Fukushima: The warnings were stark and issued repeatedly as far back as 1972

[txlibdem]

The warnings were stark and issued repeatedly as far back as 1972: If the cooling systems ever failed at a “Mark 1” nuclear reactor, the primary containment vessel surrounding the reactor would probably burst as the fuel rods inside overheated. Dangerous radiation would spew into the environment.

Now, with one Mark 1 containment vessel damaged at the embattled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and other vessels there under severe strain, the weaknesses of the design — developed in the 1960s by General Electric — could be contributing to the unfolding catastrophe.

In some reactors, known as pressurized water reactors, the system is sealed inside a thick steel-and-cement tomb. Most nuclear reactors around the world are of this type.

But the type of containment vessel and pressure suppression system used in the failing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant is physically less robust, and it has long been thought to be more susceptible to failure in an emergency than competing designs. In the United States, 23 reactors at 16 locations use the Mark 1 design, including the Oyster Creek plant in central New Jersey, the Dresden plant near Chicago and the Monticello plant near Minneapolis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html

You don't drive a car designed in the 1960s, nor watch a TV that was designed in the 1960s, nor cook your food, heat your home, air condition, mow your lawn, or wear clothing designed in the 1960s. Probably 99% of people would never think to do any of those things. Why aren't most people asking the government to replace these old 1960s nuclear plants with new nuclear plants that are 1.) passively safe, 2.) mass produced to keep costs down, and 3.) burn Thorium instead of Uranium so they cannot be used to make bomb material.

The anti-nuke crowd would have you believe that "all nukes are bad." The sad part is that their opposition to new nuclear plants may make a Fukushima-type disaster right here in the USA a reality.

[rfranklin]

1. What about the radioactive waste?

Can we store in your basement?

[BeFree]

2. Nice spin

""...opposition to new nuclear plants may make a Fukushima-type disaster right here in the USA a reality""

While in reality our opposition actually may preclude such a thing.

Frankly, if one is a real doomer, then they love the nukes, for such a love surely will be the doom of all life on the face of this little blue ball spinning in the vast blackness of infinite space.

'Yes we can' saith the nukers.

[BeFree]

12. I said: Nice spin

Is your lack of response an admission of spin? I take that as a YES.

[wtmusic]

3. Blame the reactor, not the earthquake that was 50x stronger than its specs.

Thanks NYT, for shamelessly hopping on the "we should have seen this once-in-a-millenium event coming" bandwagon.

Next: Nostradamus's hot predictions for 2011!

[BeFree]

5. Any idiot could see...

...that storing nuke wastes in a pool hundreds of feet off the ground is just asking for trouble.

It is so simple even a caveman can grok it.

Well now their dirty secrets are out. And if we don't bring that shit back down to earth we are all gawd damned idiots.

What are you gonna do?

[Kolesar]

6. Groked

The cooling tanks should be smaller and spread out so that the heat is not concentrated.

Too bad we cannot put that heat to use, like warming a greenhouse.

[BeFree]

8. Wasted heat

I never knew they stored any of that stuff up in the air. Knew they had inground pools, but never knew they actually did anything so stupid as building pools up in the air like that.

Anybody who did, and didn't raise an alarm, should be ashamed.
But that's par for the course with nukers.
Nukers are not to be trusted.

[jpak]

4. What horseshit - what US utility is planning to REPLACE any older BWRs with new designs

BS fail

yup

[txlibdem]

7. Utilities do only what they are required to do: no surprise there

So they should be REQUIRED (see how I can capitalise) to replace all Gen I, II, and III nuclear plants with Gen IV, mass produced, passively safe plants.

You don't see the coal industry cleaning up its poisonous emissions just from the goodness of their hearts do you? Hint: answer is NO, the EPA is now beginning to require them to end their practice of pushing the costs of their toxic emissions (which include Mercury, Lead, Arsenic and tons of Uranium and Thorium each year) off onto the rest of us.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bananas]

10. They should be required to replace them with efficiency and renewables

The Gen IV reactors are still in the research phase and will be for at least 20 years.
And they probably won't be any cheaper on a per-kwh basis.
It's cheaper to replace old appliances with new energy-efficient ones,
wind is cheaper than new nuclear now and keeps getting cheaper,
and solar will be cheaper within a few years.
Energy storage is also getting cheaper, by the time we actually need it, renewables+storage will be cheaper than nuclear.
There's just no good reason to continue wasting our time with nuclear energy.
But we do need to expand renewables now to address global warming.

