The Other Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant
May 25th, 2011
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Since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world’s attention has been fixed upon the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The six reactor plant suffered major damage that disabled the primary cooling systems on units one, two, three and four.
Yet there is another Fukushima nuclear plant, which was struck by exactly the same forces but has gone largely unnoticed, primarily because there have been so few problems. Fukushima Daiichi translates directly as “Fukushima Number 1,” and was built starting in 1967. In 1976 it was decided to construct a second nuclear power plant, Fukushima Daini, directly translated as “Fukushima Number 2.” The first units came online at Fukushima Daini in 1982, with a total of four reactors being built, the last coming online in 1986.
Both nuclear plants are located directly on the coast. Fukushima Daini is about seven miles south of Fukushima Daiichi. Both plants also have very similar breakwater designs.
Fukushima Daini is also where a worker took these amazing pictures of the tsunami surge flooding the area around the reactor containment buildings. The water actually came in even higher than these pictures show, but the worker didn’t stick around to take any more photos.
Fukushima Daini is also where the first death at a nuclear plant as a result of the tsunami was reported. A worker was trapped in the control booth of a crane at the plant’s exhaust stack by the inundation of water. Rescuers reached the worker several minutes later but found he was already dead.
The quake also triggered a shutdown of all four of the reactors at Fukushima Daini, which had been operating at full power at the time. Significant damage was sustained to numerous plant systems, both nuclear and non-nuclear. The fourteen meter high tsunami that struck the plant was more than twice the height the plant was designed to survive. Fires were reported in at least one turbine room. At least some of the on sight backup power systems were also destroyed.
Three of the four reactors at Fukushima Daini sustained significant damage to their primary cooling systems. Flooding of pump rooms rendered the essential service water systems inoperative for units one, two and four. Backup cooling systems continued to function. Even without the ability to dissipate heat into the environment, the internal cooling mechanism of the reactors assured that enough heat was dissipated into the wetwell of the reactor, providing more than a day of decay heat dissipation.
On March 12, officials began preparations for releasing pressure from the reactors at Fukushima Daini, but this was determined to be unnecessary before any pressure was released. Emergency cooling systems continued to function properly and within two days of the tsunami, the primary cooling systems of all reactors were once again functional. On March 30, secondary systems were once again required when a fault occurred in equipment that supplies power to pumps at one of the reactors. Full functionality was quickly restored.
Since then, Fukushima Daini has remained in a state of cold shutdown. As time as passed, the cooling of the cores has become less critical, and all cooling capacity has remained functional. There were no explosions or other major accidents. There have been no releases of pressure or radioactive material from the plant and spent fuel storage remains stable. At this time the plant is considered safe and secure.
Why Daini survived the quake and tsunami so much better than Daiichi:
There’s really only one glaring difference between Fukushima Daiichi and Fukushima Daini: the vintage of the nuclear technology of the plants. While Fukushima Daiichi was built with reactor designs from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Fukushima Daini was built with technology of the early to mid 1980’s.
A comparison of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi and Daini:
Both plants use boiling water reactor designs developed by General Electric, although in the case of Fukushima Daini, the vendors were Hitachi and Toshiba, who had licensed the designs of General electric. These are similar to reactors operated in the United States and elsewhere.
The BWR-3 and BWR-4 reactors are very similar in design. The primary difference is that the BWR-4 is larger. Otherwise, most of the basic systems and design features are the same. They use a similar containment structure and general layout to the BWR-1 and BWR-2. The containment system is the Mark 1 containment design, first used at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in 1969 for a GE BWR-2 reactor. These reactors would be considered early Generation II nuclear power reactors.
The BWR-5 represents a considerably greater change in design and technology from the BWR-4 than the BWR-4 did from the BWR-3 or than the BWR-3 did from the BWR-2. The BWR-5 introduced newly designed core spray and auxiliary cooling systems. The BWR-5 also introduced the Mark-2 containment design, a complete redesign of the reactor structure. The Mark-2 design integrates more of the cooling and support equipment into the central containment area of the reactor building. It also includes a number of new safety systems. The explosions that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi were the result of hydrogen buildup from a reaction between the zirconium alloy fuel cladding and the water in the reactor vessels. The Mark-2 containment system includes a system that can purge the reactor coolant with nitrogen gas to avoid such dangers. Further refinements were made to the Mark-2 Advanced containment design.
The BWR-5 represents what would technically be considered a late Generation-II nuclear reactor, although many of the design features continued to be used in the BWR-6 and later the ABWR and ESBWR, which GE Continues to market, members of the Generation_III and Generation-III+ reactor classes.
The conclusion that one can draw from the events at the two Fukushima plants is relatively straight forward: While the older BWR-3 and BWR-4 designs are sufficiently safe in most situations, their designs are nowhere near as robust and reliable as newer reactor designs. Of course, despite holding up so well against forces far beyond what designers had planned, the BWR-5 is, by today’s standards, old technology. Newer reactors are much safer still and have even more reliable passive-based safety features.
This is all the more reason why we should be building more nuclear plants. As newer reactors are built we will be able to eventually shut down the older reactors, thus improving economics and safety even further. The events in Japan do not diminish the picture of safety we have when it comes to new reactors. Rather than assuming that reactors will fail in the manner that they did at Fukushima Daiichi, we should consider how well they held up at Fukushima Daini. This is far more representative of new reactor designs, although those are even safer and more reliable still.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Good Science, Nuclear, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 25th, 2011 at 6:29 pm
I would guess that even if this was the only nuclear power plant affected, the media would have been just as rabid, maybe even more so, as the operators would be accused of hiding the “actual” release of radiation.
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May 25th, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Of course we shouldn’t be closing any nuclear power plants (which can continue to be used) until fossil fuels have been taken care of.
Even the old BWR Mark I containment is safer than any fossil fuel burner (probably applies to the RBMK design as well (and almost certainly every VVER)).
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May 25th, 2011 at 7:44 pm
Just another indication of how biased the media is against nuclear energy. It is very hard to believe this bias is accidental, or a consequence of ignorance.
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May 25th, 2011 at 10:08 pm
DV82XL said:
Not to play devil’s advocate here, but couldn’t you simply chalk that up to a plant not failing being non-newsworthy? Just like the thousands of planes that land safely every day and are never made a news story.
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May 25th, 2011 at 10:21 pm
Q said:
I suppose. I am just ticked off at the way the media handled this story from the get go. While some sensationalizing is expected these days, the fact that there was more coverage of the reactors than the rest of Japan, much of which was reeling under the blows from the earthquake and tsunami. I can’t help but wonder if something else was at play here.
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May 26th, 2011 at 2:30 am
The point of the safer designs is well taken, however Fukushima Diani suffered significantly less flooding damage than Daiichi. Diani was able to secure power offsite after the tsunami and Daiichi 5 & 6 had diesel generation power. So I’d like to know if the differences in design contributed to the different outcome, or did some of the reactors just got some better luck than the others?
So putting that thought aside for now, I’ve been wondering if part of this whole scenario unfolded because of bad crisis management. If reactors 1-3 (4 being offline) all had power supply issues, could one of those reactors (the best condition of the 3) have been started backup (before the backup failed) with at least enough power to keep the other 2 plus some auxiliary systems going to keep the coolant flowing? So in other words, might have it been better to run a potentially damaged reactor rather than waiting for the backup power to fail? I don’t know enough about the plant condition at the time to know if that would have been a viable alternative.
If so, could this have been avoided? Could following safety procedures be partially to blame for what happened? I’m not saying the safety procedures should be ignored but there are always going to be times where some quick thinking and good judgement should take precedence over procedure.
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May 26th, 2011 at 3:27 am
My understanding (based on what others have said to similar questions) is that there is a minimum amount of power those reactors can generate and that with the grid connection gone no where to go for any excess power generated and no way to use enough power at the site.
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May 26th, 2011 at 8:01 am
At least one design of new reactors is designed to stay on line with a loss of off site power. It may be a FERC requirement. The main turbine/generator would keep supplying in plant loads and extra steam is dumped to the main condenser. If you flood out the basement of the turbine, that ability is lost.
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May 26th, 2011 at 9:32 am
Jason said:
If you mean could the reactor have been run to provide electricity to power the other reactors the answer is no.
The quake and tsunami caused very very severe damage. There were fires in the transformer areas. The turbines were damaged. The pipes that carry steam to the turbines were broken. The basements of the turbine rooms were flooded.
Also, even if they had electricity, some of the electrical switching and equipment that feeds the power to the reactor systems was destroyed.
Also, the reactors all SCRAM’ed when the quake hit. You can’t just restart a standard lightwater reactor right away after a scram. There are issues with xenon poisoning and uniform reactivity in the core. The safety procedures for restarting them take some time.
On top of that you can’t really run these reactors at low power. There is a range of power output they can produce, but if it’s a 700 megawatt reactor, you could maybe run it at 600 megawatts or maybe even 500, but not 200. It’s an issue of xenon poisoning, neutron flux stability and that kind of thing.
There are some reactors designed with a lot of extra room for changes in power and for rapid restarts. The reactors on nuclear submarines are like that. If you have to scram the reactor, you can’t wait around for days to restart it when you’re underwater. However, power plant reactors are not intended for this kind of operation.
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May 26th, 2011 at 9:44 am
>> Newer reactors are much safer still and have even more reliable passive-based safety features.
Sure.
But I guess that when the plants of the years ‘70 in Daiichi were built they were also considered top gear, extremely safe, able to resist anything imaginable.
The point is that we cannot allow any single accident like Chernobyl or Fukushima to occurr if we do not want to avoid closing down a part of our planet for a time significative compared to the duration of any known civilization existed up to now.
So how can you be 100% sure that today’s designs are ok in this respect, when we the same nuclear industry claims that they severely underestimated the probability that something like an earthquake+tsunami happening?
Please remember also that the earthquake magnitude when it reached Fukushima was Richter 6.0, something not so unusual for Japan.
And there are also many records in the past for >100feet/30m tsunamis.
Please remember too that most of Japan nuclear power plants lie on sea level. If there’s an earthquake close to the plant there is also a tsunami, most of the times. Or am I missing something?
Also, after what we have seen and what we are still seeing, can we believe in the nuclear industry? It’s like any other industry: first goal is profit. Safety comes in second place.
We cannot afford this game when dealing with radioactive materials. Radioactivity may affect the whole world, for a too long time, it even changes our own essence: our DNA.
Lastly, where can we place all the depleted uranium (and Plutonium, and Technetium,and and and) apart from bullets? Apparently 90% of all the spent fuel worldwide is still stored beside working reactors (Spent fuel pools in Fukushima). This is by far the biggest problem we will be faced in the upcoming years. And centuries. And millennia. How much is the cost (and risk) for disposing of them? Is there anybody that can calculate how much its impact is on the not_yet_paid cost per kWh?
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May 26th, 2011 at 11:16 am
It seems to be the right solution to use for loss of off site power is somthing like the Hyperian Nuclear battery – aka a sealed underground failsafe reactor.
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
Even if you loose hardware above ground you still have power being generated onsite which can be tapped into without running wires for miles.
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May 26th, 2011 at 11:50 am
leodp said:
Unnecessary. If you had all the systems fail, all containment open up completely and 100% of the contents of the core get spewed all over the place what you would have is, at worst, a localized problem that is less than the consequences we have seen from a single major dam failure.
leodp said:
We can’t ever be 100% sure of anything. All we can say is that it’s highly unlikely, but build enough plants and once in a blue moon one of them will fail catastrophically.
It’s like anything else. Once in a blue moon, a plane crashes, despite air travel being ultra-safe. It’s better on balance to have something that rarely fails and almost never kills anyone when it replaces something that kills tens or hundreds of thousands per year (such as fossil fuel)
leodp said:
Plutonium is very useful for fuel.
Technetium is useful in medicine, as an environmental tracer and as a catalyst. It has very low radio toxicity anyway – significantly lower than many naturally occurring isotopes. You can warehouse the stuff pretty much indefinitely if no other use is found. It’s chemically and physically stable and does not take up much space. Or there’s the deep geological repository.
As for depleted uranium, which is lower in radioactivity than the natural uranium you can pick up off the ground in numerous places, it has any number of uses. It can be used in a fast reactor to breed more fuel. It also could be used for radiation shielding, aircraft counterweights, switching diodes, weights for elevators, forklifts and cranes, for pottery glaze, special optics and in certain chemical compounds that are useful for chemical refinement, batteries etc.
If you need a place to store it, you can keep it at my place. (well.. some of it, I don’t have all that much room) I already have a small amount of it.
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May 26th, 2011 at 4:20 pm
Dr. Buzzo,
ummm, actually all Gen II and later are capable of running in “house turbine” operation, meaning the can suply themselves with power to run their systems in hot standby mode, in theory. BWR’s are the easiest as they can controll reactivity in the core with both control rods and circulation pumps (moderator temperature control).
In practice however things may be different, I have been working in plants that managed to crash down from 100% and run on house turbine mode for about a day and half, the sister station managed about 4 seconds (same event)… Best way is to start up the plant from hot zero power and run it on house turbine (if you can do that without challaging the steam generators with contaminants).
Xenon poisoning does not become an issue until about 6-8 hours and after ~20 (~3 half lives of I-135) it such a serious problem that you have to wait for the Xe-135 to decay off before the core is stable enough to be restarted safely.
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May 26th, 2011 at 4:41 pm
leodp said:
Actually, the ground acceleration at the plant was ~125% above the design level (design is eq. to Richter 7.2), sorry can’t give you a source other than it is reliable. The numbers I have are in acceleration numbers that I do not understand the unit for, but I can tally the totals…(I am a chemist not a geophysicist).
leodp said:
This is a common missconception, in some places perhaps it may be true but I doubt it. I have never met an operating organisation that does not have operational safety as a number one priority. Reason being, the regulator does actually evaluate the safety culture of the operating company. If it is not up to the standards expected the plant gets shut down. A shut down plant cost money, so nobody want that. I have experience of working in the UK, US and Scandinavia…
leodp said:
True about fuel pools being an issue, this is well known in the industry. The tsunami incident in Japan did cause a total whipe out of the on site as well as the off site infrastructure. Normally you have about 4-10 hours to restore cooling to a fuel pool before it starts to boil, if you have your infrastructure in place doing something to restore the coolability is easy, if everything is whiped clean you are in trouble.
