The amount of mis-information and fear-mongering around the nuclear situation in Japan is staggering, and a lot of people (I see Spring is no exception...) are taking this as a call to arms to end nuclear power forever. This is incredibly short sighted and ignorant.
First of all, it is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE CHERNOBYL! I can't stress this enough. Any comparison to Chernobyl only proves how completely ignorant of the situation that the person espousing that idea is. The design of the reactor is massively different, and it's physically impossible to have a catastrophic explosion event that is anything like Chernobyl. The incident at Chernobyl was the result of bad design, incompetence, and very bad luck. When the incident happened they were doing testing of the equipment to see how well it could transition from producing no power to producing max power near-instantaneously, and as this test was not expected to have bad results it wasn't cleared by any of the overseeing engineers, and was only run by the plant technicians. In the process of doing this testing, they shut off several of the safeguards that were normally in place. More heat was produced than expected, and the backup generators that powered the cooling could not keep up with the heat produced by the reactor, and this resulted in a breach which blew open the containment unit dropped the reactor core into water which resulted in a massive steam explosion that ripped the building apart and left radioactive material burning and dispersing a huge quantity of radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Now, at Fukushima for reasons I don't feel like typing out (I can link to sources with more information, if you don't believe me), this CANNOT HAPPEN. Can bad things happen? Yes. Can it have a complete failure? Yes. Can it result in a Chernobyl like fallout? NO. Any fear of a disastrous failure of containment(Which even if it happened, would be not even remotely close to the scale of Chernobyl) have long ago dissipated as the situation is completely under control now. There was huge media-reaction to this event freaking about radiation and buzzwords like meltdown, which has resulted in a totally uninformed backlash by the public.
At the moment of the earthquake, the plants automated shutdown initiated perfectly, the reaction was shut off, and all that was left over was residual heat production that can continue ~1 week after the reaction stops. The backup cooling systems all worked fine, until the tsunami breached the flood walls and washed away the backup generators. The battery backups continued to work until they ran out of power after about 8 hours. By that time limited personel were able to make it to plant to keep the situation well enough under control(though there were a variety of complications). There was a long series of unfortunate events, while the media continued to scream radiation, without bothering to mention any numbers or comparison to normal/dangerous levels. There was only a very small time period during the entire disaster where the radiation levels directly outside of the plant were at even somewhat dangerous levels, and even the workers who were there all day every day for the whole period were never under dangerous levels of radiation. Two workers were hospitalized for a short period as a precautionary method, but were quickly released when their radiation levels were found to be within safe limits.
The only radiation that leaked was through controlled venting, and it was particles all with a short half-life, primarily iodine, which decays in hours, a couple days at most.
So, lets review this shall we. A 40 year old plant, very near the end of its life, survives an earthquake that is 1 in 1000 years, 7 times higher than it was rated for, then withstands a tsunami bigger than anything ever seen in Japan. Initial automatic safety mechanisms work perfectly, the reaction is shut down. Primary backup cooling systems work until washed away by the tsunami shortly after the earthquake, and then secondary backup systems work perfectly until their power is depleted. It withstands all this without a single casualty, no catastrophic failure, and only extremely insignificant amounts of radiation released, all which will disperse extremely quickly (all you people freaking about radiation in the food chain - stop it. Either take my word for it or research it yourself, but it is not even REMOTELY as serious as "OMG RADIATION" media would have you believe.)
In 40 years, massive advancements have been made on several fronts. Cost, efficiency, safety, and even much more significant advances, particularly thorium reactors. They produce significantly less waste, shorter-lived waste, they cannot be weaponized, and their fuel is extremely abundant and inexpensive.
Now, lets compare this to coal. First of all, coal is extremely dangerous from the mining till the burning, and both to people and to the environment. Have a look at this:
Unbeknown to most, burning coal actually produces A LOT of radiation, and it's actually much more dangerous than radiation produced by most other means, because it is in residual particles. First of all, fire makes radiation, it's just a simple by-product of the release of energy. Normally an insignificant amount, but when you take into consideration the astronomical amounts that are burned for energy production it starts to add up. But more importantly, burning coal releases particles of several radioactive materials, including uranium, thorium, and arsenic, all of which have very LONG half-lifes and will be sitting around for thousands of years, continuing to be radioactive. Now, seeing as how these particles are small and dispersed you might say this isn't dangerous, however they accumulate in many ways and can create localized pockets of radiation that becomes dangerous in the long-term, particularly; the human body.
