why do people suddenly fear nuclear power plants?

[TheEvilCheese]

Generally, nuclear power is relatively safe, I personally am not worried. In fact, we should be using it more!
But I can understand the fears related to it, as most people don't know exactly how they work and what safety measures are in place.

if any country in the world SHOULD be scared of nuclear power, it is certainly Japan. And yet, they have a huge amount of nuclear plants compared to other similarly developed countries.

Like it or not, nuclear power is the most viable medium-term solution to our energy problems, as renewable sources just aren't there yet. They will be, but not unless we devote a sizeable investment into research.

 

[wulfy42]

That is BS. Meltdowns do not spread from plant to plant.

Um...yes they do?

If you have 3 plants within a 5 mile radius and one melts down (while all three are damaged in some way and need human interaction to prevent a meltdown) it is quite likely that all three will melt down.

You talked about a chain reaction spreading over the whole country making it uninhabitable. That is far different than having a meltdown in one reactor hamper efforts to control another nearby reactor at the same plant. There are no plants within 5 miles of each other in Japan. Therefore given your own 5 mile limitation there is no way this could not happen.

I listed multiple plants within 5 miles of each other in a post above in japan. And yes, if 3 nuclear plants melt down it's quite likely it could have a large enough effect to make an entire country uninhabitable. I didn't say the chain reaction would hit ALL the plants in a country, just that the effects of the chain reaction would effect the entire country (which it could).

It depends a ton on the radiation levels being leaked, how much contaminated steam etc is being blown put into the air and a ton of other factors....but yeah...it could be very bad. How bad we have no clue because it's never happened. Hopefully it never will but I think having NP' within 5 miles of each other is a bad idea especially in areas with a high chance of natural disasters. We don't have any near where I live within 5 miles of each other (heck none within 50 miles) and I think that is the best way to go.

 

[Flauros]

The thing survived a fucking earthquake. Cmon. Our shit falls down when a plane hits it, think about it.

Did you know that a coal plant is MORE radioactive then a nuclear plant? Yup, thats right. Living by a COAL plant is worse.

But were used to coal.

 

[Steven True]

Nuclear power is clean... And if you think for some reason it's dirty we have this amazing storage system that's been under construction for holding spent rods. Gasp, this has been thought out so we don't pollute more and there is no real risk?!

As an advocate of nuclear power I can tell you that it is not clean.
And that the "some reason" is the fact that spent rods & other waste have to be stored for so long that scientists have no idea how to warn the people of that far distant future how dangerous the material will still be. It's so long that we count on any current language be know of.
And any system to store this material will have to last 10,000's of years. Can you think of any engineering system that we can guarantee for 10,000's of years?

The risks might be lower than the continual use of fossil fuels & the rewards higher. I believe this. But we shouldn't paper over those risks.

 

[Kaytastrophe]

Because they are hippies who fear an alternative energy that might actually work, and they listen to horror stories about things like Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island, ignoring that fact that neither of those are possible with a well-designed, safely implemented reactor. Things like a nuclear plant going critical is only possible if the plant was designed by a drunken idiot, and staffed by retarded turtles; neither of those is the case with the reactors in Japan, which are fine.

And they get scared by radiation, because they can't understand it, even though you get hit by more radiation watching TV than you do walking around a nuclear power plant.

The problem is that drunken idiots and retarded turtles do build and run nuclear power plants. Look at the Pickering Nuclear Power plant in Pickering Ontario Canada; it is built on a major fault line and is right beside one of the great lakes. When/if an earthquake hits there is going to be trouble there. I agree that nuclear power is safe 99.9% of the time; the problem is that when the other 0.01% it fails it has the potential to have long lasting devastating effects. However of the alternative energy sources this is the one I have the most faith in.

EDIT: A friend posted this article on Facebook, makes sense to me.
http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/53461/fukushima-nuclear-accident-simple-and-accurate-explanation

 

[Grubnar]

I would think that since Japan was hit by what may be the most powerfull earthquake of out times and that their nuclear power plants withstood it, maybe it should be seen as a display of how save modern nuclear power plants are.

