(04-20-2010 03:24 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Because I'm honest. There's been a shitload of accidents. Most haven't released radiation outside of a containment unit. But quite a few have. You only need to be wrong ONCE to have another Chernobyl is my point. And the idea that nuclear accidents don't happen that often is false. It's just that backup systems keep them from getting out of hand. But again ... you just need the backup system to be wrong once (or the operators controlling it for that matter) and you get utter devastation.

Just like car accidents happen all the time and most are minor fender benders, reactor accidents, however often, by far and away are mostly fender benders. But about 40,000, in the US alone, die in auto accidents. That's every year. Millions die every year because of another un-justifiable fear, the DDT ban. More Than 100,000 people die every year in the U.S. because of hospital acquired infections. Around 100 in the US die from lightning strikes. Every year.

No matter how bad it could be, the worst nuclear accident imaginable just wouldn't come close to so many other things we just accept and live with every day.

I have an irrational fear of heights. I don't want to ban skyscrapers. I just avoid them. At least windows in them. There have been many men who have died building them. I don't know how many but I'll go out on a limb and say far,far,far,far,far,far, ahhh... far,far,far,far more than all the nuclear accidents ever. They have even been knocked to the ground. The good that comes from them is still deemed by, oh, I don't know,... everybody, that we continue to build them.

You have an irrational fear of nuclear power plants. Avoid them.

(04-20-2010 05:19 PM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  We all eagerly await your example of a state / small country that was wiped off the map by a nuclear accident.

Or perhaps you could outline in detail a scenario where either a small state, say Delaware, or a small country, say Switzerland, is vaporized by a modern, state run nuclear facility accident. No more examples from 1956 or Russian examples from the mid 1980's.'

Translation: Give me an example ... and you can't use the glaringly obvious one that does exactly what you claim. *rolleyes*

Quote:In fact, the vast majority of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_alienation are now considered safe for settlement and economic activity.

Yea ... so long as you, you know, don't go digging. Laying pipes. Anything that removes current overgrowth to get to what was top soil during the accident. Keep a Geiger counter on you at all times. Don't go near any buildings or vehicles or infrastructure that was around at the time as it soaked up radiation like a sponge. In summary: if you're a complete moron.

Quote:Just 20 years after the worst nuclear accident in human history and things are considered safe. And this safety is without any sort of large scale, Westernized clean-up.

Yesssssss because when I think of clean and efficient and total clean up, I think of New Orleans after Katrina. What a fine job the West has done! Mind you the current sarcophagus is in disrepair and threatens to leak another plume of radiation. Yes it's the very picture of safety in highly radioactive long half life material:



Mind you what's in there will remain highly radioactive -- in lethal doses -- for 10's of thousands of years. So it remains a perpetual threat of radioactivity as mother nature continues to eat away at the sarcophagus relentlessly over time.

(04-20-2010 12:55 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Safer? Damn near everything.

....... hydroelectric along rivers,

I did a quick search but couldn't find anything but I'm wondering how many people have died from dam collapses since the days we started building them? And should we stop building them and get rid of the ones we have because they "might" fail? China's Three Gorges dam has displaced over a million people and who knows how many would perish if it failed.

GTS, if you take away everything that could potentially cause people to die we'd have nothing and that includes our children and pets.

(04-20-2010 09:43 PM)smn1256 Wrote:  

(04-20-2010 12:55 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  Safer? Damn near everything.

....... hydroelectric along rivers,

I did a quick search but couldn't find anything but I'm wondering how many people have died from dam collapses since the days we started building them? And should we stop building them and get rid of the ones we have because they "might" fail? China's Three Gorges dam has displaced over a million people and who knows how many would perish if it failed.

GTS, if you take away everything that could potentially cause people to die we'd have nothing and that includes our children and pets.

If all the biggest dams in the world simultaneously collapsed, the land around them would be back to normal -- save vegetation regrowth -- in a year. Compare that to the centuries long devistation from a nuclear disaster. When the hydroelectric dam is no longer operational, it simply leaves a relic. When a nuclear reactor is no longer operational, it leaves behind highly radioactive waste that will remain lethal for 10's of thousands of years.

No contest.

(04-20-2010 10:02 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  If all the biggest dams in the world simultaneously collapsed, the land around them would be back to normal -- save vegetation regrowth -- in a year.

Yeah, but it'd suck to be downstream.

Don't we have bubbleheads on here that are suppose to be experts in nuclear power? I know the Navy has been using the stuff essentially issue free for nearly 6 decades, and people continue to feel safe enough to work on them to this day (though why you'd want to spend 6 months underwater in a steel tube is a separate DADT issue).

