I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima.
Perhaps we should first stop downplaying the damage from every single coal power plant in the world, particularly those in China and other developing nations with minimal pollution controls, where there are millions of people suffering from pollution-related illnesses?
Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors. On the other hand there are plenty of people suggesting that we not build new reactors. We aren't seeing an attack on old reactor designs, we're seeing an attack on the "other option" you listed.
the real political and economical power is with the current nuclear industry which doesn't have other designs. Any permit to build if given in the next 10 years would result in a new old nuclear plant. Like any powerful established industry they protect their position with heavy regulations and wouldn't let any innovative outsiders in.
The reactor designs are newer, but we also need newer designs for management and disaster prevention/response. Even with the crappy obsolete Fukishima reactors, we would have come through this event fine had there been a (much) bigger investment in those non-technological areas when the plant was built and over the decades since then.
Wait ... what? Are you saying that nuclear fusion (and not fission) poses some kind of proliferation risk? Proliferation of what, exactly? Advanced lasers? Powerful magnets? Hydrogen? Deuterium?? Tritium??? Helium????
Or are there some reasons to worry that the neutron flux from the reaction would be used to activate or otherwise enrich something dangerous that I don't know about?
this 2, laser driven inertial confinement and tokamak, don't pose a significant proliferation risk even/when they are successful. Unfortunately this 2 is also least promising as the decades of experiments have clearly shown. As a result, there is no rush of investments into them.
The proliferation risk is creation of relatively compact, say, in the first generation, up to transport container size fusion device. Creation and maintenance of such a weapon wouldn't be possible to control as there is no radiation, no uranium mining/buying, no massive enrichment facilities, no breeder reactors,... nothing to control. Basically a nightmare for modern international politics.
At the end of 199x the government analysis shown that the fusion wouldn't be cheaper than 4c/kwt of coal power and it would pose the significant proliferation risks if developed and miniaturized into the deliverable device. Thus we have such a dismal investment and progress. Do you pay attention to Sandia?
If you have a citation for where Sandia says there are proliferation risks, I would be interested.
>I have a hard time believing that a fusion power source would work at all like a fusion bomb.
No need to. The only thing what matters is the amount of neutrons generated. High intensity flux during 10-30sec. instead of super-high during 0.001ms explosion would do the same damage if the total amount of neutrons generated is the same.
I mentioned Sandia because what they do (more precisely what they did 10 years ago) was the most effective and promising way to get effective fusion - for energy generation as well as to weaponize it without fission part, and i think it is illustrative to look at them to see how progress has stalled (more precisely it was redirected from advancing of the engineering of the fusion into more plasma research) when it became that clear.
I do understand that practical fusion requires neutron flux, but I didn't think we had achieved any significant amount of fusion capable of producing such a flux.
Do you have any information about this subject that I do not?
Also, the major problem with putting solar power plants in deserts is that you lose most of your power trying to get it somewhere useful. Expect this to change when we have commercially viable room temperature (ish) superconductors.
Of course nuclear isn't much better in this regard - while we do have uranium deposits, we don't have any uranium mines, and hence rely on imports for nuclear fuel.
>Do you have any information about this subject that I do not?
do you have any information about fusion development being really seriously continued? It isn't proliferation risk alone that affects the development. It is also about projected cost of the produced energy. Any such facilities would be extremely expensive, typical nuclear plant expensive, and it doesn't look like it will have energy density higher than current nuclear plants as both are limited by the same factors, like cooling system engineering that transfers the energy from core to turbines. Thus the price of fusion energy may theoretically be cheaper than the price of fission energy only by the cost of uranium itself. Permits, regulatory approval process, etc... will not be cheaper. Such cost projections, together with the proliferation risk are the reasons that there is no meaningful development of fusion today.
Surprise, coal power plants have filters now...
Surprise 2, coal is also not the energy of the future...
Lets say that you need to mine, say 2,715,384x the amount of coal to produce the same amount of energy as you would uranium. (From https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Energy_densit...).
