Flood Berm Collapses At Nebraska Nuclear Plant 417
mdsolar writes "A berm holding the flooded Missouri River back from a Nebraska nuclear power station collapsed early Sunday, but federal regulators said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger. The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station shut down in early April for refueling, and there is no water inside the plant, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. Also, the river is not expected to rise higher than the level the plant was designed to handle. NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said the plant remains safe."
Well that does it. (Score:5, Funny)
Its time to go back to burning dead dinosaurs, this nuclear stuff is clearly too dangerous!
Just look at how many news stories there are about it.
This must be what it was like to live in the 70s.
Re: (Score:2)
There was this popular movie "The China Syndrome" with Jane Fonda about a news crew that just happened to be in the right place at the right time to film a nuclear plant accident from the control room. The company tried to cover it up and the good guys got all activist and stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Syndrome [wikipedia.org]
There was this really weird coincidence where there was an accident at a real nuclear plant (Three Mile Island) at the same time the film was ru
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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So... Did the math here... Just over 1MPG? Must have been a real bitch to make that drive on a 20 gallon tank.
(I'm guessing $100/week?)
Re:Well that does it. (Score:4)
Unfortunately developing new reactors is very expensive. Not only do you have to overcome quite a few outstanding problems with thorium reactors, you then have to prove they are safe and develop procedures to deal with accidents. Alternatively you just build a much cheaper reactor based on 70s technology and try to keep the regulator happy with some flood and tornado defences.
All the money for development is being pumped into renewables, which makes sense when you think about it. Given the choice you can either continue with a system that consumes nuclear fuel, produces nuclear waste, has very costly safety requirements, is heavily regulated, needs a lot of cleanup at its end-of-life and has the potential to release radioactive material if it goes wrong leading to billions of dollars in liability... Or you can develop a clean renewables that in roughly the same timescale as developing thorium reactors. No fuel, no mess, very little danger, plenty of space to build them because site requirements are minimal, and as a bonus you can sell the technology to other countries without fear of legal issues when trying to supply them with nuclear material. The plants have a pretty much unlimited lifetime too and maintenance requirements are low.
In other words by the time you have developed a thorium reactor renewables will have taken away much of the demand, and chances are suppliers will choose to keep using the older and cheaper technology unless forced to do otherwise, and governments are usually unwilling to push the cost of energy up like that.
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In other words by the time you have developed a thorium reactor renewables will have taken away much of the demand
We know how to build advanced nuclear reactors today. If fully committed, they could come online in less than a decade, and be one order of magnitude cheaper than any renewables. What's preventing them is:
a. NIMBY-type ecologists and fear-mongers
b. Proliferation concerns
c. Increasingly, green industry lobby, makeshift "job creation" and other assorted economic fallacies
I don't dispute your conclusion that the free market will chose renewables over nuclear. But that's not because of engineering concerns or r
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Enjoy this picture to see the true stupidity of being cheap. http://www.omaha.com/article/20110626/NEWS01/110629782/1007 [omaha.com]. Yes that is dry land at the back of the power plant, nothing like cheap when it comes to losing money hand over fist, "a water-filled tubular levee", to cheap even to pay for a real levee but what the heck risk tens or millions of people's water supply or chase bigger profits, the picture shows the answer to that one.
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Oh no. The plants were far better maintained in the 70s.
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I'm not joking. And don't call me Shirley.
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One of you deserves a whoosh, and I don't know who. Probably GP.
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Were you alive in the 70's?
It was not really a decade of hope. And anyone with eyes to see and a brain to think could see that the events of the 80's were a precursor to what is happening today.
I remember seeing Ronald Reagan taking the oath of office and thinking "we are SO fucked!"
I remember talking to a lot of people who shared my belief that we were in for a half-century of decline.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe in papal infallibility, so I'll argue with you. I graduated high school in 1974, and the '70's were a decade of hope. Now, as for the '80's, yeah, you're pretty close to right. The steel industry set the example for all the rest of corporate America. Stop paying those Union wages, and ship the jobs to Europe, Asia, even Africa if you can find enough people there with the intelligence to run a furnace.
