why do people suddenly fear nuclear power plants?

[Steven True]

Japan has a plant in Kata, Kaminoseki that is within 5 miles along with plants in Monju, Takahama, and mihama

1) Monju has suspended operations, it's being tested.
2) Kaminoseki is about a 500 kilometer drive from those other plants.
3) Mihama is 52 km drive from Takahama.

There are no plants with in a 5 mile radius of each other.

 

[Technicolor]

Number one killer in an earthquake? Buildings.

BAN THEM!

Do you know how many people die in the coal industry? Alot.

BAN THEM!

Nuclear power is extremely safe, extremely powerful, and extremely regulated. The only reason people are against them is from media fear mongering.

This

People are clearly misinformed about nuclear power, and especially misinformed about their contemporary use. The Cold War has ended 20 years ago, we stopped production of nuclear weaponry.

Nuclear Power is cleaner & more efficient than coal, but its only problem is the media.

 

[Adam McKeitch]

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.

First of all, Nuclear power is very clean. That vapour you see coming out of the Simpsons-esque chimneys is steam, with very small traces of other compounds. The only thing that is really dirty about it is the mining operations for getting the material in the first place, and even that's not as bad as Oil drilling or coal mining operations.

Secondly, Language doesn't evolve instantaneously as you have implied here. I'm sure someone will remember to translate "WARNING: DANGEROUS RADIOACTIVE STUFF HERE" into the new language, whatever it may be, as it evolves. Do you think we just seal off the stuff and think "Well thank goodness that's over with, let's grab a beer and forget all about it?".

Thirdly, I can actually think of a technology that would last tens of thousands of years - it's called "Put it back in the ground where we found it, since we have taken most of the energy out of the rods for our own purposes." Obviously this wouldn't apply to tectonically active areas, but surely putting it in the deepest of mines in a tectonically INACTIVE region, THEN reinforcing said mines with concrete etc would keep the dangers away?

I understand what you're trying to get at here, but felt compelled to point out your mistakes here. If any of this seemed patronising, my apologies.

EDIT -

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!!

I've lost the exact source, but BBC website says it was the 5th strongest Earthquake to occur Globally in about 100 years. So yeah, it's a big yin alright.

 

[CrazyGirl17]

Blame nuclear radiation, not to mention the problem of what do do with the nuclear waste generated.

I dunno, I think people are really jumpy around this kinda thing. If there wasn't a problem with meltdowns and nuclear waste I'd be fine with it, but...

(Any feedback on how ignorant I am on this topic?)

 

[Steven True]

Batteries work for small scale things. But how exactly are you going to store enough energy for one city, much less an entire country?

Electric cars & plug in hybrids, millions of people with a huge stack of batteries sitting in their garages at night. With a smart grid a fleet of these would sell a some of their energy back to the grid when they are plugged in at night and actually lower their owners electric bills.

 

[lapan]

Well, Austria was against nuclear energy for a very long time and we do just fine. Honestly, as long as it's possible to do it another way i'd rather have the nuclear power plants as far away from home as possible.

The big problem with nuclear energy is that IF something happens the results still affect us years and decades past.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

People get their undergarments in a bunch over a reactor half a world away while sitting downstream from a large hydroelectric dam. Maybe they should be asking themselves what happens if the dam breaks, if they want to be terrified of technology? A dam rupture is far more destructive than even a full-blown reactor meltdown... remember that only 70 people died in the Chernobyl accident itself, and most of those were in the containment team. (Yes, there are long-term health risks from the radioactivity release... but there are also long-term health risks from pollution washed through New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge. Some of that pollution came from, wait for it, gas stations. So should we ban cars?)

I see people advocating switching to solar or wind power, but there's a good reason we haven't switched yet; power storage isn't good enough. Batteries don't scale up well enough, and we don't have the technology to build a battery bank big enough to supply a city. Water storage sounds good, but the problem is where do you store the water? Look at the size of the reservoir for Hoover Dam, for instance, or the Great Lakes that feed Niagara Falls. You need a lot of water to make it work for city-sized power systems, enough that you start to run out of nearby land that needs to be used for crops, greenspace, and housing among other purposes. (And that's discounting the risk of dam failure; see previous paragraph.) More exotic storage systems, like flywheels, are sadly more dangerous right now than reactors at the current state of the art. (Ever seen a flywheel fragment under load? It's like a fragmentation grenade, only bigger.)

I'll also point out that there's an oil refinery afire near Tokyo which is poisoning a lot more people than the reactors are, but it's getting no news coverage because we're bored with massive oil fires. (They're routine, see, with all the spills in the Gulf of Mexico and that setting Iraq on fire thing a couple of decades ago.) The Press likes to exploit our fears, and to a large degree shapes them by feeding them.

Maybe fallout from Chernobyl is causing thousands of extra cases of cancer in the Ukraine and in neighbouring countries, but it's hard to tell; epidemiology isn't precise that way. We do know that automobile accidents kill 40-50 thousand Americans every year, however, because we can count each one. Yet we're more worried about the former than the latter.

Humans are weird.

-- Steve

 

[Maquette]

If you skip to 58 minutes Professor Muller very succinctly explains what a meltdown is, how it occurs and what would happen during the worst case scenario. It isn't quite as apocalyptic as you would imagine.

 

[Yopaz]

It's nothing new, people have ALWAYS feared ANYTHING nuclear

Not true, there used to be audiences that lined up to see the tests of nuclear bombs, not from a safe distance either.

Nuclear power plants are dangerous with the lack of control, such as Chernobyl which as I understand had little to do with the quality of the plant, and more to do with the idiots running it. Radioactive material with long half life needs to be stored somewhere. There are some inconveniences with it and of course it's feared because every accident makes the news, it got similarities with the atomic bomb. There aren't that many who knows how different those 2 are though. A power plant could never react like the bomb, but those who want clean energy think that nuclear power is just as bad or worse than fosil fuel.

