Geek films cop - goes to jail

Cop kills geek - goes home

This is a real positive step for no matter what you think of Nuclear power. It would seem this debate is so polarized that people forget that there are structural problems that need to be solved and this is certainly one of them. If transport infrastructure to move pu-239 and other highly energetic radionuclides can be devised, tested and solved then this is one less problem to resolve.

It is in no-one's interests to have a spent fuel containment accident such as the one threatening Fukushima right now (fortunately TEPCO are working on it) so reducing this threat is a really good step no matter if you are pro or anti nuclear.

Planning infrastructure for long term containment is going to come down to the science of the facility and the DOE has found that Yucca mountain is not acceptable in terms of their 'Defense in Depth' policy to containment. Science conducted by the Australia's CSIRO found that granite has the capacity to capture radioisotopes leaking from a facility via ground water.

Additionally, any long term, development of any future reactor technology will depend on a place to store an manage fuel. This is the type of long term planning required to manage these types of materials and is a real positive step to resolving a critical infrastructure issue. Train lines can be built later when a suitable location for a spent fuel containment facility can be assessed based on good science and engineering practices. Both pro and anti nuclear folk should be supporting these forms of initiatives.

Any development of new reactor technology is going to depend on this form of infrastructure because implementing a new reactor technology goes beyond a flippant "just use xyz' technology". Our generation may just have to face that we have been handed down a few turds in terms of energy technology because they weren't forced into thinking long-term the way our generation has been forced to. The responsible thing to do is for our generation to try to solve those problems so we have additional technology options available in the mix.

There is nothing wrong with using nuclear in the future if it is done properly, but it needs proper infrastructure to work and any honest assessment of today's nuclear industry will reveal that it could be done a whole lot better. In the meantime use of solar, wind and geothermal today are a requirement to develop good nuclear infrastructure in the future.

MOD PARENT UP - this is the most clarifying description of the problem at hand and the poster has a good point.

I had the same thing in mind and, whilst I'm normally a critic and suspicious of MS, in this case I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

So what. Same problem - different fuel cycle. Thalluim 233 a very nasty gamma emitter and a whole new set of radioisotope analogues in the environment. It doesn't matter what type of reactor technology is focused on it's the rest of the Nuclear industry that has infrastructure problems. Were you even aware of that type of reactors spent fuel product?

Therefore the only way to progress *any* reactor technology is with associated spent fuel containment facilities to manage it. To put it into economic terms, the metal itself is quite valuable AND dangerous. No one leave piles of gold just lying around, it's carefully stored and managed. The difference is that gold doesn't cause human health issues on top of being dangerous.

Think about it.

Only a fool thinks that Nukes are dead, or for that matter, wants them dead.

Well I don't think I'm a fool and I did say that it "seems like the figures prove nuclear is dead then". I do support reactor development, however I think the current nuclear industry is in such a mess that it's going to take a lot of money and some very big infrastructure project to fix it, and I don't see any political figures anywhere that are going to get involved with multi-decade infrastructure projects.

Yep, I said it was great news, because its such a mess and if it isn't going to be fixed, which is what the capital expenditure seems to indicate, then it may as well be shut down before any more of the old aged reactors have a serious accident, I don't think that is foolish either. So, since you have said something like that, do you support a spent fuel containment facility?

Heck, with JUST the nuke waste ( both from nuke plants and from rare earth mining) that we have, if we use transatomic and flibe reactors, we would have enough ENERGY (not just electricity, but full energy) to do 100% of America's Energy for over 100 years.

Well, actually, there is enough there for 5000 years of energy needs to be supplied - but do you seriously think there is a politician or company or even an economy with that kind of forward planning capacity?

And note that we got into the mess that we are, because we took coal to over 60% of our electrical usage.

No, Nuclear is in the mess it is in because it did not look after its house and put infrastructure in place when it had money to do so. More importantly when it had the political and financial support to do so. Now it is being slapped in it face for its own arrogance and, frankly, it kind of deserves it. The Nuclear industries PR machine has been one of the most voracious in slapping down the criticism it received and is now harvesting the inability to answer that criticism.

We are in the mess we are in because we heavily biased our subsidies in favour of Nuclear, Coal and Oil. Renewable energy puts too much control in the consumers hands and no company wants it's customers to have any control.

So I think that it is probably dying, not dead yet, but this is a big sign that it is over.

Because they know a good investment when they see it.