(04-19-2010 03:56 PM)RobertN Wrote:  

(04-19-2010 03:48 PM)Rebel Wrote:  

(04-19-2010 03:45 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  This is why nuclear should be the last option.

We have better technology than the Russians.

I hope you are close to the new nuke plant being built in Georgia.

Augusta is the closest metropolitan area to both the Savannah River Site Nuclear experiment and development center and Plant Vogtle, which will eventually have 4 reactors. It has two now and has had no issues since it was built in the 80's. SRS built nuclear missiles since the early 50's, again, with no major accidents. They're both within 25 miles of Augusta and I feel safer than you should in Chicago.

Nuclear Aircraft Carriers and Nuclear Surface Fleet and Nuclear Submarine Fleet have not had any Deaths contributed to the Nuclear operation. Nuclear Power is safe. No question, the debate is over, except for the flower-children. . LOL

You know nuclear power is good when the environmentalists are in favor of it.

Im more concerned about the long term storage of nuclear waste than I am about the possibility of a meltdown.

(04-23-2010 09:45 AM)niuhuskie84 Wrote:  Im more concerned about the long term storage of nuclear waste than I am about the possibility of a meltdown.

It's all part of the same problem to me. The consequences of released radiation -- regardless of how or how small the risk -- makes it undesirable. I've already gone through at length on this forum how one half life alone of "used" nuclear reactor material exceeds the duration of recorded history. If the Egyptians used nuclear reactors, their spent fuel would just now be approaching one half of one half life. How much damage would happen if a buried nuclear waste container leaked its contents into the water table and contaminated a major aquifer? While Kev may not fear a meltdown in Savannah ... perhaps he should worry about contamination to his drinking water given that Barnwell County, South Carolina is the largest nuclear waste dump in the continental US. Containment method? A big steel barrel full of steel barrels. Buried. If you're going to store it at least store it where you can visually inspect the containment vessel and take a Geiger counter up to it FFS.

(04-19-2010 06:20 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(04-19-2010 04:12 PM)SouthGAEagle Wrote:  

(04-19-2010 04:04 PM)DrTorch Wrote:  

(04-19-2010 03:48 PM)Rebel Wrote:  

(04-19-2010 03:45 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  This is why nuclear should be the last option.

We have better technology than the Russians.

I'm also pretty sure we don't turn off the safety mechanisms for testing.

Bingo.

Even if the risk is 0.00000001% ... the cost of failure is incredibly high. History is a litany of man getting sh*t dead wrong. I prefer to err on the side of caution -- regardless of how small the percentage is.

Oh -- and uh -- Three Mile Island.

(04-20-2010 03:02 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(04-20-2010 02:33 PM)Paul M Wrote:  Comparing the virtually nil to everyday occurrences is insanity.

Millions die every year from lack of water. Food. Negligence. Nuclear power plants, zip, nada, zilch.

Military Nuclear Accidents, Worldwide: 65+
Civilian Nuclear Accidents, Wordwide: 20+

United States civilian area alone ......

October 5, 1966 — Monroe, Michigan, United States - Partial meltdown
A sodium cooling system malfunction caused a partial meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration nuclear breeder reactor (Enrico Fermi-1 fast breeder reactor). The accident was attributed to a zirconium fragment that obstructed a flow-guide in the sodium cooling system. Two of the 105 fuel assemblies melted during the incident, but no contamination was recorded outside the containment vessel.

March 28, 1979 — INES Level 5 - Middletown, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, United States - Partial meltdown
Equipment failures and worker mistakes contributed to a loss of coolant and a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station 15 km (9 miles) southeast of Harrisburg. While the reactor was extensively damaged on-site radiation exposure was under 100 millirems (less than annual exposure due to natural sources). Area residents received a smaller exposure of 1 millirem (10 µSv), or about 1/3 the dose from eating a banana per day for one year. There were no fatalities. Follow up radiological studies predict between zero and one long-term cancer fatality.

November 2005 — Braidwood, Illinois, United States - Nuclear material leak
Tritium contamination of groundwater was discovered at Exelon's Braidwood station. Groundwater off site remains within safe drinking standards though the NRC is requiring the plant to correct any problems related to the release.

March 6, 2006 — Erwin, Tennessee, United States - Nuclear material leak
Thirty-five liters of a highly enriched uranium solution leaked during transfer into a lab at Nuclear Fuel Services Erwin Plant. The incident caused a seven-month shutdown. A required public hearing on the licensing of the plant was not held due to the absence of public notification.

All you need to be is wrong once, and entire states become ghost towns.

