How has your opinion on the safety of nuclear power changed after the events in Japan?
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Seems just as safe as ever... (Score:5, Insightful)
We just need to invest some time and money building new nuclear plants that aren't based on 1950s reactor designs.
Would you have bought a diesel car 30 years ago? Not unless you were a taxi driver. Would you even give petrol a moment's thought today? No chance!
As seen on reddit & facebook. (Score:5, Insightful)
"a 41 year old nuclear reactor gets hit by a 9 magnitude earthquake, then slammed with a 2 ft. tall swell, followed by an explosion due to the buildup of hydrogen gas that blows off the roof of the building, and the core is intact and contained. And you are telling me nuclear power isn't safe?"
Anyway... I wish Tritium cycle nuclear power would start getting some R&D
Time to retire the Uranium & Plutoniums reactors
Fukushima plant was hit by an enormous disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not human error, it was not a faulty design. It was one of the largest earthquakes and tsunamis recorded in recent history, and the largest event to EVER hit a nuclear plant. The fact that the reactors did not suffer a catastrophic meltdown yet is a testament to how reliable and ultimately safe nuclear technology is in Japan, but also to how dedicated the engineers working there truly are. My thoughts go out to those people that as we speak are inside the plant, trying to maintain a constant flow of water to cool the reactors in spite of the radiation and dangers. Like the soldiers in Chernobyl, they truly are heroes.
Bear in mind the Fukushima plant is built on the ocean side, and took the full force of the earthquake and the tsunami. There are risks inherent to nuclear reactors, but those engineers have shown that good designs and responsible usage can limit damages even in the face of an unprecedented force of nature. Even with the outer buildings blown to pieces radiation leaks have so far been minor, and the reactor containers are intact.
I thank them on behalf of the world, I wish I could be there to help.
My poll choice is irrelevant, but I hope all the nuclear plants in the world are at least as well built and manned.
Re:A lot less safe than I thought (Score:4, Insightful)
A single backup? They had multiple diesel generators, batteries, and a mechanism to quickly hook up mobile generators. They also had the ability to bring seawater in for cooling.
Re:Godzilla (Score:4, Insightful)
We have so many old reactors still active because after Three Miles Island and Chernobyl the peons panicked and blocked any new reactors from being built. In effect, the vast majority of nuclear plants active today were built before 1980.
In the meantime our energy consumption skyrocketed, coal and gas power plants simply do not have the capacity to replace nuclear. Not to mention that they are much more damaging to the environment than nuclear plants.
And don't get me started on green energy. It's wonderful, until you realize you'd need to cover the entire surface of the US with windmills to provide enough power to replace nuclear, coal and gas.
Re:Godzilla (Score:4, Insightful)
Your last line is complete B.S. and gives clear evidence that you don't know the science behind green energy but rather the political memetics spewed by pundits. Anyone watching the science knows its easily feasible. Brazil is over 80% powered by 'green energy' and yet they are not covered in windmills. I'll wait while you go google up Brazil's energy infrastructure and some pundit sputem to attempt to rebuke what I said. I won't be digging up all the scientific pubs, but take this as warning that they're out there.
Re:Safer than I thought (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's all been contained. There's only been one death (getting crushed by a crane) and one significant radiation poisoning (the guy will almost certainly live). And that was the result of what was really the worst imaginable scenario. Everything that could go wrong, did. And the casualty count stands at two. Maybe it will get worse. Maybe more people will get sick. But it is highly unlikely that it will even get as bad as the Deepwater Horizon disaster. In fact, comparing the two shows just how safe nuclear tech is:
Deepwater Horizon - caused by cost cutting and ignoring safeguards.
Fukushima Daichi - caused by a 8.9 magnitude earthquake, 20 foot tall tsunami, and numerous 6.0 magnitude aftershocks
Deepwater Horizon - Platform was new, modern
Fukushima Daichi - Plant was 40 years old, about to be shut down
Deepwater Horizon - 11 immediate deaths, many workers sickened during cleanup
Fukushima Daichi - 1 death, about a dozen showing signs of possibly getting sick, none terminally
Deepwater Horizon - Vast swaths of the Gulf floor coated in inches of oil, killing all life there.