Now if mining uranium is less then 2,000,000x more dangerous as mining coal, then per unit of energy generated it is actually safer.
Hence yes, I do think that coal mining is more dangerous then uranium mining, per unit of energy generated.
How much percent of Uranium is in ore? How fast is that going down in the next century?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_debate
Ever wondered why Europe has coal mines but closed all uranium mines? Just for fun?
Uranium mines now happen to be in remote areas or developing countries.
Uranium mines are a cluster fuck of all kinds of environmental problems.
Germany closed one. It cost billions to contain the damage.
France with 50 reactors doesn't have a Uranium mine. They exploit poor countries like Niger and leave an environmental catastrophe there. Uranium mining is the largest business in Niger and the life expectations is not much about 50 years there. If nuclear mining would be so great and people would make a lot of money from mining, this should be much higher.
Obviously it is not the case.
To begin: * Uranite (U3O8) is a major ore of uranium https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Uraninite and is in fact mostly uranium by weight. * "Uranium mining is the largest business in Niger and the life expectations is not much about 50 years there." Is an example of 'correlation does not imply causation'. To give you an example, the number of pirates have gone down over the last few hundred years. Global temperatures have gone up over the last few hundred years. From that information alone you cannot say that the lack of pirates causes global warming.
* I'd also mention here that there are large amounts of diamonds sourced from africa. A trade that is very profitable, yet leaves the people themselves with very little money nor increased standard of living.
* From the wikipedia article you specified: "Because uranium ore emits radon gas, uranium mining can be more dangerous than other underground mining, unless adequate ventilation systems are installed.". Assuming these safeguards are met, I fail to see how it would be 2,000,000 times as dangerous as coal mining.
I will, however, correct my previous statement. -Natural uranium has an energy density of 443,000MJ/kg -Coal has an energy density of 32.5MJ/kg.
Hence to produce the same amount of energy as you can produce using one KG of natural uranium you require 13630kg of coal.
Assuming the risk of coal mining is measured in a certain number of fatalities per kilogram mined (equivalent to a certain m^3 mined, given a constant density of the mined material) is R_C and R_U for coal and uranium respectively then the expected number of fatalities per "1kg of uranium equivalent energy" is then R_U and 13630R_C.
As such for coal to be "safer" 13630R_C needs to be < R_U, a statement I consider unlikely.
Fact is, here in Germany we have been mining for coal for decades. It has a lot of negative impacts on nature. It is still going on. But it is slowly phased out against political opposition.
Uranium mining OTOH has been phased out already. Uranium mining has such severe negative effects on the nature that in Germany it is closed with huge monetary investments.
You can read about the closing of the Wismut mine here: http://www.wise-uranium.org/uwis.html
Mining for Uranium is now going on in remote areas or in states with the political structure for it.
At the end of the day, that specifically is what we are trying to find out.
I found already out that all Uranium mines here in Western Europe have been closed, mostly because of environmental issues and because they are not economical.
I can see every day that millions of people live near coal plants and coal mines - here in Germany. There is is a large movement to shut down coal plants and end coal mining. But that movement still has some miles to go.
These are facts.
Your calculations based on energy density are useless. Nobody wants to live near a Uranium mine contaminating ground water. No matter how much energy Uranium provides. In more densely populated areas like Europe this is hopeless.
The existing Uranium mines are almost all located in areas where not the consumers of nuclear electricity live.
See: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
I've been drinking the tap water and I would eat the spinach grown in fukushima as well. It makes me very sad that farmers who are struggling to get by and have perfectly fine food to sell are not able to sell it.
I can understand people being afraid of the uncertainty of the situation. I think that is somewhat rational: the situation could get worse. You might not trust TEPCO or the government to properly handle the situation. Those are risks that need to be addressed and maybe the answer is that nuclear power isn't the way to go. That decision should be made based on hard data of real threats, costs and unknowns.
I think though, that to date, nobody outside of a very small radius (mostly TEPCO workers) have ever been in danger of receiving dangerous levels of radiation. People confuse cautionary recommendations with actual threats. On the other hand, people are dying due to lack of supplies and medication from the tsunami. Farmers and fishermen are losing their livelihood because of fear of radiated food.