[txlibdem]

16. Sure, let's trash the 20% of our power we get from nuclear and have to get up to 20% renewables

...just to break even, just to get back to square one. Brilliant strategy. Meanwhile, during those years (decades?) of intensive building of the renewables, where do you think most of our power will come from??? Why, it's your old friends, Coal and Oil coming to stay with you for decades longer than is advisable or even necessary!

The reality is that we have one shot at this. One shot to avoid climate catastrophe on a global scale. Either we end coal and oil A.S.A.F.P. or they will be the end of us all, literally. Nuclear is a safe and necessary part of that as long as we're not stupid enough to use unsafe designs from the 1960s. Then when we get enough solar, wind and other renewables online to take over from the nuclear plants then let's start an orderly decommissioning of the nuclear plants from there.

But by trashing the existing nuclear plants you start your battle against coal and oil 20% in the hole, not even at the miniscule 1% that renewables are at today. Do you really want to start this war at 20% in the hole?!? Together, nuclear and renewables equals 21% of our electricity. We need to build on that, and tear down the coal plants and oil refineries when enough nuclear plants and renewables have been built to supply our cities and electric vehicles.

[BeFree]

11. Eh?

You wrote: "You don't see the coal industry cleaning up its poisonous emissions just from the goodness of their hearts do you?"

In 1998, Clinton had several coal burners agreeing to voluntarily cut their emissions.
Bush ended that VOLUNTARY program in 2001. And it left those few companies that had invested big money holding the bag.

So there. You are wrong. Totally wrong. Go ahead, admit it.

[txlibdem]

15. When the President of the United States gives you a "suggestion" do you think he can't enforce it?

Oh, it was VOLUNTARY. They all wanted to run through the Daffodils together and sing "La La La" all through the day. How ridiculous.

They knew that Clinton had the power to make those rules mandatory and also knew that an election was just around the corner and all they had to do was pay lip service to the outgoing President for a while. So I'll just bet they just did it out of concern for the environment and not out of fear of the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Right. Riiiiiiiiiiight. :sarcasm:

[intaglio]

13. All nuclear plants are bad

I was in the camp that, grudgingly, said build them until other methods of reducing CO2 emissions become more effective but I am no longer in that camp.

You cannot make nuclear power safe because the danger from the spent fuel and the irradiated equipment lasts so long that there will be no dangerous release of radioactivity in that time. What is more, over the useful lifetime of the nuclear power station, you cannot guarantee there will be no event worse than your "worst case scenario." Fukishima is a case in point; no one planned for an intensity 9 earthquake and a tsunami of the size they got.

You propose passively safe nuclear power plants but how do you achieve that? The safest known reactor is the Molten Salt Thorium reactor and, it is true, this reactor type is self damping but substantial quantities of radioactive waste are still produced and a catastrophic core breach would still result in irradiating a vast area.

You say, rightly, that 1960s designs are not suitable for the world today but 1960s reactors are still with us and will remain with us as radioactive waste for thousands of years. Similarly any plant we build today will remain as a toxic legacy for our children and many generations of descendants. The real problem is you have used the wrong analogy for the true analogy is with materials not mechanisms.

No one today would think of using lead pigments in paint or anti-fouling a ship with Tributyl tin and we should not think of generating electric power with fission materials.

[txlibdem]

14. All _________ (fill in the blank)s are bad

You wrote, "You cannot make nuclear power safe because the danger from the spent fuel and the irradiated equipment lasts so long that there will be no dangerous release of radioactivity in that time. What is more, over the useful lifetime of the nuclear power station, you cannot guarantee there will be no event worse than your "worst case scenario." Fukishima is a case in point; no one planned for an intensity 9 earthquake and a tsunami of the size they got."
--I'm not sure where you got your info but it is exactly the opposite of everything I've read.

You wrote, "You propose passively safe nuclear power plants but how do you achieve that? The safest known reactor is the Molten Salt Thorium reactor and, it is true, this reactor type is self damping but substantial quantities of radioactive waste are still produced and a catastrophic core breach would still result in irradiating a vast area."
-- Just plain wrong. MSRs cannot have a steam explosion. "It is safe to operate and maintain: Molten fluoride salts are mechanically and chemically stable at sea-level pressures at intense heats and radioactivity. Fluoride combines ionically with almost any transmutation product, keeping it out of circulation. Even radioactive noble gases — notably xenon-135, an important neutron absorber — come out in a predictable, containable place, where the fuel is coolest and most dispersed, namely the pump bowl. Even given an accident, dispersion into a biome is unlikely. The salts do not burn in air or water, and the fluoride salts of the actinides and radioactive fission products are generally not soluble in water." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Technological_advantages

You wrote, "You say, rightly, that 1960s designs are not suitable for the world today but 1960s reactors are still with us and will remain with us as radioactive waste for thousands of years. Similarly any plant we build today will remain as a toxic legacy for our children and many generations of descendants. The real problem is you have used the wrong analogy for the true analogy is with materials not mechanisms."
--So the CO2, carbon monoxide, benzene, toluene and all the 200 some toxic substances in gasoline are fine to be with us for thousands of years? You pick your poison pretty haphazardly with that statement.