Half century of decline? I like optimism. We might come back in 50 years. But, I look
Re:Well that does it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmm. How can I be polite... Nope. Can't.
So.
Fuck you.
Seriously. This generation of 30-year-old gamers is the least criminal, the most altruistic there is. Unlike their parents, they played civilization, and they know what happens to empires with no research and no roads... They grew up without internet and know, much more deeply than their parents, what it means to be connected. They know of the passions, travails and interests of all everywhere. And they know how it was before.
They are not hungry, because they can see how wrong their hungry parents were. The pox that is suburbia. The obsession of ownership. The small-mindedness of the symbols of success. And the failure of it all to bring security or satisfaction. And now, we have reached peak oil, and there is no infrastructure to cope. They know there is no contentedness to be reached in following their parent's footsteps.
They know that the one thing that brings improvement is knowledge. And they know it is a double-edged sword. And they see how their hungry parents are defunding education and research to pay for the retirements they can't afford -- because they won't pay taxes. Yes, the GP is right: Reagan was a calamity. Not so much because of his policies, but because he made legitimate a deeply wrong view of the World.
Re:Well that does it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Let's see how knowledge serves you, when no one is willing to grow the food to feed you. I said "hungry", and that is what I meant. So long as obesity runs rampant in America, none of you kids can claim to know what hunger is. Hunger is not to be equated with the greed for superflous bullshit that you cite above.
BTW - it was your parents and grandparents, maybe your great grand parents who made this nation a superpower. Today, we see that superpower status slipping away. Yes, we are in decline, as PopeRatzo suggested. Enjoy your delusions of superiority. They won't return power to the United States, though.
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And now, we have reached peak oil
Flashback from 1973. Oil cost as much as $80/barrel in 1973, adjust for inflation and you will see that it was actually more expensive back then. It is well know that there are vast, untapped, oil reserves all over the world. The largest of which happen to lie in the US. We could easily increase production if many of the bans on oil drilling in the US were lifted.
http://www.kiplinger.com/businessresource/forecast/archive/The_U.S._s_Untapped_Bounty_080630.html [kiplinger.com]
The U.S. is sitting on the world's largest, untapped oil reserves -- reservoirs which energy experts know exist, but which have not yet been tapped and may not be attainable with current technology. In fact, such untapped reserves are estimated at about 2.3 trillion barrels, nearly three times more than the reserves held by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) nations and sufficient to meet 300 years of demand -- at today's levels -- for auto, truck, aircraft, heating and industrial fuel, without importing a single barrel of oil.
What's the problem then? Why aren't oil companies jumping to pump the black gold? Contrary to what some conspiracy theorists would have you believe, there is no cabal of oil companies and foreign governments blocking the way, bottling up U.S. oil production. The reality is much more mundane. Those untapped reserves are located in places that either Uncle Sam has put off-limits for environmental reasons or are too costly to get -- or a combination of both.
Re:Well that does it. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right! There are "vast" "untapped" seas of oil everywhere! And beneath that, there is more "vastly untapped" oil! Some rocks, then more oil! Infinite supply of energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years to be consumed and consumed and consumed so that it can be all used up in a few centuries ... no wait! God would never let it happen! How would all them born-again Christian Texan Oil company magnates get their righteously owed due?! (or alternatively, how would Allah's chosen families of the house of Saud get theirs?!)
So its Oil! Oil! Oil! Oil all the way down! [wikipedia.org]
And its only because these unreasonable tree-huggers and pinko-commies wont let the Glorious and Righteous Oil Men to drill and drill everywhere until the entire landscape is covered in Glorious Oil Wells, horizon to horizon, instead of them sissy trees and the like, that the prices ever go up! Bastards! Off with them bushes and shrubbery, off with them fish, make way for The Towers that Squirt Black Gold, The Liquid Glory of Supreme Greed at All Costs!