Great, PV is more viable than nukes! thanks for the info.

Well it seems like the figures prove nuclear is dead then. Great news, thanks!

Totally irrelevant.

I don't think you posses all of the facts, no one is proposing to throw the fuel away.

For the Nuclear industry to have any viability it has to *start* with sound containment facilities and infrastructure to support and regulate the distribution of fuel. Fukushima showed exactly why on-site fuel storage is so dangerous. The fuel may be valuable but the reactor technology only extracts .3%, yes one third of one percent of the fuel's energetic potential over it's trivial 30-60 year life span.

Fast neutron reactors are notoriously more difficult to control than PWR and much more toxic. I certainly support the development of reactor technology however materials technology doesn't exist to support viable fission power plants. The only thing the Nuclear industry can do is resolve the infrastructure issues but there isn't a single politician who will support the billions of dollars that has to be spent over a minimum of 3 decades. This is the beginning of end of the nuclear industry, if you want to blame someone blame the nuclear fanbois who never lobbied for the required infrastructure to sustain the industry because their dogmatic skepticism pooh poohed anyone who didn't just believe it was safe, that these things are all unnecessary.

You seem to think that the facility would only contain spent fuel however, there are oodles of radioisotopes from weapons production that also needs storage. This is an admission by the NRC that this problem clearly belongs in the "Too Hard" basket.

It will appear that way but it won't be the result. The 2005 energy act disassembled the PUCHA put in place after the depression. Companies are now free to come in and make plans for locating pre-approved reactors and despite the claims of NIMBYism the same 2005 act denies local residents the right to have any involvement in the considerations for placing those reactors.

Not that it matters. Only oil and coal companies have the financial clout to pay for reactors and this is a clear way for those companies to plunder ratepayers with the tax credits they will receive even if they don't build the reactor, as they drive America into another depression.

I'll probably be modded down for expressing my opinion however this is a disappointing outcome for the Nuclear Industry.

When Dixie Lee Ray was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission he proclaimed that the disposal of nuclear fuel would be “the greatest non-problem in history” and would be accomplished by 1985, yet here we are in 2014, almost thirty years past that date and still there is no acceptable high level waste disposal site anywhere. The closest anyone has come is the Swiss and even thier project is a multi-decade test project and extremely expensive.

Nuclear power is energy intensive *after* the energy has been produced simply because material technology is not adequate to produce a Nuclear reactor that has a life span that matches the geological time frames of the fuel. This exposes the facility to all the issues associated with decommissioning reactor sites every 4 decades or so. A reactor design that lasts at least 1000 years and is a closed loop, i.e. the plutonium goes in and nothing comes out (except electricity and possibly hydrogen) and avoids all the energetic costs associated with mining, enrichment and decommissioning/demolition of the reactor is the reactor technology issue that has to be solved for Nuclear Energy to be viable because otherwise it can never realize the full energetic yield of the fuel.

This looks like the authorities are effectively giving up on producing the solutions that the Nuclear industry requires to be viable. The first step is a geologically spent fuel containment facility, with appropriate infrastructure to support it is the first step in reviving the nuclear industry. It doesn't matter whether you are for or against Nuclear power this is a basic structural issue that need to be solved. If you're for Nuclear Power then it is a requirement to develop new reactors, if you're against Nuclear Power then it is a requirement to keep radionuclides out of the environment.

Just leaving it around existing reactor sites is a admission that a proper solution is too hard and that further investment in the Nuclear Industry is pointless, when in actuality investment in containment infrastructure is essential.

Yucca mountain is not a suitable site because it is made of pumice and geologically active evidenced by recent aftershocks of 5.6 within ten miles of a repository that is supposed to be geologically stable for at least 500000 years. The DOE's own 1982 Nuclear Waste policy Act reported that Yucca Mountain's geology is inappropriate to contain nuclear waste, and long term corrosion data on C22 (the material to contain the Pu-239 and mitigate the ingress of water revealed by Studies of the Yucca mountain hydrology ) is just not available.

We need something made of granite. The only human made structures we've seen that last 10000 years resembles the pyramids, and it is an engineering project of that scale, because the logistical problems of transferring the 70000 odd tons of Pu239 to the spent fuel containment facility are so involved that you want to get it right the first time and only do it once. The design of the Swedish facility shows how a reactor facility that complies with the industry designed improvements could be implemented.