Fukushima Daichi - Environmental impact yet to be determined, but if it's similar to Three Mile Island, it will be non-existent
Deepwater Horizon - People (rightfully) point out that we don't abandon airplanes just because they occasionally crash
Fukushima Daichi - People demand the end to all nuclear power
People are just irrationally frightened of all things nuclear. I suspect it's a holdover from the Cold War.
Re:A lot less safe than I thought (Score:2, Insightful)
It is importtant to note that the current nuclear reactors were built using active cooling systems but if you look at the generation III reactor design, which is what current reactor designs are based on, it incorporates passive cooling system that use natural convection instead of a pump.. Also note that even given a complete meltdown and failure of the cooling system, the reactor would still contain the radiation since the nuclear reaction can't possibly reach a temperature great enough to penetrate the concrete and steel.
Re:Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
Or maybe you've got a one-way view of what that 26% represents....
It *could* mean people who have witnessed a gigantic earthquake, tsunami, failure of cooling systems, multiple explosions --- and after 3 days of DREADING onslaught, the actual reactors have not melted down or exploded to produce the radiation that many are in fear of.
So maybe 26% of the people viewing the poll are surprised it could do so well considering the events.
(preemptive strike: i voted 'slightly less')
Re:Can be safe, but safety engineering is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
One reason that people are working to maintain adequate cooling is because a meltdown puts the containment shell to the test. This is a test that it should handle with ease as meltdown temperatures are around the 500C mark and the shell can withstand over 2000C, but it would still be better not to have to test it at all.
Another reason is that a wrecked core is a significant financial loss - in terms of the core, all the useful material it still contains, and the difficulty of cleaning it up. If cooling is maintained perfectly then everything can be saved. Even by resorting to sea water for cooling (which makes the core permanently unusable) the system can be cleaned up easily, and the fuel can be reclaimed.
Of course people are still evacuating and for a very good reason. An unparalleled disaster has just wiped out all the backup facilities necessary for a clean shutdown. There is now the potential for a meltdown, which means that the last line of defense (the containment shell) would be tested. As reliable as containment shells have proved to be there is simply no point in taking risks.
Thankfully the work done to maintain cooling means that the meltdown may still be averted, and it is also giving people time to evacuate just in case there is a meltdown and a (very unlikely) containment failure.
Re:Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Deepwater Horizon didn't need any natural disaster to cover an area the size of Ireland in toxic, carcinogenic chemicals.
The fact that primitive nuclear reactors could survive a magnitude 9 earthquake and 20-foot tidal wave at all shows that newer, better designs in safer locations are practically indestructible.
Re:A lot less safe than I thought (Score:3, Insightful)
I learned a nuclear plant requires active cooling
Yes, it requires active cooling to shutdown cleanly, as in be fit for starting up again in the future.
When the main cooling fails en the backup fails, everyone is screwed.
Not at all. When the cooling fails you get a meltdown, which the containment shell is designed to contain. There is nothing wrong with a contained meltdown as far as safety is concerned. The problem with Chernobyl is that there wasn't a containment shell, and uncontained meltdowns give meltdowns a bad name. The other problem is just the cost of cleaning up the sealed ball you are left with, anything less than a meltdown is vastly easier to deal with using existing processing facilities.
I'm really shocked it's *that* unsafe.
If it wasn't for the containment shell, then fair enough. I'm shocked that Chernobyl didn't have one, they only have to withstand temperatures of 500C, so a good strong steel is more than adequate.
No Change -- Still Bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Still as bad an idea as ever. Long-term waste disposal (or lack thereof) & long-term expense the primary factor. Meltdown accidents secondary.
Re:Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
I live less than 40 min away from one, its nice to know that that even IF it was on a fault line and hit by one of the top 5 earthquakes ever recorded THEN a tusnami, that 1940's engineering would survive with minimal damage and leakage
mindless,no, not I... I feel safer knowing that a properly maintained facility can survive one of the biggest "shit hits fan" real life scenarios with minimal in this case exposure
learn some basic math, run the numbers, and get over 1986 cbs fear mongering over piss poor Russian design ran by a bunch of flunkies who run a stress test with non functional equipment
Re:Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Who modded this up?