 

[Unesh52]

Yeah, but if something DOES go wrong, stuff goes, very, horribly wrong.
See: Chernobyl outskirts.

What, you mean that 30 mile radius of unmitigated natural growth and ecological flourishing that has existed for the past 3 decades in the absence of humans?

Seems like all the local plants and animals got the long end of the stick with Chernobyl. The quarantined area has been safe to inhabit since a few weeks after the accident, but humans are so terrified of glowing green radiation slime (which I've never ever seen) that they ran away in terror, destroying the local economies for little apparent benefit to their health and safety. I wrote my freshmen english research paper on this. The biggest killer out of Chernobyl was the spike in alcoholism driven by sensationalist bull.

It wasn't nearly as bad as most people think it was -- though some people did die in the actual explosion, and others from collecting bits of radioactive debris days after, but not the tens of thousands of dead and environmental decay of newspaper stories -- and it's basically impossible for it to happen again anyway. And don't pretend like coal power never killed anyone.

 

[moretimethansense]

Yeah, but if something DOES go wrong, stuff goes, very, horribly wrong.
See: Chernobyl outskirts.

The thing with Chernobyl is that it wasn't that something went wrong, it was that everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong at once.

Nuclear power is actually one of the safest powers around, literally every thing has to go wrong at once, AND somneone has to be activly stopping the failsafes, short of an act of god nothing can really cause a meltdown at this point.

Added to that many popwer plants are somewhat out of date, but they aren't being upgraded to be even safer and more efficiant because of all the protesters screaming "nukes are bad!".

I hate it when people talk about stuff they know nothing about, it's the reason that so many people are starving to death, GM crops (which are perfectly safe BTW) could help so many people in less developed countries AND mean we'd need less farmland to feed our populace, but uninformed scaremongers are convincing uninformed people that GM is evil, sometimes I hate the world.

 

[Deepzound]

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.

I do in no way advocate only using wind power, but instead harnessing wind where it is most viable [http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp].

Combining all of the renewable energy sources (Wind, solar, tidal, geothermal) you could supply the world with power without having to worry about harvesting any input material perpetually (or until the sun dies). There is absolutely no reason why this shouldn't be the option we choose for the future in regards to power supply.

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.

Not true, ever heard of solar power towers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower]?

I see people advocating switching to solar or wind power, but there's a good reason we haven't switched yet; power storage isn't good enough. Batteries don't scale up well enough, and we don't have the technology to build a battery bank big enough to supply a city.

Using molten salt you're able to produce electricity through the night [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night], not to mention other recent breakthroughs in energy storage [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html] that can be used on all forms of renewable energy.

 

[manythings]

I recently saw in the news that people in Russia demonstrated against nuclear power plants after they heard that three Japanese power plants where going critical. I personally think its stupid to protest against them because stuff like this only happens in extreme situations (a earthquake like this doesn't happen often and buildings are designed to resist quakes)
discuss

The Sendai province plant is rated to withstand a 5 force earthquake and they've been working for years to bring it up to a 6. The earthquake was an 8.9.

People have been scared of nuclear power for 20-25 years at this point it just didn't show in the media till this. An unsafe petrochemical plant is a serious problem, an unsafe nuclear plant could render an area unlivable for generations. There aren't even any particularly good methods of clean up as it is.

 

[Marik Bentusi]

Well, like others said, IF something unexpected happens, you got one big problem. And as long as atomic waste isn't a myth, we're digging our graves slowly as well. Here in Germany there was a big ruckus because some of the atomic waste was handled so poorly it entered the groundwater. And Germany isn't exactly a country too poor for security measurements either.

Put protected nuclear power plants on the moon and maintain them with robots and you have my vote, hahaha.

 

[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.

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.

If what you posted was true, all the reactors at Chernobyl should have had meltdowns as well; they had bad maintained structures, incompetent crews, a poor design (it was as someone mentioned earlier, designed to make plutonium, and shielding was terrible, there was even a fire at one of them during 1981). These were reactors of the same build affected by the same variables, yet only one managed to go up. Even after the reactor ran for another 13 years (with some minor hiccups, but nothing horrible)

And I'm not arguing that there is no danger of the reactor going meltdown; what many of us here are arguing that if it does, it will be contained because core containment is considerably better than Chernobyl. Letting the core go into meltdown makes it unusable for obvious reasons, which explains why they are trying stop it. There is as established from my previous post no danger of explosion due to nuclear material, which would be the only viable way of cracking the core's shield. A steam explosion, even a hydrogen explosion isn't going to cut it when these things are strong enough to take airs trikes.

 

[karloss01]

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

and if they do go up it won't be from human error, its because mother nature broke its back over her knee and its too far gone to be saved. hopefully it won't come to that.

 

[thespis721]

Chernobyl is an example but a pretty dated one. Technology and safe standards have improved drastically, and it we're not in a poor freakin' poorly watched over USSR. People think Nuclear power plants and they assume that the plant is going to radiate the whole time or is going to meltdown and we're all going to be part of a hydrogen bomb explosion. France has 58 nuclear power plants. 58! And the only thing bad to come out of that is to be the ending target of a crappy M. Night Shamylan movie. And outside of Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island, we don't hear of many really bad nuclear problems barring a massive earthquake/tsunami. Especially when you compare it to the ecological and environment impact that coal mining, natural gas, and oil has, 1 nuclear incident every 50 years really isn't that bad.

And here's the kicker... the US, where it seems like everyone is anti-nuke? It has 108 working nuclear power plants. One right next to one of the most densely populated cities (NYC) and we've been doing fine so far!