Can we just get something straight about the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant?
Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw...
Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP.
Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not survive the tsunami because said tsunami overcame the tidal wall in front of it, and then the backup generators got flooded. But for that one event, if the generators were placed up on higher ground, the outcome would have been so much different.
I have first-hand knowledge, due to..
1) Knowing the area. I lived in my Japanese father-in-law's mountain house, situated 1.5km out of Miyakoji-machi, Tamura-shi. That town was just inside the 20km evacuation zone from the power plant, the mountain house was just outside at 21km - myself and my family lived in our own house in the outskirts of Koriyama city.
2) My (now deceased) Japanese father-in-law was president of the Hitachi subsiduary company which built Fukushima Dai-ich No.4 reactor, which wasn't operating at the time of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami but did suffer an explosion thought due to hydrogen gas from the spent fuel situated in the Spent Fuel Pool in its upper level.
3) Mentioned in point (1) above, I owned a house in Tobu New Town on the Eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, and I was working at Flextronics in Koriyama at the time the M9 quake occurred - things got a tad 'exciting' at the time. I should write a book.
My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account - in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job, and at some point in time it was decided that placing backup generators underneath the buildings was sufficient - that unfortunately did not turn out to be the case :/
And lastly, I still fully support the idea of nuclear power.
> My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account
I don't know if you are old enough to remember it, but that's exactly what nuclear energy proponents said in the 70s.
Since then, actual experience showed that about every 20 years, there has been a big incident with global impact, and it will take decades if not centuries until the affected area is usable again. And the latter is something that might be tolerable in less densely populated countries or locations (Chernobyl), but in very densely populated ones it would be a major catastrophe.
And so far we've only seen disaster scenarios caused by human error and force of nature, and there's a third one (human malice), which thankfully hasn't happened yet, but which is impossible to guard against.
So my conclusion from reality is that no, we can't make nuclear power completely safe: The consequences of a disaster are too great, the monetary incentives are all wrong (it's not the nuclear companies which pay in case of the disaster, the state takes over; and the costs of the risk are not factored in into the actual running costs; and safety measures are expensive, so economics will always lead to, say, putting the backup generators NOT on the hill, because that would have cost more).
And then there's the problem that in some countries using nuclear energy and producing nuclear waste, the problem of actually storing that waste safely for the next few centuries is still not solved. Even after 50 years of producing it. And that is just insane.
I wish we could make nuclear safe. It would be a great way to reduce carbon emissions. Looking at reality, I can only conclude that we can't, and it's wishful thinking. (Yes, I know, that opinion is not popular, and the nuclear fanboys will be all over me, but so be it).
I feel like it's bad to talk about safety of nuclear without comparing it to another option. What's the safety of fossil fuels? What bar would have to be met for nuclear to save lives when compared to alternatives?
For the most part nuclear falls victim to the same human reasoning flaws that make us more worried about flying on a plane than driving even though driving is way riskier.
Seeing the number of "nuclear energy is our saviour, and will solve all our problems, and is the only option" posts on the Internet, yes, the first step is to talk about the safety of nuclear without comparing it to other options.
And no, the comparison to plane vs. car is not appropriate: In both kinds of accidents, a number of people get injured or killed. In case of a nuclear accident, a sizeable area becomes inhabitable for centuries. That's on a completely different scale.
(And just for the record, I'm neither worried about flying in a plane, nor I am worried about driving a car. I am also not worried that the nuclear power plant near me will explode next.)
If we can agree that nuclear is not safe in the long run, and should eventually be abandoned, then we've made progress in the discussion.
It's also not "nuclear or coal". That's another thing in those discussions that bugs me. Fossil fuels (not only coal) are not the answer, either: they'll eventually run out, and they contribute to global warming.
And comparing them by "counting deaths" and "how many lives can be saved" is completely missing the point. Neither nuclear accidents nor coal usage immediately kill people. And it gets totally ridiculous when people try to argue that "there are accidents during wind power constructions; people have fallen to death. So wind power is mucher more dangerous than both nuclear and coal (if you only count the deaths)."
So in the long run, we need alternatives to both nuclear and fossil fuels. If those who say "nuclear is the only solution, it's so great" get the upper hand, we'll never develop those alternatives. And that's the point.
As for the short run, I don't really care. If we can efficiently stop global warming by shutting down all coal plantes and keeping the nuclear plants for a few decades, I'm all for it. Though I doubt that will be enough to stop global warming; we must also drastically reduce energy usage; up usage of renewables, redesign the electric grid, and efficient means of storage to it, restart projects like Desertec, etc., etc.
There's enough we can do. but arguing "let's just bet everything on nuclear, it's totally safe" is the wrong thing to do.
>a sizeable area becomes inhabitable for centuries
Well no, reactors in chernobyl remained operative until 2000 ,and chernobyl is not inhabitable look at all the animals that live there , the level of radiation is low.Regarding fukushima people are already returning in evacuated zones
While I agree mostly what you are saying, I would want to add that one thing we should have in mind and it’s that most of our current risk assessments of nuclear power are done on current technologies. And also the other technologies we could use aren’t risk free either. I think it’s too early to give up on all of the our energy sources, but coal/oil. Unless we find a way to contain all of the emissions immediately.
Dang, I’m going to have to remember “if we can all agree with my thesis, we’ve made progress in the discussion” for my next argument! That’s a great and intellectually valid way to participate in a debate, for sure.
I agree with you that I don't think we can make nuclear safe. But if the choice seems to be between millions of deaths from global warming or thousands of deaths from nuclear, isn't the latter vastly preferable? Shouldn't we set out and build out nuclear to steer us away from the edge, and then worry about better solutions once we're safe?
I suspect the reason people don't buy this argument is that they don't truly believe global warming is as bad as they say. We have a history of solving problems in the past, so we'll solve this one too. There's no need to panic.
Can you provide a timeline and justification on "millions of deaths from global warming".
Why can't be invest the money in better alternatives and save the same "millions of lives" with actually sustainable tech that doesn't produce what you are describing as "thousands of deaths"
The book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas is a good start. It has extensive references to peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change.
We've already had thousands of deaths from heat waves that probably wouldn't have happened in the absence of global warming. By three degrees warming we'll have massive food shortages and hundreds of millions of climate refugees.
I find a lot of anti-nuclear renewables advocates really underestimate the scale of the problem we're facing. This book is a great start to seeing what we're really up against.
How much money and time would it take to research battery technology that could put coal and nuclear plants out of business?
We know how to build nuclear NOW. Let's do it. We can turn all the plants of the second someone finds out to store terawatts of power produced by renewable means in a cost-effective manner that doesn't rely on some geological anomalies.