As to costs, you actually can calculate the cost per kWh. The KBS-3 method will cost in the region of 11 billion US dollars to dispose of 12 reactors life time of spent fuel, that would be in the region of 1/7th cent/kWh, that includes the cost of 500 million dollars to develop the program. Slightly more than building 2 new AP1000’s, I believe.
I do not know the reasons why Yukata repository was scrapped, was there any sound technical reasons or was it just a lot of political bull?
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May 26th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Matte said:
Okay, well I don’t know the specifics of what equipment had been damaged to what extent, but bear in mind everything that was not inside the containment structure was effectively wiped out.
And regarding xe poisoning: The situation I had in my mind was that the reactor might be seen as a power source some time later, at least hours. It seems to me like a very bad idea to immediately try to restart a reactor right after being hit by a magnitude 9 earthquake when you have no idea to what extent the steam plumbing and valves have been damaged.
I would myself want to spend at least a few hours doing a basic inspection of all the steam systems, valves, pumps and cooling equipment before putting the whole thing back at pressure and running it.
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May 26th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
Bluntly the problems at Fukushima Daiichi stem from the breathtakingly shortsighted failure to provide backup power from a fail-safe source. The performance of the reactor really shouldn’t be in question as it wasn’t designed or built to tolerate running without electricity. This sounds tautological, but when the accident analysis is done it is the lack of a suitably reliable backup that will be found to be the failure point, not containment, or design.
It seems to me that commonsense and Good Practice standards should have dictated a hardened, watertight installation for the diesel generator and its fuel supply, AND a mobile secondary unit stationed some distance inland. Had these been in place, this event would not have become the drama that it did.
In other words, culpability lies with the lack of foresight, not with the failed unit’s design, or nuclear energy in general
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May 26th, 2011 at 6:07 pm
DV82XL said:
I’ve already read some of the analysis of that. It seems that in addition to the whole issue of on-site power being knocked out, hooking up a mobile generator from a secondary location was complicated by the fact that such a contingency plan had never before been considered and thus the engineers had no working plans for how and where to hook it up. Also, the design of the power systems didn’t make it easy to do so. They eventually had to improvise a method for feeding electricity into the system through a jury-rig.
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May 26th, 2011 at 9:04 pm
leodp said:
So? They could resist anything that they were designed to resist.
leodp said:
Most of the Chernobyl exclusion zone is perfectly safe to live in and very little contamination was actually released around Fukushima (most of it went into the ocean where it gets diluted).
Much of the area around Chernobyl will probably be reopening within the next few decades.
leodp said:
Nuclear doesn’t have to be perfect, all it has to be is better than everything else, which it is.
leodp said:
The Earthquake was not 6.0 on the Richter scale (some of the aftershocks may have been).
Maybe you don’t realise what the Richter scale actually is.
leodp said:
Which for that site were only found out about a couple of years ago.
leodp said:
Do you have any idea how much writing off a nuclear reactor costs?
Nuclear reactors can produce very cheap electricity when they are running but they cost a lot of money to build, that gives anyone owning one an incentive to make sure it can continue to operate (which is a pretty strong incentive not to let an accident happen).
leodp said:
Radioactivity is also natural and something we have evolved to live with.
Besides, how else are we meant to get carbon neutral electricity? Solar and wind just aren’t up to it and we don’t have enough hydro sites available?
leodp said:
Fuel for fast breeder reactors. It also isn’t that radioactive.
leodp said:
Makes a decent reactor fuel.
leodp said:
Currently the workhorse of nuclear medicine.
leodp said:
So you’re one of those people?
leodp said:
The cost for eventual has already been include in the price of electricity from nuclear power, not something you can say about the waste products from solar.
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May 26th, 2011 at 9:40 pm
leodp said:
Yes, ionizing radiation can change our DNA. However, radioactivity and ionizing radiation are inescapable. Most you are exposed to (which you are every day) comes from natural sources. Some is cosmic and other comes from thorium, uranium, radon, carbon-14 and a host of other radioactive sources in the world. You are always dealing with radioactive materials. It can’t be avoided. Nuclear energy contributes a drop into a big ocean of radioactivity.
Lets talk more about DNA damage. Not only is natural ionizing radiation a factor, but it is not the only thing that alters DNA. Many chemicals do and so do free-radicals and the process of DNA replication sometimes alters the DNA.
There is more to it than that, though. All organisms have mechanisms for repairing DNA. Actually DNA is itself a kind of error-resistant code. Sometimes it does mutate anyway. What of that? Mutations are often harmful or are unnoticeable. They are sometimes beneficial. Mutations are actually the one thing responsible for the diversity of life on earth. The fact that we are all so different, that you and I are different from, lets say, coral or cucumbers is because of mutations. It’s also how humans ended up with different color eyes and hair and different faces etc.
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May 26th, 2011 at 10:19 pm
leodp said:
Others have commented on this but I’d like to add this is completely false. To put it another way, unsafe operations = cost liability, not profit, therefore safety adds to the bottom line, it doesn’t subtract from it. No company wants to lose their investment because of negligence nor do they want to suffer stiff fines from the NRC for small infractions.
On the positive side, Fukushima will bring us even safer plants. The redundancy/variation principle could have worked better in this situation as pointed out by DV82XL and Buzz0 that might have cost a few million to implement but would have saved billions. Mother nature overwhelmed imagination in this case, whereas it can be argued that Chernobyl should have been avoided entirely because of a poor safety culture. TMI might have been avoided too with better management.
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May 26th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
Jason Ribeiro said:
Though there are still a few idiots in management who don’t seem to get that, usually in industries other than nuclear.
Also in the developing world it’s very common for a company not to bother with paying any liability.
Jason Ribeiro said:
TMI could have been avoided by just copying the first unit (which didn’t have the design flaws that caused the problem with unit 2) for the second one.
Of course there are a lot more different things that should have been done with regard to Chernobyl (like not building RBMKs, actually building what the designers designed and not overriding the safety mechanisms to run a poorly thought out experiment while the reactor was operating in an unstable state).
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May 27th, 2011 at 2:04 am
drbuzz0 said:
True enough, I was saying in general. I would not want to start up a reactor, after an external event like an earthquake without making sure all the equipment is in working order, either. LOOP events, however, don’t have to be caused by earthquakes though, more likely initiators are grid oscilations or switch yard failures.
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May 27th, 2011 at 7:47 am
DV82XL said:
TEPCO did this largely to itself with its inept dealings with the press, as did the owners of Three Mile Island. Piss off the media by providing conflicting, patronizing, evasive or no information and it will start tasting blood. Of course the fact that most reporters probably couldn’t tell you the difference between a neutron and a neutrino and the fact that expert fear mongers know how to be quotable while also knowing that they are less likely to be fact checked doesn’t help.
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May 27th, 2011 at 7:56 am
Blubba said:
Too true on so many levels. The media is not the friend of nuclear proponents, as a reasonable debate will not whip up a frenzy of gory headlines which will sell news papers or attract viewers. This is something that the ludites are capitalizing on. Soundbites that claim mass death and destruction of life as we know it will always reach the front page.
It’s an uphill struggle.
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May 27th, 2011 at 9:23 am
I have engineered a score of US nukes, including Mark I, Mark II, and developed the prototype Mark III. I disagree with this article. ( I am ignorant of Japanese practice.)
Concurrent with the development of the containment (the fission product barrier, Mark n+1), there was a parallel development of reactors (BWR n+1s). Since the inception of their nuclear program GE opted for boiling water in the reactor, and a cold water heat sink, within the “can”, the steam suppression pool, to capture the accident energies, both thermodynamic and isotopic. GE also opted for a bottom control rod assembly, a forest of long vertical pipes beneath the reactor, and recirculation loops, huge pumps and piping, which provides fine tuning of power ranges. The Mark I, commonly called the light bulb above the doughnut, housed these systems, and as a result, has very complex geometric shapes. It was difficult to construct. Subsequent designs simplified the geometries. (I omit significant improvements, here, for brevity. Some of the excellent comments above, contribute in this regard.)
The main difference between Fukushima Daiichi and Daini was luck, unrelated to the containment designs.
All nukes must have emergency core cooling systems. These huge cooling systems must operate in the hours following any disaster, or as we have seen, the nukes will destroy themselves. The power, normally is electrical, but steam driven, last chance systems, also exist. Batteries exist to power instruments loops, computers, and control, but are insufficient to run big cooling pumps for days. The difference between disaster and safe shut down is that these systems survived the quake and flood in one plant, but not in the other.
I can not conceive why emergency electrical gear was placed so low in an area known for devastating tsunamis. This caused the disaster. I can not conceive why vital plant conditions today are so unknown. There are instrument loops in US plants that would answer the massive gaps in basic information, e.g. where are millions of gallons of water, and what are the isotopes floating in them? It is important to know whether your core has melted, one should not be forced to guess. And the gross hydrogen system failures… it is inexplicable to me.
There is a current trend to reestimulate this moribund industry by Madison Avenue techniques: new and improved, whiter than white, lemon scented nuclear reactors. I know that some “advanced” design concepts, today, were rejected two generations ago. Thus I conclude that key NRC decision makers retired, and younger ones simply chanced their minds. This is unconvincing to a terrified public who wonders what is safe, and who knows what they are talking about?
It is vital that brutal honesty be extant in this profession. Stay focused on the basics.
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May 27th, 2011 at 11:49 am
R. L. Hails Sr. P. E. said:
Okay, but since both plants were subject to approximately the same tsunami and quake, and in the case of Daini it was more than twice the design height, isn’t the very fact that they survived really attributable to how the equipment was arranged and constructed?
The fact that the critical equipment at Daini survived and continued to function properly tells me that these systems were better protected or located.
I admit I’m not an expert on this but I have always been a little uncomfortable with critical safety systems that are needed to avoid catastrophic failure requiring active sources of power such as standby generators. Gravity, convection etc will always work. Generators won’t always work. From what I understand of the steam driven systems, they need to have some power (provided by batteries) to function properly because electrical power is needed to provide the control systems. Without those, the valves close and the system stops functioning. Why they can’t put a small generator on there I don’t know.
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May 27th, 2011 at 12:13 pm
It is hard to imagine that that the different designs were irrelevant to the survival of the plants. But clearly the MAIN issue was the surival of the either or both the intake circulating water pumps and diesel fuel systems.
The fact is that if the fuel tanks built by TEPCO were placed *behind* the reactor buildings (and thus up a hill) they would of survived and all we would be talking about would be the post-SCRAM/post-repair-of-BOP equipment.
Mr. Halis asked why these fuel tanks were place where they were. Simple: it makes sense if you don’t care or under estimate a potential tsunami breaching your break-water/sea walls. TEPCO wanted to *save money* and was profit driven. Fuel for these tanks is unloaded by barge, thus the sea-side location. It would of costs ‘that much more’ to run a pipeline up the hill behind the reactors to tanks located there but they were not. So this is what happened. It is *exactly* bad planning.
For someone like Mr. Halis, and all of us, it’s up to us to figure out how to prevent this again. If you are not interested in this, and only want to ’shut them down now’ then you are part of the problem.
Mr. Halis’ point about new reactors being a “Madison Ave” shows only an ignorant, not educated, understanding of the new Gen III reactors currently being built in France, Finland, China and Korea. This is highly unfortunate as I know of no designs used now that are being ‘recycled after being rejected’ except for the ABWR from GE even this is not Mr. Holis’ generation reject as it’s projected now.
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May 27th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
The issue of media bias has to be seen in context. The whole country was impacted by the geophysical events, there were plenty of stories to tell, yet a disproportional amount of coverage was given to the nuclear power station’s troubles. This continued long after it was clear that the event was under control.
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May 27th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
One more point. Raised fuel tanks have other advantages as well: gravity fed fuel to the aux. back up diesels. Thus if battery operated electric fuel pumps don’t work (DC Back Up) the gravity would be all one needs. Of course the fuel lines would have to be quake-proofed, but so what?
If you look at where Diablo Caynon NPP placed their emergency diesel fuel tanks, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
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May 27th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
The point about TEPCO cutting corners to save money is an important one. We must remember that when Fukushima Daiichi was built, it was competing with oil costing less than $10 a barrel. We can afford to spend more money on safety now, as the price of non-nuclear energy is so much higher.
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May 27th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
The responses to my thoughts are more important than the article. Again, I am ignorant of Fukushima.
It appears that the newer designs were,”up the hill”, and thus fared better in the flood. The containment type(s) was probably immaterial. Tsunamis are not uniform in height, or inland travel; there may be dynamic wave attenuation designs which acted. The development of nuclear power paralleled the nascent science of earth quake study (tsunamis, plate tectonics subduction, and complex computer dynamic modeling). When you have a number of volatile technologies interrelating, over decades, you learn that some prior assessments were flawed. In recent years, TEPCO learned from tsunami scientists that their design basis may not have been safe (a possible, now actual, much higher tsunami wave). There is enormous uncertainty about flood level, but the plant elevation is certain and unchangeable. An unmentioned catastrophic concern is floatation; will the buildings, and tanks, float? It has happened. Fukushima apparently did not.
Confused reports state that one DG simply ran dry; no one filled the tank. Were water tight doors installed and closed? Water proof electrical gear installed as a back fit? We know, their road systems were shattered. We know, from photographs, that the bay was devoid of ships the day after. It should have been filled with ships; it is a short sailing distance from one of the largest, technically advanced ports on earth, Tokyo. The plant needed DGs, power feeds, switch yards, fuel tanks, water tankers, repair shops, supply ships, worker housing, decon facilities, all preplanned, pre staged, pre rehearsed, and available, within hours. I understand they had no plans. It took two weeks to string a power line some 1/2 mile to the strickened plant.
