Quote:
Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
Speaking of Fukushima, I did some back of the envelope calculations on what if Fukushima produced oil rather than neutrons, based on the capacity of Fukushima and the daily spillage from the Deepwater Horizon the resulting spill would have been something like 60 times worse than the Macondo blowout (assuming that plutonium is as dangerous to the environment as crude oil, which it is not).
I found this to be interesting bedtime reading.
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You're preaching to the choir, TLAM
I view nuclear power as a necessary evil, if and when we manage to create another forum of power which generates enough energy to replace nuclear power, I will be very happy to see the back of nuclear power stations. Not because of the possibility of radiation leakage, but the problem of dealing with the waste and the length of time it takes to fully decomission an NPP. When you build a nuclear power plant, you're making a decision that will affect your children, their children and their childrens children, depending on how long it takes for the site to break down its radiation. Until that day, well, which is worse, a high CO2 producing coal plant that can screw the whole planet in enough numbers, or an NPP that can only generally screw a small portion of the planet.
In regards to Fukushima, well, it and Chernobyl share a lot in the fact that in order for it to happen, every single thing that could go wrong, went wrong. There was also the question of incompetent management, particularly in TEPCO, who brought in western experts to get ideas from them about how to increase the reactors safety...and then ignored most of what the experts said. Thus the whole distribution point for the reactor systems was routed through a point which was if not on sea level then damn near it. Once the sea walls were breached, well, that was that.
Not that I think that our designs in Europe are perfect, certainly there are a lot of things that could go wrong with our reactors, but like Chernobyl, they'd ALL have to go wrong at the same time for any major release of radiation. Smaller releases of radiation...yeah...they happen a lot, too often IMHO, but they've got monitoring stations on their monitoring stations so aside from standard laziness and incompetence most of these leaks are picked up on quickly and dealt with. Most of the time:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...e-nuclearpower
Still, you can't spend all of your time worrying about it, particularly when you see it nearly every day. I once did spend all my time worrying about it...didn't do me any good.