And bonus! There is more! If you squint just right you will see that God (or Allah, if that's your vice) provided for the future [wikipedia.org] (with the somewhat unlikely help of the Soviets) too when the center of the Earth somehow runs dry at the end of slurping tubes of the Glorious And Magnificent Oil Men!
So while all these godless commie tree-huggers panic, real God-fearing men like you should all get a bigger Hummer. 48litre displacement, 26 cylinder one.
Or bigger.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, you've been, just a little bit, a totally gullible victim of the ever more whiny and panicky propaganda courtesy of the utterly blind and irresponsible greed of oil-men and die-hard ideologues of this supposed cure-all system called "Capitalism" who are ever more desperate to hide the fact that their activities (and the long cause-effect chains of these activities) are nothing less than some of the most wasteful and destructive actions in the entire history of mankind, no? Oh and that little small problem: the entire planet's biosphere in total never had enough biomass to account for all of these "vast and untapped" oil "reserves", never you mind in the time-frame during which accumulation of fossil fuels occurred. And that doesn't even include factors such as the amounts of the solar energy thus trapped and the efficiency of the entire process.
Outside of the demented fantasies of oil companies and all those whose comfortable life-style depends on insane actions of irreparably destroying reserves accumulated over period near a billion of years in just a tiny percentile of that time, oil is running out. Permanently. The energy trapped within (along with the base materials for polymers) is nearly gone. And because, thanks to idiots like you, most of the Western world is dependent on wholly insane prices of what is ultimately a unique and irreplaceable material, any shortages of this material will cause societal upheavals the like the world has never seen.
I just hope that all these apologists like you get to live to see that day and get a full, violent brunt of the reckoning when it comes. Right in your faces.
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Yeah right, oil shale [wikipedia.org] and tar sands [straight.com]... just the thing we need [google.com] in our collective backyard. If we're lucky that would only be as bad as hydraulic fracturing [imdb.com] for gas. The actual oil listed in the Kiplinger piece (OCS, Bakken, ANWR) totals about 200 billion barrels... enough to supply the USA's needs for about 30 months. Yay!
And if we do go for the shale/sand play, we'll get a paltry 3-to-1 return on energy inputs. Seriously, there are better ways [oilendgame.com] to solve our petro-fuel problems.
As for the original topic (nuke
Re:Well that does it. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with nukes is that letting private companies run them for profit means they'll cut costs wherever possible. Look at how Deepwater Horizon blew up: They ignored a whole load of safety regulations because they thought nothing bad could happen and it's just cheaper to skip on the safety stuff that'll never get used anyway.
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The "it will pay for itself" thing isn't really as wrong as people think. Iraqi oil is being pumped, and it is filling a market need. Alright, it's not coming to the United States, but it was never promised that it would come to the United States. In fact, much of that Iraqi oil is being shipped to China. Which, actually helps us, in that China is not competing as strongly as they would have in other market sources of oil.
The Republicans insisted that oil must flow from Iraq, and it flows. The fact tha
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But, I look at so many of today's young people, and they have no drive, no hunger, no need to do anything.
And yet they feel they deserve everything simply because they want it. And fuck you if you disagree. I call them the, "Entitled Generation."
Unless things dramatically change, this generation is going to completely fuck over America. And thus far, they show every indication of being extremely proud about it.
Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:5, Informative)
Still alive here in Omaha, right by the river. Water's not glowing, no evacuation orders.
The plant has been turned off since April, there's not any danger of anything catastrophic. Spent fuel ponds are not flooding, although I have no idea if they've drained/moved them or not. As much as I love conspiracy theories, there's nothing here to be worried about.
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http://www.startribune.com/nation/123466069.html [startribune.com]
Of course people are only going to start worrying when the shit has already hit the fan. Until then, everything's peachy.
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:5, Informative)
Also here in Omaha. For Calhoun to be compromised in a significant way, the Missouri has to exceed 45 feet. At 45 feet, the rest of Omaha's flood defenses (and Council Bluffs) will have failed. A plant getting decommissioned will be the least of everyone's worries.