Ah, I must have missed the news of where, after being hit by a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, and a 20-ft wave, the 40 year old plant completely wiped out everything within a 50 mile radius. Link please?
When you consider the magnitude of the catastrophe, it *is* impressive that the site is as under control as it is. Despite all of the media hype about the imminent doom, things seem to be holding up remarkably well. Not great, but certainly not the end of the world, and frankly the least of Japan's problems right now. And hey, so far it seems like the long-term damage from the reactors will probably be way less significant than the Deepwater explosion in the gulf. Nuclear power *is* safer than the media portrays it. And certainly modern nuclear plants are safer than these older ones.
As an aside, applying a single trait to an entire group like /. is fairly silly. Slashdot isn't pro-apple, or pro-google, or whatever; nearly every article on any topic has tons of comments on both sides. Try not to make wide generalizations about things simply because you read opinions you don't like.
Re:A lot less safe than I thought (Score:5, Insightful)
"a nuclear plant requires active cooling" is not true. "Very old types of nuclear plants require active cooling" would have been better.
Re:Seems just as safe as ever... (Score:2, Insightful)
Would I consider a car based on gas? Both my cars are gas. I won't ever buy a diesel, and I won't buy other new things until they are cheaper, or proven to be reliable... or at least able to get me to work and back.
Diesel sucks because it is slow and stupid. I'll outrun any diesel trivially, and the fuel system is more complex. It's also nasty gunk, but w/e about that.
Hybrids don't suck, but they are heavy and slow. Anything can outrun one of them, and they are vulnerable to subzero temperatures.
Full electrics might be the way to go some day, but they suck for now. Not a single one can drive me to work and back for less than 80 grand- the others might work, maybe, if it's not cold out, and there's not a lot of traffic. If I had 80 grand to spend on a car, I'd put it right towards a Nissan GTR.
Re:Godzilla (Score:5, Insightful)
You might also be surprised how many fairly old aircraft are in use. Non-engineers tend to think that things inevitably wear out and have to be replaced, but that isn't necessarily the case. Aircraft can be flown indefinitely and safely as long as they are maintained correctly, and similarly so can nuclear reactors. What tends to take them out of service is parts and skills becoming harder to get or the on-going cost of maintenance making buying/building a new one a better option.
As for nature Japan has proven itself to be fairly earthquake proof - few if any buildings collapsed in the quake. I am in Tokyo at the moment and when it hit I never felt scared at all, despite being on the 5th floor of a tower block. Buildings moved (as designed) but there wasn't much damage and it didn't seem that big of a deal at the time. What did all the damage is the tsunami and there is now a lot of discussion about what can be done to defend against them in the future. Japan has sea defences because there are regular tsunamis, just none this big. I'm sure that in time this country will be as well protected from large waves as it is from large earthquakes.
Re:Seems just as safe as ever... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bias (Score:4, Insightful)
I would hope a coal plant wouldn't burn. Coal is radioactive. Running a coal plant releases orders of magnitude more radiation into the environment than a nuclear plant. I also wouldn't like to see what would happen when that nasty, nasty fly ash stored on site was washed away by a tidal wave. Where would it end up?
Coal power stations are seriously unclean, radiation spewing things. Nuclear plants produce nuclear waste, but it is contained. Coal plants produce *millions of tons* of fly ash along with all that radiation, that gets piled up outside the plant.
And your assertion that they have to take "special measures" to "avoid another exclusion zone like Chernobyl" is just total FUD (and you're the one claiming "zealotry"!). These reactors will not fail in the way Reactor 4 did at Chernobyl - an RBMK reactor operating outside of its safety zone with all of its safety systems intentionally disabled, and crucially not enclosed in a containment structure, that suffered a catastrophic steam explosion (it did not melt down until afterwards) that blew the top off, and surprise surprise, with no containment, exposed the core.