This does nothing to the fission products. And reprocessing only lets you destroy the actinides if you burn them in a fast reactor. Fast reactors have, so far, been even more expensive than thermal reactors.
Fast reactors have been disappointing all over the world. The harder neutron spectrum is more damaging to materials, and liquid sodium has serious drawbacks. Fabrication of fuel elements with mixed actinides is also difficult. Fast reactors also require a higher density of fuel (due to the lower fission cross section at high neutron energy), which presents safety issues.
The french choice was clearly the wrong one. It's a net economic loss for them. It was predicated on the use of the separated Pu in fast reactors, but their experience with fast reactors was dismal.
If they weren't going to use the plutonium immediately, reprocessing was stupid. Spending the money they didn't have to, in order to make Pu they didn't need, just to have the Pu sit around, made no economic sense. And no, it doesn't improve the economics of waste disposal.
Understand where reprocessing came from. Way back then, the story was that nuclear was going to be dirt cheap, but would ultimately be limited by the cost of uranium. The solution was breeding, to provide all the expensive fuel those thousands of cheap reactors would need. Reprocessing was needed to close this fuel cycle.
But this story bears no resemblance to reality. Reactors turned out to be expensive, the number of installed reactors was far below projections, and uranium is not in short supply.
One still hears echoes of this old narrative from people who don't really understand where it came from, and why it doesn't apply.
No, the point is to minimize the cost of dealing with waste. Reprocessing doesn't do that.
But let's stipulate that they want to destroy the waste. What's the cheapest way to do that? If they wait to reprocess the fuel, and destroy the actinides in the future, it comes out cheaper than if they reprocess now. That's because reprocessing, and developing and building fast reactors, is quite expensive, and the net present value of that cost is minimized by moving it off into the future. Moreover, reprocessing becomes easier as the fuel cools off.
So, reprocessing NOW is a pointless waste of money, even if ultimately you want to do it. The ONLY reason you'd want to reprocess now was if you needed the actinides now for use in energy generation. And no one needs them for that.
No. You're missing the point of the entire discussion.
The point is to deal with the waste. The whole argument is that we can't go to nuclear power because "waste". So deal with it.
No one cares about the cost of it -- it's far cheaper to deal with it now than to manage it for a thousand years anyway -- especially in political capital with a bunch of nimbys who think nuclear power is scary.
No, it's nothing like that - although it might be like refusing to fly in a 737 MAX.
First, any coal analogy is out of date. Only the coal lobby wants to continue burning coal. Everyone else is like "No, that's stupid and self-harming, let's just not."
Secondly, plane crashes don't make entire areas uninhabitable for long periods.
Third, the problem with nuclear isn't the engineering, it's the management. The nuclear industry has proven time and time again that it can't be trusted with nuclear technology. The long list of smaller accidents, cover-ups, and outright lies make it clear that trust has not been earned.
Four, the waste problem still hasn't been solved. I'm not sure how a technology that creates waste that remains toxic for thousands of years can be considered "clean", but the very curious pretence that is somehow clean - or that it can always be buried under a "Keep Out" sign that will somehow remain in place for many centuries - is a handy example of the toxic rhetorical pollution the nuke industry generates.
Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
> Only the coal lobby wants to continue burning coal. Everyone else is like "No, that's stupid and self-harming, let's just not."
How I wish that was true.
What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
As an example, when the choice is between being cold in Stockholm (Sweden) or burning coal, the citizen of Stockholm rather burn the coal until the water heating plant has been replaced sometimes 2022 (to be burning other fuels). It is only used in the exceptional cases when the other systems are not enough, and yet it stands for 20% of the total pollution of the city.
> Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic
If we include the use of burning fossil fuel when renewable energy is not delivering, then the cost of renewable is uneconomic and very polluting.
We have not solved the continuously supply problem for renewable energy. Hydro is not enough, large scale battery technology is not a reality yet, adaptive energy policy has never been attempted at a global scale. People want continuously energy 24/7. They will pay for clean and cheap energy when they can, and burn coal when it is not available. The only current clean alternative is to have nuclear when solar and wind is not producing, but the marginal cost of running the nuclear plant is low enough so it will most likely also run when wind and solar is running. A little more environmental friend strategy is to lift up the rods to save fuel and reduce waste, but that means the whole cost need to be recouped during low production periods.
> Apart from that, it's a great idea.
The great idea is to have a full ban on burning fossil fuels for electricity and heat. A full stop. How people then want to solve the problem of continuous power is road full of issues. It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
>What they actually do is preferring to not burn coal, but when the choice is between blackouts or burning coal for power even the most environmentalist governments in Europe prefer burning coal.
It is true.
Germany has already built its last coal fired power plant and has already mandated the closure of all 84 plants by 2020.
Germany is already shifting to generating by renewables, demand shifting to deal with fluctuations in the cost of power, overproduction and pumped water / batteries to make up the rest of the difference.
>It is a bit strange political situation where those in favor of renewable do not want a full ban of burning coal, gas and oil, while those in favor of nuclear do want it.
It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
Germany will just continue to cheat and import from France during lulls. Either that or they will just burn natural gas. Renewables (excluding dams because they aren’t supported by zealots) for base load are a complete fantasy. Pumped storage and batteries are so inefficient that we can’t switch without quintupling electricity costs for everyone.
>It'll happen eventually. Nuclear is in no position to make it happen any quicker than renewables are though.
Renewables are not competitive with nuclear for base load, at all. That’s why “environmentalists” conveniently allow the burning of coal and gas for the base load while they sit around waiting on a miracle for storage. Nuclear is a solution that works now. Hoping for storage tech 50 years from now is just stoking the fossil fuel burn.
These countries do not exist. There is no county getting by without burning fossil fuels or using nuclear for baseload somewhere. The 100% you might be thinking of are countries that import fossil/nuclear baseload during lulls and export spare renewables during high generation times for a “net 100% renewable”. This is a start, but it’s marketing bullshit because it’s not actually sustainable for all countries to do that. Someone needs to provide baseload.
Which countries? The closest I know of is Norway. But they do burn some gas and also import from Sweden (and others). Even if they didn't have gas I don't think it is fair to say that a country runs on 100% renewables if they import energy from a country that isn't 100% renewable.
>The nuclear industry has proven time and time again that it can't be trusted with nuclear technology.
You can count these events on your hands. The same can’t be said for aviation accidents caused by incompetence. Thousands of deaths have been caused by bad management/bad engineering/bad operations/bad pilots and yet we still fly more and more every day.