BTW, Here's the link to the water supply/rain water radiation levels I use:
[citation requested] I haven't seen any hint of that. Is that from actual scientific reports based on sensible standards of "unlivable" (i.e., based in sensible risk analysis), or is it just based on unscientific worries?
And did you have a hard time finding "uncontaminated" meat because there was actually a shortage of meat that was scientifically unsafe to eat, or because there was a shortage of meat due to an overzealous safety organization that proactively condemned vast swathes of goods unnecessarily to look active and because people are just really scared? Because if the latter, this turns the argument circular; nuclear is dangerous because governments overreach and aggressively condemn things because nuclear is dangerous.
If you got actual sources, I'd love to hear about them, in all seriousness, and then I'd like to know why I didn't hear about 20 kms being rendered uninhabitable yet. But I'd like to see the citation first.
This call for sources, at the same time demanding they be sensible and have to use sensible definitions in this kind of discussions has an unfortunate "get off my lawn" tone to it.
Clearing the area is also already openly discussed by the Japanese governement. By contrasting "overzealous safety organizations" with "sensible risk based analysis" you put excatly no argument forward but already indicate what you would do with any such source.
I, personally, have provided citations for every single person who requested one of me as far as I know, not to mention answering quite a few requests made to others. Feel free to trawl my comment history looking for examples. If you can find one that I haven't seen, I'll go dig up a citation to support it.
It's hard to trust someone's opinion if they can't explain the facts upon which they base it. Of course I'm still wrong sometimes, but the exercise helps me to prove to myself whether or not I know what the hell I'm talking about. I often find new information and refine my opinions accordingly. That's how I learn.
No shit?
"The radiation levels and the finding of Pu in the ground, leaking out radioactive water and the like have already been reported to death."
None of which lead to "20 (presumably square) km" being rendered anything remotely resembling uninhabited. I still haven't heard anything that would even permanently condemn the land the reactor is on. The mere presence of plutonium in the water isn't that interesting.
It may help for context to realize that my house is a RADIOACTIVE DEATHTRAP. I have RADIOACTIVE GASSES seeping into my basement that were ABOVE THE LEGAL LIMIT. No, I am not kidding. I have a radon remediation system running all the time. See that bright red blotch in southern Michigan in [1]? That's where I live and have lived all my life. If we freaked out in linear proportion to people who are freaking out about the stuff happening in Japan, we wouldn't be talking about how Detroit is depopulating due to the bad economy, we'd be talking about how Detroit is a radioactive uninhabitable wasteland.
Except it isn't.
In fact, I bought this house knowing it was a RADIOACTIVE DEATHTRAP. It didn't significantly reduce the value, even, I didn't even get a deal. The radon remediation system has a big radioactivity symbol on it, so I seriously live in a house with a for-serious radioactivity symbol in it. I find myself wondering how many people flipping out do too.
I suppose arguably I can't really afford to just flip out and call it the holy and proper response or I'd have to, I don't know, burn my house down or something.
"By contrasting "overzealous safety organizations" with "sensible risk based analysis" you put excatly no argument forward but already indicate what you would do with any such source."
Bullshit. Flat out bullshit. I will happily accept analysis that shows that some exposure would trip the rather conservative limits of, say, the US OSHA or EPA. What I have seen is that it remains orders of magnitude below those limits for almost everybody who isn't right on top of the plant, like, on the property. It sounds like you're the one trying to hide irrational beliefs from the light of sanity, not me.
There is plenty of suggestive evidence, like the nytimes article EScott11 referenced, showing cesium 137 contamination 200% of Chernobyl levels 25 miles from the plant, or the recent Greenpeace video where they max out their Geiger handhelds 35km from the plant, that there are going to be some fairly widespread consequences to the contamination of soil by radioactive material.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/04/02/world/asia/ass...
"As the water leaks out, you keep on pouring water in, so this leak will go on for ever," said Dr John Price, a former member of the Safety Policy Unit at the UK's National Nuclear Corporation.