Do we really need to compare the incident of nuclear accidents to the incidents of oil and gas accidents which happen pretty much every week... killing people... spoiling water... ruining land... Three Mile Island resulted in nothing... merely "fear". Chernobyl was a disaster due to stupidity. How about Exxon Valdez? This weeks incident that killed people... One event over decades of GLOBAL Nuclear use, including in battle zones.

(04-23-2010 10:40 AM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Do we really need to compare the incident of nuclear accidents to the incidents of oil and gas accidents which happen pretty much every week... killing people... spoiling water... ruining land... Three Mile Island resulted in nothing... merely "fear". Chernobyl was a disaster due to stupidity. How about Exxon Valdez? This weeks incident that killed people... One event over decades of GLOBAL Nuclear use, including in battle zones.

Giving you a generous benefit of the doubt --- what about the waste?

IMHO, the only problematic aspect of nuclear waste management is the possibility that plutonium may fall into the wrong hands. As I understand it, nuclear reprocessing as done by the Indians renders a product that cannot be weaponized.

The half-life canard is fear-mongering. If something has a long half-life, it doesn't give out a lot of radiation. The stuff that is most dangerous in terms of radiation also decays fairly quickly. An often-repeated statistic is that within 40 years, the amount of radiation given off by nuclear waste is reduced by 99%. The radiation given off by Plutonium can be blocked by a sheet of paper. The major concern with long-term storage of waste is to not allow it into the food chain where it can be ingested.

Nuclear waste has been stored underground for long periods of time without being an environmental or evolutionary disaster.

(04-23-2010 10:54 AM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(04-23-2010 10:40 AM)Hambone10 Wrote:  Do we really need to compare the incident of nuclear accidents to the incidents of oil and gas accidents which happen pretty much every week... killing people... spoiling water... ruining land... Three Mile Island resulted in nothing... merely "fear". Chernobyl was a disaster due to stupidity. How about Exxon Valdez? This weeks incident that killed people... One event over decades of GLOBAL Nuclear use, including in battle zones.

Giving you a generous benefit of the doubt --- what about the waste?

Deferring to I-45's comments...

While there is certainly anecdotal evidence... is there any evidence that this is any worse than bio-medical waste? Oilfield slurry waste, much less the processing of fuels/oil to generate power.

It's a problem, I agree... but what isn't? We need to be realistic about the amount of waste we're talking about versus the amount of energy were producing/replacing. The world is going to have this nuclear waste whether or not we generate any nuclear power. I'd prefer that we have a vested and significant interest in finding a solution.

(04-23-2010 11:11 AM)I45owl Wrote:  An often-repeated statistic is that within 40 years, the amount of radiation given off by nuclear waste is reduced by 99%.

Proof?

as an aside... GTS... I am in NO way trying to dismiss your concerns. They are not only real, but reasonable. I'm just trying to put them into the context of our alternatives. IMO, the benifits outweigh the risks, ESPECIALLY in that some of the risks you talk about generally exist globally whether or not we produce any. I believe we do a better job than many places of ensuring safety, and can build upon a pretty good global track record.


This from Wiki

The back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, mostly spent fuel rods, contains fission products that emit beta and gamma radiation, and actinides that emit alpha particles, such as uranium-234, neptunium-237, plutonium-238 and americium-241, and even sometimes some neutron emitters such as californium (Cf). These isotopes are formed in nuclear reactors.

It is important to distinguish the processing of uranium to make fuel from the reprocessing of used fuel. Used fuel contains the highly radioactive products of fission (see high level waste below). Many of these are neutron absorbers, called neutron poisons in this context. These eventually build up to a level where they absorb so many neutrons that the chain reaction stops, even with the control rods completely removed. At that point the fuel has to be replaced in the reactor with fresh fuel, even though there is still a substantial quantity of uranium-235 and plutonium present. In the United States, this used fuel is stored, while in countries such as Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Japan and India, the fuel is reprocessed to remove the fission products, and the fuel can then be re-used. This reprocessing involves handling highly radioactive materials, and the fission products removed from the fuel are a concentrated form of high-level waste as are the chemicals used in the process. While these countries reprocess the fuel carrying out single plutonium cycles, India is the only country in the world known to be planning multiple plutonium recycling schemes.[7]. This has two distinct advantages, the reprocessed fuel is rendered unusable for weapons development, and high fuel efficiency can be achieved. For their plutonium generating reactors, India has realized a burn-up almost four times as high as the typical fuel efficiency of normal commercial nuclear reactors.[7]

