations with the burden of a booby trap that will likely still be causing much suffering and death when our present civilization is as ancient as the Parthenon is now.

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Re:Deaths per unit of energy for various sources by decadentcactus on Wednesday March 16, 2011 @10:00PM (#2334785)

I think he's trying to say Chernobyl was an outlier, a faulty design which melted down under completely outrageous circumstances, and due to today's safety standards it won't happen again. Therefore Chernobyl can't really be used to say nuclear power is unsafe.

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Re:Deaths per unit of energy for various sources by blahblahblah on Wednesday March 16, 2011 @11:33PM (#2334973)

The point is that the consequences of a disaster like Chernobyl are so nasty and so long-lived that, if we are to continue building and operating nuclear power plants, we have a responsibility to ensure that such "outliers" never happen unless the earth sustains a direct hit from an asteroid or the Yellowstone supervolcano is erupting (in which case, we're screwed like the dinosaurs anyway). If we can't do that then we have no business being in the nuclear power business. Failure is unacceptable. The situation in Fukushima is not the same as Chernobyl, but that doesn't mean that what is happening there is acceptably safe. We shouldn't be seeing news articles stating that "primary containment feared breached" or that the water level in the spent fuel pools is low (source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870389970457620...).

From the most pro-nuclear article I've seen thus far: "The earthquake which hit on Friday was terrifically powerful, shaking the entire planet on its axis and jolting the whole of Japan several feet sideways. At 8.9 on the Richter scale, it was some five times stronger than the older Fukushima plants had been designed to cope with." - excerpt from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/14/fukushiima_analysis/

The article spins this as though it is some magnificent testament to the quality of the engineering design. I read something like that and then look at this historical list of Japanese earthquakes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan) and the thought that comes to my mind is, "Why the fsck didn't they build it to withstand a 9.5 and a tsunami so they'd have some goddamn margin of safety?" Why is it considered sufficient to have a system where unavailability of power to run pumps is the single point of failure in all of the cooling systems except for the inadequate-to-do-the-whole-job 8-hour battery-powered system? Why haven't we come up with a completely passive system capable of cooling the reactor if all else fails? The bottom line is, if you want the public to put their trust in nuclear power, then build the reactor so that even a 9.5 earthquake + tsunami is a total non-event.

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Re:Deaths per unit of energy for various sources by webXL on Thursday March 17, 2011 @12:45AM (#2335104)

So in order to get the trust of the public, all we have to do is build a super safe prototype reactor and wait for a 9.5 earthquake and direct tsunami hit to come along and have the damn thing survive? Sorry, but that just means we'll be building more coal plants for at least the next 100 years.

If we managed to get a man to the moon, I think we can figure out a reliable system for backup power at earthquake and tsunami prone plants. And if that fails, add a couple more levels of containment. Some of the latest designs don't require external power for cooling, so once all the old reactors are decommissioned, we shouldn't run into this kind of problem again.

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Re:Deaths per unit of energy for various sources by blahblahblah on Thursday March 17, 2011 @02:41AM (#2335298)

You don't have to wait for a 9.5 earthquake to come along to test a design. That's what computer models are for. How do you think they came up with the estimate of what magnitude of a quake the existing design could withstand (assuming that the statement that this quake was "five times stronger" than what the plant was rated to handle has some basis in fact and isn't just a number plucked out of thin air)?

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