I repeat. If your basic design requires continuous post tsunami electricity, you must provide back up emergency systems that works, with any containment type. TEPCO’s top management failed. The government regulators failed. The Japanese emergency response planning, and current reassessment of safety risks were grossly inadequate. In a few years, we will know this in detail. We know that the company has lost 80% of its value since March 10, and severe regional danger exists in the metastable plant condition. Fukushima is vulnerable to after shocks and typhoons. My guess is that their top management are financial and political types. I do not know. A tip off is that their robots come from New England, not Japan. Another tip off: their workers are putting in 100 hour weeks, in cruel, dangerous work environments, yet have no showers, no flush toilets, eat dry food, and sleep in chairs. A few worked in calf deep radioactive water without boots. Japan has lousy bosses. So did the earlier disasters.
A core melt down is supposed to be a one in ten thousand year event, causing biblical devastation. Yet in sixty years, US designs, light water reactors, have suffered four melt downs, without one acute death from radiation. The long term radiation death estimates range from none, by pro nuke types to millions from anti nuke types.
I Know, due to the long nuclear hiatus, no new plants, that any new US designs will be managed, regulated, engineered, fabricated, and built by people who have never done this before, from A to Z. If Michael Jordan had not touched a ball in forty years, would his game be his best? I know, that by 1991, that 69 US engineering colleges had dropped course work, vital to power plant engineering, because their graduates could not find employment. We lack a generation of experienced engineers. The US now relies on foreign nations to supply our advanced degreed engineers (45% at the MS level, 75% at the PhD level.) Nuclear power is an advanced technology, struggling in a technically ignorant democracy.
Voters fear it, and vested interests (media and political types) exploit these fears. The result is enormous overruns, and schedule delays. ( A new Texas BWR was recently canceled due to skyrocketing costs in the paper stage. Finland’s new nuke is three years behind schedule, and 50% over budget.) IMHO, these, not Gen N+1 safety advances, are the barriers to societal acceptance of nukes. Larding on more cost, delay, and regulatory complexity is not safety; it is useless waste. Putting some back up DGs (one of the most reliable machines ever invented), some mobile homes, and a canteen, on a few barges, and paying for practice drills, is safety. Funding robot R&D, at Universities, to enter hi-rad areas, is safety. Forcing academic paper pushing regulators to work on a real job site improves safety. Paying talented people is safety.
Fukushima must force clear thinking about this complex technology. Its problem was not an old containment design.
Without nukes, the US can not survive.
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May 27th, 2011 at 3:20 pm
David Walters said:
I don’t know that we can go that far – to say that had the tanks survived everything would have functioned. The tanks are only one part of the equation. You can have diesel and if the generators are not functional, that does you no good. If you have diesel and generators but the switching equipment or the electrical connection to the equipment is damaged, still no good.
I know that there were large diesel storage tanks located near the shore at the plant. I don’t know that this was the only diesel on site. From what I have read it seems like there were diesel tanks at the location of each of the generators and then the centralized storage tank as an additional reserve. Had the generators survived the only issue would have been procuring more diesel fuel to the site before the tanks on the generators ran out – clearly it was worse than this.
If you look at these two photos, it appears that the exhaust for the backup generators can be seen. It looks to me like the generators were located in small structures in front of the turbine halls, roughly at ground level:
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp2/pict55.jpg
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp2/pict53.jpg
David Walters said:
well I’m not sure you can say it’s as simple as profit. Obviously they lost a lot of money because of this decision. It comes down to risk versus cost. They decided that the risk of losing a lot of money because of a tsunami was very low – so low it was a risk worth taking to save some money. Unfortunately, every once in a while the improbable happens. The odds were on their side but they lost anyway.
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May 27th, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Dr…I’m not sure that is exhaust or steam from the building the exhaust is coming out of. It’s hard to tell.
Yes, it could be profit or not, but it could be, right? The main thing is that even with knowledge of 3 times a century OVER 14m tsunamis, they decided on a smaller, @14m breakwater. This was an error/oversight/incompetent decision on TEPCO’s part.
Secondly, yes, for example, the bus work for the CWPs and the other salt-water pumps. According the maps I’ve seen from TEPCO the top of the CWPs where the motors are located were above ground water but below the tsunami level. Thus they *automatically* short out. Breaker boxes for same? I don’t know where they are located but probably ground level. Diesel pumps…ground level but facing the ocean.
Let’s say this was at best, dumb, at worst, dumber. So…the task now is for current sea-side plants to audit these problem and come up with fixes that included raising the CWP motor by extending the shafts and placing the motors on towers and/or in extra-reinforced housings with tsunami-proof busses and switching gear (from my own power plant experience even passive salt-water corrosion is always a problem.
Water/tsunami proofing diesel generators and fuel tanks, pumps and bus work/switch gear including relocation of same. Perhaps raising them on tsunami-proof blocks at about 10 meters up *behind* all reactor containment buildings will do the trick.
Breakwaters/seawalls do not have to be the same site as the tsuanmi to stop them. You have to ‘break them’. A series of 10 meter (from high tide mark) breakwaters, about 4 of them would broken the forward velocity and volume of the tsunami (it’s never the actual height that is the problem if you remember from Thailand, but the force behind it and volume that goes with it). Or, build up close in seawall protection at the plant itself. There are numerous plans in the works now.
New plants now have to take all these precautions everywhere in the world they are building seaside reactors. Drawing on the lessons from Fujushima will help prevent core-cooling issues in the future.
David
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May 27th, 2011 at 5:27 pm
David Walters said:
Yeah I don’t know for sure, but I believe those are the generators and/or deisel pumps for a number of reasons. One is that in all the photos I’ve seen I have not seen any other area that appears to have generator-like equipment. Also, in the stories I’ve read about the placement, they were described as being “not far from the ocean” and “at ground level” – vague, I know, but it seems consistent with the descriptions.
So anyway, they are somewhere in the general vicinity that is at ground level.
And regardless, this is a dumb place to put them.
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May 27th, 2011 at 7:18 pm
I just corrected my post referencing your excellent post. After reviewing the 87-slide TEPCO presentation [PDF] I think the main conclusion of this post is incorrect. The tsunami impact on the two sites was different. Ignoring any issues of design errors, my take away is this:
1. I don’t think the updated Daini BWR designs were decisive in the relative outcomes of the two NPP. It isn’t clear to me how the newer designs handled the seismic accelerations — perhaps Daiichi suffered greater damage in critical components.
2. It is clear that the tsunami impact was significantly different. I don’t understand exactly why, but Daini experienced 14M only on the south side of unit 1 but overall the site was subjected to a 7M inundation. Secondly the flooding depths were less at Daini being sited 13 meters above sea level (O.P.) vs Daiichi 10 meters above sea level (O.P.)
3. The bottom line of course is that Daini retained enough electrical power to operate reactor cooling: one (of four) off-site power lines survived, and 3 of 12 backup diesel generators. We don’t know how Daiichi would have fared if the same level of power supply had survived there.
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May 27th, 2011 at 9:29 pm
George Carty said:
In many places coal is still cheap.
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May 27th, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Great article. First time I’ve read anything along these lines (i.e. a comparison of post-tsunami events at Fukushima 1 and Fukushima 2).
Cheers.
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May 29th, 2011 at 3:00 am
It would be useful to compare with Onogawa NPP.
There is information to describe the impact of the earthquake and tsunami for this site?
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May 29th, 2011 at 6:14 pm
David Walters said:
I don’t agree with that, the industry regulator made a blunder as well. TEPCO just built it as they needed to. The limits are set by the regulator for the site.
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May 30th, 2011 at 3:26 am
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May 30th, 2011 at 4:01 am
Could you please not screw up the quoting function so massively.
leodp said:
Nuclear power plants which are operating can afford to spend a lot of money on safety and still make a nice profit.
leodp said:
Maximum construction costs is what you get when a nuclear regulator gets captured by the fossil fuel industry and it doesn’t do a thing to improve safety.
leodp said:
Oil isn’t really a competitor to nuclear (nuclear basically pushed it out of the electricity generating market). Coal and natural gas are the competitors of nuclear and coal tends to have rather stable pricing.
leodp said:
So can pretty much anything.
leodp said:
Of course they’d do a full analysis and discussion with the regulator if they think part of the plant isn’t working properly as to whether the risk justifies an immediate shutdown or whether to do it at the next refuelling outage but I’d be surprised if a nuclear power plant operated for years with a known bad component very often.
leodp said:
Fossil fuels are the most dangerous way to generate power (with coal as the worst possible).
leodp said:
Solar and hydro destroy a large amount of land and when hydro dams burst they can kill a lot of people (rare but it does happen). Solar panels also require semiconductors which aren’t exactly very eco-friendly to manufacture.
Statistically the renewables are in between nuclear and fossil fuels (i.e. not as dangerous as coal, oil and natural gas but more dangerous than nuclear). Of course the fact that only hydro and geothermal are actually useful means that in terms of fatalities per useful unit of energy generated wind and solar may very well come out worse.
leodp said:
The worst nuclear accident possible was Chernobyl and the highest fatality estimates which don’t blatantly contradict reality (there’s a lot of uncertainty and it could be far less than that) are about what a coal power plant would have produced from air pollution.
Given that and the fact that no reactor currently operating is anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl (the remaining Chernobyl type reactors still operating in Russia have had significant safety upgrades) it is quite reasonable to say that nuclear will never do worse than coal (which is often what you get when you oppose nuclear, just look at Germany for proof of that).
leodp said:
Which is exactly what will happen. People at other nuclear power plants will reconsider whether the ground shaking their plant was designed to handle really is the maximum and if not will make the necessary upgrades.
You can also expect there to be a review as to emergency generator siting.
leodp said:
The dose makes the poison. Low doses are basically harmless, high doses can very well kill you (and radiation protection probably does tend towards paranoia).
leodp said:
But people who live in areas of higher background radiation don’t tend to show any ill effects from it (for an extreme example look up Ramsar in Iran).
leodp said:
DNA is an error correcting code.
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June 1st, 2011 at 8:53 pm
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June 1st, 2011 at 9:52 pm
No, I’m afraid the media did exaggerate the impact.
That there were likely three partial core meltdowns was suspected for a long time and publicly stated (assuming you were actually watching, instead of out there waving anti-nuclear protest signs).
Oh and looking around that site you linked to it is clear that the don’t know what the are talking about (quoting Chris Busby approving for example), don’t for one second think it is somehow a “fair and balanced” news source.
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June 2nd, 2011 at 12:31 am
Anon said:
I don’t think that’s news to anyone. As soon as the reports started coming out of zirconium-hydrogen reactions and that the water level in the primary vessels was lower than the fuel rods it was pretty clear what was happening.
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June 4th, 2011 at 8:00 pm
Just writing to thank everyone here for their insightful comments, especially R. L. Hails.
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June 10th, 2011 at 9:41 am
Actually, something major about Fukushima Daiichi was missed here.
What happened at Fukushima Daiichi didn’t have to happen. It was not doomed to happen even after the quake and tsunami.
They never lost all ability to cool the reactor cores. They still had the ability to use injection pumping to cool the cores by simply pumping in water and then letting it boil off or recirculating it as needed for more injection of additional cool fluid.
The problem was they didn’t have ample fresh water to do this. This technique requires a lot of water. Had the local water supply been working, it might have been much different.
They did have plenty of water though. The problem is it was sea water. If they pumped that in it would be writing off the reactor because its corrosive and would foul all the plumbing of the reactor systems.
TEPCO, of course, didn’t want to do this and avoided it until it was too late. Of course, they did eventually order sea water injection but by the time they did it was too late and the reactor had overheated. This caused the cladding failure, the hydrogen reaction, the explosion and so on.
Had they injected sea water as soon as it was apparent that the reactor was not being cooled sufficiently there would never have been any of these problems and none of the radioactive byproducts would have been released.
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June 10th, 2011 at 9:47 am
@Ray1952
How would you suggest you accomplish that when you have a total station blackout scenario?
The injection pumps require electricity.
I will be honest and say I don’t know what facilities are available for using external diesel pumps in Japanese power stations.
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June 10th, 2011 at 10:55 am
Ray1952 said:
We can say pretty much anything with hindsight (though Matte does point out that they might not have been able to do it earlier).
Determining whether to use such drastic measures is always a hard call though (and had they done it earlier they may well have wished they’d waited instead of writing off the reactors).
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June 10th, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Matte said:
They started the injection about a day after the failure. For the first few days before they had the pumping systems working at all they used external pumping. Actually what they used were fire trucks from the plant’s fire department. the fire pump truck was connected into the reactor water system and pumped water directly from the ocean.
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July 12th, 2011 at 12:30 am
Thanks to all of you for your insight and back-and-forth discussions. I’ve learned a lot and will be sharing this link with my colleagues. Wish I had known about this site as it was all happening.
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July 21st, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Again, thanks to everyone for the discussion.
To the individuals who use their brain (e.g. buzz0, Anon, Matte, Hails, etc.): I happen to be a college student interning (temporary work) at a nuclear plant in the US. And to settle the issue about core cooling, and pumping in sea water, look up RCIC (Reactor Core Isolation Cooling) and HPCI (High Pressure Coolant Injection). Both RCIC and HPCI are emergency systems, both work off of station batteries, and I believe that in some plants and designs these pumps are powered by a small turbine (which is fed from pressure from the reactor). In any case, RCIC and HPCI are designed specifically for the situation where all else fails. As to whether they could be modified to route seawater into the reactor, that I do not know.
At leodp: One of your main concerns is radiation. Bet that you didnt know that on a yearly basis, a coal plant produces over 100 times the radiation a nuclear plant produces (including spent fuel). And there are a LOT more coal plants then Nuclear (US Nuclear is sitting at 117 I believe, including decommissioned). Dont believe me? See below:
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~aubrecht/coalvsnucMarcon.pdf#page=8
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/manradwa.html#note_b
Both articles are very informative, and driven by facts. If you are SO VERY WORRIED about radiation, and our DNA, then you need to lobby against coal plants, and lobby for nuclear power. If you are against nuclear, you are arguing for coal, that is the bottom line. And if you are for coal, then you are promoting something that releases radioactive material into the surrounding area, and into the world. Oh, and one other thing: Nuclear fuel and all radioactive material is LOCALIZED, SHIELDED, and KNOWN TO BE RADIOACTIVE; the shielding and storage is thereby reducing radiation to almost negligible amounts. Once a permanent site is found (or once politicians remove their heads from their arses) then radiation from nuclear plants will be near zero, unless you work there. And if I can make one request of you: tell your friends that coal plants produce 100 times more radioactive material than nuclear, AND coal plants release it willy nilly to the world.