But no.

 

[Eisenfaust]

usual post-indicent fear... because how dare they build cheap power generators that take an earthquake and a tsunami to sort of bugger up...


my original misgivings about nuclear power (ie: before i actually read anything about it) really came from sim city... the nuclear power stations blew up after 50 years just like every other plant, and adding "nuclear" to a large explosion seemed... unwise

 

[wulfy42]

Come back with solar power and wind farms and then we can start talking (In Australia's case the amount of sun and wind we get would power our nation easily on them, just imagine the Simpson desert full of solar power panels)

Wind and solar power simply isn't practical, and won't be for ages. Collecting and transporting power is difficult enough (covering the Simpson desert in anything is no small feat, let alone complicated machinery), but there's no feasible method (yet) of storing solar power during the night. Maybe in 50 years, but not now.

.... ever heard of a BATTERY? You can buy solar powered phone chargers now. That is solar power going into a battery. Not that complicated.

Can you really blame people for being scared/worried about nuclear power? We've seen what CAN happen, and i'm sure we're all aware of Murphy's Law. After all, who thought that the twin towers would have been brought down by a pair of planes, or that the "unsinkable" Titanic would sink on it's maiden voyage? Or that 96 people would die at a football match (Hillsborough)? We should ALWAYS consider the worst case scenario, because eventually, it will happen.

Actually I think the concept was to use both bateries to store power and to use the solar power to lift/pump the water up so it can be used to generate hydro power at night. It's a combo of solar and hydro power really but a pretty cool idea (that hasn't been actually implemented yet).

The concept though is pretty interesting although cloud cover would of course be a serious issue. In areas with little rain fall/cloud cover though the concept could allow you to basically spread the energy generated by solar panels out over an entire 24 hour period.

I believe the concept relies on solar power filling the tanks which when full can generate hydro power throughout the night with room to spare. It takes something like 10 hours of sunlight a day to keep the tanks above 50% full constantly and allows for additional energy to be generated with any other daylight that is available.

If the tanks were too low that would certainly be a design flaw but since it hasn't been built yet it could still be fixed.

 

[Wicky_42]

Because they are hippies who fear an alternative energy that might actually work, and they listen to horror stories about things like Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island, ignoring that fact that neither of those are possible with a well-designed, safely implemented reactor. Things like a nuclear plant going critical is only possible if the plant was designed by a drunken idiot, and staffed by retarded turtles; neither of those is the case with the reactors in Japan, which are fine.

And they get scared by radiation, because they can't understand it, even though you get hit by more radiation watching TV than you do walking around a nuclear power plant.

EDIT: A friend posted this article on Facebook, makes sense to me.
http://theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/53461/fukushima-nuclear-accident-simple-and-accurate-explanation

Nice article, though I don't know enough about it to comfortably take his word for it

Before I noticed that my response was going to be:

people in Russia demonstrated against nuclear power plants after they heard that three Japanese power plants where going critical.

You know, I think that they would have a point when presented with that info - you hear that not just one, but three nuclear powerplants are going CRITICAL, you're not going to want to see any built at home, especially with Russia's legacy! If that's what their media's feeding them, I'm not bloody surprised!

 

[pro1337tariat]

but there are a ton of nuclear plants in japan (around 60 right now I think)

There are around 60 nuclear reactors. There are 18 nuclear plants.

it just takes one plant melting down to put all the others in danger through a chain reaction that could not only leave all of japan uninhabitable

That is BS. Meltdowns do not spread from plant to plant.

Um...yes they do?

If you have 3 plants within a 5 mile radius and one melts down (while all three are damaged in some way and need human interaction to prevent a meltdown) it is quite likely that all three will melt down. It of course depends on the level of damage, size of the hydrogen explosions when the plant melts down, the level of radiation being leaked etc, but I would say it is indeed quite likely that multiple plants would melt down within a certain radius.