"There has to be some way of dealing with it. The water is connecting in tunnels and concrete-lined pits at the moment and the question is whether they can pump it back.
"The final thing is that the reactors will have to be closed and the fuel removed, and that is 50 to 100 years away.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/01/3179487.htm
I actually heard an interview with this guy, and he was assuming the exclusion zone (20km from the plant I think?) would remain for at least 50 years.
Every power generation method we have significantly impacts the local environment, even geothermal and hydroelectric. There are a lot of accidents and environmental corruption stories every year, but one accident in a worst case scenario impacts you personally, and suddenly you're issuing edicts and saying hard facts are "handwaving" and "misinformation."
Great.
However, to simplify further, I think that Nuclear power supports hand wave deep issues of trust that develop because of the way these issues are treated.
I don't imply that there are any easy answers to power. Solar, wind, etc.. are not mature enough (to the best of my understanding). Coal releases more radiation (but not in catastrophic all-at-once scenarious)
Eat your dog food. Spend real money doing so. Otherwise, frankly, it's internet posing.
I'm sure their families are just as unwilling to listen to people talk about coal being safe as you are unwilling to listen to people talking about nuclear being safe. The difference? There are MANY more of them.
I don't think anybody wanted to offend. People just learning what mSv is, and there is a lot of propaganda and brainwashing happening here and around the world. Big money at stake.
If you are female and pregnant, that overreaction can be justified, but otherwise you only have your overreaction to blame.
We just need to build stronger and safer reactors.
Personally I'm glad OP posted this article. Fukushima was tragic, but it didn't give everyone the right to abandon rational thought.
I used to work for a state pirg banging on doors to complain about nuclear power. Spreading fear by barking "3 mile island, chernobyl" etc. Then one day I knocked on the door of a nuclear physicist and he explained to me why I was wrong.
I am not defending coal or solar or whatever. I am referring to the closed attitude of the nuclear industry. There is a huge problem with nuclear defenders in Japan who don't eat their own dogfood. You'd think they would be happy to do so since the reward is huge (improved confidence) and the risk is only 20 or more years down the line (if ever)
But the problem is, when people freak out about Fukushima, they don't say "Hey! Mark I BWR's aren't safe! We should shut down those designs!" They go after Nuclear with a wide brush, and instead we're stuck with more gas and coal dependance.
But the problem is that using Fukushima as an argument against nuclear, is like using a car crash as an argument against transportation.
Please note that I'm not saying the reactor designs themselves weren't old and out of date. They were. But that wasn't the root cause of the problems. The stresses that these reactors have withstood due to the lack of backup power are far beyond any safety specification they were built to.
There are much cleaner modern coal plants with filters. Still coal is dirty and dangerous.
In the nuclear industry you have new designs. But this does not solve the basic problems:
* mining of Uranium is dirty
* you need to transport dangerous material
* nuclear weapons can be produced
* reprocessing is extremely dirty
* storage is unsolved
* it promotes large corporations with all problems (corruption, ...)
* a society needs to be sufficiently advanced to handle the risk (i.e. better than Japan, the Soviet Union, or the US)
* the capital costs are large, needs to financed by the government
Plus with the new reactors you get interesting new dangers. Ever heard of 'stuxnet'? There are now viruses and attacks against nuclear facilities based on computer viruses.
I'm not saying it's something that should be dismissed, but I do think that we just have to take into account that anything that handles humongous amounts of energy in a concentrated space is dangerous, but nuclear energy is less so than most alternatives.
And here in Uruguay, the current way to supplement the already exhausted hydroelectric power is burning oil - I'm advocating a nuclear power plant to get us out of our current energy crisis (and I would have it in my backyard if needed)
By your reasoning, you should be raising your kids on a coal ash dump. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/us/07sludge.html
The fact that one such glider still exists and is apparently in use has no bearing to the current state of the art of aeroplane design. Similarly that one old, outdated and utterly inferior reactor can fail when provoked says nothing of the current state of the art of reactor design.