You wrote, "No one today would think of using lead pigments in paint or anti-fouling a ship with Tributyl tin and we should not think of generating electric power with fission materials."
--Excellent! We finally agree the Thorium fuel cycle nuclear plants is the preferred power source for our future. I'm glad you came around. The LFTR reactor:

China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.

Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

A thousand times less waste, inherently less prone to disaster, has an amazing safety feature. Yeah, that all sounds pretty bad for the USA --because China will be building these all over the world, our companies will lose hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions in contracts.

[madokie]

17. You really didn't debunk any thing that was said

'Chinese scientist claim' is not proof of anything

I really don't see how we can go any further with nuclear energy now that its pretty obvious that there is so many faults as to be dealt with and trying to do that dealing with a party that is not willing to accept that things need fixed to begin with. How or where do you start

Where is these thorium reactors at anyway? best I remember its still at best a hoped for salvation for the nuclear industry not a sure thing

[txlibdem]

18. Don't trust the Chinese to do anything right?

Have you looked at where probably 90% of the things you use every day are made? Unless you've been going to super-human efforts, most of those things are made in China. Not that I'm all for that but China has more "A" students than we have students, total. I think it's inevitable that China will become dominant in a lot of areas. 40% of the solar panels made in the world come from... wait for it... China. Here's a little something you might not have known about wind turbines:

Sinovel, China's biggest wind turbine maker, has said it wants to become the world's largest by 2015. Sinovel is among the Chinese companies now opening U.S. sales offices in preparation for a big export push next year. They are backed by more than $13 billion in low-interest loans from Chinese government-owned banks and billions more are being raised in initial public offerings.

http://www.startribune.com/business/112025129.html

I'm not saying anything about which nation's products are best, I'm just stating the facts about what comes (and will come) from where. While I agree that just because some scientist says one thing or another isn't important: the Chinese government has made Thorium cycle nuclear reactors a priority because they are superior to Uranium cycle nuclear reactors. And, unlike the US gov't, when the Chinese gov't makes priorities it usually sticks with them.

Further, you said, "I really don't see how we can go any further with nuclear energy now that its pretty obvious that there is so many faults as to be dealt with and trying to do that dealing with a party that is not willing to accept that things need fixed to begin with."
-- So many faults. As shown in Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl. Right? Please show me the post that I've made, or any of the known "pro-nuke" posters here on DU where we said those type of plants should be built again. Don't bother, I'll save you the time: Never, none, nada. No person, even those in the nuclear industry, wants to build more examples of bad designs. Quite the opposite: I have gone on record a large number of times that we need to build more Generation IV (the new kind) nuclear plants and replace all of the old plants.

This is why I ask people why they aren't driving their family around in a car designed in the 1960s. Why don't you watch a TV designed in the 1960s? Why aren't you using a lawnmower designed in the 1960s? Do you still have a radio in your car or at home? Chances are it was NOT designed in the 1960s.

Painting all nuclear plants in a bad light because of a failure of a 1960s design (that was well criticised even in 1971) is an attempt to use the Spotlight Fallacy and Secundum Quid logical fallacies.

[madokie]

19. We were trying to tell the nuclear industry in '71 that nuclear power wasn't cool

and time has shown that we were right. It has nothing to do with the Chinese or the Japanese or the Indians rather it has everything to do with splitting the atom. Not good no matter how one tries to explain it away, actually to me and many others like me who are against using nuclear energy the more the nuke boys try to feed us bullshit the worst it smells. I see it for what it is and its not a pretty picture. I thought that after tmi we were finally free from this fight but no here we are 30 years or so later having the same fight. It'll be with the same outcome as before too.
If I was a betting man I'd make you a wager on that but beings as how I don't bet I won't.

We were telling you and them that it was wrong when they were building them and thats what matters. We were right all along.

Generation 4, now that is a riot as its just like before, Oh we can do it just look at this shiny new reactor. We've gone through 3 iterations so far and they've all been failures and now you want me to believe that the next one will fix that. :rofl: is all that comes to mind concerning that.
have a good day and don't forget that the nuksters don't give a shit about you just like they don't give a shit for me or us.