Has it happened? Nope, but it certainly could.

Chernobyl had four reactors at its plant. One reactor went critical in 1986; reactor 4. Want to to take a guess at what happened to the other reactors? Thats right. Nothing. Hell, the plant with the rest of reactors 1-3 continued to run until 1999. These were all reactors on the SAME plant, so what makes you think that its going to hit multiple plants.

Reactors fuel is not pure fissile material; one of the choice materials is uranium oxide. That means that it is impossible for a reactor to undertake a explosive nuclear reaction; the explosion at Chernobyl was a steam one, not a nuclear one.

And please don't tell me that hydrogen explosion is going to be able to extend for a five mile radius; the amount of hydrogen would absurdly large; for perspective, the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki had a total destruction radius (meaning "its gone completely zone"), and fires to about 2-3 miles out. And that was caused by splitting a atom, which releases FAR more energy than breaking a H2 bond.

 

[Dana22]

Reactors fuel is not pure fissile material; one of the choice materials is uranium oxide. That means that it is impossible for a reactor to undertake a explosive nuclear reaction; the explosion at Chernobyl was a steam one, not a nuclear one.

Also note that explosion at Chernobyl was caused by combination of human error and AWFUL reactor design.

 

[pro1337tariat]

Come back with solar power and wind farms and then we can start talking (In Australia's case the amount of sun and wind we get would power our nation easily on them, just imagine the Simpson desert full of solar power panels)

Wind and solar power simply isn't practical, and won't be for ages. Collecting and transporting power is difficult enough (covering the Simpson desert in anything is no small feat, let alone complicated machinery), but there's no feasible method (yet) of storing solar power during the night. Maybe in 50 years, but not now.

.... ever heard of a BATTERY? You can buy solar powered phone chargers now. That is solar power going into a battery. Not that complicated.

Can you really blame people for being scared/worried about nuclear power? We've seen what CAN happen, and i'm sure we're all aware of Murphy's Law. After all, who thought that the twin towers would have been brought down by a pair of planes, or that the "unsinkable" Titanic would sink on it's maiden voyage? Or that 96 people would die at a football match (Hillsborough)? We should ALWAYS consider the worst case scenario, because eventually, it will happen.

Batteries work for small scale things. But how exactly are you going to store enough energy for one city, much less an entire country? Not the mention the serious environmental concerns you get by getting all the metals you need to make said batteries.

 

[octafish]

People are panicking for the wrong reasons, nuclear power plants are amazingly safe. What we should be worried about is the radioactive waste.

And I think that problem can be solved by substituting uranium with thorium.

Thank you. That is my concern with nuclear power, where is the waste stored, how is it stored and what means are used to transport it from the power plant to the waste dump?

 

[wulfy42]

I would think that since Japan was hit by what may be the most powerfull earthquake of out times and that their nuclear power plants withstood it, maybe it should be seen as a display of how save modern nuclear power plants are.

But no.

It wasn't even the strongest earthquake of the last 6 years....and there have been what 5? earthquakes that caused more damage in the last 5-6 years then this one. The distance from the epicenter was quite large as was the depth of the quake. Most of the damage in Japan was from the Tsunami not the earthquake or after shocks themselves.

The 9.1 earthquake in Dec of 2004 caused far more structural damage.

It's actually quite scary that the plants are so damaged when so many other buildings were not!!

 

[Deepzound]

Both of those are flawed. Nuclear (and its successors) are the only way for any real progress. Solar, and wind on a scale of anything bigger than a calculator is a pipe dream like clean coal.

People scare easily over nothing.

Nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, and most efficient energy source. (wind is not viable in most areas)

I think you people need to stop listening to coal industry propaganda and in stead check up on the facts for yourselves [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States].