Claims exist that the problems of nuclear waste do not come anywhere close to approaching the problems of fossil fuel waste.[8][9] A 2004 article from the BBC states: "The World Health Organization (WHO) says 3 million people are killed worldwide by outdoor air pollution annually from vehicles and industrial emissions, and 1.6 million indoors through using solid fuel."[10] In the U.S. alone, fossil fuel waste has been linked to the death of 20,000 people each year.[11] A coal power plant releases 100 times as much radiation as a nuclear power plant of the same wattage.[12] It is estimated that during 1982, US coal burning released 155 times as much radioactivity into the atmosphere as the Three Mile Island accident.[13] We have an example in nature to suggest that final disposal of high-level wastes underground is safe. Two billion years ago at Oklo in Gabon, West Africa, chain reactions started spontaneously in concentrated deposits of uranium ore. These natural nuclear fission reactors continued operating for hundreds of thousands of years forming plutonium and all the highly radioactive waste products created today in a nuclear power reactor. Despite the existence at the time of large quantities of water in the area, these materials stayed where they were formed and eventually decayed into non-radioactive elements. (http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/wast.htm Nov 2007)

The World Nuclear Association provides a comparison of deaths due to accidents among different forms of energy production. In their comparison, deaths per TW-yr of electricity produced from 1970 to 1992 are quoted as 885 for hydropower, 342 for coal, 85 for natural gas, and 8 for nuclear.[14]

(04-23-2010 11:11 AM)I45owl Wrote:  Nuclear waste has been stored underground for long periods of time without being an environmental or evolutionary disaster.

Since when is 40 or 50 years in the context of nuclear radiation considered "long"?

We are talking about millenia here.

(04-23-2010 12:39 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote:  

(04-23-2010 11:11 AM)I45owl Wrote:  An often-repeated statistic is that within 40 years, the amount of radiation given off by nuclear waste is reduced by 99%.

Proof?

Nuclear reprocessing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_rep...#Economics Wrote:The relative economics of reprocessing-waste disposal and interim storage-direct disposal has been the focus of much debate over the past ten years. Studies[which?] have modeled the total fuel cycle costs of a reprocessing-recycling system based on one-time recycling of plutonium in existing thermal reactors (as opposed to the proposed fast breeder reactor cycle) and compare this to the total costs of an open fuel cycle with direct disposal. The range of results produced by these studies is very wide, but all are agreed that under current (2005) economic conditions the reprocessing-recycle option is the more costly.

If reprocessing is undertaken only to reduce the radioactivity level of spent fuel it should be taken into account that spent nuclear fuel becomes less radioactive over time. After 40 years its radioactivity drops by 99.9%,[27] though it still takes over a thousand years for the level of radioactivity to approach that of natural uranium.[28] However the level of transuranic elements, including plutonium-239, remains high for over 100,000 years, so if not reused as nuclear fuel, then those elements need secure disposal because of nuclear proliferation reasons as well as radiation hazard.

When you are talking about reaching the level of natural uranium, you are talking about approaching the radioactivity level of dirt.

If there is one thing to remember, it is this:

Radioactivity and Radiation

http://web.ead.anl.gov/uranium/guide/uco.../index.cfm Wrote:Because radioactivity is a measure of the rate at which a radionuclide decays (for example, decays per second), the longer the half-life of a radionuclide, the less radioactive it is for a given mass.

The half life of iron is > 3.1×10^22 years

Lesson - don't conflate concerns about half-life and radioactivity in the same discussion (at least be careful with it, and/or view such claims skeptically).

(04-23-2010 02:01 PM)niuhuskie84 Wrote:  

(04-23-2010 11:11 AM)I45owl Wrote:  Nuclear waste has been stored underground for long periods of time without being an environmental or evolutionary disaster.

Since when is 40 or 50 years in the context of nuclear radiation considered "long"?

We are talking about millenia here.

See the comments above about the Oklo reactor. These are heavy elements for the most part and are unlikely to wash away or blow away in the wind, even in the absence of hardened containers as envisioned by Yucca Mountain.

People are concerned about leaving nuclear waste sitting on-site in barrels for 40 years, but, as above, that may be a very reasonable short-term waste management strategy.

The Indian-style reprocessing has a great deal of potential - the problem with it is that plutonium is one of the intermediate by-products and even a 40-50 year lifetime of a facility is an eternity in terms of political considerations (consider the changes in Germany, Japan, Iran, Russia in the last 100 years). Will the government of India be as benign 40 years ago as it is now?

Whether nuclear power is economically viable with reasonable scale, regulatory, waste management considerations is a valid question, and I am somewhat uncertain about the answer there.