>Fifth, if you remove all subsidies and include end-to-end clean-up costs, nuke power is actually uneconomic, and becoming more and more so.
Only if you make up arbitrary numbers for cleanup costs. See what happens to solar if you remove all of the subsidies for the panels as well as the required storage batteries as well as the cleanup costs for the mines providing all of the materials and it won’t be “economic” either.
I've been trying to figure out this problem. It seems like people understand the dangers of nuclear (with some overstatement[0]). The problem I see is that people don't understand dangers of other sources. Like even solar kills more than nuclear (on a per kilowatt basis, and including predicted deaths from cancer of Fukushima and Chernobyl). Or they don't understand how small the waste is in comparison to other sources (~soda can a year compared to train fulls a day (coal)). I don't know if this is due to fear or humans having a hard time comparing large numbers. Or some combination.
[0] example being that meltdowns make a place inhospitable for centuries. Fukushima's exclusion zone is shrinking fast. And only Chernobyl and Fukushima have exclusion zones. Plus, those ares have thriving wildlife and vegetation.
The counter risk is having the entire planet rendered uninhabitable for human life, right? Let's see, some area rendered uninhabitable versus the planet rendered uninhabitable... I'm going with A.
The worst of the lies about nuclear is that it can somehow help create a carbon-neutral economy.
Of course it wouldn't. Designing a carbon-neutral economy is a much bigger problem that requires much broader strategic thinking.
The levelized cost of renewables is already cheaper than the equivalent for nuclear power, with much smaller capital costs, much faster start-up and build costs, and no concerns about long-lived waste.
And the trend lines are clear.
There is simply no case for nuclear power now - economic, political, or environmental.
>The levelized cost of renewables is already cheaper than the equivalent for nuclear power,
Not if you want electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. If renewables were competitive for providing constant load, nobody would be having this fucking conversation.
The levelized cost of renewables with enough battery storage to make reliable carbon-free power is higher than nuclear, except in areas where lots of hydro or geothermal is available.
Who says nuclear is carbon neutral? It definitely has a footprint. But so does solar, wind, and hydro. All 4 of which are extremely small though. The advantage nuclear has over the other two is that it can generate power 24/7, it can vary its output, and it has a small footprint on land usage per kilowatt-hour it produces.
AFAIK there are no high energy producers that are end-to-end carbon neutral (or negative). Doing so needs some type of sequestration.
Not claiming those are the only options. I'm comparing the advantages with the risks. It just seems easier to watch a thousand tons of spent fuel than to dim the sun or remove a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.
If you know of a baseload power source with similar carbon emissions to nuclear, I'm listening.
> Since then, actual experience showed that about every 20 years
That's not really a good metric. What you need to do is a time varying analysis and consider the total number of reactors (globally).
Eg. if we hold danger of reactors constant but we increase the number of reactors over time then you'd see disasters being more frequent (but the opposite is true).
Alternatively if we hold the number of reactors constant and pretend that all new reactors replace old reactors you can determine if new reactors are more, the same, or less dangerous.
But to do a real analysis you have to combine both of these (and some more stuff). Otherwise you're pretty much just saying that the average of the set {1,2,3} is 2. That 20 year thing is a bit contrived and I'm surprised it has popped up a few times.
This is interesting because you blame human error or malice on the failure of a reactor causing a potentially global issue. For about 60 years now we’ve had nuclear powered ships without a single issue (with exception to the russian subs rusting and decaying while waiting for decommissioning). Wouldn’t malice or human error be more of an issue here vs a land based reactor? I think most enemies would rather bring down a military naval ship over a land based reactor unless causing terror is their goal. Either way, the reactors generally manage themselves, get replaced every few years but overall are very stable and safe. Nuclear is here to stay in ships and the potential to irradiate the world is much higher when you’re floating in water.
Tack onto this you’ll have eras of better and worse regulation and privatization (with the accompanying emphasis on profit over all else), depending on which parties are in office.
I think it’s inevitable you will have bad disasters. The human race is not smart nor mature enough.
I think the debate is now shifting from nuclear vs. coal to nuclear vs. solar/wind. In that context, this argument doesn't help. Especially recently, people have been really bullish about solar and wind power, and I think that has lead to weakening of the support for nuclear power.
China is extraordinarily bullish on renewables.
From wikipedia:
"China's renewable energy sector is growing faster than its fossil fuels and nuclear power capacity. ... In 2017, renewable energy comprised 36.6% of China's total installed electric power capacity, and 26.4% of total power generation, the vast majority from hydroelectric sources."
Nobody wants to burn more coal except people who own stocks in coal. In other news being beat with a stick sounds like a better alternative to being blown up but most of use would prefer a massage.
The Germans seems to prefer coal to nuclear. Oh, maybe they thought lowering nuclear would increase the renewable? The renewable sure did increase, but it doesn't compensate the decrease in nuke power. What did is the other fossil fuels.
Of course, most Germans would deny that. But the fact is, reducing nuke power leave us only two alternatives: increase the consumption of coal/oil etc, or decrease energy consumption period. Solar and wind are all the rage, but they're still very little compared to nuke.
And good luck with significantly reducing energy consumption: energy is more or less the limiting factor in our economy, so decreasing it decreases the GDP. So it would mean a big fat, long term recession. Now it doesn't have to be bad, but it sure needs a significant overhaul of our societies.
Renewables today produce twice as much power as nuclear plants back when Germany had twice as much nuclear than it has now and the share is growing by 4-5% per year. By the time a new nuclear plant is done Germany would be at 90% renewables.
Your numbers are a bit off (2018: 155TWh solar+wind; 65TWh biomass+hydro; 2006: 158TWh nuclear as of [0]), but I'd agree with your conclusion. The biggest disappointment in those graphs is the near constant use of lignite, but politicians seem still very resistant giving up the jobs of that industry.
We burn a tiny amount of fuel to get a lot of nuclear energy, and we burn a huge amount of coal to get a lot of thermal energy.
You need to consume orders of magnitude more coal than atomic fuel to get the same amount of energy; so the trace elements in coal become a big deal.
The radiation from coal isn't even the worst contaminant, you get all sorts of trace elements. Sulphur (causes acid rain around the power plant) leaps to mind, and there are other really nasty impurities. It is hard to understate the tiny, tiny nature of the nuclear waste 'problem'. Storm in a teacup stuff. It is barely an industrial quantity of dangerous material, and the energetic bits are Very Likely to be recyclable as diluted fuel for a more advanced reactor.
Pretending nuclear waste isn't an actual problem basically means your entire analysis is disastrously wrong. Consider contributing after doing further analysis.