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:5, Funny)
You say that now, but you'l be singing a different tune when the giant mutant frogs and McDonald's drive-thru employees start attacking your house.
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:5, Funny)
If something like that ever happens, we as a people will rise up and fight for our lives side by side against the horrible monstrosities we face. And after we're done, we'll find a nice home for the mutant frogs. Perhaps Montana, I hear they have a lot of extra space.
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No. No space for mutant frogs. Hop away, now.
And Cooper? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:4, Insightful)
Exceed 45 feet only if the water has to go over the wall, instead of thru it or under it.
Escape routes? (Score:2, Troll)
Cooper still operating (Score:4, Informative)
"The elevated river level caused the closure of several area roads including a portion of Interstate 29 and Route 136 in the State of Missouri which isolated one of the planned emergency evacuation routes."
http://cryptome.org/0004/cooper-npp-flood.htm [cryptome.org]
Don't raft down stream I guess.
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I'm also from the area. The spin on these stories that the sky is falling are both funny and annoying.
Even if there was some kind of catastrophic failure at FCS that required immediate response, the surrounding infrastructure is still more than able to deal with it. Omaha is still standing and chugging along just fine. The rest of the country isn't exactly paralyzed by a Japan style disaster.
People need to be more concerned about the levees around Omaha and Council Bluffs and the areas already effected by
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(1) The river is flooding a bit
(2) The material used to keep the flood away from dangerous radioactive goo (tm) has partially failed
(3) No one is in the least concerned about the river flooding enough to actually get at the dangerous radioactive goo
(4) The news needed something to report on that
Re:Nothing to worry about, move along (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that during the nuclear accident in Japan, the Japanese authorities were saying the same thing.
It's nice to see a little skepticism out of our media for once.
You live under a rock don't you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that we've all learned from the Fuck-U-Shima accident in Japan, let me give you a refresher. The power to the plant is off, disconnected, out of order. That means the pumps for the spent fuel pool are running on diesel generators. That's all well and good, but you are one fuel shortage away from a complete power outage. If the power goes out for a few days, the spent fuel pools start to boil off water, the rods get exposed - which means not enough cooling - and then they melt - right there in the swimming pool which is not contained anything like a reactor core - in fact, since it's shut down the core is probably in the pool. Is this scenario likely to happen? If I had to bet money I'd say no. If I lived nearby I'd pay close attention. As it is, I eat enough food from the midwest to follow this one, and I'm down wind like half the country. It doesn't look easy to do maintenance there with a couple feet of water for miles around. Nuclear plants that are "shut down" are not safe to evacuate and leave until the flood waters subside - not even close.
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how on earth will they keep the SFP cool with all that water coming through?
Really? (Score:5, Funny)
"...said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger."
Yep, we really heard that a lot lately.
I personally find that in Japanese it sounded even better.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
"...said they were monitoring the situation and there was no danger."
Yep, we really heard that a lot lately.
I personally find that in Japanese it sounded even better.
People who died as a result of the earthquake/tsunami: 20000
People who died as a result of the nuclear power plant incidents: 0
It seems that there really was no danger.
Stop helping (Score:2, Offtopic)
I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.
Misinformation does not help the cause of nuclear power.
Re:Stop helping (Score:4, Informative)
You were mistaken. Or whoever wrote what you are referring to was mistaken. Noone has dies due to radiation exposure at Fukushima.
I agree. Stop spreading misinformation.
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The pro-nuclear lobby has been at the GP, but I'll go ahead and answer this.
Modern geothermal takes less water than nuclear. One tenth as much actually and greywater can be used for those little inputs. And since everything that comes up from the ground goes back into the ground, there are no emissions or outputs whatsoever except electricity. There is no fuel, no fuel waste, no radioactivity, no danger in earthquake, tornado, hurricane or flood. No danger of losing the source of fuel in global conflic
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One worker was dosed with levels that will show up in around 30ish years. Middle-adged man, part way through his career, not going to be that much damage done. Not to mention, any workers dosed have signed up for this kind of thing, and no real outward displays of regret as it should be.