-MD out
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July 21st, 2011 at 10:45 pm
Hi MD,
Coal doesn’t produce more radioactivity than nuclear. It *releases* more radioactivity to the environment, and produces more waste by volume. But that waste, even in aggregate, has far less radioactivity than spent fuel. 36 hours after shutdown, spent fuel has about 1.8 TBq/g of activity. That’s about 5 x 10^19 Bq per GWyr. Scientific American reported this incorrectly a few years ago, and despite publishing a correction the error was widely disseminated.
-Carl
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July 22nd, 2011 at 1:33 am
@Carl
I thought it was the releases to the environment we where concerned about, no?
At least the spent nuclear fuel will decay away, currently a bit slowly but at least it will be gone within a definite time frame. Whereas the ~15 kg of hazardous waste every 1st world inhabitant produces every year will be hazardous for ever, with out the ability to be recycled or reused…
Ah, there is a viable solution to the “spent fuel problem”, there are no solutions for the other hazardous waste we produce.
Which is the biggest and real problem?
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July 22nd, 2011 at 2:03 am
Hi Matte,
The only thing I’m concerned about is accurate statements about nuclear power. MD said “produces”. That’s not correct.
It’s also not correct that chemical wastes stay toxic forever. Chemicals compounds admit to various reactions under the influence of heat, sunlight, bacteria, and plain old time.
Too, many components of spent fuel are chemically toxic even after they’ve become radiostable.
Finally, it isn’t true that chemically hazardous wastes can’t be safely buried. Any liquid or solid waste, radioactive or otherwise, can be safely and indefinitely buried. If 15kg is all I’m producing per year, I can easily afford to safely dispose of my share.
-Carl
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July 22nd, 2011 at 2:54 am
I was not talking about chemical toxins, I was infering heavy metals (Pb, Hg, As, Cd, Ni, Cr etc…)
Chemical toxins are easy to deal with, I agree.
It is interesting that you claim chemical toxins can be safely burried. So spent nuclear fuel is not a problem to burry then?
If all your lifetimes electricity was produced from nuclear, the fuel waste would fit in you palm. Would you be happy with disposing of this in the same way?
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July 22nd, 2011 at 10:24 am
Carl Lumma said:
Um… I assume you mean the toxic heavy metals in spent fuel- that even after decay there is still barium, lead etc.
This is just silly. There are tons and tons of toxic heavy metals on earth. There always have been. There always will be. Lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium etc – these exist in the earth’s crust and always have. They can sometimes be a bit hazardous when concentrate by artificial or natural forces. No, it does not need to be human intervention. There are places where there are preexisting dangeous levels of these elements in the water table as is.
Uranium is toxic (although only mildly so). It’s toxic whether you take it out of the ground or not. If you put it back in the ground, it’s still toxic. If you leave it as ore or process it to fuel, it’s toxic either way.
It’s ridiculous to fear these elements. We’ve always lived with them and in most circumstances, they’re not a problem – at least not unless you eat them in large quantities. It depends on how they are distributed and what chemical form they are in, of course, but regardless, they can be managed.
Are you suggesting that every place on earth where there are naturally occurring deposits of lead ore we should evacuate the local population and declare the area to be unfit for human occupation for all eternity?
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July 22nd, 2011 at 10:47 am
@Matte
Obviously, industrial processes do not produce heavy metals. They may change their chemical forms, e.g. mercury methylation.
> It is interesting that you claim chemical toxins can be safely burried. So spent nuclear fuel is not a problem to bury then?
Correct, as I already wrote.
-Carl
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July 22nd, 2011 at 10:50 am
@dr
> This is just silly.
I was responding to the implied claim that nuclear fuel is not chemically toxic (read above).
> Are you suggesting that every place on earth where there are naturally occurring deposits of lead ore we should evacuate the local population and declare the area to be unfit for human occupation for all eternity?
I see I triggered your anti-anti mode somehow. I hope you get better soon.
-Carl
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August 18th, 2011 at 8:36 pm
This sounds great but where are the costs of Chernobyl workers been taken care of by their government maybe 50,000 men plus medical expenses, Also the children that have grown up with ridicules metical problems. How about the cost of land, businesses and buildings in the no zone that is lost. The Russian government are forcing people to live in high radiation areas to see how it effects them. How about the ongoing cost to mix radiated food products with good food to dilute the amount of radiation eaten at one meal. How about the cost of lost food products. Now Japan, how much for the same as above plus food loss from the oceans. How much does it cost for loss of trade as shipments are being turned back by countries not excepting radiated products, even cars. China is looking for compensation for losses they are having from radiation. How about the Wars that may come out of this or at least cold war. Now how can you say that this is acceptable to continue. I for see a terrorist attack in the near future close to where you live that causes a meltdown and permanent evacuation of a large city.
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August 18th, 2011 at 9:40 pm
Richard Perry said:
To start off with Chernobyl is in the Ukraine, currently an independent nation, thus the Government of Russia’s wirt no longer runs there. Second, you have not provided any proof or reference for any of your contentions, making them valueless in this forum.
Get your facts straght, and find some way of backing them up or no one will take you seriously here.
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August 19th, 2011 at 2:00 am
@Perry
China is looking for compensation you say, compensation for what? What losses?
The fishing industry may suffer abit outside the notheastern coast of Japan, but the Pacific is a big ocean so the environment will recover a lot quicker than most people realise. Problem is, due to the TSUNAMI, the Japanese fishing fleets may take longer to recover than that.
Food that is deemed to be too contaminated to be suitable for human consumption does not enter the consumer market, any other food does not need to be “diluted” for any reason what so ever. Have you any idea how conservative the LNT really is?
There are places in the world where people live with a radiation background that are an order of magnitude higher than what would be normal for most north America (I am excluding certain places in Nevada), and the people who lives in these areas don’t suffer for it, explain that one if radiation is the killer of everything on earth!?
I would like to see the terrorist who manage to knock down a powerplant, the amount of explosives needed would require at least a handful of trucks to transport. Not just something you can do with out being noticed…
As DV82XL said, back up your statements, the fact that you don’t know the difference between Russia and the Ukraine makes me wonder where you have been since 1989.
People like you who scare people about an industry branch that is one of the cleanest sources of energy on the planet, inspite of all the accidents and missmanaged waste issues, is more dangerous than any percieved risks from the industry itself. Being sceptical is all well and good, but scaring poeple for no other reason than flaunting your own ignorance is just stupid, dangerous and above all immoral.
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August 19th, 2011 at 4:47 am
Richard Perry said:
A few thousand cases of thyroid cancer which has a very high treatment rate is all that Chernobyl caused.
On the other hand the anti-nuclear movement has caused a high rate of fetal alcohol syndrome by making people think their lives are worthless (when they’d live just as long as they would had Chernobyl unit 4 not have blown up).
Richard Perry said:
The zone around fukushima is perfectly safe so if people aren’t allowed in there it is a failure of government. Some of the area around Chernobyl has high enough radiation levels that you wouldn’t want to live there but others are perfectly safe.
Richard Perry said:
I have yet to see any evidence of that (some adults who want to are allowed to live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone but no one is forced to, of course it just so happens that those people still living there have better health outcomes than the people evacuated).
It would also be a good idea if you learnt a bit of basic geography.
Richard Perry said:
How about the wars that may come about because of global warming which would’ve been solved if it were for people like you.
Richard Perry said:
Because nuclear is still the safest form of power generation.
Richard Perry said:
Then you foresee that which will not happen.
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August 20th, 2011 at 1:21 am
Why coal what about the true green solar, wind, etc. has very little waste and does not effect the invirment much.
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August 20th, 2011 at 1:24 am
Matte said:
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August 20th, 2011 at 1:35 am
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/103906
See bove site and read it all this is thier view who are living it, the government abanded them with no resorses so had to stay in these areas with a meager exestance, may not happen in North America but what about southern USA, they left them swinging in the wind. Has the ameriican government helped, tell me how much they have done being such a rich nation and all. You see they say they mixed good and bad food.
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August 20th, 2011 at 1:59 am
Global warming, explain to me how my direction to go with solar, wind, etc will effect global warming, how would it effect people’s health. Yes nuclear industry is now destroying large areas of land where it is mind because the percent of uranium in the ore is one hundreth of what it was when they first mined it. In northern Saskatchewan they have huge craters worse than the coal mines in southern Saskatchewan that runs the provinces power grid to mine the uranium. They have small shallow lakes that are manmade to put the tailings into that have to be maintained for ever. These lakes have burst into the lakes beside them several time and will need maintained for ever. The good news as each time it happens the main lake gets more uranium and someday will be as bad as the storage ponds so they will decide hell just let it flow. But the trouble with that is that it will dry up and the winds will blow it all over north America, so if you live in north America maybe you will tell your children “do not eat the snow” someday ever day.
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August 20th, 2011 at 3:06 am
@Perry
I am sorry, a news source who references Greenpeace is not reliable…and the Morning Star, how many of my brain cells are you responsible for killing by making me read that crap?!
But to the point:
Don’t even get me started on solar PV, clean energy it is not! It takes more energy to create a PV solar panel than it will generate in 10-15 years (depending on where it is used), the processing gases used for thin film manufacturing includes gases that will make CO2 seem to have no global warming effect what so ever. Solar energy comes at a cost of around 85 US cents/kWh, without back up power.
Wind power will produce 30 g CO2/kWh produced and nuclear produces around 15 g/kWh [Royal academy of science, 2010, "Energy resources in a 40 year perspective"]. A big utility in northern Europe quotes 3 g/kWh for nuclear and 10 g/kWh for wind power. And if that was not enough, read this (as we are touting tabloid references): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
Renewable energy is not emission free! Oh and windpower just got ~10-15% more expensive due to price hikes on certain metals…
As to mining tailings, I have studied the area around Saskatchewan, couple of ponds next to an airfield in the middle of nowhere? Have you ever seen a coal mine? Here are some pictures of a small one: http://detlaphiltdic.blogspot.com/2010/07/coal-companies-sue-epa-over-mine-permit.html
Tell you what, if you want us to quit the mining industry altogether you will not get any wind power either and we will have to live in caves with an average life expectancy of about 20-30, would you want that?
One of the biggest suppliers of uranium ore is a copper mine! The uranium just happens to be a by-product of what they are really after, go figure. The tailings are easy to store in the old mining tunnels so I don’t see the problem there, they do not need to be maintained for ever. The ponds are used to extract and enrich the ores not to store the tailings, get your facts straight!
You should know that every year about 32,000 tons of uranium is washed into the sea by all the rivers in the world, naturally! A significant portion of this ends up in the great lakes, what the worlds mining industries spill every year pales in comparison to this. What are we going to do about that? Punnish nature for polluting her self?
The nuclear industry can afford to extract uranium from seawater today! It is not done due to conventional sources of uranium is a lot cheaper this is also one of the reasons why reprocessing is not done. With reprocessing it is possible to extend the utilisation of the fuel by about a factor of 10 without having to mine for more of the stuff (if mining was your concern, which it shouldn’t be).
I am not saying nuclear will solve everything, but it will help. To stop polluting the planet we need cheap energy and lots of it, nuclear can supply a large part of it but not all of it.
Perry, please get your facts straight and use a word processor to check spelling and grammar in your posts so we can understand what you are trying to type.
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August 20th, 2011 at 5:30 am
Richard Perry said:
Solar and wind have higher environmental impact because they require more raw materials (and PV manufacture isn’t all that eco-friendly either).
Not to mention the need to back them up on a still night which usually means burning methane (energy storage at the scales we’d need isn’t a solved problem).
Richard Perry said:
They go on about birth defects caused by the anti-nuclear movement convincing people they have nothing to live for and may as well just drink lots of alcohol during pregnancy as though it was the very small amount of radiation which caused it.
Now how about I provide a web site with real information:
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html
Richard Perry said:
If you try to solve global warming with wind and solar you will fail and end up getting the health problems global warming will cause along with the health problems air pollution from fossil fuel burning causes.
Richard Perry said:
Uranium mines are relatively small compared to pretty much all other mines simply because of the immense energy density of Uranium compared to fossil fuels (i.e. what you use when you are anti-nuclear).
Besides, we get get a two order of magnitude improvement in resource usage just by switching to breeder reactors (can wind or solar get a 100 times improvement considering we’re pushing the technologies about as far as they can go already?).
Quote Comment
August 23rd, 2011 at 7:08 pm
Anon said:
Anon said:
[10]But wind cost $0.00 dollars and no waste to get rid of.
[10]there seems to something wrong on this site.Maybe because I used * before
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August 23rd, 2011 at 7:52 pm
Richard Perry said:
Well I for one prefer to believe those who are right, regardless of whether they profit from the nuclear industry or whether they profit from the fossil fuel industry.
Reality doesn’t really care who pays a researcher.
Richard Perry said:
While you believe Greenpeace, who also have a dollar interest and job security.
Have you considered reading about the history of the UNSCEAR and how they were actually created largely to oppose nuclear weapons?
Richard Perry said:
The wind itself may cost nothing but the wind turbine for collecting it certainly isn’t free either to build or maintain and there is still quite a bit of waste to get rid of during construction.
Not to mention that even if wind turbines were free they’d still be useless without energy storage or fossil fuel backup.
Richard Perry said:
Do you even understand the basic jargon used in energy discussions?
PV when talking about energy means Photovoltaic which is the technical term for solar panels and as far as I know do not contain any Polyvinyl-chloride.
Richard Perry said:
Replacing them with methane isn’t really all that much of an improvement (especially when you consider that burning methane may be worse than coal from a global warming point of view). Besides, oil doesn’t get used to produce much electricity anyway.
Richard Perry said:
If Pregnant women never drank alcohol there wouldn’t be any such thing as fetal alcohol syndrome.
Richard Perry said:
That isn’t stopping it from happening, nor is it going to stop us from suffering negative effects from it.
