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I'm still OK with it in places where 9.0 earthquakes are very unlikely. The main problem seems to be the backup cooling schemes. It will be interesting to see if anything new comes out of this.
Yes
No
sort of (explain)
I certainly have gone from being skeptical, to downright against nuclear power, under any cir stances.
I don't think that paying a few pennies more per kilowatt hour of electricity is that small a price to pay for avoiding the potential of a large swath of the USA being rendered uninhabitable for 20,000+ years.
Nuclear proponents can't guarantee safety and neither can they claim compe ive economics.
I just don't see it as being worth the risk.
I'm still OK with it in places where 9.0 earthquakes are very unlikely. The main problem seems to be the backup cooling schemes. It will be interesting to see if anything new comes out of this.
To think this disaster could have been averted with a $20,000,000 piece of concrete.
I'm still for nuclear power. I think it's got a lot of potential down the road to become much safer and even more efficient.
This disaster is educating the dumbed down ppl at worst. You don't just open up a nuclear plant like you're opening up another McDonald's.
Once you open a plant up it's there forever or you gonna have to deal with consequences. The nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are there and need to be cared for for the next hundeds of years.
It will never be fully safer than alternatives, and the efficiency of other forms of power is coming along as well.
There are alternatives to nuclear power that don't involve exposure to this risk.
It isn't the absolute value of nuclear power that I question, it is the relative value, given that there are alternatives.
"very unlikely" would be something like what? once every 200 years?
Given that Chernobyl will be uninhabitable for say, 20,000 years, that means we will have 100 new nuch areas by the time the first one cools down enough to allow for people to live there again.
Not a long term solution, IMO.
The odds of going another 50 years without another large-scale nuclear accident, if we don't scale back nuclear power plants, are pretty small.
What are those alternatives? Renewable sources (wind, solar, etc?)? Coal?
From what I understand, renewable energy is still not economically viable, as compared to nuclear power.
As for non-renewable sources, have you factored in its impact on the environment?
I'm no expert, so I'm really just asking questions and not trying to prove a point.
That is the other problem that gets glossed over.
What happens if you get a quake like this at/near whatever storage facility you pick?
I guess if we colonize the moon by then, it might not matter as much.
It hasn't changed my mind, but that's not to say that there isn't a serious need to re-evaluate some things.
the whole "nuclear power" concept did not take into account the Godzilla Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, natural disasters of the next hundred years.
Time to go back to the drawing board.
When was the last 9.0 earthquake in Texas, for example?
No plant in the US ever was or ever will be designed like Chernobyl.Given that Chernobyl will be uninhabitable for say, 20,000 years, that means we will have 100 new nuch areas by the time the first one cools down enough to allow for people to live there again.
I love Texas.
No moratorium on nuclear expansion in Central Texas
http://www.kxxv.com/global/story.asp?s=14250604
That's where I am. But I don't have a firm grip on the various kinds of energy formats and the economics/safety/etc of them all.
I'm no less than 100% biased on this but: Every street corner should have a mini-reactor.....
Seriously though, I don't know if alternative power is viable economically.
All reasons for being for nuclear power.
People need to remember, the oldest reactor with trouble is 41 years old. The others weren't much newer and I think they are all the more dangerous type. The "boiling water reactor." New reactor designs are several orders of magnitude safer.
So what does "going back to the drawing board" look like for Japan, a country without significant fossil fuel resources who has tapped out their hydroelectric capacity?
Safer?
How many people have died from nuclear incident from any reactor built in the 90's or later? Now consider these:
Wind vs. Nuclear Power: Which Is Safer?
wiki: Nuclear and radiation accidentsNuclear power has been been used to produce electricity for more than four decades, beginning with the Shippingport nuclear power plant in 1957. Today there are 104 nuclear power plants in the United States generating some 60 billion kilowatt hours per year of electricity. There have been no deaths from radiation in more than 40 years of American nuclear plant operations. Even considering the "catastrophe" at Three Mile Island, there has not been a single case of injury to any member of the public. (There were fatalities at the Russian Chernobyl plant, but that plant was radically different from an American nuclear power plant. It did not even have a containment structured around the nuclear reactor.)
How about wind power? How does it fare compared to the perfect record of the American nuclear power industry? Believe it or not, there is an organization, the Caithness Windfarm Information Forum, that keeps data on wind-power-related accidents and/or design problems. Caithness is based in Great Britain, where homeowners have already grown tired of the noise and other wind-turbine-generated problems. Their "Summary of Wind Turbine Accident Data to 31 December 2008" reports 41 worker fatalities. Most, not unexpectedly, were from falling as they are typically working on turbines some thirty stories above the ground. In addition, Caithness attributed the deaths of 16 members of the public to wind-turbine accidents.
From Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 December 2010Comparing the historical safety record of civilian nuclear energy with other forms of electrical generation, Ball, Roberts, and Simpson, the IAEA, and the Paul Scherrer Ins ute found in separate studies that during the period from 1970 to 1992, there were just 39 on-the-job deaths of nuclear power plant workers worldwide, while during the same time period, there were 6,400 on-the-job deaths of coal power plant workers, 1,200 on-the-job deaths of natural gas power plant workers and members of the general public caused by natural gas power plants, and 4,000 deaths of members of the general public caused by hydroelectric power plants. In particular, coal power plants are estimated to kill 24,000 Americans per year, due to lung disease[14] as well as causing 40,000 heart attacks per year in the United States. According to Scientific American, the average coal power plant emits more than 100 times as much radiation per year than a comparatively sized nuclear power plant in the form of toxic coal waste known as fly ash.
And just think of all those poor, innocent, defenseless birds dying meaninglessly at the hands of those evil blades. Sighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
The overall efficiency of renewables in generating power has been making it more and more compe ive economically as time goes by, and both wind and solar have started creeping up on the important coal price per unit of electricity in terms of cost.
I don't think one can really make the statement that nuclear is more economically viable than renewables, when there have been no new nuclear plants in the US for decades, and the ones that have been built have averaged 200-400% cost overruns. These cost overruns are not unique to the US.
I once spent a lot of time trying to pin down a viable cost per installed unit of electricity for nuclear, and was unable to really get anything I was really comfortable with.
Best I could tell was that the cost was pretty roughly on par with that of renewables. The cost structure is similar in terms of operating life. All your expense is up front in building the things, with fairly minor maintenance costs afterwards (negligible fuel costs).
As for non-renewables, they generally get "subsidized" to some extent, because the people that use/extract oil etc. generally don't pay the full costs of that. Pollution from this process is, in essence, subsidized, by the people/businesses who have to be exposed or harmed in some way.
Given that technological advances, as well as efficiencies of scale seem to favor the continued reduction in costs per unit of electricity for renewables, and similar long-term trends will drive the costs of coal/gas/oil UP, it would seem to be a given that we will depend substantially on renewables towards the end of my lifetime, 30-40 years from now.
The real insurmountable problem that keeps nuclear power from being viable economically, is simply NIMBY. Everybody wants nuclear power as long as it is in the other guy's backyard.
People might get pissy about a wind turbine ing up their scenic view, but get downright cantankerous if that series of turbines were to be a nuclear plant.
Before, I thought "meh, it isn't economically all that viable, but worth a shot", but now, I just don't think it can be argued plausibly that you can build one to the safety levels that I would be comfortable with.
If a wind turbine falls over, will it irradiate an area for 20,000+ years?Safer?
How many people have died from nuclear incident from any reactor built in the 90's or later? Now consider these:
Wind vs. Nuclear Power: Which Is Safer?
wiki: Nuclear and radiation accidents
From Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 December 2010
How do wind turbine deaths compare to other construction deaths?
Since I assume most of that data is from construction. It is a bit illogical to compare deaths in the construction of wind power to the operation of nuclear plants, not that illogical arguments ever stopped you before.
(edit)
Oddly enough, placing these things offshore seems to amolierate the risk, as does placing them in sparsely populated areas.Of the 73 fatalities:
• 52 were wind industry and direct support workers (maintenance/engineers, etc), or small
turbine owner /operators.
• 21 were public fatalities, including workers not directly dependent on the wind industry (e.g.
transport workers).
That is a risk that seems a lot more measureable and manageable than the consequences of nuclear meltdowns.
Last edited by RandomGuy; 03-15-2011 at 02:16 PM.
I really don't care about the birds. I want my electricity.
Of course, distributed PV power wouldn't involve such things.
Cool, thx. What about Nat Gas?
And a good nuclear plant will last for several decades with less maintenance costs per megawatt.
We would disagree here. Renewables are subsidized for political gain in my view. Seems to me the there is no subsidies for oil since you continually call tax breaks, a subsidy. Cleanups like the Exxon Valdez were not the responsibility of the oil producers, but of the ship owners. Too much for them. As for the recent Gulf Coast incident, BP said they would pay, then the government demanded to take over the liability. Again, political reasons.
Why not wait and let the marketplace do this with capital venture money when the time is right?
You guys are determined to undermine capitalism. Let capital venturists decide when the time is right, instead of using it as another political football.
That's where good leadership rather than partisanship comes in. Teach the truth instead of lies in political discourse.
How do you expect a serious answer to a exaggerated question?
But enough PV to make a good dent would decrease the surface temperature and increase the air temperature. What could that do for climate change?
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