Re:Stop helping (Score:5, Informative)
I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.
Who was it? When did it happen?
There have been fatalities at nuclear plants related to the reactor or radiation in general. For instance, Louis Slotin was heavily irradiated and died within a week after mishandling a plutonium core, and the (3) workers at the early military power production facility SL-1 were killed due to a criticality accident. There have not, on the other hand, been radiation-induced casualties from civilian plants that I'm aware of, with the exception of Chernobyl (a non-Western style design).
If you're referring to Fukushima, there was a plant worker at Fukushima Dai-ni who died in a crane after the tsunami, but this was not radiation-related, as this was before the meltdowns occurred, and this was at Dai-ni, not the site with the meltdowns (Fukushima Dai-Ichi). At Fukushima Dai-Ichi itself there were workers who went missing after a hydrogen explosion who I'd never heard about afterwards -- it's possible that they were killed, although this also would not have been due to radiation (not that it matters to them...).
There have been ~9 or so workers exceed the already-raised 250 mSv exposure limit but as far as I'm aware there have been no fatalities due to radiation exposure, so I'd be interested to know what I'm missing that you read about.
Re:Stop helping (Score:5, Informative)
Two workers died after the tsunami flooded the turbine building of unit 4 at Fukushima Daiichi, their bodies were recovered two weeks after the tsunami. Those two are the only casualties related to the disaster in a meaningful way. Another worker from a partner company died from a hearth attack apparently, but he started to work in Fukushima Daiichi 3 or 4 days before his death. 6 workers in total have received radiation doses above the emergency limit of 250 mSv, two of them had around 600 mSv of exposure. A female worker had surpassed the fairly smaller limit for female workers by their child bearing condition, but since she is around 55 years old, she shouldn't face any trouble.
Re:Stop helping (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we stop the incredibly selective reporting already? When discussing coal casualties we seem to include power station fatalities, mining fatalities, pet fatalities, people who ever lived within 50,000km of a piece of coal who subsequently died for any reason. When we look at nuclear fatalities it has to be caused by gamma radiation above 1,000,000,000TBq and only if the guy is called Ivan and was touching the PV within 1 minute of actually dying. Oh and he must have mutated terribly and grown 6 more legs or it wasn't really the radiation.
Or to be brief, judge the safety of nuclear the same way as you judge the safety of coal. No selective reporting please, we call that "lying" where I come from.
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Nobody who matters, anyway [reuters.com]
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I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.
And I recall that a plant worker has died from a heart attack, 2 were treated for radiation exposure, and several others for physical injuries.
No doubt that some of these workers now have an increased risk of cancer, but why make this sound worse than it really is?
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Wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. There are a great many deaths that may be attributed to the Fukushima mess.
Possibly in 20 years a HANDFUL of workers actually in the plant might get cancer. To claim anything more than that is fantasy - not science fiction to be sure, since there's no basis in science for your claims.
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Now apply the same standard to coal, gas, and oil-fired power, not to mention solar (nasty chemicals in the fabrication process), wind (tower deaths), hydro (failure or entrapment)...
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solar (nasty chemicals in the fabrication process)
Care to elaborate?
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
"It seems that there really was no danger."
I assume you don't have any real estate 15 miles around the reactors?
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In your strange world of black and white, are all non-deadly things also non-harmful?
"Danger" to me doesn't mean "has been shown to cause death," but rather "is likely to cause harm."
What, exactly, does it mean to you?
Evacuation = Low Death Toll - Danger Very Real (Score:3, Insightful)
You're correct, the death toll due to Fukushima is single digits.
However, the main reason for that being so is because the authorities evacuated people far away from the plant; hundreds of square miles of land surrounding the plant is now considered uninhabitable for many years.