On February 11, 2010, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory released the first comprehensive update of the wind energy potential by state since 1993, showing that the contiguous United States had potential to install 10,459 GW of onshore wind power.
source [http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/filter_detail.asp?itemid=2542]

 

[Maquette]

Snip.

I agree wholeheartedly, there's much less awareness regarding coal fired power plants and mercury, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and carbon dioxide emissions.

 

[wulfy42]

but there are a ton of nuclear plants in japan (around 60 right now I think)

There are around 60 nuclear reactors. There are 18 nuclear plants.

it just takes one plant melting down to put all the others in danger through a chain reaction that could not only leave all of japan uninhabitable

That is BS. Meltdowns do not spread from plant to plant.

Um...yes they do?

If you have 3 plants within a 5 mile radius and one melts down (while all three are damaged in some way and need human interaction to prevent a meltdown) it is quite likely that all three will melt down. It of course depends on the level of damage, size of the hydrogen explosions when the plant melts down, the level of radiation being leaked etc, but I would say it is indeed quite likely that multiple plants would melt down within a certain radius.

Has it happened? Nope, but it certainly could.

Chernobyl had four reactors at its plant. One reactor went critical in 1986; reactor 4. Want to to take a guess at what happened to the other reactors? Thats right. Nothing. Hell, the plant with the rest of reactors 1-3 continued to run until 1999. These were all reactors on the SAME plant, so what makes you think that its going to hit multiple plants.

Reactors fuel is not pure fissile material; one of the choice materials is uranium oxide. That means that it is impossible for a reactor to undertake a explosive nuclear reaction; the explosion at Chernobyl was a steam one, not a nuclear one.

And please don't tell me that hydrogen explosion is going to be able to extend for a five mile radius; the amount of hydrogen would absurdly large; for perspective, the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki had a total destruction radius (meaning "its gone completely zone"), and fires to about 2-3 miles out. And that was caused by splitting a atom, which releases FAR more energy than breaking a H2 bond.

Could does not imply probable, or even likely.

I don't remember every saying that the explosion of one nuke plant was DIRECTLY going to cause another plant to explode, just that the fact that plants are so close together and likely affected by the same factors, and would all be reliant on the same human resources makes it likely a chain reaction would occur and the other plants would melt down as well.

As you can see in japan right now that is true. Having multiple plants near each other increases the danger drastically. If a plant does melt down the explosion and radioctive steam would make it quite dangerous for anyone in the local area. Radiation does escape because it has already in Japan and the plants have not yet melted down. People have died in the explosions each time....because they are trying to keep the plants from melting down. If there was no danger of that happening they certainly would not be there risking their lives (and dying).

The explosions and steam released though is plenty strong enough to put quite alot of radiated material into the atmosphere and more then 1 plant doing so could have serious consequences.

 

[Exocet]

On a slightly off topic subject,any word on thorium replacing uranium anytime soon?It's apparently much more efficient.
Also,no,I'm not scared in any way of nuclear plants.The reactors are inclosed in meters of concrete and probably huges plates of lead,for good measure.Those buildings are all made to withstand earthquakes/plane crashes/everything short of military bombing.
I would feel safer living next to a nuclear plant,than any other powerplant.

 

[pro1337tariat]

Both of those are flawed. Nuclear (and its successors) are the only way for any real progress. Solar, and wind on a scale of anything bigger than a calculator is a pipe dream like clean coal.

People scare easily over nothing.

Nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, and most efficient energy source. (wind is not viable in most areas)

I think you people need to stop listening to coal industry propaganda and in stead check up on the facts for yourselves [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States].

On February 11, 2010, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory released the first comprehensive update of the wind energy potential by state since 1993, showing that the contiguous United States had potential to install 10,459 GW of onshore wind power.
source [http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/filter_detail.asp?itemid=2542]

It takes 1500 windmills to equal one 1500 MW nuclear reactor. Thats assuming the wind is always blowing at full capacity. Seems a little absurd to me to be using all that steel, concrete, and land when you can easily match it with something else that uses far less of all the above.