Richard Perry said:
I don’t really care about such ancient fiction.
Richard Perry said:
Weather and climate aren’t the same thing.
Quote Comment
August 23rd, 2011 at 8:54 pm
Matte said:
[11]The manufacturing of magnets is bad but most of it stays there and does not bother me. Nuclear cannot be contained when there is an accident, it goes everywhere in different concentrations. I cannot avoid this no matter where I go. About magnets what type of magnets do they use in the turbine generator. Those magnets create invierment problems also and are huge compared to a wind tower. Will you list the types of poison products used and created in the process of making and using nuclear fuel, some like plutonium that is one of the most deadly products in the world and is lose in Japan right now(Total of about ten). A big problem for the industry is still to come, the decommissioning cost. The estimated cost 50 years ago was U$25,000,000.00 a plant. Looking at inflation and their record of under estimating will be U$2,000,000,000.00 about 10% of a plant cost. You may think this high but a few years ago in my city a brewery shut down and it was not very large and it cost U$1,000,000.00 and a average house today costs U$400,000.00. This will show the true cost of nuclear power. Also add cost of stabilizing a plant after a accident. When customers start seeing these costs they will take a better look at nuclear power. As before CO2 problems to me is a farce promoted by the nuclear industry.
And you believe in those that make a living if the industries is still around. Like the new Japan report that a whistle blower says he was paided big money to shut him up, how many more are feeling bad about what what they did and are coming forth because of guilt.
They will ship the tailings to another location you say, did they promise that. You are making up stories now.
Quote Comment
August 23rd, 2011 at 10:09 pm
Richard Perry said:
Never mind all the chemicals used and what happens when they get out.
Richard Perry said:
Both Three Mile Island and Fukushima Daiichi resulted in small releases of no off-site consequences (only psychosomatic illness which the anti-nuclear movement is to be blame for).
Richard Perry said:
We I can’t get away from the COâ‚‚ the coal power plants that people like you prevented from shutting release either.
Richard Perry said:
A single turbine for a power plant running a 90% capacity factor (common for nuclear) is going to need less material in magnets for the generator than the equivalent power generation from a bunch of 30% capacity factor (considered pretty good for wind, many countries average only 20%) wind turbines.
Richard Perry said:
The plutonium found in Japan is most likely from nuclear weapons testing (and plutonium isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as you think it is either).
Richard Perry said:
I don’t see the problem of just running a nuclear power plant another 20 years if it can survive that long (and the decommissioning cost is already paid for with the power plants old enough that you’d actually talk about it seriously).
Richard Perry said:
Estimated cost 50 years ago (when there were only a small handful of nuclear power plants) is irrelevant when you consider that nuclear power plants have already been decommissioned.
Richard Perry said:
Much less than the cost of what happens when a large dam bursts and floods over a hundred thousand people.
Richard Perry said:
There have only ever been a handful of nuclear accidents ever and they haven’t been especially bad by the standards of industrial accidents (Bhopal likely killed more than the nuclear industry ever has, yet we don’t see people calling for a ban on methyl-isocyanate).
Richard Perry said:
Then it is obvious that you are arguing from an ignorance of basic physics.
Richard Perry said:
More likely he though he could get more money as a paid speaker of anti-nuclear groups than what he was making working for the nuclear industry (he might not even have ever worked in the nuclear industry at all).
Quote Comment
August 24th, 2011 at 2:05 am
Richard Perry said:
It takes about 4-5 thousand windturbines (the large +80 meter type) to replace one nuclear reactor. Do the maths, this would require about 5 times the amount of concrete, steel and fiberglass/carbonfibre. And about 6-7.5 thousand tons of Nd magnets. Last I checked a generator in a nuclear plant uses electromagnets and does not use Nd magnets (there may be a bit in the exciter but I will let a generator expert wade in there).
I am glad you don’t mind having farmers in China poisoned in order to ease your own conscious and energy from an inefficient source. Thanks for clearing that up! So remind me why you are worried about uranium mining then, it doesn’t affect you what so ever as it is done far away from you?!
I said nothing about shipping tailings anywhere.
Sorry Perry you can’t quote fiction (bible) on this blogg, we only accept scientific arguments.
Your money arguments don’t mean anything to me. The plants I am concerned about have set aside a decommissioning fund which costs less than 1/5 US cent/kWh produced, including safe disposal of fuel we are talking about 2/5 US cents/kWh, now I don’t know but that is pretty insignificant considering the cost of nuclear generation is in the region of 4-5 US cents/kWh (sorry, don’t know if this is true for US plants but should not be far off).
Perry, use a spell check and stop arguing your case. You have no idea what you are talking about, which is clearly evident from reading your posts here. If you want to get educated I suggest you post your questions here or on “Nuclear power yes please” (I will not link here with respect to the good Dr. but the webpage can easily be found using google) where they have a forum where people can learn about energy generation and nuclear energy in particular.
Quote Comment
August 24th, 2011 at 6:29 am
Richard Perry said:
A statement like this shows the depth of this moron’s ignorance. Even the deepest of Deep Greens have never made this type of accusation.
Quote Comment
August 24th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Richard Perry said:
Are you kidding me? not only is it supported by the vast majority of scientists, but the nuclear industry has not nearly benefited to the degree that the “renewable” industry has, despite the fact that they don’t actually have a viable solution. Many of the most vocal proponents of greenhouse gas reduction are decidedly anti-nuclear
Richard Perry said:
Nuclear power plants are the ONLY ones who are actually expected to set aside money and produce a plan for decommissioning. No other industry has these stringent requirements. How will they decommission coal or gas plants? Nobody cares and no funds are pre-allocated to it.
I am, however, highly critical of decommissioning plans for nuclear plants. The standard now in existence basically turns the site into a greenfield. That’s ridiculous. It costs a huge amount to go in and jackhammer all the foundations down to nothing.
It’s stupid because these sites are already pre-surveyed for power generation and have the necessary transmission infrastructure in place. If the plant reaches the end of its useful life it should be replaced with a new nuclear plant, not a greenfield.
Richard Perry said:
The “fuel” is free, but not the equipment, the real estate, the maintenance or for that matter, the enormous costs of buffering and backing it up – usually done by gas and at a surprisingly small reduction in consumption versus a standard combined cycle plant running at constant load.
When you get down to it, the energy is there, but it’s too diffuse to be economical or practical to get it. The problem is inherent to the medium: Air does not weigh very much and it does not move very fast. That’s it. That’s the problem.
Let me draw a parallel situation:
There is gold that is free for the taking. You can have it. It’s free. You could go get several million dollars worth of gold. It’s easy to get to too.
There is only one catch: The millions of dollars of gold is dissolved in about a cubic kilometer of seawater.
Quote Comment
August 24th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
It would take about 400 3.5MW turbines *at name place capacity* to replace 1 GW nuclear plant. At capacity *factor* this would be closer 1600 23.5MW wind turbines. The DofE (the only study i’ve seen) shows that all land based wind turbines use 8x the amount of copper, concrete, rare earths, steel, plastic and aluminum for every unit of energy produced by nuclear. So…that’s a bad thing for wind.
On decommissioning: returning to greenfield status is reactionary and anti-energy. In fact, I’m for a law that states in effect that for any nuclear plant that is decommissioned, it’s brownfield status be maintained and a nuclear power plant of equal or larger size permits allowed, has to be built in it’s place and all viable balance of plant equipment should be integrated into the newer, safer structure.
But that would make nuclear even cheaper, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?
Quote Comment
August 24th, 2011 at 3:50 pm
sorry…ha thould be 3.5MW wind turbines, not 23.5 MW ones. Duh.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 12:37 am
Anon said:
[15] How easy is it for a small group to take over a power plant, shooting everyone on site. Is there any armed resistance to hold them back and prevent them from bombing their way in. In the states they have radical groups that would love to.
[15] You had said that background radiation is higher than none safe stated amounts, this maybe but there is a difference, the background over years is very mixed and there are very little clumps. The explosion has sent large very high radioactive particles all over the place and a person can intake these by air or food. It takes a very small amount of plutonium to kill or damage health.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 1:00 am
DV82XL said:
Eventually I suspect some of them may.
David Walters said:
I understand that EdF are planning on replacing their old gas cooled reactors with new reactors once they’ve finished decommissioning them.
Richard Perry said:
Given that most nuclear power plants have armed guards on site (usually ex-military and armed with MP5s) I’d say rather hard to do.
Richard Perry said:
Plutonium simply isn’t that dangerous though (not to mention that the evidence of harm from low doses of radiation is rather lacking).
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 1:20 am
Anon said:
[16] If radiation is so safe go to Japan with your friends and buy a dozen mantions for a buck and live like a king and eat the free food that they will reject. Man will you ever have a great life.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 1:30 am
Richard Pery said:
I guess you didn’t notice this: http://depletedcranium.com/forget-the-old-people-ill-clean-up-fukushima/
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 2:36 am
Richard Pery said:
What if they fly a fully fuelled 747 into a chemical plant or an oil refinery?
Nuclear power plants just aren’t any worse when it comes to risk then those are, yet we don’t see all that many people demanding we ban chemical plants.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 2:46 am
Anon said:
You are an idiot if you think very few where harmed. The evidence is over whelming and the only people that deny it are pro-nuclear. We always find out there statements are wrong and they lie and lie. Their studies are a joke the way they throw out evidence that they do not like. They have no study showing pre Chernobyl heath info compared to post Chernobyl. In studies they make claims that the countries involved do not have a national record. What a piece of crap, they can go to any doctor and see his files. If a doctor does not have a accurate file on their patients they will be disbarred. This kind of bull goes on and on in their so called studies and they come up with this bull that we are getting hear. You wonder why we do not trust the nuclear industry, it is because of attitude you show and you think you are a hero for this industry, while the industry would like you to stop representing them. This site is a joke.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 3:08 am
Anon said:
Besides, a fuelled 747 slamming into a nuclear plant (ie. a heavily reinforced concrete structure) basically becomes an aluminum pancake spurting burning kerosene. Nasty, but not particularly dangerous to anyone not standing right there.
And I’m going to go out on a limb and say Richie isn’t very conversant with conditions in Soviet Ukraine.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 3:22 am
Matthew said:
18] Japan’s sites had a lot of metal roofing, a lot of computer, control and switches not working. The power grid will go off line and cut by invaders, will back up work with shorted and or severed wiring. Japan site could not handle a earthquake as TEPCO now claims meltdown before waves hit Japan. Other reports say some plants in USA are not safe from terrorist
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 3:29 am
Anon said:
[19] But does not move to other countries and in concentrated form does not harm anyone.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 3:38 am
Richard Perry said:
If you believe that anyone was killed by radiation from Fukushima, then please refer everyone here to a credible source of information that documents a radiological death from that accident. I expect you won’t have a credible reply.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 3:46 am
Richard Perry said:
Compared to Bhopal, yes very few were harmed.
Richard Perry said:
You’ve yet to show that.
Richard Perry said:
That’s the anti-nuclear movement you’re talking about, who just can’t seem to admit that the people of Ramsar are just as healthy as people of similar socio-economic status in lower radiation areas.
Richard Perry said:
The cancer rates have been compared between before and after and there has been no detectable increase in non-thyroid cancer cases among the general population.
Richard Perry said:
Why should anyone trust any industry more than any other?
Though the scientific community (overwhelmingly pro-nuclear) tends to be trusted by most people (at least when the scientists don’t contradict one of their precious beliefs).
Richard Perry said:
Dangerous chemicals released from a burning chemical plant very well can go to other countries and very well can harm people (especially when in concentrated form).
Jason Ribeiro said:
Considering that no one even got acute radiation sickness there I’m going to have to agree (even most of the Chernobyl first responders who got acute radiation sickness survived).
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 7:13 pm
Matte said:
[25] This is a statement that did not post before or went to wrong area.
The biggest problem is the nuclear industries honesty, years ago Russia did a study on Chernobyl and claimed about 80,000 would die over time and the nuclear industry says 4000 injuries. Why would Russia say that, this did not benefit them in any way, in fact it would cost them big money. Explain this.
Gorbachev agreed with it and coming from a great leader I believe it to, with all the other studies it confirms it.
Quote Comment
August 25th, 2011 at 10:48 pm
NOTE TO RICHARD PERRY:
STOP E-MAILING ME. THE FEATURE ON THIS SITE FOR BEING SENT EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS OF COMMENTS IS ONLY FOR NOTIFICATION! REPLYING TO THE EMAIL DOES NOT REPLY TO THE COMMENT. DON’T FORWARD THEM TO ME EITHER! I KNOW WHEN COMMENTS ARE MADE!
I’m just telling you – keep bombing me with emails and I’ll start flagging them as spam which will likely get your email address on some spam lists.
So stop it!
Quote Comment
August 26th, 2011 at 1:26 am
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August 26th, 2011 at 2:58 am
Richard Perry said:
Oh come on now, I haven’t seen any reason to believe the nuclear industry to be any worse in that regard than any other industry out there.
Richard Perry said:
Could it be that they didn’t really know and just guessed?
Actually the Soviet Union had good reason to exaggerate how much damage Chernobyl did since they were dependant on selling fossil fuels to western Europe.
Richard Perry said:
It was under his administration that Chernobyl happened.
Quote Comment
August 26th, 2011 at 1:09 pm
Anon said:
[40] You think taking a risk of crashing his government and admitting they have caused so much damage to so many people and had to appoalagise for the incurred losses that the people blame them for is offset by maybe selling more oil that they are gradually running out of. You really believe that. If that is believable than why in the world would we in trust anyone with safety of plants of any kind or weaponry , as anyone seems to be susceptible to extreme greed.
Quote Comment
August 26th, 2011 at 1:14 pm
drbuzz0 said:
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August 26th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
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August 26th, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Perry, I should clarify.
References need to be peer-reviewed that is the only hard currency accepted here, anything else is just woo-woo.
So far you have only supplied Woo-woo, sorry.
But I agree with you about anything we humans do, it consumes resources and hurt the environment. We have to pick the energy production means that destroy the environment the least. The only renewable than can compare to nuclear in terms of polution and power production is hydro and even that is not certain for hydroelectric dams placed in subtropical or tropical areas, if you are to believe recent research.