Likewise with Chernobyl ... again, the mandatory evacuation is why the death toll there has been relatively low.
In both incidents, if people had been allowed to stay, the death toll would be in the thousands, at minimum, and potentia
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Citation?
Citation?
Oh, and just out of curiosity, how does evacuating an area prevent deaths outside the area?
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So, what you are saying is that nuclear power is harmless because deaths can be prevented? What's the problem then?
How about a car analogy: the only reason why people don't die by the thousands every day is because they take the precaution to stop at red lights.
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So, what you are saying is that nuclear power is harmless because deaths can be prevented? What's the problem then?
How about a car analogy: the only reason why people don't die by the thousands every day is because they take the precaution to stop at red lights.
When you can get an insurer to cover the cost of abandoning an entire small region in case something goes wrong at your plant, I will buy your car analogy.
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"In short, the hazard is very real - it's the mandatory evacuations that has kept the death toll so low"
well noooo kidding. Evacuating a burning building prevents fire deaths too.
Sure. The difference is, the demolition site of a burning building is safe to re-enter within a matter of days. The preventative evacuation from a nuclear reactor accident will need to remain in place for decades, if we're talking about cesium isotope fallout.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
The current number of displaced people is around 90000. Not all of these are because of radiation. There are many older people in shelters, and the living conditions are harsh. This is taking a physical and mental toll. Some vulnerable people have already died, and the suicide rate is up. Those evacuated because of radiation are among the most effected because of increased health worries and uncertainty about the future. I was unable to find any online figures, but it is clear the survivors have a lower life expectancy.
The situation for people working at the plant is also uncertain. According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster [wikipedia.org]
In the Japanese press these people are being referred to as "disposable employees".
So I guess these people don't count. Not the ones who are already dead, or the ones who will be dying sooner or later. Or maybe you don't think these people are humans, and their lives don't count?
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're forgetting that the nuclear accident seriously hampered search and rescue efforts within the evacuation zone.
In other words: the Fukushima reactor has not killed anyone, but the government's response to the problems at Fukushima lead to an evacuation, and more people who were brought to the verge of death due to being buried in Tsunami debris died than might have died if the government reacted differently.
Sorry... neither the reactor nor nuclear power killed those folks; all their injuries were caused by the Tsunami. Their death was certain unless they received timely assistance, and the chaos created in the wake of the Tsunami and the poor government response caused them to not receive any assistance.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Nuclear plants have the unique ability to make a bad natural disaster even worse by creating a man-made catastrophe which impacts a large area and mandates additional evacuations and displacement.
And Japan is lucky, in that it has an incredibly developed (some might say overdeveloped) infrastructure, one which generally held up pretty well to the massive quake and subsequent tsunami.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
The water level around Fukushima was not expected to rise higher than the level the plant was designed to handle either. And according to some reports [slashdot.org], the Fukushima plant was not even able to handle the earthquake itself even though it was designed to handle it.
Now I'm all for modern nuclear plants, we should be building a lot more of them, but I've learned to take official reports on nuclear incidents with a grain of salt
In other news: (Score:3)
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Sorry, but you absolutly didn't get the concept of "failsafe"
Something that requires continuous measures to avoid damage (like... cooling a spent fuel pool or keeping a car on track on the road) is by definition NOT failsafe, not matter how many layers of security you wrap around it.
All those security stuff may make an accident almost impossible, but it's still not failsafe. It's more like what -273 degrees is compared to absolute zero. (ok... failsafe designs are feasible, but NOT by approximation and addi
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I'm sorry miss dyke, but it seems it's you who doesn't understand the term "fail-safe".
A fail-safe is there to prevent excessive damage in case of failure. It does not mean it's safe from failing, it means that when it fails it does so in a safe, controlled way.
fail-safe
[feyl-seyf] adjective, noun, verb, -safed, -safing.
–adjective
1. Electronics . pertaining to or noting a mechanism built into a system, as in an early warning system or a nuclear reactor, for insuring safety should the system fa
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I'm sorry miss dyke, but it seems it's you who doesn't understand the term "fail-safe".