The problem isn't that we don't have designs that can deal with these sorts of problems. The problem is that we don't have the political strength of will to decommission the older, unsafe plants and replace them with newer, safer plants. Similarly we don't have the political strength of will to do what is required to ensure uncompromised safety, ie. moving spent fuel into secured areas away from power plants, breeding fuel to dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive waste created and burning that waste out to make it less radioactive before it ever needs to be stored, etc.
Nuclear power is inherently UNSAFE. It takes a lot of hubris to claim otherwise. It harnesses intense fundamental forces of nature that we can never control without a small but inevitable risk of horrible damage and harm to unlucky populations. In controlling power of this magnitude, it is inevitable that there will be mistakes or freak events that allow this power to seep out of whatever is the latest in fundamental-forces-of-nature-containment technology. Coal plants may cause awful air pollution, but there is no chance of radioactively poisoning an entire city. There's a reason no coal power plant has ever been paid quite as much attention as Fukushima, isn't there?
"the 1975 Banqiauo Dam collapse in China killed 171000 people"
"The dam failure killed an estimated 171,000 people; 11 million people lost their homes"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
I did remember the Bhopal gas disaster:
Why do you keep changing the subject? Quit talking about coal and pesticides and explain why it's okay to risk the lives of entire cities of people for the sake of extra electric output?
Edit: I never disagreed with the article's title. I was agreeing with the parent post's sentiment that regardless of the numbers, downplaying the suffering of the people in Fukushima and the risks they still face is wrong. Nuclear power is dangerous and can have terrible costs. It's entirely reasonable not to view it as a praiseworthy technology.
In case you are unversed in the nuanced English being used here, "safe" != "safest", nor are their meanings equivalent. So why do you keep changing the subject?
Nuclear isn't 'safe', but it is the 'safest'. Modern society assumes some amount of risk, get over it.
Do you not understand, that's the exact reason why people are bringing up coal.
If we were to switch off of coal and onto nuclear, scores less people would die and get sick. A massive amount. Not to mention the benefits of halting climate change.
That doesn't mean nuclear is all sunshine and rainbows, and nobody who reasonably supports nuclear over coal thinks that.
Yes. There is a reason: sensationalism.
That's just a dramatic case that makes for good soundbites though, unbelievable more places have been rendered effectively uninhabitable by coal mining, to say nothing of the damage it does to local food sources (acid rivers anyone?)
The thought that nuclear is more dangerous, or has done more damage, than coal, comes from nothing but ignorance of the coal industry and it's history.
No it isn't. It's fucking dangerous. Air pollution killing lots of people doesn't change this. Radiation kills people too.
That's a very important distinction, so I would ask you to please consider that.
In my country we're building giant wind turbines that will generate twice as much energy as our nuclear plant.
I'm not saying we should ban nuclear power forever, but it shouldn't become the main source of energy either, at least not until we're researched it enough to be 100x safer than it is today, and when it will deliver 100x more energy than solar and wind can, through actual fusion or whatever. Until then, I don't see why we should blindly keep building them when there are perfectly viable clean energy alternatives out there already, or just slightly behind, and just need a little push capital wise to become more advanced.
Wind and solar power are inherently unsuitable for providing base-load coverage - you need to have sufficient generating capacity spooled-up and available to cover any lulls in output. They can reduce the environmental impact of conventional generation, but they're useless on their own.
Nuclear power already produces 100x more than even the largest wind farm, because when you're working out how much base-load coverage you've got, you need to think about that wind farm at it's worst-case 0 MW output.
A single wind farm may have 0 MW output. But for a European grid of wind farms this is highly unlikely. Like 1% of the year. For that 1% we will have other energy sources pick up nicely.
They are "safe" in the sense that the probability of a catastrophe is 1 in 10,000 years (that is the statistic).
But they are exponential orders of magnitude more deadly, with the consequences thereof lasting for tens of thousands of years, when that 1/10,000th year comes around.
With 500 nuclear power plants operating, we can expect a serious nuclear catastrophe every 20 years.