It means my analysis is informed by a working knowledge of how we treat existing risk factors that affect human society. Everything I've seen suggests that in practice the macro-scale threat posed by radioactive material is similar to that posed by lead, but easier to deal with because the volumes are so tiny we can afford to isolate it completely from the biosphere.
We produce tiny amounts of waste, I can't find a great source but the numbers seem to be of the order of 10,000 to 100,000 m^3 of material that needs special handling and a much larger quantity that can be scientifically measured to have come from a nuclear plant if you have the right equipment. Those are tiny numbers compared to what industrial processes working with waste have to deal with (for scale, 1 small mine open pit coal mine would move that much material a week).
People are trying to protect the world from smaller risks than the environment already faces. It isn't rational, and it isn't very clever either. The volume of the problem is truly tiny compared to stuff we just walk on by as a society.
Your numbers seem way off. My first google results [0] mentions a single plant producing more than 100,000m³ waste requiring special treatment. Most of it on the less bad end, though. Or are you just talking about fuel waste and conveniently ignore everything else?
[1] compares solid waste from different power sources. Little info for solar/wind. Both nuclear and coal seem bad. But none of us wants to build coal plants anyway. But i sure as hell also don't want lots of public resources spend for new nuclear that is decommissioned a few years later once more environmentally friendly alternatives go online. Especially if those resources could accelerate renewables in the first place. I have no problem with keeping existing nuclear plants running as long as they are safe.
I'd love read better concise summaries from official sources, if you can recommend some.
I don't have any decent sources on waste. I wasn't ignoring decommissioning, but what I was trying to and failing to communicate was per-annum figures (comparing per annum production vs. the storage required over the same time period).
From a volumetric perspective compared to what we know how to handle industrially the numbers are tiny. I strongly suspect the only reason we treat the waste with such care is because there is so little of it that that sort of care is feasible.
I've seen a big lead mine in operation. I wouldn't live anywhere near to one of them, containing the waste is basically impossible. With nuclear waste, there is so little we could literally ship worldwide waste production to the middle of the Sahara and just dump it there. 100,000m³ just isn't that big a number - I mean, we wouldn't because it is a silly idea, not because we can't. It isn't a very responsible approach, but in practice it would work. The volumes are small enough that in my view world-wide nuclear waste storage crosses the boundary from a technical issue to an economic and political issue.
There are lots of uninhabitable wastelands that have been created here and there by industrial processes. One more in a location chosen to be remote would make literally no difference given the scale of the benefits. There are a lot of deserts out there.
> Your conclusion is different than mine, therefore you are talking nonesense. Consider coming back when you get closer to my level of knowledge.
Be careful about how you know what you think you know. How informed are you about these matters? Have you taken a good look at the numbers? I know I haven't. How trustworthy are your sources? Why do you trust your sources? Are they expert or something, or do they happen to appeal to you emotionally?
This is a problem at the global scale we're talking about. We need good solid numbers. The number of articles in the newspaper for instance is not a good solid number. Emotion is not a good number.
It's a huge issue that I work with an international team on. It's also almost politically impossible to address in the us. Technology (for safe isolation of waste) is not the problem. Democracy is. So, it collects in aging leaky dams around each plant because it can not be moved and can not be centrally disposed of.
> in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job,
Plate tectonics was not understood or scientifically described until 65-67. It was not a widely accepted theory until later, at least the 70s. By that point, Fukushima had already been permitted and built.
Without plate tectonics to create the plate shift earthquake which resulted in the tsunami which caused the disaster, the only mechanism to create tsunamis known was underground rockfalls from steep slopes. Afaik the builders of the plant studied the bathymetry around the area, and saw limited risk of tsunamis.
The primitive science of the time ruled out the possibility of a tsunami overcoming a tsunami wall that was X feet tall. So they built a tsunami wall that was X+k feet tall, and called it a day. When later scientific theory showed that larger tsunamis were not just possible, but inevitable, the plant was not retrofitted to deal with the new reality. Oops.
> When later scientific theory showed that larger tsunamis were not just possible, but inevitable, the plant was not retrofitted to deal with the new reality.
You are saying the process of risk assessment and mitigation was not regularly actualized with new scientific knowledge. How is that possible ? Is there communication issue between different fields ?
For our information, does someone know : As soon as the engineers / executives were informed of this new risk, what was their decision at the time ? (Maybe this was asked during a court hearing)
You typically don't have a design engineer actively monitoring safety features that are permitted by the regulator, built and maintained to standard. In a dynamic environment where the situation changes regularly there is a little more defense for catching that type of thing. In a static environment like fixed plant it could well be they just weren't ready for that sort of change.
That style of hazard, where existing controls passed through a rigorous system but become insufficient with time, are really insidious. It is certainly easy to understand why they would have missed it; even though it isn't an acceptable outcome. Especially given that communication in the 70s/80s involved a lot more talking to people and reading the right journals.
yet, this is specific to this one incident, one specific threat.
The issue is more likely to be systemic. Once a production system is up and running, it is not consistantly being improved and iterated upon, but instead left to stagnate technologically (and in this case, in safety in light of new research etc).
But the argument is that such level of continuous improvement/iteration is costly, and the owners would not recouperate the costs! And so hence the economics goes, and so does the human condition continues to revolve around profit and loss.
Thus regulate mandatory re-certified every 10 years. Also that such process must involve meeting or exceeding //current// engineering standards and safety, with the potential for limited exceptions if approved by need and actively in progress plans for achieving the specifications.
The tsunami which hit Fukushima was 43-49 feet tall. For seismic originated tsunamis, this is near the upper limit.
Not all tsunamis are caused by earthquakes though. On July 9th, 1958, there was a rockfall in Lituya Bay, Alaska. A cliff face broke off, and fell 3000 feet into the ocean. This resulting in a tsunami which stripped vegetation at up to 1720 feet in the surrounding areas.
In Japan? Maybe. Globally? Not even close. As recently as 2004, there was a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that caused over 200,000 casualties (compared to the 15,000-20,000 casualties of the 2011 Japanese tsunami).
Sorry if it seemed insensitive, I didn't mean the most harmful, but the most powerful in terms of physics, as an engineering reference point if you will.
Death toll really isn't a good number to use for gauging the risk to nuclear reactors. Indonesia was more vulnerable to tsunami damage and deaths than Japan for basically the same reasons why Japan has nuclear power plants and Indonesia doesn't.
I grew up near Chernobyl. My parents still work on CNPP (which was closed in 2000 but still needs personnel).