Coal mining is really dangerous. It kills a lot of people, from direct accidents or more slow-death means such as black lung. It's extremely destructive to the environment, besides chopping gigantic holes up and down the earth, it completely destroys ecosystems all over the world and creates huge blights that won't go away for a very, VERY long time. On top of all that, it's a non-renewable resource. There's a fuck-ton of it on the planet, yes, but the more we take, the harder it is to get at (more dangerous, more expensive, worse for the environment), and it's not like there's more growing somewhere.
A lot of people have mentioned renewable energy such as solar or wind or hydro. While these are all fantastic sources of energy, they're also VERY expensive and very low-yield, none of them are even near a point where they could replace more than a couple percentiles of US energy production without multiplying cost in a big, big way. I hope this technology continues, and I look forward to a day when all our energy production is non-destructive and renewable, but simply put we aren't at that point yet, we need an intermediate solution, and that's nuclear.
Nuclear power plants are really expensive, but they're also very high-yield, safe, and have relatively low operating costs compared to coal. And they're mostly non-destructive, you don't have to rip up the planet to get the small quantities of uranium or thorium needed. In the case of uranium, it requires very expensive and difficult enrichment processes, but that is still a far preferable solution to coal. This isn't required for thorium. Reactor designs get smaller, safer, and cheaper every year, in the history of nuclear power there has been one disaster, and it's all that was needed to teach everyone how potentially dangerous it can be, and more importantly, how to remove the possibility of such an incident ever happening again. It's virtually impossible to have a catastrophic failure that would breach containment in any modern reactor design, the amount of design improvements and safeguards and preventive measures taken is extremely thorough.
Yes, this is a massive post, but I consider this a very important issue and I do not want the world to shun nuclear power because of a media scare, when it's SO much safer and cheaper and less harmless than the primary power source that is coal. Radiation is scary to people because they don't understand it, I encourage everyone who has a lot of doubts about nuclear to do some research. Confirming everything I said in this post could be done in a couple hours of research, and there is a vast wealth of information out there for you look up, and when you research it you'll realize that OMG RADIATION isn't as serious as you thought before, and that you can take a calm and informed view rather than riding the fear-mongering train.
So, please please PLEASE research how nuclear power works before spreading a bunch of fear-mongering.
Cheesecan wrote:
And you know what else? The Japanese government chose to extend operating time on the Fukushima-1 reactor by another ten years earlier this year. It was originally intended to be taken out of operation before the catastrophe happened. This despite some analysts pointing out that the plant had severe problems. This shows how reckless their government is - and why they should not be building more nuclear power.
Their nuclear companies (including Tepco) have a bad track record of hiding incidents from both the government. This is because their society is mob-driven, many big politicians in Japan have ties to the yakuza who bribe politicians to do their bidding. Not as transparent as western democracies. For instance their prime minister still visits their WW2 "shrine" every year to celebrate the memory of their transgressions.
This is not a failing of nuclear power, but of administration. Is it bad to keep a very outdated and depriciated nuclear plant running? Yes. Does that mean nuclear power is bad?
I'm just going to let you answer that because the answer is obvious.
Nobody is saying the situation in Japan was perfectly fine and problem-free, but people like yourself are placing the blame in the completely wrong places and using it as an opportunity to spread uninformed fear-mongering bullshit.
TEPCO has a history of falsified upkeep and repair reports, as well as general sloppyness and bad administration. They need to be replaced or nationalized, but this NOT a reason to stop nuclear power. Dishonestly like what they displayed would be despicable in ANY field, but the difference is that if it were any other field the blame would be placed on right thing, that being the offenders, and not the field itself.
You mention spent fuel, and I think you need to look into that as well. There are lots of very thorough and safe plans for the storage of nuclear waste until such a time that we develop the means to get rid of it or use it safely.
You also mention saving power. Saving power is great, we should all turn of our lights and not suck extra power. Is that a solution to a power generation problem? FUCK. NO. That's a pathetic excuse used by people who have a totally unrealistic outlook and don't know how to come up with a decent solution. the simple fact is, the entire world, even places where there wasn't before, there is a huge rising demand for energy. How is this demand going to be met? If you think turning off lights is going to make that demand go away you're retarded, more countries are going to need more plants and we can't just scrape that out of the planet in the form of coal forever, especially considering the massive effects it has on the environment, and renewable solutions are not even NEAR viable.