These numbers are based just on nuclear power plants and exclude nuclear submarines, warheads etc.
I believe he is using the standard definition of safe, for a power source, which is expected deaths/Twh.
Applying deaths per TWH to nuclear is naive. It's an abstraction that in no way reflects the underlying reality, and which leads the general populace into mad ambivalence. It's the kind of rhetoric you hear on Animal Farm. This idea that some deaths are better than others. In fact, it's a question of asymmetric risk with outsized consequences. If you learn anything from Ben Graham or Warren Buffett, it's that that's not the kind of game you want to be playing, unless you're really smart like LTCM. You don't want to have anything to do with it, especially not if there is human mental apparatus, governments, and contractors involved. There are too many variables you cannot control, and they are not captured by deaths per TWH.
The second thing to learn from Graham and Doddsville, when dealing with asymmetric odds is that history is no reliable guide to the future. What happened last year or the year before, is no indication of what may happen next year or the manner in which we can expect it to happen. That nuclear catastrophes have historically not been catastrophic (according to the author), is no reason for the author to believe that they may continue to remain so.
Yet the Washington Post article has based its argument on the premise that you can even measure deaths per TWH. You cannot count deaths directly and indirectly related to a nuclear accident. We have learned that much from the history of these accidents, and it would be ignorant and insensitive to claim otherwise. Take for instance Chernobyl, does the author truly believe that only 50 people have already died as a direct and indirect result? Even the most conservative numbers reported (deaths actually incurred) are higher, and show significant variance between sources:
"Estimates of the number of deaths potentially resulting from the accident vary enormously; the World Health Organization (WHO) suggest it could reach 4,000 while a Greenpeace report puts this figure at 200,000 or more. A UNSCEAR report places the total deaths from radiation at 64 as of 2008." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
From those to whom much as been given, much will be expected.
Danger is relative, and relative to the rest of the power industry, nuclear is absurdly safe.
There must be some creative statistics at works behind those safety figures.
deaths/TerraWatt.
The only thing people like you accomplish is preventing modern reactor designs from being implemented, therefore effectively discouraging improvement in the industry.
You are handwaving when it comes to the dangers of coal power, and screaming at the top of your lungs when it comes to nuclear power, despite the fact that coal power kills people every year, despite the fact that coal power plants actually emit radioactive particles in the air, and nuclear plants normally don't.
The point is that most forms of power generation we have, today, is less safe and causes more environmental impact than nuclear power. And yet you are upset about nuclear power? You are not being rational, you are sensationalist.
It's not really a "discussion" when you're just saying the same thing over and over, without addressing the data presented by others or providing any data of your own.
The reason to focus on nuclear over coal power and other bad industrial practices is that nuclear still has a lot of support among educated people. Coal has been discredited. No one thinks we should build more coal plants (aside from those who profit from them). But the amount of cheerleading you see for nuclear among a population like HN's is incredible. I don't know if it's a testament to the industry's financial weight or what, but it's clearly getting a pass where other harmful industries are not. That's bad.
The main problem with radiation is that it's invisible and poorly understood by the public, and has been overused in movies as a fear device. Why are people seemingly more afraid of radiation maybe killing a few people than a tsunami killing many thousands? Consider if Fukushima had been a nerve gas plant, which may not have as stringent of regulations as nuclear power.
I can't drink milk, had to avoid water for a day or two, having problem finding relatively uncontaminated meat, 20 km or so of this country is probably going to be left unlivable and so on.
I find it incredibly offensive to see the Americans on this board downplaying the damage from Fukushima. Mod me down all you want. I will be happy to pay attention when someone purchases land at a fair price near Fukushima #2 and raises his children there.
Until then, you are handwaving for industry or for some vision of "environmentally friendly power". Put money on the table, or frankly, your opinion is worthless.
We need nuclear power. Unfortunately, the culture of misinformation and understating danger around nuclear power means it is going to be impossible for it to supply the majority of our power. What this means in terms of loss of quality of life is not lost on me.