A fail-safe is there to prevent excessive damage in case of failure. It does not mean it's safe from failing, it means that when it fails it does so in a safe, controlled way.
So that's exactly what a batch of spent nuclear fuel DOESN'T to in a failure situation when for some reason the pool runs dry.
Ok, I read "failsafe" as "failure leads to no damage" instead of "failure leads to minimal damage", but besides that we're agreed on the meaning of failsafe. And still, the best road to a failsafe system is not additional security, but inherent safety [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
One of the sad things about our approach to nuclear safety is that we do shoddy work at each level because we thing the other levels will save us.
That is not "sad". That is good engineering. If you have $X dollars to spend on safety, it is almost always better to build multiple shoddy levels than one really good level. Three layers that are 90% reliable are ten times better than one layer that is 99% reliable, and probably cheaper.
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One of the sad things about our approach to nuclear safety is that we do shoddy work at each level because we thing the other levels will save us.
That is not "sad". That is good engineering. If you have $X dollars to spend on safety, it is almost always better to build multiple shoddy levels than one really good level. Three layers that are 90% reliable are ten times better than one layer that is 99% reliable, and probably cheaper.
I agree, but I think it is worth adding that if you take that approach then you need to make quite certain that there are no common-mode failures that will defeat all of your protective measures at the same time.
That was the problem in Japan: one event was able to take out locally-generated power (because the reactors scrammed), grid power and backup generators, leaving only a very limited amount of battery power. This is one of the reasons why modern reactor designs tend to emphasise passive safety, so tha
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That was the problem in Japan: one event was able to take out locally-generated power (because the reactors scrammed), grid power and backup generators
As I understand, it took two events to do that: the earthquake and the tsunami. It also took an earthquake that was extremely rare in terms of the power of the quake. Really, while there are some questions about the way that the Japanese government handled the situation, I would not assign any blame to the engineering of the reactor. Nothing can be built to withstand anything.
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The reactors were scrammed manually.
Emergency generators used Sunday (Score:2, Informative)
Berm collapse self-inflicted (Score:2)
Something against nuclear... (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems everything mdsolar keeps writing about nuclear tech has a sensationalist fear-mongering spin to it.
Re:I support nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, look, we get it. You're into solar power.
You also live a long way south, where you get lots of sunshine, and - crucially - long days during the winter.
Solar power is completely bloody useless if you haven't got long days. Clear sunshine isn't so important. Guess when you tend to need electricity the most? On dark winter days. Guess when solar panels just plain don't work? Go on... there, I knew you could say it.
Here in Scotland we have one of the largest on-shore wind farms in Europe. It's spent roughly three-quarters of the year to date shut down, because it's either not windy enough, or too windy to operate it. So, wind is right out. We've got hydroelectric power too, but flooding huge areas isn't exactly ecologically very nice either.
We need to invest in modern nuclear plants. All this "renewable" stuff is just putting a pretty green elastoplast on a gaping wound.
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Sure. I guess 0.45/kwh to 0.92/kwh is cheap depending on where you live, and if you're snorting coke off the breasts of a $10,000 a night whore too.
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Ok. safe this time. (Score:2)
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However, a coal fire power plant is continuously pumping soot, CO2, and a whole host of other unfriendly substances into the atmosphere. A report from last year estimated that coal power kills roughly 13,000 Americans each year.
So, yes, nuclear power is not perfect, but the perceived risk is far greater than the actual ri
Re:Ok. safe this time. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, what other power source would you like to see deployed? Wind and hydroelectric need to be augmented with another source of energy. What would you like to use? Coal, with the slag piles that kill people who live near them? Natural gas, which leaves people living near the mines with flammable tapwater? There is not enough wood to burn, not when we are trying to sustain billions of people on the planet.
