So is he a mechanical engineer, or a nuclear reactor safety expert? The fact that you are a professor does not imply you know something about nuclear power. What exactly were his arguments? How does he explain the fact that the increases in radiation at the site perimeter were modest?
This is a complex subject, so I'd rather listen to someone who might want to cover his ass but actually knows what he's talking about than to a neutral person with a poor grasp of the issue.
Yes, you should exercise caution when reading industry sources, but they're far better than the anti-nuclear people. The industry of course has an agenda, but at least it knows what it's talking about.
The waste is the biggest problem?
1. No civilian spent fuel was ever accidentally or on purpose released into the environment, even though transportation of it is common. Soviet military waste was sometimes dumped directly into rivers, but this is really unrelated to nuclear power.
2. The only person that ever died from civilian spent fuel was a guy that got ran over by a train during an anti-nuclear protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_S%C3%A9bastien_Briat
3. If someone used only nuclear electricity (average U.S. electricity consumption) from present reactor technology for their entire life, he would generate about a soda can of waste.
4. Vitrified nuclear waste is completely insoluble in water. It's rather hard to spread it over a large area. Even if it was just dumped into the ocean, there would be no harm to humans - the waste would bury itself in the seabed. We are not using this solution because Greenpeace and other assorted clowns do not understand anything about marine biology or oceanography. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
5. Even if the waste does somehow escape into the environment, it is very easy to detect this. Radiation detectors are very cheap and compact compared to the laboratory setups needed to analyze chemical pollution - so cheap and compact that every radiation worker has their own detector that keeps track of their exposure. This fact facilitates cleanup operations.
I can understand the uneasy feelings, but let's have some perspective. This isn't even as bad as the hazardous chemical waste we already have to deal with (e.g. from semiconductor production, mining and metallurgy), which unlike nuclear waste will remain toxic forever.
Considering that Chernobyl released several percent of its core directly into the air through a graphite fire, and the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl was rated at 1000 MW (roughly the combined power of units 1 and 2 at Fukushima I), this can only be an extremely pessimistic upper bound.
Everything depended on the assumption that the coolant had a backup system.Once that assumption was mooted by the tsunami, the flaws in the rest of the system became known.
Not really. The real assumption that failed was that even if there was a complete loss of power in the plant, power could be reasonably quickly (8 hours) provided from outside the plant. The problems escalated because no supplies were available due to tsunami devastation, not even freshwater. The power grid was so damaged that an extra cable had to be laid to get any external power.
One of which is that once you lose cooling and can't get it restarted, you will inexorably have to vent hydrogen into a closed space full of air. Another is that there is no way to vent it to the outside to reduce the effects of an explosion.
The hydrogen was vented inside the containment on purpose, to allow activation products to decay. It could be vented outside the containment, but this would increase the radiation emissions, which the operators desperately wanted to minimize at that point. Hydrogen explosion was deemed an acceptable risk. It looks like this kind of mindset, "reduce public radiation exposure at all cost", is what caused the situation to escalate.
Another is that if the cooling system is completely bunged, there's no way to throw external coolant on the thing that has any effect.
The design assumption was that once cooling completely fails, the reactor will be drained, sealed and allowed to melt down. But this would necessitate a very costly cleanup which TEPCO wanted to avoid.
And another is that they stored the "spent" fuel rods in bunches in what is basically an open swimming pool, so that any chance it gets to evaporate the water around it will result in a fire.
Storing them elsewhere would necessarily expose the workers to more radiation. The point of the temporary storage near the reactor is to allow the fuel to lose most of its radioactivity before it is moved to a longer-term storage location.
What's criminal here is that these things were known to be bad assumptions long ago, but these reactors were operating as originally installed.
Each of the design considerations had a lot of thought behind it. The real problem is that the nuclear safety regulations are not based on a realistic risk analysis, but on fantasies (e.g. child drinking maximally contaminated water for an entire year, or somebody eating exclusively spinach for an entire year). As a result, the operators focused minimizing public radiation exposure rather than on stabilizing the facility, which was actually counterproductive.