In my opinion nuclear is the only reallistic solution to solve global warming. Per kw produced it is safer than even solar or wind and modern reactors are even safer.
I now live in bay area and have high end solar panels. While this is a nice thing, looking at their output - it is just not enough (covers our family consumption at about 70%, this is house plus electric cars, but, obviously, not including products consumed and long distance travel. And this is California)
less deaths. I was myself surprised when I learned this, but apparently people fall off while installing solar and wind; combine that with much smaller energy output and you'll get nuclear to be the safest
Rooftop solar is quite different to industrial solar plants. The latter is on the ground, for example. Also, the installation of the latter is less ad-hoc and not done by small scale operators.
I don't think the safety of a large power plant vs lots of home power installations is at all a fair metric.
The people falling off is just one example of death, not the only. You have to include total solar, industrial and home. But you get numbers that show that per kwhr nuclear results in less deaths (even when including predictions of deaths caused by future cancer incidents from Chernobyl and Fukushima). It honestly is a surprising result.
The definition of "safer" is fewer people killed per kilowatt hour of energy generated. By that very reasonable metric, nuclear power is objectively less deadly than rooftop solar or wind turbines.
People are usually more ok with predictable risks that can be mitigated by the parties involved. Example taking proper safety precautions against falls vs oops we melted down and gave you cancer 10 years later.
Not to be rude but that seems like a silly qualification to be speaking on a matter. I grew up next to a Lockheed factory and my father worked for NASA, but I fail to see how that qualifies me to comment on what a "realistic" solution for interstellar travel would be.
I think he’s speaking as someone whose family history is directly impacted by a nuclear disaster, the fear of which has greatly affected the politics of nuclear power.
Sure that doesn’t qualify as expert opinion, but that also only gets you so far. In a debate that gets emotional it can’t hurt to have someone stand up and say “yes, bad things can happen. It happened to me and my family, but I still support it because it makes sense overall”
Yes, this is anecdotal evidence. But having grew up there I obviously read up about it a lot and this is why I am speaking my opinion on this matter.
Also, in my opinion, what I saw written about it in the US media is fear mongering or outright lies about death tolls, radiation levels in nearby areas, cancer rates, etc.
To give you an example. Did you know that CNPP was profitably working until 2000 while the disaster was in 1986?
Or another, fact - CNPP is an almost exact copy of an older nuclear plant which still profitably produces clean energy near St. Petersburg in Russia
Yes but the RBMK is still an irresponsible design: highly positive void coeficient, no containment, then the control rod misdesign which was fixed. VVER reactors (Russian PWRs) are much more safer by contrast. Of course it was profitable, it ran on natural Uranium and it was cheaper to build (no containnent).
You should watch the "A is for Atom" episode from Adam Curtis "Pandora's Box" series. It also talks about US designs and how they upscaled the naval PWRs to utility level which was not deemed safe by nuclear scientists of the time.
I am not advocating for building more CNPP - like plants. Those reactors are obsolete. There are much, much safer options now ( such as generation 3 reactors in US).
However, even those older designes are statistically much safer than coal - how many people died just in coal mines colapses?
>But having grew up there I obviously read up about it a lot
I disagree, what you read isn't obvious and still doesn't qualify you to speak on the matter unless it was legitimate and vetted information. Reading a bunch of infowars doesn't make me a legitimate political commentator.
Exactly my point, I don't know, and it isn't "obvious" as he claims. For all I know its the equivalent of infowars, skepticism is my default position, like it or not.
It's a valid qualification to speak on the reasonableness of community fears.
As someone who grew up near a Lockheed factory and a father that worked for NASA, you are qualified to speak about the community impacts of building and operating flying machines.
I'm pretty pro-nuclear. Nuclear power has proven to be extremely safe relative to the alternatives. In this specific case though, to say that there was one design flaw is failing to go beyond the first why.
The second why is "why does the reactor require an uninterrupted supply of electrical power in order to not melt down? Gen 2 nuclear power is inherently dangerous, and is only made safe through active safety systems. If the reactor trips, the cooling pumps must run or decay heat will cause a meltdown. Gen 3 reactors tend to incorporate a lot more passive safety systems or at least ones that don't require electricity.
It's just a trade-off of mathematical probabilities. The alleged extreme safety comes with an extreme destructive disasters.
When it comes to risk management, the human brain that is bound by evolution to dangers close in time and location, is not capable of assessing the consequences of losing a piece of the planet earth's habitat for millions of years.
Radiation is not as scary as you've been led to believe. The main long-term dangers from a really bad nuclear accident are Cs 137 and Sr 90. Both of these have half lives of about 30 years. We past the first half life of the Chernobyl fallout.
The arctic and antarctic regions are literal ninth-circle hellscapes (the ninth circle of hell is the one that is frozen over). Significantly worse than the areas around Chernobyl which is apparently well on the way to becoming a national park.
I'm not sure that there is a 'risk' that the human brain can't process. Risk of what, exactly? Huge cost to the generation that has to move, massive risk if it hits farmland, sure. But even assuming that the 'millions of years' figure is factual - which I doubt - we are certainly going to run out of human race before we run out of land. The risks are all fairly short-term things.
* building reactors in areas with severe earthquakes and tsunamis was the main design flaw
* flood protection too low, even though this was known
* backup-generators not safe against flooding
* loss of outside electricity over a long period of time -> powerlines were not working, other sources of electricity on the grid were offline due to earthquake
* too long time to restore electricity, we are talking about many MWs for cooling and other purposes -> generators were difficult to bring in with further problems making them work
* various damage due to earthquake on reactors, buildings and infrastructure around the plant
* too much spent fuel in pools, required large amount of electricity for cooling
* spent fuel pools high in the buildings, hard to reach
* no cooling capability in case of days-long loss of electricity -> then needs to be cooled with seawater pumped with vehicles with concrete pumps (which were flown in from remote places, even from the US) -> caused structural damages to buildings and spread radiation
* no idea what to do with the contaminated cooling water
* no protection in main buildings against the explosions that happened
* no technology existed for a decade or more to deal with molten cores
* ineffective security/safety process -> the plant had checks a few months before the accident with no consequences
* unwillingness to invest major amounts of money into upgrades
* life extension for outdated reactors, due to economical pressure
* no independent controlling instances for the nuclear industry
That may all very well be true, but it still means that the power plant was unsafe.
All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe".
And all the time bad things happen and they have to admit "well, not when X happens". Or "not when A and then B happens".
Just as you did here. It's nice that Fukushima could have survived an earthquake, but the tsunami isn't a freak accident, it's actually a common cause thing.
It's nice that Fukushima could have survived both the earthquake and the tsunami, had it been built differently.
