The nuclear power industry had been experiencing something of a rebirth in the United States, following decades of doubt. That’s been put at risk by the crisis unfolding at a nuclear power plant in Japan in the wake of a devastating quake and tsunami there.
With that situation still in flux, attention should remain focused on dealing with the immediate safety issues in Japan, says Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, an association of electric utility companies.
“There will be plenty of time later on for a, hopefully, thoughtful dialogue,” Owen says.
But officials in Owen’s industry recognize that problems in Japan are bound to have repercussions when it comes to nuclear policy in the U.S.
One hopes, but does not expect, that people will hold off until the whole thing plays out, and the time line is understood. I have heard at least one “expert” who is against nuclear power wringing his hands over something which is in fact working exactly as designed. We may find that the layered safety features worked, or fell short. In any case, we will have invaluable data on real world conditions with which to compare the various studies and models.
However it plays out in the end, I think we can already say that 40-year-old reactors stood up remarkably well to an earthquake five to six times more powerful than the maximum they were designed to withstand.
The MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering department has a blog that’s been posting articles on this, starting with the widely-reposted “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors,” edited slightly for technical accuracy: http://mitnse.com.
The meltdowns in Japan are because the reactors are old technology. That sort of thing cannot happen with pebble-bed nuclear reactor technology. http://web.mit.edu/pebble-bed/papers1_files/PBReactors.pdf
We could be energy independent within a decade if the enviro-whackos would let us, and we could do it safely and with less pollution, too. How many people were injured by 3 Mile Island radiation? Here is the answer…none. There were no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community at 3 Mile Island, yet our nuclear power industry was absolutely destroyed by the screeches from the greenie-weenies. About 30,000 people are injured EVERY year by falling off ladders. About 6,000 of those people die…EVERY year. I don’t hear any hysteria about licensing ladders or requiring citizens to take a safety course before they can own one. So there were no recorded deaths due to 3 Mile Island and we killed our nuclear power industry due to hysteria while we let the ladder holocaust continue unabated! It’s been about 30 years since the 3 Mile Island incident. In that time, some 180,000 people have died from falling off ladders in the US alone. Another 900,000 have been seriously injured. Clearly, there is a skewed perception about the “dangers” of nuclear energy. I wonder who benefits from perpetuating such misconceptions? Who profits when the USA does not use nuclear power? Perhaps, now that the mid-east is in flames, we might be able to have a rational dialogue about nuclear energy and begin to become energy independent.
Meanwhile, I hope the eco-nazis enjoy the $5 per gallon gasoline prices this summer.
[i]Meanwhile, I hope the eco-nazis enjoy the $5 per gallon gasoline prices this summer[/i]
If they do, it will only be because they can demonize “big oil”. These people come from the class that cries about everything and takes responsibility for nothing.
Achieving energy independence is far easier than our first trip to the moon. That trip was full of unknowns that had to be faced as they came into view. The path to energy independence is well-known to anyone with half a brain.
So, energy independence is not an intellectual exercise, it is an excercise in national will and leadership; two areas where we are woefully short.
But an excellent leader could build the national will to drive us to energy independence. Where is that leader?
“eco-nazi”, now there’s Christian discourse if ever I have heard it.
I for one don’t like the idea of any energy system that produces toxic waste that needs to be stirred for the next 100,000 years, and some of which has a half-life of 1,000,000 years. The ancients bequeathed to us civilization, writing, art, architecture, democracy, and the faith once delivered. For all of the talk about leaving the national debt in the hands of our descendants, we are bequeathing radioactive sludge to be dealt with by generations unnumbered on a time scale unimaginable. And I’m not sure I like that idea. But apparently that makes me a fascist with only half a brain. Thank you so much for that lovely piece of Christian charity this Lent.
So, do you have a permit for that ladder? (Oh, the horror!)
As for specifically calling anyone an eco-nazi, I didn’t. That you embraced the moniker should give you pause. Seriously, take time and reflect on your defensiveness to that term. Why did you assume that I was referring to you specifically? I don’t even know you.