Where are your facts?
Quote Comment
August 26th, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Matte said:
Yes there are no studies and that is exactly why there is a problem, we are going ahead with nuclear and we do not have any good evidence that long term non-linear low radiation is safe, leaner is not in question because that’s the weaponry and it will go on regardless. The only so called study they have is Linear Low and high Radiation over several years. We have no idea what it will do to the generations to come, our great, great, great grandchildren may look back to us and say what kind of monsters were we. The other problem is the background radiation increases with each new accident and I am not convinced that we can reduce the rate of accidents, now on average of 1 in 15 years and more are getting older. I believe it comes down to, do we go ahead and take are chances or not. The other sources of power are bad also but if we stall maybe we will find a better form of power. It would be great if new technology in the future will allow us to tap the earth’s core at a reasonable cost and solve all problems. If it does not, then in brace nuclear and hope for the best. For me this is the way to go until we can get better info on nuclear radiations effects. This is what I got out of this site.
Quote Comment
August 26th, 2011 at 10:18 pm
Richard Perry said:
While I strongly doubt a moron like yourself could understand any of them, there are many many studies that have been done, and published in peer-reviewed journals as even a cursory search with Google would show you. True not all of then are positive, but nevertheless the sweeping statement that ‘there are no studies’ is categorically and specifically wrong, and again indicates that you are an idiot.
That is if your utter incapacity to understand this site’s commenting syntax, or the basics of the web in general, weren’t indication enough.
Quote Comment
August 27th, 2011 at 12:33 am
Richard Perry said:
The Soviet Union was an oppressive government not really afraid of just murdering people who caused them problems.
Besides, Russia still has plenty of oil and methane left to sell.
Quote Comment
August 27th, 2011 at 3:25 am
Anon said:
The USA has been at war for years with countries all over the world and have killed more fouren people then Russia. Russia has at least for the most part stayed in their on area that has about 10 threatening countries on its boarders or close by, USA has two countries on its boarders and they are friendly. USA with no enemies on its boarder has been in war after war. We have no idea what Russia has to defend, Russia’s cost for armament is many times the cost of USA, this is a great drain on the people and because of this their government has to operate deferent. If their government operated like USA the people would be starving to death because of the costs. They may look evil from time to time as countries around them increase their armament like USA’s aggression against Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Aphanistan, Iran, etc. and these are not even on their boarder. The point I’m trying to get across is maybe they’re not as evil as you think because we see the bad without the why as the media we see is from USA perspective. So I do not believe that they would treat their people that way as the people where OK with their government just prior to Chernobyl.
Quote Comment
August 27th, 2011 at 3:55 am
Richard Perry said:
Russia not attacking its neighbours? Did you really not pay attention throughout the twentieth century?
Let’s see… much of Eastern Europe (including putting down revolts in its satellite states), Chechnya, and Afghanistan for starters.
Restricting ourselves to the past 30 years:
The USSR invasion of Afghanistan is generally put at somewhere near 1.3 million deaths, and its war in Chechnya at around 200,000. Plus killing something like 30 million of their own people in purges, planned famines, etc.
The current US conflicts have a total casualty estimate (on all sides) somewhere in the high tens of thousands (certainly under 150,000, even if you count all deaths in the Iraqi civil war).
You really *are* ignorant, aren’t you?
Quote Comment
August 27th, 2011 at 6:27 am
Matthew said:
See this first site I picked up on my search : http://www.vietnampix.com/intro.htm
2.5 million deaths, I would think more killed by USA bombing than any other fighting, that is what the USA does in every war, bomb the hell out of the area and then send in troops and if they have trouble they back out and bomb some more. They do not count the dead in their states very often because it does not look good because of the civilian deaths. I would listen to American news and the USA government bragged about the tens of thousands they killed each month, it was like a quota and challenge between army and air force to see who killed the most. I do not know where you live but out of the state’s news were portrayed differently as in USA they wanted the people to know that they were killing lot’s so they were winning, outside they portrayed themselves as a none aggressor. They carpet bombed thousands of square miles. I did not mean no aggression to neighbor I meant they were in that region of the world not like USA fighting in area’s half way around the world from them. I will leave it at that, will not search any more. When you have a powerful army fighting, both sides will have huge deaths and wounded. Because of bombing many many Vietnam soldiers where disabled and USA killed many civilians with the bombing. The deforestation with agent orange killed off thousands of square miles of crops, I would laugh when people wondered why USA bombed same sites time and time again, about every 4 to 5 months when time to harvest. This is done by every invading force and they burn all the houses it is a scorched earth program. P.S. Also Russia would lose the 60% uranium market it had at that time, it is more than extra oil they may sell, also Russia can reduce their price of oil to take the market size they want. So do not believe everything you read from any source, I usually look at both sides and end up at mittal ground because both sides portray it as they want the public to think. Dam politics.
Quote Comment
August 27th, 2011 at 10:03 am
Richard Perry said:
Are you kidding? The Soviet Union killed an estimated hundred million just under Stalin without even needing to go to war (though they tended to kill a lot of people when they did go to war).
Richard Perry said:
Never mind the cold war when both countries were fighting proxy wars.
Richard Perry said:
Actually the US has much higher military spending (almost as high as everyone else combined).
Richard Perry said:
Towards the end of the Soviet Union they were dependent on US foreign aid not to starve to death.
Richard Perry said:
Russia now isn’t as evil as the Soviet Union.
Richard Perry said:
You sure you’re not doing satire?
The only reason the people in the Soviet Union tolerated their government was because those who didn’t got shot or sent to Siberia (hard labour from which most did not survive).
Richard Perry said:
I highly doubt Russia (or the then Soviet Union) had that much of the uranium market ever (it’s typically around 40% Canada and 20% Australia) and if you sell raw materials you make a lot more profit selling a million litres of oil than a kilogram of uranium (even though the uranium actually has more energy in it).
Quote Comment
August 27th, 2011 at 11:15 am
Anon said:
What kind of right-wing propaganda did you get that number from? 100 million dead may be about right for the total body count of all the Communist regimes of the 20th century (including Maoist China, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), but for the Soviet Union alone it’s nuts.
Anon said:
Maybe true under Stalin, but not his successors. The Gulag system was scaled down and became a lot less deadly. And while dissidents were still liable to be beaten up by regime thugs, or to lose their jobs, or to be confined to insane asylums, they weren’t usually instantly silenced with bullets as they were back in Stalin’s day.
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August 27th, 2011 at 2:52 pm
George Carty said:
Fair enough (though Berya was pretty bad, if I recall correctly, and none of the successors hesitated for a second to send troops to put down revolts and such in satellite states, with the Hungarians in 1956 being one of the better known examples) – but the fact is that the USSR and Russian Federation have consistently waged aggressive warfare (and whatever you want to call it, sending troops across the border to kill people and break things constitutes warfare IMHO) against its neighbours. That’s the original point – Rich Perry’s claim that Russia is a peaceful nation that doesn’t attack its neighbours is, bluntly, false.
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August 27th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
Matthew said:
He would have been as bad as Stalin (if not worse) if he’d actually been able to consolidate power, but the other leading Communists to survive Stalin’s regime knew that, and realized that if they wanted to live, they’d have to whack Beria. Once they did, they decided to to run the country on a collective basis from then on. Something similar also happened in China with the downfall of the Gang of Four.
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August 27th, 2011 at 8:42 pm
George Carty said:
And this has… what to do with nuclear energy?
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August 27th, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Anon said:
[50] I am not sure but uranium may not have much copatition and they may get an exceptional profit margin. Canada seems to do very well on its royalties. I did see an article in the last couple of days that claimed that Russia(here I go it will always be Russia to me I am just to dam old, Ha) had 60% of the market before they greatly reduced their market share, the article did not explain why the reduction in production, maybe cost of mining or, maybe Chernobyl but I am not sure. I would think it maybe a wash between a maybe increase of oil requirements if nuclear fails verses what production is now, I am going by the high price of oil , if you see different let me know. I do not see how they may conclude that oil production would go up if nuclear power stopped production, it will go up no matter what, we have more and more cars and oil we know will run out so they will want to keep production down for future wealth. Has Russia stopped plans to build new nuclear plants.
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August 27th, 2011 at 10:31 pm
Matthew said:
[60]I may have wrote this bad, I know Russia has been monstrous to countries in that area but what I thought I was conveying is Russia for the most part have stayed in their area of the world not like USA fighting half way around the world in a country that has no aggression to them. I was saying Russia and USA are very similar so why would we believe Russia’s actions any more then USA. The media in both areas conditions are images of what the government wants us to believe. We are way off topic here.
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August 27th, 2011 at 10:54 pm
Matthew said:
[60]I may have wrote this bad, I know Russia has been monstrous to countries in that area but what I thought I was conveying is Russia for the most part have stayed in their area of the world not like USA fighting half way around the world in a country that has no aggression to them. I was saying Russia and USA are very similar so why would we believe Russia’s actions any more then USA. The media in both areas conditions are images of what the government wants us to believe. We are way off topic here.
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August 27th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Matthew said:
[60] See 102 comment.
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August 28th, 2011 at 12:45 am
Matthew said:
]60] See comment 102.
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August 28th, 2011 at 12:55 am
Matthew said:
[60] See cmment 102 that is just one war, USA army has huge bombing, they seem to never count these deathes as not seen not confirmed deathes. Do I believe this number, no they exagerated thier kill’s but maybe the auther has allowed for that?
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August 28th, 2011 at 12:57 am
Matthew said:
[60] See comment 102.
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August 28th, 2011 at 1:06 am
drbuzz0 said:
It’s called going off topic, something we just love doing around here. :-p
Richard Perry said:
The Soviet Union only needed such a large KGB because they were an oppressive government (and the US homeland security is mostly a joke).
Richard Perry said:
What other borders does Canada have?
Richard Perry said:
Of course Canada hasn’t appointed itself world policeman.
Richard Perry said:
It wasn’t just the weather (western countries don’t starve due to bad weather).
Richard Perry said:
There is quite enough competition that the profit margins really aren’t going to be exceptional (though they are pretty decent).
Richard Perry said:
Possibly because about half of the uranium used in the US now comes from decommissioned Soviet warheads down-blended to low enrichment.
Richard Perry said:
Maybe because they don’t have an unlimited amount of old warheads using highly enriched uranium.
Richard Perry said:
Oil production might not go up but oil prices would (especially if oil production stayed where it were.
Right now almost no oil is burned to produce electricity (nuclear pretty much already replaced oil in electricity generation) although shutting down nuclear power plants is going to require fossil fuel power plants be built as they are the only thing which actually could replace nuclear (wind and solar are just pipe dreams). Most likely it’d be natural gas which actually gets used (along with some coal if the place trying to get away from nuclear has any) but natural gas tends to track the price of oil since they can be substituted for each other.
Richard Perry said:
Not that I know of.
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August 28th, 2011 at 2:54 am
DV82XL said:
[60]I did not elaborate enough, there is no independent study not founded by the nuclear industry with proper control group, they are all after the fact studies with trying to evaluate what conditions where before the accident and after, then pick and chose what data stays in the end. The reasons why some info is thrown out that makes it bad for pro is ridicules. I will give two out of many, what is not in a study often tells the biases of the study. One study refused to gather the data in an area of concern by the population because, they said the country had no national record keeping! Why with the concern of the people did they not go to the doctors and ask to see their records as every doctor in this world keeps a proper file on every patient, otherwise how can he possibly treat them. If he does not have records he will be bared and yes bared as in stopped from practicing under his license to practice. Next, a poor area of a country where conserned about a high cancer rate and they started the study, so they continued with it and found there to be a higher than normal rate of cancer but threw that data out. Reason why, they claimed that this area is poor and health was not good because of being under nourished and that something else has caused the cancer. Now I see this differently which I am sure they thought about as I have very little experience with studies compared to these experts in this area. My thoughts are in the richer part of the area the children play indoors, why, was there not a computer game that came out in those days and it was not battery operated like today and had to plug it into the wall outlet. This and richer kids had VCR tapes rented or bought to keep them entertained, also if like in Canada the poor have no cable so the selection to watch on TV is poor for kids. Added to this is poor area live in small houses and apartments, the parents chase the kids out door. Added more is rich kids are driven around place to place in a steel framed car to protect them, also what about the surface they are on, paved areas the radiation is washed off by the rain and in some areas the streets are actually washed by road cleaning equipment(note: in Japan the government takes readings over paved areas but conserned groups read in the grass areas, again we see the manipulations as guess what will be the official record ) I lived in a richer area of my city and if I seen a kid under 16 years old it was unusual and I would take a good look because he may be a thief. This industry has had years to do a good controled study by an independent researcher for many years and because I have never seen one I am very concerned. Added to this is when there is an accident we get information that in many cases is a out and out lie, in many cases it is at great peril to the public, so how can I have trust in the safety of this industry when the studies that have been done are mostly exposure rates not the radiation in the environment where we eat and breath it, it is even in my sperm that may produce a child. So if anyone can show me a good study please forward it as I have tried several times with pro-government authorities and I get things like a study on monkeys or other animals and as a side bar it gave results, it maybe accurate but it was never meant to be the primary study and if duplicated may have turned out deferent and this is a picked study, how many did they throw away before choosing the one that shows it is safe. I do not see these as a reliable study because they can pick and choose the data they want or the studies, there is no control.
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August 28th, 2011 at 5:05 am
Christ man, paragraphs are your friend.
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August 28th, 2011 at 6:14 am
Anon said:
It’s also called feeding trolls, something else we seem to do a lot around here.
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August 28th, 2011 at 6:34 am
Nick P. said:
Indeed, as is a spellchecker and a minimal comprehension of English grammar.
Richard Perry said:
As if reading this exhibition of gross stupidity wasn’t depressing enough, he’s thinking of breeding.
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August 28th, 2011 at 8:37 pm
BMS said:
[70]Take a look at this, talk about safety. Also site about nuclear plant at Fort Calhoun, USA has a news black out by president. I do not know if this news ever reached use. But where is the safety and up keep of these plants. OH YA I forgot but plutonium is not as bad as one thinks.
http://flyingcuttlefish.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/virginia-quake-updates/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AckqN57G2OU
There are many sites about this plant.