[txlibdem]

20. We've gone through 3 iterations so far and they've all been failures

You mean failures in that there has never been a death caused by one of these reactors here in the USA? Yeah, that is a pretty terrible safety record for the US nuclear plants: Zero deaths since 1954 when the first commercial reactor came online. I wonder what other US industry can say that? Automobile industry? Nope. Chemical industry? Nope. Pharmaceutical industry? Nope. Soft Drink industry? Nope. Computer industry? Nope. Etc., etc., etc. Coal? Hell no. Oil? Double hell no. Fracking natural gas? Also no (and scary as hell to boot).

Something smells in your post but it isn't coming from the rational people: it's coming from the zealots who salivate and sweat and rock back and forth mumbling "Nookz iz bad!, Nookz iz bad!"

[madokie]

21. The big problem with your argument is that radiation kills rather slowly

most times. If you're going to try to tell me there have been no deaths due to nuclear power plants here in the usa I'm saying you are nutty as a fruitcake.:-)
prove to me that some of the cancer deaths, cancer is what nuclear gives us, is not from radiation from nuke plants.

I don't buy this argument of yours or anyone else for that matter who spouts it especially when they have a dog in this fight

[Nihil]

22. Oh come on ...

Normally we can simply agree to disagree on the subject of nuclear power
but this really is twaddle:

> cancer is what nuclear gives us

The many causes of cancer

There are about 200 different types of cancer. They can start in any type of body tissue. What affects one body tissue may not affect another. For example, tobacco smoke that you breathe in may help to cause lung cancer. Overexposing your skin to the sun could cause a melanoma on your leg. But the sun won't give you lung cancer and smoking won't give you melanoma.

Apart from infectious diseases, most illnesses are 'multifactorial'. Cancer is no exception. Multifactorial means that there are many factors involved. In other words, there is no single cause for any one type of cancer.

* The many causes of cancer
* Cancer-causing substances (carcinogens)
* Age
* Genetic make up
* The immune system
* Bodyweight, diet and physical activity
* Day to day environment
* Viruses
* Bacterial infection

http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/about-cancer/causes-symptoms/causes/what-causes-cancer

Yes, radiation can have an effect (under the "day to day environment" topic)
but that, in turn, can have many sources:

http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/prod_consump/groups/cr_common/@cah/@gen/documents/image/crukmig_1000img-12072.jpg


Sorry but this subject has personal connections for me - I raise money for this
charity in response to them - and the broad brush of "nuclear/radiation causes
cancer" was just too much to take this time.

:pals:

[kristopher]

25. Why should we build nuclear?

At this point it is up to the supporters to justify it.

1. nuclear power isn't "cheap" it is expensive;

2. learning and new standardized designs will not solve all past problems - waste, safety and proliferation are part and parcel of the technology;

3. the waste problem is a real problem, even if we’d follow the lead of many other nations and “recycle” our spent fuel;

4. climate change does not make a renaissance "inevitable";

5. there are other ways to provide electricity than with large-scale “baseload” sources of generation - "baseload" is in reality nothing more than an economic construct that developed around centralized generation and a distributed approach is technically far superior;

6. there’s every reason to worry that a rapidly expanding global industry will put nuclear power and weapons technologies in highly unstable nations, often nations with ties to terrorist organizations.

!
V

[Nihil]

26. At least your random off-topic response was short this time ...

... rather than your usual cut & paste of five unrelated articles
with the sole intention of shutting down discussion of the thread
or sub-thread.

Progress!

[caraher]

23. Interesting point about cancer deaths

I've never seen anyone estimate this using standard "mainstream" assumptions. The American Nuclear Society puts annual exposure to people living within 50 miles of a nuclear plant at 0.01 millirem/year. Let's just use this figure for the sake of argument.

I don't know how many people in the US live that close to a nuclear plant, but I'll guess 1/3, or about 100 million people. I may be too high by a factor of 2 or so...

The rule of thumb using the linear no-threshold hypothesis is that roughly 2000 person-rem of exposure leads to a cancer death, on average. So we get

(100 x 10^6 people) x (10^-5 rem)/(2000 person-rem/death) = 0.5 cancer deaths per year. So it's pretty reasonable to assume that several tens of people, at a bare minimum, have died of cancer thanks to radiation exposure associated with normal operations over the history of US nuclear plants.

Of course, note that the ANS figures show triple the radiation dose for a coal plant, so you can probably triple that figure for cancer deaths from coal plant radiation. Coal probably killed many, many times that figure due to other causes over the same span of time.

[kristopher]

24. Time to "take the cure"

!
V