But it hadn't. And that's why all this "This time everything is safe" is just as unbelievable as over the last decades.
Now, you can certainly say that decarbonization is worth the risk, and I might even be on the fence about it.
But please don't insult the general public's intelligence by ever telling us again that nuclear power is safe and it was only those stupid Russians who totally mismanaged their power plant.
Disclaimer: I am not really pro- or con- nuclear energy but try to keep an open mind.
How does what you are saying not apply to any other technology? Cars are “save” but kill more people than all nuclear power plants and accidents combined. Still we say to ourselves we can deal with the risk, which is obviously the case for lot’s of cases but might not be in some exceptions.
I think your reaction seems a little bit too emotional to an interesting and seemingly informative (haven’t fact checked his claims) personal perspective. The problem with discussions about nuclear energy is that there is a strong dogma towards openly thinking about the costs/risk/benefits in the political sphere. In Germany postponing our nuclear exit could buy us some time to get coal offline earlier and provide some stability to the grid. Ironically, the green party would never consider such a move due to ideological (and historical) reasons.
You're right. It fully applies to cars, as well. That's why we have those "more bikes" discussions here every now and then.
But that's no reason not to point out the obvious flaws in the comment I replied to.
And re: emotionality: you can wish it away, but it is real. Nuclear fans always act as if they only had to show this one scientific study to citizens, and everyone would immediately fall in line. That's hilarious.
Nuclear is done. It may be irrational, but the nuclear community has richly earned that. A little bit of humility and risk-weighing instead of grandiose claims of "perfect safety" would have helped.
But these lies of "perfect safety" were useful back then. They were a shortcut. A cheat. They could get their reactors much quicker if they made false claims.
Now they get the long-term results to their short-term thinking.
Yeah, you have point. I am certainly not in favor of large energy companies stealing their way around paying for the long-term containment of spent fuel rods for example. People should be held accountable for the damage they do and the waste that they cause. Offloading of negative externalities should be reduced as much as possible. For example, meaningful taxation of carbon emissions or the set up of a nuclear waste recycling and emergency fund where required contributions are determined by external auditors.
However, I am still a staunch defender of differentiated learning from the past and rational planning of the future. Given the information we have right now, nuclear might actually be an important (probably temporary) piece of a rational plan for a good future. Moving forward means setting the stage and right incentives for people to learn from mistakes, improve and grow.
>All the time nuclear power fans tell us that "this time we've learned and current design are safe".
This is a strawman argument. No one is claiming that old reactors are getting safer as we come up with better designs. None of the newer designs that people are claiming are safer have had issues. Fukushima was literally constructed before Chernobyl.
> My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account
To be honest, you could probably make that argument for anything under question in any scenario. But even if we were to skip the logical loopholes ("We took it into account, but we decided the benefits outweighed the costs because of <fill in any reason>"), let's just look at the raw numbers or simply just historical facts. Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries? OK, take one step back. Would those disasters have occurred if "all disaster scenarios [were] taken into account"?
The reality is that we have no one good and practical energy solution for the world. And even though I believe that there's no practical solution that can beat a tried and tested solution like nuclear in terms of efficiency, I also believe that there's been no tried and tested solution that's been worse in terms of failure.
> Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries?
Not a coal plant per se, but there's the Centralia mine fire [1] in PA, which is expected to burn for over 250 years, resulting in the entire town being abandoned.
Anything is "arguably" worse or better. But honestly, I would challenge that point any day. As much as I'm against fossil fuels, coal powered plants only contribute a very minor part to global warming compared to lets say... ships, planes and cars. And my point is not about coal specifically - it was just mentioned because that's what the main opposition is to nuclear. Not solar/wind/water.
My point is that failure of nuclear energy provision is demonstrably worse than the failure of any other options we've tried. Does this mean it's better/worse? Who knows.
But you simply cannot say that something is safe if <xyz>, especially when history says otherwise.
I'm flabbergasted at the number of people talking unironically about "human error" as if it's historically insignificant...
> My point is that failure of nuclear energy provision is demonstrably worse than the failure of any other options we've tried.
No it isn't; when dams fail villages get swept away and everyone dies. Bad mining disasters can wipe out ~50 people too.
When Fukushima failed, basically nobody got hurt, and there is a lot of inconvenience and resources have to go to cleaning the thing up.
Obviously it is still awful for the people involved, but I'd personally rather go through a nuclear accident than a dam failure or have a mine fall on me, because I'd still be basically ok after a nuclear accident. The argument might be that it is uneconomic after accounting for the costs, but it is demonstrably safe and so a far better failure mode than anything else we've tried.
I mean, Fukushima has basically proven that the only question is economic cost/benefit.
> As much as I'm against fossil fuels, coal powered plants only contribute a very minor part to global warming compared to lets say... ships, planes and cars.
Do you have a source behind this? From what I can tell this statement seems wrong. E.g.:
Coal is a huge source of energy. And the dirtiest available. And if electricity+heat production accounts for 25% of global greenhouse gasses, and transportation 14%, there's a decent chance coal power plants contribute just as much to global warming as all of transportation does, and basically zero chance that it plays a "very minor part" when compared to ships, planes, and cars.
This varies by region. In the US transport and coal power are equal in terms of their contribution. In Nigeria it's diesel and deforestation. But I will concede that it's not "minor" (not sure why I said that...)
I'm not saying that coal is good or nuclear is bad or vice versa. As I said in my original comment, there is no one practical (in terms of safety, efficiency, cost etc) global energy solution right now. I don't believe any coal-powered plants should be built. Should existing ones be replaced by nuclear? Depends on the actual area, geo-political situation (which changes over time) etc.
From what I understand, far more people have been radiated to a far larger degree by coal plants operating as designed than by nuke plants in disasters. It’s just not as obvious and doesn’t make for a good breaking-emergency headline.
How many people died because of Fukushima? How many died when the oil train blew up in the Canadian town? How many coal miners died from silicosis? How many die when a dam fails and wipes out entire towns?
The failure scenario is demonstrably better than everything we’ve tried. More people have died installing solar and wind than have from nuclear.
Right in the middle of Toronto is the Hearn Generating Station, which only used coal for a portion of its operating life. The area around it requires considerable remediation to be considered for most land uses; only film companies have leased it (and recently purchased it AFAIK) since.
Have nuclear plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries? I'm pretty sure Pripyat can be made habitable if someone wanted to live there, with enough financial investments. It's just that there's so much already habitable land in Belarus/Ukraine that nobody really bothered. Japan is actually trying to cleanup Hamadoori coast, which I believe they will in a few decades, and I think we'll get a lot of valuable decontamination tech and experience out of this.