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August 28th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
Richard Perry said:
[60] I said I would leave the subject about deaths but I could not help it as it is to day’s news.
100,000 civilians, how many soldiers maybe 30 times, wounded 100 times as USA tries hard not to kill the inaccent.
Female Trafficking Soars in Iraq
Rebecca Murray, News Analysis: “Prostitution and sex trafficking are epidemic in Iraq, where the violence of military occupation and sectarian strife have smashed national institutions, impoverished the population and torn apart families and neighbourhoods. Over 100,000 civilians have been killed and an estimated 4.4 million Iraqis displaced since 2003. “Wars and conflicts, wherever they are fought, invariably usher in sickeningly high level of violence against women and girls,” Amnesty International states. Sex costs about 100 dollars a session now. Many virgin teenage girls are sold for around 5,000 dollars, and trafficked to popular destinations like northern Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Non-virgins are about half that price.â€
READ | DISCUSS | SHARE
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August 28th, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Richard Perry said:
Well, the grammar hasn’t become any better. I can only hope that the breeding hasn’t been any more successful.
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August 29th, 2011 at 2:57 am
Richard Perry said:
Yes, but none of them report anything that has any resemblance with reality.
I suggest you have a look at the NRC site, their information is accurate if a bit slow. (You now the NRC, their head honcho hates nuclear power, so why would they lie?)
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August 29th, 2011 at 3:44 am
BMS said:
[60] I said specifically that there where studies but that they are biased both pro and anti nuclear from almost zero to 2 million deaths, how can I believe in any of these studies when there is that great of a difference. It makes it look like studies of this kind are a joke and you can pick any number out of the air and claim the deaths. Sure does not look professional to me, what can I believe with this mess, do I just take an average and say it should be 1 million. That’s why I want to see a study close to this by an independent researcher, with 100 control animals with no radiation and 100 animals eating and breathing radiation in groups of ten animals with each of ten radiation types used, to see the effect over 40 years and the off spring shall be given the same dose rate. The test animals should have a life span of at least ten years and if there is, signs of a problem then go to longer living animals. The problem I see is what dose does one start with but I will leave that for the experts, by your standers high. I do not want a study where one can throw away data that does not favor the researcher’s expectations. Is this asking for too much with the risks involved? As of 2011/08/29, I have not received one test site and so I do not get a bunch of sites; send your best test site and I will go from there. (I turned on my grammar checker for you. In my work with life safety, short sentences were to the point and they were like a command, if it sounds like I am harsh and machine gunning, I do not mean to be, far from it.)
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August 29th, 2011 at 5:49 am
Richard Perry said:
Then you need to look at which studies are well conducted using proper statistics and trying their best to come as close to reality as possible and which ones just make things up.
Richard Perry said:
The argument to moderation is a logical fallacy so you can’t just take the average (though taking the average of the well conducted estimates has some merit, provided you also understand the error bars).
Richard Perry said:
PETA won’t like it but we don’t like them very much around here.
I should also note that most research on the effects of radiation is done by university researchers, many of who are not employed by the nuclear industry nor in any way financially dependent upon the nuclear industry (and with good job security due to tenure), you’ll find it was people like that who wrote the official report on the effects of Chernobyl.
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August 29th, 2011 at 7:22 am
Anon said:
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August 29th, 2011 at 7:41 am
Anon said:
[70] I cannot find studies like you are talking about. I have been looking since April, I wonder if the USA news blackout has anything to do with it, they are filtering key words relating to nuclear on the net since end of March. I sure would like a site to view. Man, if radiation is not too bad that would make my day because it would be the answer for sure because that is the only problem I have with it.
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August 29th, 2011 at 7:57 am
Richard Perry said:
Ground source heat pumps would be a better technology (even if you used oil to produce the electricity you’d still get a significant saving just due to the vastly superior energy efficiency).
Richard Perry said:
http://www.hps.org/ is the profession association of people involved in radiation protection in the US, that’s generally considered to be a good starting point although you really need to be looking at the scientific literature if you want to go to the source.
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August 29th, 2011 at 8:58 am
BMS said:
Anon said:
[80]Info: A geothermal pipe system looks good and can greatly reduce home heating. My sister has gone that way. She claims her heating bill is now about $20.00 a month in coldest times -30 degrees C. The cost was not that bad, the hydro company paid Canadian $10,000.00 and should have cost them $20,000.00 but her husband did the labor and borrowed the machinery from his business. But they gained about 25 SQ FT of space in the basement so would be maybe $2,500.00 back, houses hear run at $200.00 to $250.00 a square foot so I have allowed $100.00 a SQ FT for gained basement area. Therefore, when done it cost them $0.00 dollars and gained 25 SQ FT otherwise would have cost $10,000.00 but gained 25 SQ FT = $7500.00 total cost. This system heats and cools the house and is very comfortable no noise. I do not know why cities do not place these piping systems under the road with the sewer pipes. This should reduce the cost greatly instead of piping the back yard. These systems should last for many years so can be part of the mortgage or city taxes and with energy jumping every year it should end up being much cheaper than any other energy as it is all most free after install. I believe you require about 500 to 1000 feet of pipe horizontally or vertical in the ground. In Canada, the heavy use of electrical is heating and cooling it would sure help our problems.
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August 29th, 2011 at 9:26 am
Richard Perry said:
I was reading back through the comments and couldn’t let this slip.
… I worked at a nuclear plant, and I can’t say a whole lot about this matter, but lets just say that 20 lbs of ammunition at a minimum with highly trained soldiers with fully automatic weapons(mostly ex-military or military personnel on temporary leave) are the people guarding the plants in the US. If there were ever an attack on americans, or if there was a war on american soil, the first thing I would do is quit school and go back to work at the nuclear power plant. Why? Because I can guarantee you that no “radical group” or “terrorist” is going to crack into a nuclear plant with force. I wish I could give more information on the actual defenses of a nuclear plant but I do want people to know that even flying a fully fueled 777 plane into a nuclear power plant would hardly damage the superstructure.
/end rant
Quote Comment
August 29th, 2011 at 9:28 am
Messed up the quoting option above, so forgive me but could someone give me a quick “hey do this” to get good quotes?
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August 29th, 2011 at 10:01 am
Anon said:
I don’t see how.
If you use oil to generate electricity you have to pay Carnot his due, and you do not get all of this waste back by using heat pumps. Burning fuel directly to produce heat means you don’t have to pay Carnot at all.
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August 29th, 2011 at 10:45 am
With 30% efficiency for an oil burning power plant (actually on the low side) and a coefficient of performance of about 7 (common for ground source heat pumps) you’ll end up with effective efficiency greater than 100% (and burning the oil directly won’t give you all the heat as some will have to escape up the flue, at least if you want to be able to breath).
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August 29th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Physically, the savings come from the source of energy used to heat the building. For a heat pump, most of the energy that goes into heating comes from the local environment, in this case the ground. The electricity going into the heat pump is used only to move this energy from the ground into the building (minus efficiency losses), which depending on the temperatures involved, can be much less than the amount of heat being pumped.
Compare this to the situation of a heater or furnace, where all of the energy used to heat the building must come in as electricity or fuel.
Ground source heat pumps have the performance advantage of using a thermal reservoir with a very steady temperature.
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August 29th, 2011 at 7:53 pm
[90] To MD, I see you have some on hand Experian; I can believe your statement and glad to hear that the plants are strong. The other area is the spent fuel pools, at Fort Calhoun they have more fuel than Japan and it looked like the pools where out in the open with the river running through it, and it was strange that the operators said no radiation escaped, hard to believe. I would like more info, thanks.
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August 29th, 2011 at 8:23 pm
Richard Perry said:
Would be one of the hardest possible targets to mount such an attach on.
And what on earth would it get them? If they somehow managed to take over the whole plant then what? Turn off all the cooling systems and wait a few hours for the water to boil off so there would be a meltdown? Assuming that they could do this before the plant was stormed and re-taken, then what? It wouldn’t kill anyone. It would cause some expensive damage. What exactly would be the point?
Now you want something scary, imagine a radical group hijacked a train carrying hundreds of tons of chlorine and started breaching the tanks in a populated area. That could kill thousands easily. Or what if they stormed a water treatment plant or paper mill, also with tons of chlorine on hand.
What about a natural gas terminal? Or an oil refinery? Or a chemical plant?
Do you have any idea how many industrial substances there are that could be released in huge amounts and kill tens of thousands? Hydroflouric acid, hydrazine, Methyl isocyanate and others. The later of which once killed several thousand in India when it was accidentally released.
If you’re so worried about a nuclear plant being taken over, your fear is misplaced
Richard Perry said:
.
Very good proof that you have no idea what you are talking about. First, the rivers did not run through the spent fuel pools. Secondly, if they did, they would not release anything. The fuel is a high density ceramic which is surrounded by an inert gas and packed inside zirconium alloy tubes. The only time anything can escape is if the cladding and fuel structure is compromised.
Richard Perry said:
There have been literally hundreds if not thousands of animal studies conducted relating to ionizing radiation going back to the 1920’s and earlier. Huge numbers were done in the 1950’s. Many were done by the US government. Others were done by governments around the world (UK, Canada, Australia, Japan etc, and many many by the Soviet Union) and still others were done by private universities and private bodies.
Your best bet for finding the raw data is to use a scholarly journal search. This usually is a premium service. Most university libraries have them. You can check to find a university in your area with a library open to the general public. Many have that. Otherwise you can try to find a journal search that gives free abstracts, but you’ll have to pay a few bucks for the full article.
There is no media blackout. I’ve seen plenty of absurdly negative press over Fukushima in the US media and on the web. I’ve never had any trouble accessing websites on it hosted in the US and outside the US and nothing I’ve ever published has ever been blocked in this country or elsewhere for such reasons. I’ve seen plenty of reports of everything from deformed rabbits to how millions will die of cancer.
Not that you even really could block that from most US ISP’s. The system has too many backbones and nodes with overseas jumps to do so without a very large operation at all the major gigapops and routing areas, which could never be done covertly.
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August 31st, 2011 at 4:34 pm
drbuzz0 said:
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August 31st, 2011 at 4:55 pm
Richard Perry said:
Thousands of years? Not only is this person incompetent when it comes to using the quotation system here, but he also appears to be a Young Earth Creationist.
You do realize that the Earth is over four billion years old, don’t you? During the time when animals were slowly evolving into man, the background radiation on the planet was higher than it is today.
Seriously, Richard, please enroll in some science classes. Perhaps there is a community college near where you live? Short of that, you could perhaps check out some science books from the local library. Helpful hint: don’t waste your time reading anything that mentions “Greenpeace” in the acknowledgments. You should want to learn science, not propaganda.
Oh, and English writing lessons wouldn’t hurt either.
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August 31st, 2011 at 6:17 pm
Richard Perry said:
The methyl-isocynate released by the Bhopal disaster didn’t just stay there, instead it got out and kill thousands (had it just stayed there it would have been localised to the chemical plant and not killed any members of the public).
It should also be noted that one way of disposing of dangerous substances is to dilute it to harmlessness.
Richard Perry said:
Not significantly in most places (much of the artificial background radiation is from atmospheric testing which is now illegal).
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August 31st, 2011 at 7:19 pm
Anon said:
[100] MD thanks for the info.
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August 31st, 2011 at 7:22 pm
Anon said:
Yes, I agree, and radiation experts also agree.
The National Academy of Sciences has said that “at doses less than 40 times the average yearly background exposure (100 mSv), statistical limitations make it difficult to evaluate cancer risk in humans.” Nevertheless, they go on then to assume that the “risk would continue in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and that the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans” (BEIR VII, pg. 7). This is unfortunate, since they have no solid, convincing evidence for this assumption, and they themselves admit this.
The position of the Health Physics Society is that quantitative risk assessments for dose levels below 50 mSv/year are essentially meaningless. They further recommend that any discussion of risk below this level emphasize that, “based on the uncertainties in estimating risk (NCRP 1997),” we are unable to detect any increased health detriment. Or in other words (their words), “zero health effects is a probable outcome.”
This is what the experts in radiation protection and the effects of exposure to ionizing radiation say today.
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August 31st, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Richard Perry said:
[100] Looks like I still have funny things happeming the name was MD on my posting but after posting chabged to Anon, go figure. Sorry about that Anon.
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August 31st, 2011 at 9:52 pm
Anon said:
Anon said:
[100] Anon, then is 100milSv/year of gamma radiation safe.
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August 31st, 2011 at 10:49 pm
drbuzz0 said:
[100] Are they exposure or are they intake of radiation by breathing and or eating radiated food.
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August 31st, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Richard Perry said:
The Sievert measurement has already been corrected for relative biological effect so all types of radiation at that level would be safe (just that you’d need more energy to get to that if it’s gammas compared to alphas).
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August 31st, 2011 at 11:32 pm
Anon said:
[100] I am not sure what you mean, the meters on the national sites read counts per second and I though the hand held did and when you switch to milSv range it just converted the cps to milSv. How does it allow for different types of radiation?
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August 31st, 2011 at 11:38 pm
Richard Perry said:
[100] I believe I errored should be counts per minute.
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August 31st, 2011 at 11:51 pm
BMS said:
[100] I have no problem with exposure but what about studies of intake by breath or and eating radiation.
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September 1st, 2011 at 5:53 am
Richard Perry said:
There are models based on experiments that take ingested or inhaled amounts of radionuclides into account. The “hot particle” nonsense is well understood by radiation protection experts and is just a new buzzword for anti-nuclear ludites…
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September 2nd, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Matte said:
[110] For the person with the problem with my posting, I use a numbering system so when someone comments on a previous posting I can do a search for all postings on that session and we can see under what context the posting was about also new viewers can do a search to see more info pertaining to the posted subject, I can use date but many times I go past midnight. Now is this a problem, does it confuse you in any way if so please let me know and I may be able to change to something you like, please send me how you would like the postings.
[110] You say they allow for breathing and or eating in the study so I assume there are no studies about actual breathing and or eating radiation as I had stated earlier.
If thats the case I am not interested in rubbish.