As for the term itself; in my opinion, there is a cohort of extremist environmentalists that view humanity as a “cancer†on the planet. Their world view is more neo-gaiaism than scientific. These self appointed guardians of the “living planet†are willing to impose all sorts of privations and restrictions on their fellow man to further their worldview, despite actual scientific evidence to the contrary.
Did you know that bananas are radioactive? It’s true! Bananas contain radioactive potassium-40. If you were to eat one banana per day for a whole year, you would have been exposed to an additional 3.6 millirems of radiation. You would have ingested radioactive potassium-40. Natural bananas are so radioactive that they can cause radiation sensors at US ports to give false alarms. For every 3 bananas you eat, you increase your risk of death by about one in one million! And don’t even get me started on peanut butter! For every 13.3 tablespoons of peanut butter you eat…well, you might as well have eaten a banana.
So, what’s my point?
Radiation levels spiked at one of the Japanese power plants that are in “melt down†at about 30 bananas per day, and then fell back to 1-2 bananas per day after two days. If you live in an average house, you get exposed to about 200 millirems of radiation from Radon gas every year. Just living in your house, you get 55 times the radiation from Radon gas than you would get from the potassium-40 in your once per day banana eating. So the peak radiation levels at the ruptured power plant gave people a radiation exposure equivalent to living in the average house for about a month.
The horror!
So, have you heard about the Ladder Holocaust? Yep, 6,000 people die every year in the United States from falling off a ladder. Kinda makes a fella think. Sort of puts it all in perspective. For some, I bet their lives flash before their eyes at the thought of climbing that household instrument of death. Me, I think I’ll pop a banana in my mouth, climb the ladder in my basement and change my mercury filled fluorescent light bulb out for a plane old outlawed incandescent bulb. Shoot…I might even skip wearing my SPF-45 sun block and go for a walk in the sun! I live on the edge, man. Don’t push me. I have run with scissors more than once and I’m not afraid to do it again.
S & T, did you have to bring up the ladder thing? Now we are going to have some Govt group going after ladders ! Oh, sorry, we already do…….OSHA.
Actually, “Alta Californian” has a reasonable point. I don’t particularly want massive amounts of plutonium sitting around either. But then I don’t particularly want solar panels obliterating hundreds of square miles of wildlife habitat with the possibility of brownouts with every flash flood because the footings were underdesigned. Nor do I want the kind of grid instability that will be inevitable with wind power, regardless of how well-geared. Nor, despite my doubts about the greenhouse gas scare, do I particularly want the inevitable pollutants that attend the relatively inefficient burning of coal, oil and natural gas. If I had my way, the whole world would run on cold fusion. Too bad it doesn’t exist.
Thing is, we can’t get electric power without cost. Funny how a finite world works, isn’t it. The advantage of nuclear power, of course, is that it’s such an efficient means for converting mass to energy that there is really a very tiny amount of waste produced. We could store several hundred years’ worth on site at any of the nuclear plants I work for (my employer operates five units in two states) and still have room for more. If we reprocessed our waste, using the recoverable fissile material, we could shrink the amount roughly tenfold.
But then, there’s always the danger of something like the ongoing difficulties in Japan. Frankly, I’m appalled that apparently these guys didn’t design for a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami. I should have thought this an obvious Design Basis Accident, particularly after the 2006 event. But then, likely they didn’t expect to have discharged fuel from one of the other units in the Spent Fuel Pool, making that cooling source unavailable nor that the loss of offsite power would be quite so devastating and long-term. I’m not surprised at the amount of doomsday speculation going on, as annoyingly ill-informed and over-the-top as much of it is. But then, on the whole, the media is handling things much better than they did back during TMI. We’ll need to pray for these people, see how things shake out – hopefully, Daichi Unit 2 isn’t as badly damaged as feared – and look over our options going forward, remembering, as noted above, that it is a limited world that God gave us. And do all we can to help the good people of Japan clean up.
