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Originally Posted by original durangotang
A short story. A number of years ago they had an explosion in a boiler at the 4 Corners Power Plant. The portion of the plant was shut down for months while repair were made. But it was only months. And then it was as good as new.
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I was shaken awake at night once when I was a teenager because our local coal plant blew a boiler. We lived miles away and it still shook the house. Several people died. Different plant than what you mentioned. The accidents aren't that uncommon. People die from them.
No nuclear power accident in the US has killed anyone. It is because of the amazingly strict standards they are held to, which were strict even before TMI.
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Contrast that with 3 Mile Island. Which was never repaired.
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So you give ONE example of a fossil fuel plant accident, one among MANY, and compare it to the only major accident power accident in the US. NOBODY DIED at TMI.
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Or Chernobal, which was damaged about the same time.
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If you think that 1979 (TMI) is about the same time as 1986.
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The damage was, quite literally, unbelievable.
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The damage was quite believable if you understand the accident.
What was unbelievable was the terrible Soviet reactor design. If you study the RBMK design, even the most basically educated engineer will scream repeatedly "WHY WOULD THE COMMIES DESIGN IT LIKE THAT!!!!!!!??????"
If you study the experiment the Soviets were performing, how stupid it was, how they didn't receive permission, how they disabled their own safety systems, how they violated their own rules... you really feel like you are in a horror movie screaming at the screen "NO! NO! DON'T DO IT!"
However, if you are capable of understanding that, you are also capable of understanding how impossible it is for that disaster to occur in the US. Our designs are so different, with so much more safety and containment, and our processes are so different. Any one of those things would have prevented Chernobyl or made it at most a minor release instead of a disaster.
50-60 died acutely from the explosion or radiation. It is estimated that from 1986-2056 that there will be eventually be 5,000-9,000 premature deaths from cancer in total. This is amazingly terrible and it didn't have to happen. However, to put it in perspective with horrors in our own country, please note that chemical and radiation releases from coal plants in the US are estimated to kill 18,000-24,000 people EVERY YEAR. Coal power plants cause over 500,000 cases of serious illness PER YEAR. These are all through legal emissions.
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Entire communities abandoned. And much of the country side laid waste. With no hope of ever being reoccupied.
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Believe it or not, the Soviets kept operating the remaining 3 RBMK reactors at Chernobyl for several years!
The village of Chernobyl and the city of Pripyat were abandoned. They are within the 19mi exclusion zone around the accident site. However, people still live and work in the exclusion zone and there is even a hotel for tourists. The countryside is hardly "laid waste" and the area mostly devoid of human interference has become a wildlife preserve of sorts with the animals and trees thriving in the years since the accident. The other closed areas have been mostly reopened and people have returned. Different then what you thought? This is what happens when you spew without knowing what you are talking about.
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But it can't happen here. Right? BS
Nuclear power depends on 100% reliability. And if things go wrong the catastrophe can be mind boggling. The point is:When human beings are involved things ALWAYS go wrong.
You cannot engineer an idiot proof system.
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Nuclear power doens't depend on 100% reliability. It depends on massive overengineering so that when things DO fail, they fail in a way that doesn't cause consequences outside the plants. That said, nuclear powe IS the most reliable power generation in the US with the highest uptimes and the best safety record in the US.
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Plus: 3 Mile Island WAS that bad. Almost blew the top off the containment vessel. In addition to coming minutes from a Chernobal melt down.
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I'm trying to figure out how to respond to this without saying something along the lines of you have no fucking clue what you are talking about.... so maybe I could say go read something, even if it's wikipedia... but I'm feeling generous:
I doubt your grasp that these were entirely different types of accidents.
TMI was a LOCA (loss of coolant accident) from a slow leak resulting in a core overheat with a partial meltdown. There was a small radiokyrpton release from the coolant and a small hydrogen fire. There was no vessel breach. There was no dome containment breach. There was no core exposure. The core didn't even suffer a full meltdown and it was never fully uncovered from coolant. Nobody died. Nobody received more radiation than a chest x-ray. It was still a bad thing.
Chernobyl was an uncontrolled reaction (massive power spike) caused by an unauthorized and poorly run experiment conducted by personnel NOT EVEN QUALIFIED OR EXPERIENCED IN NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS, run with safety systems disabled and against regulations at inappropriate power levels in a transient poisoned reactor with the control rods out. This caused a power spike which destroyed their control rods (which actually did the opposite of what they wanted due to idiotic design) and the resulting steam explosions that blew the reactor vessel and core apart (killing 30) exposing everything to the atmosphere (there was no containment dome) and then started a graphite fire (which is what released most of the radiation, and what killed another 30 people fighting it). Then the core melted. Chernobyl was not the worst Soviet radiation accident as there were many more Soviet military accidents. The Soviets had problems that way.
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Breeder reactors are a TERRIBLE idea. If you want more nuclear proliferation, if you want more access to materials necessary to making bombs breeders are the answer.
Not to mention vastly more waste.
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You just have no clue what you are talking about here. Breeders can burn transuranic (long halflife waste) into short lived waste. Breeders can even transmute waste into FUEL. You really have no clue what you are talking about. I'm getting tired of explaining concepts to you since you have no interest in learning anything new, only in repeating what you've been told to believe about things you don't understand.
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There is NO SOLUTION to the waste problem. It must be isolated for far longer than civilization has existed. You cannot engineer a containment system for 20,000 years. It is impossible.
Nor can you secure that material for that length of time.
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WRONG. My God... do you just stick your fingers in your ears and shout LALALALA so that you don't have to hear new information counter to what your read in a Greenpeace pamphlet?
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But the bottom line is economics. There hasn't been a nuclear power plant built in the USA in 30 years BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT ECONOMICAL.
The money boys on wall Street refused to finance them.
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Then why are there new ones under development? Do you realize that newer reactor designs are 50%+ more efficent, not to mention safer and more economical? No... of course you don't. Besides, is this really purely about power company profits? Or is there more value in ensuring we have safe, clean, reliable power, the lifeblood of our economy, that doesn't destroy the climate or make use beholden to foreign powers?
If you want to know what is a good idea, it's cutting our carbon emissions ASAP so we don't destroy the planet. You need to eliminate coal and replace it with a highly reliable energy source that can grow fast to also supply the energy needed for growth and the replacement of petroleum as our mobile power source. This makes us energy independent and then we don't have to waste our soldiers lives fighting for oil wells in the Middle East.
Our current system is killing 18,000-24,000 people per year. It's making another half a million seriously ill. That IS HAPPENING. It should stop ASAP. Nuclear is the ONLY way to do that without destroying our economy. The problem is that people fear what they don't understand. The Nuclear boogeyman scares people because it is unusual and they don't understand it. They are perfectly happy to accept tons of unnecessary deaths from things they do understand, but will get into a tizzy the moment one person might be sick from something else. YOU, durangotang, FEAR what you don't understand. That's not the problem. Your problem is you seem to have no interest in understanding.
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