Solution: nuclear powered ships. As a bonus, the ships can go really fast.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6OHHGrVM3g
(in the middle he says some standard anti-nuclear bullshit, but otherwise it's a great clip)
The problem with insuring a nuclear reactor is that, if it does fail, the cost is going to be so huge that it would immediately bankrupt pretty much any insurance company.
This is what old, extremely pessimistic reactor accident consequence studies say - for example, they assume that LWR reactor core material can be dispersed as fine dust over a large area, even though there is no known physical process which could do that. The upcoming SOARCA study from the NRC will hopefully be more in line with reality.
The anti-nuclear activists have been quite successful with such an argument.
The Chinese government likes lockdown only as long as they're the ones doing the locking. Once someone else is in control, it interferes with their own power.
Catholic Church is a good example. A variant of it can exist in China on the condition that it dissociates itself from the Pope, so it is not controlled by a foreign entity. Chinese don't like lockdown and censorship, they like a monopoly of power and influence on the public. Once you think about it, that's also what many of the Western leaders want, but don't have the means necessary to get it.
Psst! Your political ideologies are showing.
At its root this is not a political question, but a sociological one. For what it's worth, I would describe myself as a liberal socialist.
Really now. Who in this day and age really believes that the Reagan nuke build-up was anything more than hollow posturing against a dying nation?
Reagan was an utter idiot who didn't really understand the stability given by MAD. His SDI program proves it.
It worked so well that the military budget is STILL untouchable all these years later. Wise up you dipity-doo sniffing right-wing wannabe -- there is no nuclear threat. There hasn't been a nuclear threat since 1965.
First, USA defence budget (which I agree is total lunacy) is an entirely different issue, because the lion's share of it is conventional weaponry. Second, instead of investigating my ideas critically you're trying to bang the tribal drum by branding me as a neocon, which I am not (as mentioned before). No points for you.
All those missels might as well be filled with spare pin-ball machine parts for all the use they will ever get and they are absolutely no good as a modern deterrent.
Non sequitur. What really matters is not whether you actually have nuclear strike capability, but what others think about your nuclear strike capability. You could indeed replace all of the weapons with decoys, but it does not follow from it that you could publicly announce the dismantling of all of your warheads and the situation wouldn't change.
And we can't bomb anyone else.
Which is the whole purpose of the exercise. In a world governed by MAD, all nuclear powers have essentially equal standing.
Mod parent up. Many people detest the idea of MAD but so far it has worked. In practice, nukes are primarily a weapon of influence rather than destruction.
I think the continued existence of United Nations and its various agencies can be attributed in part to nuclear weapons, which made open conflict an existential risk for the superpowers, and created a need for a different way of resolving disputes. At this point, UN could probably survive without nuclear weapons, but its creation would not be possible without them.
I think that regardless of any ideology, nuclear disarmament is very unlikely on the grounds of simple game theory - it's essentially a prisoner's dilemma where the temptation to defect is extremely large (the last remaining nuclear power can blackmail the whole world) and punishment for mutual defection is small (the cost of producing and maintaining the weapons).
In fact, the Iranians chose the type of nuclear reactor that would produce nuclear fuel usable by both domestic and military plans precisely to hide how much nuclear fuel they're generating.
This is patently false. Bushehr is a VVER which is a Russian variant of the popular PWR (pressurized water reactor) design. PWRs are useless for plutonium production.
The killer psychopath does not take over the leadership of a nuclear armed country. He goes around killing people with his hands.
The power and control freaks are not psychopaths, and are capable of enough rational thought to realize that upon launching a preemptive nuclear attack they will die along with their country, which will be reduced to dust in massive retaliation.
Additionally, without nuclear weapons, the USSR would have invaded Western Europe in the 60s at the latest. The UN Security Council would have no real power, and wars between superpowers would probably continue.
his facility would be used to reprocess spent fuel from Canada's CANDU reactors to 'harvest' the pu-235 that is a natural byproduct of the fission process used in these reactors.
It's Pu-239. You are confusing with U-235.
Canada would be MUCH better off spending its energy (no pun intended) on developing an export market for it's reactor know-how and convincing countries to adopt them as a means to get off non-renewable energy.
That's kind of what they do, and the CANDU is used in China, Romania, South Korea, India and a few other countries.
Always look over your shoulder because everyone is watching and plotting against you.