No, Sick and Tired that doesn’t give me pause, because all of your analogies are inapt. Climbing a ladder hurts only you, and no one else, and only for a short while. Eating a banana confers a small amount of radiation only to you, and no one else, and only for a short while. In Japan 100,000 people may have to flee the effects of material that will be dangerous for 100,000 years. And yes, there are rabid environmentalists who believe that humanity is the biggest blight upon the planet, but they are a minority, and until they try to seize power in a coup d’etat, purge those they consider to their inferiors, and start sending people to death camps your insinuation of National Socialism is not appropriate or accurate.
No, I don’t take it personally, but I do object to baseless and inflammatory rhetoric. Every time we call our political opponents totalitarian tyrants (be it the right calling Obama a dictator, the left calling Bush one, the Wisconsin unions calling Walker an American Mubarak, or what-have-you) it makes us that less effective when we call Muammar Qaddafi one. I am also bemused that you thought I had “embraced the moniker” as if you’ve never heard of sarcasm. Oh, that’s right, understanding sarcasm involves a grasp of nuance, and you’re sick and tired of nuance. Far better for the world to be black and white and served straight up, that would certainly make life easier.
Daniel Muth, now your argument is the more compelling. You do set up something of a straw man; how about solar on every rooftop, and placed in the desert in a more sensitive fashion, with better designed footings, to be combined with wind where appropriate, and geothermal where appropriate. You are clearly more knowledgeable about nuclear technology than I am, and perhaps you are right that increased efficiency, safety protocols and waste reprocessing make nuclear power worthwhile. But I think that we should admit that some of the concerns about it are genuine and reasonable, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand by the likes of Sick and Tired of Nuance.
“Alta” – Fair enough. I alas am on my way out the door for another issue and haven’t time to spend. My point is that every form of energy technology – and I mean EVERY form of energy technology – comes at a price. You cannot and will not get something for nothing. Generally speaking, nuclear comes in for the kind and weight of criticism that it has because it [i]actualy exists[/i]. Solar will have its issues, whether in the form of underdesigned footings against flash floods or unanticipated maintenance expenses or repeated manufacturer recalls for rooftop units, or what have you. Too much of this discussion seems to operate under the assumption that we can move into fantasyland once the next form of technology comes available. We won’t. Don’t expect it. If you’re going to debate energy technologies, make real-world assumptions. Take your own advice and avoid straw men, whether of a solar utopian or nuclear dystopian kind. You won’t do yourself or your movement any good assuming that because existing technology sucks, something on the drawing board won’t. And that goes equally well for Pebble Beds as for rooftop solar as for that gawdawful eyesore the wind turbine. Best regards – DWM
Daniel, I’m not involved in any movement, I merely have an unsettled personal opinion. But the point you have made about realism is well and truly taken. I have an entirely unsubstantiated feeling in my gut that our civilization is capable of something better than we are seeing now. No utopia, at least until the Lord returns and brings to fullness His New Creation, but something better. Until we see that, I guess we’re stuck with what he have, but we don’t have to like it. Thanks for taking the time you have for this discussion.
“Alta Californian” – I honestly think doubts are called for. If latter-day Liberals had half the doubt about birth control technology that they express with regard to nuclear energy, the poor in this society would be ten times better off. The sexual revolution, founded as it is on inexcusably rosy assumptions regarding the technology of rubbers and the like, has destroyed more impoverished lives than all the robber barons in history combined. Doubts are called for with respect to any technology. No, nuclear fission is in fact no panacea and only a fool would claim it to be so. And only a monumental fool would refuse to take even small amounts of ionizing radiation seriously. But then that’s why we design these things with four-foot thick containment structures. And even when you do your homework and are careful and take reasonable precautions (as the Soviets didn’t at Chernobyl – a positive moderator coefficient and no containment structure is a deadly combination only an idiot would rely on which is exactly what those knuckleheads did) bad things can still happen, as we’re now seeing in Japan. All the indications are that God designed this as a dangerous world as well as a limited one.