These reactors in Japan are contained, and at any time the operators can simply "abandon" them by draining out all of the water (so no more steam or hydrogen buildup) and allow them to melt inside their containment structures. It will make them more expensive to dismantle afterwards (hence the attempts to maintain active cooling so they can decommission it more cheaply and quickly afterwards) but if they run out of options they can leave them to melt safely within their containment, keeping all the radioactive material inside.
The fact that these containment systems have already survived a 9.0 earthquake and many powerful aftershocks with no damage should probably tell you that they were built with extreme conditions in mind, and with a single job: to isolate the core from everything else.
This whole "it will be like Chernobyl!!! zomg!" nonsense is like standing outside an airport and protesting modern commercial passenger flights by holding a sign that says "No more Hindenburgs!!!!"
Re:No Change -- Still Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, you know, we could just use that waste as fuel, in reactors we know how to build *right now* but don't do so for political reasons.
Storing it is just silly - it would be like refining oil to get gasoline and then storing all of the kerosene, diesel, propane, methane etc that also comes off in giant barrels and burying it in the desert.
Nuclear power is crippled by an image problem, by misinformation, and by ludicrous red tape.
About sums it up... (Score:5, Insightful)
I was discussing this on IRC, and someone pretty well summed up my feelings in regard to people saying stuff like "The plants weren't safe enough", etc etc
"It's like shooting someone in the face with a tank and saying bulletproof vests are useless"
Irresponsible Journalism (Score:5, Insightful)
The media has been horrible, at least in Canada and the US. They seem to only be able to sell stories and get ratings by trying to scare people. If you look at various other outlets, you see very different reports of what is actually going on, and what the situation is.
I was totally disgusted that the CBC up here in Canada last night aired a program that was sensationalistic to begin with, and then on top of that brought in an "expert" to comment about want was happening to the power station in Japan. The "expert" was the head of an anti-nuke lobby. Seriously. Unbelievable. That's some responsible balanced coverage let me tell you.
Re:Godzilla (Score:5, Insightful)
Diesel?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some very young people on here. And I'm showing my age.
A couple decades ago some bright people at the Big Three noticed diesel fuel was far less expensive than petrol (gas) - it was only used by transport and construction companies.
As a byproduct of refining petroleum it was underutilized and in ready supply - produce millions of gallons of lighter hydrocarbons from the mixture that is raw petroleum and you will have lots of it. Something few people consider is that Petroleum is a homogeneous mixture of hydrocarbons from the very light, such as C8, to the very heavy (depending upon the source) Asphaltics, C40 to 70. Fractional Distillation of a barrel of raw petroleum produces a wide range of potential fuels and other compounds.
So the Big Three shifted to production of diesel automobiles, promoting them as less expensive to operate. Consumers purchased them and then the darnedest thing happened, the price of diesel fuel went up! I mean, seriously, just because there's an increase in demand a price shouldn't go up, right?!? Well that seemed to be the prevailing logic.
Reduce dependence upon nuclear fuel for power plants and that energy will have to come from somewhere - Hydro? Solar? Wind? Geothermal?
Never, ever suggest using less energy, though. That could lead to Socialism (or even Communism, as detected in lab mice.)
Re:Seems just as safe as ever... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Diesel?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Seems just as safe as ever... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, as far as I can tell, the media circus surrounding Japan has lasted for far longer than the one for Haiti.
Uh, Haiti was in the news constantly for weeks, and then intermittently for months after the earthquake. Japan is still in the news a few days after, but it's pretty early to be making this sort of comparison.
Funny how we care about (generally) rich Asians more than poor Blacks, isn't it?
You're the one that started ignoring the news about the poor blacks after a couple of days...
Re:Can be safe, but safety engineering is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
So there is no risk associated with letting the reactor melt down, and yet they decided to vent radioactive gas anyway? And then, they took the step of using seawater to cool it down despite the fact that the reactor is essentially destroyed after such a corrosive material comes into contact with it, but they "needed" to do that instead of letting it "Safely melt down"? I doubt they trust the reactor shells nearly as much as you do, Mr armchair nuclear engineer.