>Have any disasters at coal plants rendered areas uninhabitable for centuries?
Yes, the very use of fossil fuels at the extent we use them is causing an extinction level event for the entire planet. Does the gravity of that really sink in?
The problem is that "taking all disaster scenarios into account" is easy in hindsight, but maybe not in planning. But I believe that modern nuclear power reactors can be build intrinsically safe. For me, the real problem begins with the treatment of the waste: It's hard to find a good place to store it or reprocess it. Not so much because finding the actual place is hard, but because using that place will face hard opposition of the locals, which leads, at least in a democracy, to a political compromise for the location (to see this in action, look at the story for long term storage in Germany). If I have to chose between nuclear power and democracy, my vote is on the latter.
The positive thing about hindsight is that we the human race can learn from it and subsequently re-design things like nuclear power plants, amongst a whole swathe of other technology.
Situated in an earthquake/tsunami-prone land? Situate backup generators on higher ground, build tidal walls sufficiently high.
The human race is built upon hindsight. Who was the first human who unfortunately tried eating a poisonous plant? We subsequently learned which plants were safely edible and which were not, for example.
So don't go dissing those who speak with hindsight - we humans stand on the shoulders of those who, unfortunately, lost their lives for everyone else to have the knowledge to progress :/
> The positive thing about hindsight is that we the human race can learn from it and subsequently re-design things like nuclear power plants, amongst a whole swathe of other technology.
most reactors fail because of humans and money, how can you learn about that?
just look at fukushima, some problems were known, but the management have found that such a event cant happen and saved some money here and there.
I'm not dissing anybody, but I believe that there are more ways something can go wrong than we have tried yet. Luckily, our progress is not only dependent on hindsight.
My response was not directed at you personally, but was a response in general for the benefit of everyone reading the topic.
The point being that the human race's total knowledge and subsequent forward movement is based entirely on "that <event> happened therefore <these lessons have been learned and subsequent actions shall be enacted>."
I'm not so sure I'd pick Democracy over nuclear power. Recent years have made me question our idea of the absolute superiority of Democracy. Look at the clusterfuck that is the US "democracy" vs the success of Singapore or even China. The rest of the Western world in Europe is barely better off than the US.
On the other hand, not getting nuclear power deployed ASAP everywhere essentially means the long term destruction of our planet.
So all in all, I don't think it's nearly as clear cut a decision on nuclear vs. democracy, and if forced to choose I may pick the former.
>Look at the clusterfuck that is the US "democracy" vs the success of Singapore or even China
Tell that to the millions of people in concentrations camps because they practice the wrong religion or were born into the wrong ethnic group.
China also produces more carbon dioxide emissions than the US and Europe combined and it's growing at a faster rate, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese model is offering up a better solution for climate change.
Not sure I'd take that definition of success. China seems like an absolute failure in the face of almost certain success. The CCP seems to ruin every good thing about the Chinese culture, suppress every positive instinct, and punish every decent behaviour. They absolutely do not care about your silly environmental causes, and if you got in the way of any one of their state-sponsored ecological disasters, you would be crushed like roadkill.
I think nuclear power generation is an excellent idea, but if it is somehow incompatible with representative democracy, there just isn't an option, I guess we have to find some other good way to generate power. Though I think the idea that the two are incompatible is nonsense.
Look at Australia. We've been very easily influenced by the coal lobby. If there's plenty of jobs and investment flowing in, we'll do the same for nuclear.
Population density argues otherwise [0]. The aboriginal population of Australia pre-colonization is estimated to be around 750K spread out over nearly 3 million square miles.
There may be differing perspectives about how much of it is unusable, but the debate is between "most of the continent" and "even more than that". A nuclear waste storage facility in an unvisited portion of the outback would rank rather low on the list of bad things happening to the indigenous people of Australia, wouldn't you say?
A considerable part of the waste can be reprocessed and further burned in fast breeder reactors, creating fuel for the conventional ones. The rest can be vitrified and stored. Why we don't already do this? Fear of nuclear proliferation, breeders are quite expensive, anti nuclear sentiment.
The waste from fast reactors is just the fission products. It's about 1% as much waste by volume as conventional reactors. Encased it in glass, and the overall mix will be back to the radioactivity of the original ore in a couple centuries.
The waste from conventional reactors is the fission products plus lots of U238, a fair amount of plutonium, some U235, and various transuranics. The transuranics and plutonium are the really long-lived radioactive waste.
We don't reprocess spent fuel because it's a net economic loss to do so. The separated plutonium is sufficiently difficult to turn into fuel that, far from saving money, it costs more than just enriching fresh uranium.
I will support nuclear if you have a solid solution that will work for the waste for the island living populations of the world. Hawaii for example. If a good solution for the waste can be presented there, we can more effectively move forward. Looking just at large continental areas when solving the problem leaves some holes to fill.
Not saying nuclear is bad, it does have a solid cost presentation and a low pollution foot print.
I mean, if the world switches largely to nuclear power, it’s probably fine if small populated islands that don’t have anywhere to store nuclear waste keep using whatever power source they’re using now (or switch to other clean energy sources if possible). There’s no reason to let the perfect get in the way of the better.
Your post makes it sound like Fukushima failed in a catastrophically unsafe manner. I think it’s important to be explicit about the casualties that resulted from the disaster. The death toll currently stands at... maybe 1. A plant worker died of lung cancer in September 2018–over 7 years after the incident—and the government thinks it might have been caused by the plant.
And over a thousand people died due to the evacuation. Every one of those deaths is the moral fault of generations of anti-nuclear fear mongers who created the atmosphere of paranoia.
My opinion is that you might underestimate the magnitude of potential nuclear accidents. I think that Germany's decision to decommission over time their nuclear power plants was pretty well studied. Please see: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2018/...
That has little to do with the decommissioning itself, and more with the Governments stupidity and ignorance. The decommissioning is only one part of that screw-up.
Germany wants (and the whole world should):
* enough energy
* carbon-free
* nuclear-waste-free
On order to do that, you need massive investments in renewable energy and storage.
Instead, they found a way to have:
* large investment in solar energy, without protectionist measures, leading to the German solar industry dying an creating demand that lead to cheap China solar (overly simplified - feel free to elaborate in your answers)
* laws that limit the building of wind power significantly
* failure to build a power line from the north (offshore windparks) to the south (high power demands, less power resources) which currently leads to insane situations with the neighbors
* first extending the nuclear power plants permits, shortly afterwards deciding to shut down, which lead to Germany having to pay compensations to the companies (in addition to a completely botched nuclear fuel tax, that they had to pay back after it was found invalid in court)
* subsidies for dirty coal plants over decades (300 billion was a number floating around) and another I think 50 billions to help the regions which rely on the coal business after the coal shutdown
Politicians deal in compromise. They see different interests and they try to find a middle ground between those two. They do that with a pretty heavy disregard of science. Scientist are just another interest group.
