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Nuclear Power Fanboys Take Note - Fuksushima on the Missouri River?
They build a nuclear power plant in an active Earthquake zone combined with a known flood zone....and people are shocked and dismayed when catastrophe ensues.
In other Earth shattering news.....we should just stop building houses altogether because idiots in Colorado have never heard of controlled burns. Let's let a giant pile of fuel build up (that nature normally expends from time to time) and then all cry our eyes out when monstrous, out of control wildfires burn down entire neighborhoods.
It's no different than the idiots who continue to rebuild in New Orleans...a city that sits on the Northern side of one of the warmest bodies of water in the world (which serves to supercharge every tropical storm that travels there)...in addition....a good majority of the city is built below sea level....but everyone is perplexed when a hurricane strolls in and swamps the city.
I guess we should never drill for oil again because some idiots at BP and their subcontractors didn't follow the rules while drilling miles deep on the ocean floor.
Can anyone think of a WORSE place to build a nuclear reactor than the location at Fukishima? Seriously? You'd be hard pressed.
How dumb would it be to store nuclear weapons in a flood zone or Earthquake zone? How stupid would it be to build a biohazard research facility in those locations?
The reality is that we have hundreds and thousands of "plant-years" of successful and safe operations here in the US and more people die in a single year due to the harvesting and burning of fossil fuels than in the entire history of nuclear power.
Moreover, having worked at combination coal-fired/nuke facility before, most people would be shocked to learn that the surrounding community gets several times more radiation from the Potassium isotopes that are released during coal burning than from the nuke facility (not to mention the C02, sulfates, nitrates and all other manner of pollutants that escape the scrubbing process).
The other inconvenient fact is that for every decision, there's a benefit and a cost. Nuclear power provides a substantial amount of our current power production, enough so that the costs of eliminating it, while not obvious and direct, are huge. I guess people would prefer strip mining for coal or driving the cost of natural gas and petrolium up an additional 20%.
And by the way, the Germans aren't boycotting anything. Just because they shut down their own nukes, doesn't mean they've stopped consuming nuke power. They simply buy it from across their borders in neighboring countries and let them take the risk (and the political fallout) of operating nuclear energy facilities. The French have a very successful nuke program and have for DECADES and yet we don't hear any scaremonger stories about them.
Nuclear power has risks, benefits and drawbacks, just like any other energy industry...but to arbitrarily and ignorantly discard it as unsafe or not viable based off a single accident/disaster is at best ignorant and at worst, conflicted with the interests of non-nuclear energy and power industry interests (i.e. coal, nat gas, "green" energy proponents, etc). Before you reject it, make sure you understand the costs and benefits.
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
That's the thing. Not only do you have one huge potential disaster problem in the form of the power plant themselves. The waste is the 800 lb gorilla in the room that the nuclear power industry just sweeps under the rug. Oh well, that'll be a taxpayer problem too. So we don't have to worry about that. They tell you they can do that and that. But they can't. And they don't.
I think Sweden just last created a garbage dump. I'm sure the single most expensive garbage dump on Earth. I've always wondered how the cost of electricity factored the costs of maintaining it's garbage. Personally, I suspect it is carried lock stock and barrel, by the taxpayer. And then the same industry shafts us for taking care of garbage that they don't take care of.
Funny that all those in the know don't talk to educate those that would scream first when there is a brownout. The talk is done by the same that are not in the know.
We take hell of lot more risk going downstairs or driving on the road than from nuclear energy. It must be done right as in USA (well almost) since 1979. There have been far more risk from coal and other so called "safe" energy than nuclear in this country. God forbid USA nuke some other country again with trigger happy maniacs in Office and Congress, this discussion will be moot.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stunned the nuclear industry last week by putting power plant licensing decisions on hold while it reconsiders rules on nuclear waste storage struck down by a federal appeals court in June. At issue is the NRC's 2010 ruling that spent nuclear fuel can be safely stored on a plant site for 60 years after the closing of the plant. The question is whether that ruling will withstand the scrutiny inherent in a full environmental impact statement that the court says is required by law.
The issue is part of the much larger and troubling question about the legacy costs--economic, social and environmental--of toxic industrial pollution that are mounting with each day. We'd like to think that we can simply take our industrial wastes and throw them away somewhere. But increasingly, in what economist Herman Daly calls our "full world," (PDF) there is no "away." Hazardous wastes that we thought we could safely sequester deep in the Earth via injection wells are already coming back to haunt us.
This is exactly the why Yucca Mountain Project was started in late 80's, a license application was accepted by the NRC, for review 3 years ago but the Nevadan short sighted politicians cut the funding and Reid's Man heading the NRC stonewalled and put the review on back burner to the point that NRC staff wrote to Congress, the Chairman was questioned in hearings, and the whole thing was a political sham.
Yucca mountain project was to store reactor waste in a deep geologic repository in volcanic rock encapsulated in casks analysed to last more than a million years. The regulatory requirement is 10,000 years. More than 1200-2000 engineers and scientist at times from all national labs and industry worked all these years and produced massive documents supporting the technical and environmental safety aspects of the repository. All the waste from nuclear sites would have been transported and stored in the repository, which would have been accessible for future reprocessing with new technologies. Now we have nuclear sites storage spread at 104 or more reactors.
Not to sound arrogant here, but frankly, unless one has worked on the commercial side of the nuclear generation industry, one will never know the highest degree of safety involved in design, construction, and operation of a nuclear power plant with regards to safety of the public and environment.
NRC is all for the repository, it is the politicians that don't keep their nose out of the science which they don't know anything about.
For anyone interested just do a search on DOE.gov or Google the Yucca Mountain.
This is one (only one) reason I just can't take anybody seriously when it comes to the removing this garage. The concept is ludicrous. Garbage so deadly we have to bury it for 10,000 years. As if!! Five times longer than our own written history. Give or take a couple of thousand years. The problem is that some people have a 'little knowledge'. That makes them dangerous. Especially when they have a lot of money and influence and are in positions of power.
Never mind all this talk about what you would replace it with. Get rid of them. We'd find a way to replace it or deal with it, soon enough. Consider it this way. Nuclear power is not an option.
If we scuttle all energy produced from nuclear, what percentage is that of energy used? What do we do, use less energy? What alternatives that work today are available today to offset that demand for consumption? Is there any record of actual damage or danger other than a what if situation?