I’d like to think we could do better but what would better look like? To be honest, I’m far from convinced that it’s going to look like wind turbines, solar panels or geothermal, though I readily concede that some combination of these may be able to help. Do we really know the consequences of diverting the sun’s energy from what it usually does to do something else? Can rooftop units be combined in a meaningful way to provide a significant amount of electrical power without project-killing line and/or conversion losses? How do the inevitable maintenance and spare/replacement part issues get dealt with and will these costs undercut the project? I honestly don’t know and haven’t looked into the matter. I can’t see a dispursed solar collection system being more efficient in terms of maintenance and operation than a centralized one and thus far these tend to remain prohibitively expensive. And this doesn’t even take into account night time energy needs, snow removal, etc.
My understanding of the problems with wind is that they begin with the inconstancy of the wind itself. It is a tricky matter to gear the turbine such that it nets some semblance of a constant electrical output. Too much wind energy input has in the past tended to destabilize the electric grid. In addition to which, frankly, I’d rather not have to look at the blasted things.
Nuclear is dangerous. No question about it. As I say above, the advantage it has is the efficiency with which it converts mass to energy, far outpacing all other forms of combustion save, at least theoretically, fusion. One of the main difficulties with this latter, apart from reaching break-even in terms of energy output, is converting the energy to electricity. You don’t boil water with a several thousand degree C plasma. I’m not sure what you do. And no, I can’t think that a containment breach in a fusion reactor would be a particularly pretty or comforting sight. But the matter is moot until they reach break even and I’m not sure they will any time soon. Or ever.
Oh, and geothermal tends to be filthy. Plutonium is pretty nasty stuff, but at least it [i]has[/i] a half life. Arsenic, for instance, which comes out of the ground and has some kind of involvement in just about any of the technologies mentioned (whether in the cement, silicon, fly ash, or what have you) stays extremely dangerous forever. Pleasant thought, huh? Again, we have to pay for every form of technology we use – which doesn’t mean that they don’t come with advantages that often or even generally outweigh their disadvantages. Otherwise we shouldn’t bother.
But a healthy skepticism is called for. Frankly, I’m a skeptic. Granted, one with a nuclear engineering degree and a lot of years in this business. I still think that on the whole nuclear technology, precisely because of the precautions and heavy regulation involved (how many other technologies could turn a profit with this much oversight?), is a good choice for the future, but I understand other people coming to a different conclusion. As long as you’re being as fair as you can be in your assessments, more power to you. All the best to you – DWM
“In Japan 100,000 people may have to flee the effects of material that will be dangerous for 100,000 years.”
Yeah…hmm…you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two cities that had atmomic detonations overhead, both have people living normal lives in them (well, at least prior to the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami)?
“Today, the background radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the same as the average amount of natural radiation present anywhere on Earth. It is not enough to affect human health.”
Source: http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/kids/KPSH_E/question_box/question12.html
Maybe, just maybe, things aren’t quite as dire as you seem to believe. There is something known as “dispersion” that seems to mitigate the effects of pollutants…even radioactive pollutants.
As for “eco-nazis”…sorry you got your knickers in a twist, but anyone that advocates the death of mankind in order to save “mother earth” from the “cancer” or “virus” of humanity is an eco-nazi in my estimation. In fact, folks that advocate government control of all carbon emissions in the name of saving the planet from climate change, and begin their international meetings with an invocation to the Mayan jaguar goddess Ixchel, and then plan ways to tax the world into submission to their carbon schemes, qualify as “eco-nazis” in my book. So, it’s good to hear that you were just having me on and that you do not really consider yourself to be one.
I’m sorry that you didn’t consider the Banana Equivalent Dose (BED) concept apt. Some folks think it is a pretty good way to get a handle on the relative dangers of radiation.
http://www.ehs.unr.edu/Documents/RadSafety.pdf
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N56/yost.html
I thought that if folks like the University of Nevada Reno used it as an apt reference point in their Radiation Safety Manual for their staff and employees, that it might be a useful way of understanding what we are hearing about radiation and the reactor problems in Japan. Shoot, the folks at MIT’s school paper thought it was a pretty good way to get a handle on radiation issues, too. I’m sorry that you didn’t find the concept of putting the dangers of radiation into perspective by comparing such exposures with the radiation levels found in bananas to be an apt one.