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September 2nd, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Matte said:
Richard Perry said:
If I were you, I’d focus a lot less on your posting techniques and a lot more on actually reading the comments.
How can you have an experiment that accounts for the amount of radionuclides that has been ingested or inhaled without ingestion or inhalation of radioactive material?
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September 2nd, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Richard Perry said:
[110] I thought about billions but creationists would abject so choose thousands to include current time and viewer can add as many zeros on to thousands that they wish so it covers all ages, I also thought of saying eons of time but then could again be viewed that it does not count for current. I used thousands meaning many years. There are several views as to how radiation was created in and on this planet from the small particles and gas in the early years to the forming of rocks, metals, molten center and cooling that have had their effects. My opinion is that the age from the beginning to now is much older than people think as Carbon dating is one that I believe is very inaccurate for dating over 10,000 years because of changes do to the apparent great floods etc., I have no proof just that there is materials that are dated that do not make since in the flow of history.
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September 2nd, 2011 at 4:53 pm
BMS said:
[110] Why I am probing more is because I have been given so many studies and have reviewed them and none of the studies have breathing and or eating radiation, I am tired of the time I have put into this so I wanted assurance that there are sum, I looked at about half a dozen of your suggested sites and all have been exposure only, when you said allowed I thought you might mean is that they extrapolated the findings to come up with what they would expect if breathed or eaten radiation. Thanks for clearing that up for me I will continue viewing the studies
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September 2nd, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Richard Perry said:
Don’t concern yourself with what creationists would think around here (I suspect more than half the regulars are atheists anyway).
Richard Perry said:
Maybe you should read up a bit on the basics of radioactivity.
Richard Perry said:
Actually the reason carbon dating doesn’t work past about 50,000 years or so is because ¹â´C has a short half life along with being relatively rare.
Richard Perry said:
Doing human studies like that is likely to run into problems with the ethics committee though animals studies have been conducted.
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September 2nd, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Richard Perry said:
First of all, one cannot breathe or eat “radiation.” All radiation is either some sort of subatomic particle or a photon, not something that is either edible or breathable. You can eat or breathe radionuclides or radioactive materials — that is, something that produces radiation. Please do us all a favor and use accurate terminology if you want a serious discussion of scientific studies.
Next, if you want a review of the recent epidemiological scientific literature involving internal exposure through inhalation or ingestion, then you might want to read Chapter 9 of BEIR VII. It’s available online from the National Academy of Sciences to read for free.
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September 3rd, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Anon said:
[120] Ha, Ha: Yes but they should have done this 60 years ago; it would not have been an issue then. They can do it in other countries as the chemical companies are now.
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September 3rd, 2011 at 9:43 pm
Richard Perry said:
They actually did do quite a bit of that (using rather high doses too).
Not that it was just radiation where they did that kind of crap.
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September 4th, 2011 at 3:08 am
Richard Perry said:
[120] See this site http://www.news.google.com/newspapers?id=OpsJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=nkkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5123,1102573&dq=embrittlement+nuclear&hl=en
Was any of the material over 50 years old as I wrote before I had seen an article about this before and found this one? I only saw dry cast above ground at Fort, is the fuel pool water proof because I see almost everything under water.
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September 4th, 2011 at 3:20 am
Anon said:
[120]Many hand held meters do not read Alpha particles, I believe the plastic housing prevents Alpha particles from entering the meter, so zero times any conversion would be zero.
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September 4th, 2011 at 5:08 am
Richard Perry said:
Looks like a whole lot of nonsense to me especially since neurons are pretty much only going to be emitted inside the reactor (there are delayed neutrons from some fission products but those are emitted relatively quickly), not in the waste dump, the fuel would be sent to one when it can’t sustain a chain reaction, not to mention the lack of a moderator and there are so many other barriers in place which won’t ever be exposed to a serious neutron flux that it just isn’t a legitimate concern (even if a chain reaction starting up in a waste dump were a concern just putting a bit of boron in the containers should be enough to prevent it).
Richard Perry said:
The swimming pools are pretty hard to drain.
Richard Perry said:
True, though alpha emitters are really only dangerous when they’re inside you (the dangerous fission products are pretty much all beta and gamma emitters anyway).
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September 4th, 2011 at 9:36 am
High energy neutron bombardment does degrade the structural integrity of many materials it is true, and it is also true that this, along with neutron induced swelling, is a limiting factor in fuel rod life in a reactor. However, like most metal embrittlement, this only becomes a concern when the item in question is under load. Used fuel, in a dry cask is not under any mechanical strain, (such as on the walls of a pressure vessel) and at any rate the cask, not the fuel support, is responsible for maintaining integrity in long term storage.
This is another example of a half-truth being spun to insinuate something that is just not so.
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September 4th, 2011 at 10:34 am
Dry storage casks are overdesigned to the point of being almost obscene. Even the professional anti-nuke liars admit that they don’t have anything to hang their hats on there.
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September 4th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Richard Perry said:
It depends on the instrument. It’s true that many geiger-muller tubes and scintillation probes will not detect alpha particles. Many will, however. They need to have a thin wall, typically made of mica. It’s sometimes made of mylar on some scintillation and gas proportional probes.
Alpha particles won’t travel far though. They’re blocked by a thick piece of paper and won’t go through more than a few feet of air. Even a few inches of air will attenuate alpha readings by quite a bit.
Normally you would not be scanning for background alpha levels anyway. Alphas are only harmful internally. The equipment used to assess the risk from alpha fallout is usually some kind of air sampler or something like that.
You don’t need to detect alpha particles to get a good assessment of the level of material present somewhere either. In nearly all isotopes, alphas are present in combination with gamma radiation. An instrument can detect the gammas easily and then that can be used to compute how much material is present or any levels of contamination.
If you want to assess the biological dose to someone, you have to consider the pathway of exposure, the type of radiation etc. There are formulas that have been developed to do this.
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September 6th, 2011 at 1:02 am
drbuzz0 said:
[130] Thank you all, this has been of great help for me and puts me at ease, I will take some time looking at all these studies, it will be awhile and again thanks for putting up with me. Richard
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September 6th, 2011 at 1:50 am
[130] I don’t know if you have seen this site about Canada.
http://www.youtube.com/user/connectingdots1#p/a/u/3/EBfvkCEr-Is
http://www.youtube.com/user/connectingdots1
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September 6th, 2011 at 2:55 am
Richard Perry said:
Looks like a typical crank to me.
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September 6th, 2011 at 2:59 am
Richard Perry said:
333 Bq, how is it measured? Did somebody stand too close to the detector? What was the background at the site?
1,5 micro Sv/h would equate to 17 mSv/year…but what isotope, not to mention that levels are much lower than at the powerplant so I wouldn’t take this very seriously.
What Anon said, typical crank…
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September 28th, 2012 at 1:25 pm
Isn’t the relative ages of the two Fukushima reactors a red herring?
The real issue is that due to the undersea topography, the tsunami which hit Fukushima Daichi was 14 m high, while it was less than 8 m high at Fukushima Daini and at Kashiwazaki–Kariwa (the reactor closest to the earthquake’s epicenter). Those other reactors would most likely also have been wrecked if hit by a 14 m tsunami.
(thanking Leslie Corrice for this…)
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April 15th, 2013 at 3:36 pm
So how do you propose we replace the 100 or so quote quote old technological reactors here in the US? Not only is it extremely dangerous but its extremely expensive when it comes to fixing and replacing pieces on a reactor. Not to mention how much it costs to shut down a plant and safely remove and demolish its structure. Your proposing that we should built more plants? Why do we want more of our precious land being devoured by concrete platforms where nuclear waste sits long after the plant is removed (see Maine Yankee). Why build when we don’t have anywhere to put the waste? Wake up!
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April 15th, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Steve Buchanan said:
please contrast and compare the amount of land occupied by the ash ponds from coal-fired generation with that of existing nuclear waste and get back to us. (hint: we’re not the ones that need to wake up!)
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
DV82XL said:
Are you really comparing it too coal and other fossil fuel plants. I should of been more clear… IT’S ALL A WASTE OF VALUABLE LAND. Fortunately organizations like the Sierra Club have been shutting down coal plants left and right. Who is forcing the shut down Nuke plants? No hint common sense here
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:36 pm
Steve Buchanan said:
Because it is cheaper than wind or solar (which requires a lot more concrete for the equivalent energy production and magnitudes more for equivalent base load production), it is a h**l of a lot cleaner than coal .
Removing a single windfarm (VESTA 90/100 2MW) would cost in the region of $2-300′000 US not including the concrete slab, which is not much compared to a nuke plant. But considering that the equivalent energy production, 4000 windfarms cost 800 million dollars to remove (which happens to be pretty close to what Main Yankee cost to decommission) excluding the concrete base mat for the windfarm ofcourse. For baseload production from wind it gets even worse, then you would need to remove 16 700 of them, at which point the argument about decommissioning costs really goes out the window. Your argument about concrete slabs taking up land is just plain silly in this context…
Or did you actually have a valid point hidden somewhere in your post? What ever it was I fail to see it, care to elaborate please?!
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
Steve said:
So you want to have people freeze and starve due to lack of power? Or go back to being medieval peasants dependent on muscle power only?
That’s the logical end result of your argument.
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April 15th, 2013 at 4:46 pm
Steve said:
Let me put it another way than Matthew did. What is your alternative? How should we produce the energy required for our hospitals, food production, heating our homes and cooking our food and lighting our streets and houses at night?
This is not trivial but I am dying to hear what you propose… literally!
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April 15th, 2013 at 7:30 pm
Steve Buchanan said:
Actually, older reactors have proven to be capable of operation for decades beyond their original estimated lifespan with upgrades and retrofits.
Replacing power plants should focus on the bigger offenders, the coal burners. That said, it’s not that hard to replace nuclear reactors with new ones, given a favorable regulatory climate. The USAPWR, produces 1700 MWe, the EPR produces about 1600. The AP1000 produces 1200. Most older reactors are smaller, so a single new reactor may produce as much as three reactors from the 1970’s.
Really, though, it’s not that big a problem, even with existing systems. Remember, we built most of those operating now in less than a 20 year period.
Steve Buchanan said:
Not really. Happens all the time. But there are circumstances where a new reactor might be the way to go.
Steve Buchanan said:
Actually, nuclear plants are the only type of facilities that are required to maintain the funds for full decommissioning from the start.
Connecticut Yankee is not far from me, and they completely decommissioned it. It’s amazing, really. You’d never see this in any other industry. Not only did they remove the reactor, they actually jack-hammered and hauled away the reenforced concrete and left it as a greenfield.
I actually think it’s a bit silly. The site would have been well suited to a new power plant, utilizing the existing transmission lines. But that is what they do. They allocate the money for complete removal.
Steve Buchanan said:
Are you kidding me? We lose more “precious land” to landfills, housing developments, graves and tombs, abandoned shopping malls, disused airport runways, ash dumps, quarries, mines… damn near everything we built takes up more space than that.
All the spent fuel ever generated by the United States could be placed in casks and stored in an area less than the size of two football fields.
Steve Buchanan said:
Yucca mountain would have been fine. It’s unfortunate, but it was built completely and then political rangeling shut that down. WIPP has been running well, but statutes prevent civil waste being taken there.
In any case, it will surely be reprocessed some day.
It can be stored where it is for the foreseeable future, however. It’s not expensive to warehouse. It’s chemically stable. There is no imperative to move it any time soon.
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April 15th, 2013 at 7:43 pm
Matte said:
RP: You are assuming that wind needs to relocate, why not repair or rebuild on same site. A high cost of building wind is the foundation, infrastructure of roads and power cables so why would this not be used over as long as possible with maintenance and rebuilds on the same site. Nuclear needs to be totally rebuilt from top to bottom and old site and waist decommissioned for many years at a cost that will probably be 100 times what the industry claims if it is like there estimates costs to build a plant that no company will insure against a plant meltdown or blow up and cover the extensive losses. If one used the cost to pay for insurance policies on a nuclear plant, electrical power would be 10 times the most expensive method of producing power. This is way to much.
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April 15th, 2013 at 8:59 pm
drbuzz0 said:
So i suppose you like the world to continue building nuclear power plants? Continue this old way of thinking… occupy foreign land for oil, build pipelines from sea to shining sea, frack until we can frack no more, eat genetically engineered food, and fill the ocean with plastics, oil, and radioactive particles. Why even worry/care about the environment the future is now and where its ends.
P.S. The NRC had underestimated the full cost to actually fully decommission a power station, so most stations are short 300 million dollars. Also places like Maine yankee will continue to spend 8 million dollars a year to maintain there mess for well the rest of existence of the world, which because of thinking from you guys will probably be another 20 years.
source for the so called “Trust Fund” http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i13/Nuclear-Retirement-Anxiety.html
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April 15th, 2013 at 9:49 pm
Wind and solar advocates like to get themselves whipped into a self righteous frenzy over the issues of other sources of energy without coming to grips with the fact that without the inputs these provide, wind and solar are next to useless as large scale generators. They also seem incapable of getting their heads around the problem of scale and have no conception of just how large wind and solar installations would need to be to replace combustion and nuclear as baseload generation, and what the environmental implications of that would be. The fact is is that wind and solar are nothing but figleaves for combustion (mostly gas) and that is all they will ever amount to.
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April 15th, 2013 at 9:51 pm
RichardPerry said:
Not a point in favour of wind as you can also build new nuclear power plants on the same site once the old ones have been decommissioned.
You also need a lot less such sites and are going to be rebuilding a lot less (though there is likely to be some downtime while you wait for the old reactor to be decommissioned).
RichardPerry said:
Nuclear reactors have already been decommissioned so there is no way it’ll cost 100 times what the industry says it will (they’ve done it, the regulator supervised it, I think they might know better than you).
Steve said:
Better than any alternative anyone has come up with.
Steve said:
I’d rather synthetic hydrocarbons produced using nuclear heat instead of the fossil fuel subsidy that is the US military.
Steve said:
Which is safer than the stuff that hasn’t been genetically engineered (no one has died from genetically modified food, people have died from ‘organic’ foods).
Steve said:
You realise that if those plants continue operating that they could easily raise that money?
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