What we need is more investment in new reactor designs, which have passive safety features (they do not require a power source to maintain coolant flow and prevent meltdowns). We should also look more closely at the thorium fuel cycle, since there is more thorium available than uranium. Nuclear power is not going away; we need it, and when we can't get any more oil out of the Earth we are going to need even more nuclear power. This is not the time to throw away plans to deploy nuclear plants; this is the time to develop safer nuclear power plants and start deploying them.
Or we could continue to hope for cold fusion. I won't hold my breath on that one.
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And a coal mine that catches on fire can burn for decades as well. Unlike the sort of doomsday scenarios that people predict for nuclear, the coal fire has already happened. New Straitsville, Ohio [wikipedia.org] And that's not the only multi-decade coal mine fire either.
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A berm? (Score:2)
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Re:USNRC = TEPCO? (Score:5, Funny)
Haha, I haven't been RickRolled in months... :)
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Damn, where is "Useful Offtopic" when we need it?
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what the planet needs (Score:2)
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... planetary-scale hazardous installations ...
Are you aware that nuclear power is safer, in terms of death toll and environmental impact, than both fossil fuels and hydroelectric power? Source [newscientist.com]
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who is guaranteeing a major nuclear installation will not be directly in the midst of a level 8-9 quake next time ?
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If it takes a combination of an extremely rare high-magnitude earthquake and a tsunam
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The Fukushima evacuation zone is smaller than the COUNTY (not country) I'm living in now.
If Fukushima Dai-Ichi were halfway between my house and my inlaws' house (a half hour drive apart), neither house would be in the evacuation zone. Neither house would be within a two hour's walk of the evacuation zone either.
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Nuclear power is not inherently bad, and in terms of the impact on the environment, nuclear power is a whole lot better than coal. Yes, we need cheap power in the world -- when oil is not as plentiful, we are going to need ways to power tractors or else peop
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Anti-Nuke fear-mongers (Score:2, Troll)
Nice to see the pro-nuke people out in force, demanding news black outs
The only people seeking to block access to anything are you and your kooky cohorts, trying to convince everyone the great noodley tentacles of Flying Spaghetti Monster of Nuclear Power have come to spread radiation across the land and claim us all.
Meanwhile you bury any attempt at transmission of anything like facts about radiation or safety in your mass of gibbering alarm.
And I'll bet you do that all with bananas sitting right in your h
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Both nuclear plants issued flooding alerts earlier this month, although they were routine as the river's rise has been expected.
Yeah, that's not fear mongering. That's pooh-poohing. Everywhere in the article it says something scary, it surrounded with a calming rhetoric. WTF is a "routine" nuclear plant "alert", other than an oxymoron?
The federal commission had inspectors at the plant 20 miles north of Omaha when the 2,000-foot berm collapsed about 1:30 a.m. Sunday. Water surrounded the auxiliary and containment buildings at the plant, it said in a statement. The Omaha Public Power District has said the complex will not be reactivated until the flooding subsides. Its spokesman, Jeff Hanson, said the berm wasn't critical to protecting the plant but a crew will look at whether it can be patched.
See? Inspectors were standing by, but couldn't avert the collapse. The berm isn't critical but after this is over they'll probably fix it anyway, just in case.
No mention that Fort Calhoun is the spent fuel repository for both Nebraska reactors, and that the spent fuel is kept in in-ground pools
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Who is demanding a News Black Out? I only see people demanding honest news which properly puts the risks into context.
If I told you "Coal plant kills hundreds of people!" you would be alarmed but we don't get those kinds of stories since they're boring and mathy. Instead we get "Catastrophic failure* at nuclear plaNT!#@!!!" and a fine print story below that then clarifies that nobody was hurt, there isn't any danger and this is pretty much a non-story.
How about "Cars kill hundreds of thousands of people
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Fear mongering is something the media has been good at lately.
If they can combine the nuclear fear with Lindsay Lohan, it would be media nirvana. Maybe Lindsay can get wasted and drive a car into a nuclear power plant or shoplift some nuclear fuel to exchange with Al Qaeda for heroin.