Scientists: If we don't cut CO2 but this much until this date, the effects of climate change will become this nasty.
Industry: If we do that, that will cost us X moneys and endanger Y jobs and we will make Z less profit.
What's green about an energy source that produces waste that has to be stored for thousands of years by a nation which only exist since 1945?
There is still no final depot for that waste, and the depots they have now are currently running full of water.
I get the argument of nuclear being zero-emission and maybe nuclear can be the solution - but not in its current form. If they wanna play, they need the new kind of reactors, which are actually safe and minimize nuclear waste. Also maybe figure out what to do with the waste before you produce it.
It's not even about knowledge. When you include active human attackers that have nothing to loose or state actors in times of war in the equation it's simply impossible to secure.
Let me argue that there's at least one more design flaw: backup generators are generally not very reliable. So for any given plant, there's a comparatively high risk that they don't work when you need them. This risk is non trivial even when the generators are well taken care of (both maintenance and regular test runs) but it's very easy to skimp on the tests.
My knowledge is from another industry that relies heavily on backup generators.
Friend of mine has a high school friend that a maintenance engineer. He has contracts to maintain diesel back up generators for hospitals. And sometimes they don't start. It's very disconcerting when that happens.
The other design flaw is diesel or no they require cooling water during shutdown. What bothers me for instance is during the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes the Mississippi ran backwards for a while. During other earthquakes you see significant uplift. If the intakes run dry because the local hydrology suddenly changes you're just fucked.
To add to that: backup generators are also a logistical mess. Diesel doesn't last infinitely. Do in particular if you expect to run large generators to sustain significant load (like in big data centers, I don't know how significant the load is for the backup gens of a nuclear plant), the amount of diesel you get to store is impressive. Which in turn means that the logistics/tank life issues of the fuel get worse.
The physical&power infrastructure side of big data centers is really quite interesting, by the way. Not something we all get exposed to regularly but I can only encourage anyone who has a chance to learn about it to take that opportunity.
It is extremely difficult to clean up thousands of kilometers of contaminated land - esecially if said land is comprised of mountainous area...
Miyakoji-machi itself is situated in a valley surrounded by hundreds of square kilometers of mountainous terrain. To blithley claim it would somehow be easy to decontaminate thousansd of square kilometers of mountainous area is naive folly.
But blithley saying it is difficult is different than explaining why it /appears/ that very little effort, relative to the scope of the problem, has been applied.
Especially goven that tepco didnt even ADMIT to the other reactir failure, nor the acale of the catastrophy for a really really long time. They down played the whole thing feom day one and failed to even seek out external help immediately. Thats why thousands of kilometers and trillions of galllons of sea wer contaiminted
Well then maybe we should develop reactors that solve the problem. Any fast reactor or molten salt breeder will do it. Russia has two fast reactors in commercial operation right now, and a bunch of startups are working on various designs.
And yet, very few companies (in the U.S. at least) want to build them. It's because the worst case scenario they're planning for is very bad indeed, so they have to spend all this expense to keep it from happening. Compared to every other renewable energy technology, it is more risky and has a much higher cost to get up and running.
And that's setting aside the other problem which is that many of the countries that are still growing, and will need new, clean sources of power are countries that don't have as much nuclear expertise to begin with. And some of them are countries that the West has tried to actively keep from having nuclear capability.
Better solar, wind, etc., has fewer risks than better nuclear tech in the long run.
Also the generators were originally situated in a raised location but had been moved to the ground level after their installation. If the generators had not been moved they would have functioned through the tsunami.
Even if you were right the spent fuel ponds were not safe. Just let an airplane crash there - the reactor may survive it the ponds will not and they may very well be the bigger problem. The amount of radioactivity stored in these ad-hoc structures globally is staggering. Increasing the problem by further investing in nuclear is not a good idea.
Indeed. I'll point out, however, that the Error Cascade began with the loss of the underground backup generators - hydrogen would not have been a problem if the backup generators were operative.
How many times do we have to hear this "1 in 10,000 year accident!" Argument (3? This guy wants 4!) Before we realize that the idiots designing nuclear power plants don't understand probability?
To be clear there is no "safe" option. But this 60+ year old nuclear facility survived the 4th largest earthquake in record history, a tsunami, and only failed because the placements of the back, back up generators. Other plants (e.g. the Onagawa Nuclear Power Plan) that were closer to the epicenter survived just fine.
Old outdate plants aren't perfect, but even still its better than the guaranteed best case scenario for fossil fuels.
Although it was a 1960's design, the reason it failed the way it did was because of one design flaw...
Its backup generators were not placed up on the hills above it. Rather, the backup generators were situated below sea level underneath the reactor buildings. DERP.
Fukushima Dai-ichi survived the Magnitude 9 earthquake. It did not survive the tsunami because said tsunami overcame the tidal wall in front of it, and then the backup generators got flooded. But for that one event, if the generators were placed up on higher ground, the outcome would have been so much different.
I have first-hand knowledge, due to..
1) Knowing the area. I lived in my Japanese father-in-law's mountain house, situated 1.5km out of Miyakoji-machi, Tamura-shi. That town was just inside the 20km evacuation zone from the power plant, the mountain house was just outside at 21km - myself and my family lived in our own house in the outskirts of Koriyama city.
2) My (now deceased) Japanese father-in-law was president of the Hitachi subsiduary company which built Fukushima Dai-ich No.4 reactor, which wasn't operating at the time of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami but did suffer an explosion thought due to hydrogen gas from the spent fuel situated in the Spent Fuel Pool in its upper level.
3) Mentioned in point (1) above, I owned a house in Tobu New Town on the Eastern outskirts of Koriyama city, and I was working at Flextronics in Koriyama at the time the M9 quake occurred - things got a tad 'exciting' at the time. I should write a book.
My point is that nuclear power is safe, as long as all disaster scenarios are taken into account - in Fukushima Dai-ichi's case, for some reason (possibly financial?), it was decided that the tsunami barrier was sufficient (it wasn't) for the job, and at some point in time it was decided that placing backup generators underneath the buildings was sufficient - that unfortunately did not turn out to be the case :/
And lastly, I still fully support the idea of nuclear power.