IIRC, NIMBYism is how the project ended up in Nevada in the first place because one Nevada politician did not show for the vote and that was enough to place the facility at Yucca. This is not the way to place a spent fuel containment facility. A location evaluated by science and engineering practices is.

According to the US Geological Survey an earthquake of magnitude 9 will occur once every 500 years.

This means in up to a decade, maybe two, the population will rebuld, as there have indeed been earthquakes and tsunamis before.

The radio isotopes released by Fukushima also decay in geological timeframes. Picking a sample of sr90, one of the shorter lived radioisotopes has a 600year*20 half lives as it decays through its daughter products. Being generous in allowing extra time for another eruption that roughly means there will be 20 magnitude 9 earthquakes before that radio active effluent will become benign in the environment.

For the toxic pu-239, its oxides and chlorides it will decay in 25000years*20 half lives as it decays, which means there will be 1000 magnitude 9 earthquakes before that radioisotope becomes benign in the environment. There will be 50 magnitude 9 eathquakes before it decays into its first daughter product. Though I expect that the organic binding of pu-239 into biota will accelerate the process.

This is the long scale of nuclear accidents, they are mind numbingly slow. Most people can't see a year into the future, so it's completely understandable why the earthquake seems like a greater impact. Perhaps you hadn't considered it that way.

Long after everyone alive today is dead, those radioisotope will remain toxic to life in the environment for up to 500,000 years. Bioaccumulation of these radioisotopes will ensure that it has a significant impact on the birthrate of human beings over time with genetic and transgenic disease for those born, so in comparison, the impact of the earthquake and tsunami is quite small.

I could care less but it's too much effort.

Happened with Vista, ME, Windows 2, DOS 4 (iirc). Everyone has to shit a real steamer sometimes look at people in stores trying to use it, it's hilarious but they kept annoying people with UI changes and moving things around so it's really turned into Windows H8 now.

The fundamental flaw in your response is that the Fukushima units had no design features to deal with a tsunami from the start, so analysis was never part of the equation.

The report commissioned by the Diet specifically pointed to active resitance on the part of TEPCO to resist documentation efforts that would support an increase to the height of the sea wall because they relied on historical data instead of geological data and more modern techniques for assessing the risk.

If you postulate a tsunami that breaches the wall, then you must analyze the plant to ensure it can withstand, and this was never done.

Exactly. Like an aircraft crash, more than one thing has to go wrong to produce the failure. This is reactor failure caused by long term mis-management of the technology, not the actual technology. No enhancement to the sea wall or improving back-up power redundancy, operator training, more intensive drills and simulations - the list goes on. In the 60's Fukushima was state of the art and the sea wall was built according to what was reasonable at the time.

Over time a belief system, 'Nuclear is Safe', developed. That produced a dogmatic skepticism, re-inforced by social proof so no actual challenges to the beleif system, even those based in science, were accepted. No machine is immune to human foley. And this is a point made in the official report into the Fukushima disaster:

The Nuclear industry learned nothing from the lessons of Chernobyl.

In the case of Diablo, they designed the plant with the ability to withstand an earthquake from the start. They postulated the earthquake, performed the analysis, then obtained new earthquake information and validated that the existing analysis enveloped the new data.

Great. I haven't looked at Diablo Canyon. I was more concerned with San Onofre, Palo Verde, Davis Besse and, Indian Point but for different reasons. I'm glad SONGS is being decommissioned, it was on the other side of the Pacific in a fault zone with a greater density of fuel rods. It looks like the people who actually matter making the decisions about operating them in the US are smart enough to understand the dangers and not affected by social proof, but actual scientific proof.

None of this happened at Fukushima.

That's right - we all lost. The collusion between TEPCO and the regulator meant doing that work was actively resisted. It looks like there is a real movement in the NRC to grow some and challenge the operators of the reactors to shut them down if they can't be re-certified. This is a positive thing and the NRC should be commended for protecting the US from an accident caused by the same collusion that caused Fukushima to explode and melt down.

It looks like a really beautiful countryside from the pictures in the wiki too.

The documentation is the beginning of the process to either revise processes or install modifications. This was the primary issue at Fukushima as the documentation to improve the sea walls was resisted and stopped. This meant the process to improve the seawalls there did not commence planning or other things required to improve the safety of the plant.

The author probably understands this because he has a deep understanding of reactors and the processes under which they operate. The belief system that surrounded operating processes at Fukushima was the real danger, more than likely the reason why he has reacted the way he has.