phoenix_ca

Which is why you should do thorough background checks on people before you hand them the gun. I don't find it hard to imagine that there are people who wouldn't manage a nuclear power plant properly. What in my many previous posts didn't make that clear? From the outset I've said that policy is an important part of nuclear power management, and if you screw it up, you end-up with situations like Fukushima-Daiichi. That is exactly not the point I was making. The point was that Canada has enemies just like every other nation on the Earth, not that it's a particularly menacing country. And yes, there are people who want to kill us too. What a cheerful world. So, you design the important stuff like reactors to deal with it, and pay your security services enough to stop these sorts of things. This is well off-topic but that isn't really true either. We're a nation that sells natural resources. We still sell asbestos to India, knowing that they'll use it without proper safeguards. We sell bitumen to whomever will take it, even though it's literally ruining hundreds (even thousands) of square kilometres by turning it into a toxic wasteland. And on top of all that, our armed forces, though small, are just as ready to kill as the next country's. To be honest, CANDU reactor designs are one of the few things we actually demonstrate responsibility in how we sell. Yes. Really. Hence all the links. I'm sure that'd be interesting, because it's exactly the opposite of what the designers and builders of nuclear power facilities explicitly claim.

I'll grant you that the material is dangerous, and yes, you'd be pretty dumb to just shuttle it all over the place, but the act itself can be made quite safe.

It's usable, in theory. In practice, it's usually easier to start with natural uranium and enrich that instead. As for long term storage, the USA already built a solution. Yucca Mountain. And then people made such a huge stink about storing waste at all, because nuclear waste is so bad and evil and moving it would be bad. They hate the waste so much they'd rather not have any place to store it properly and then glower at nuclear proponents and yammer about waste storage. It boggles the mind. (And don't anyone start with the "shipping is dangerous" bit. We build shipping casks for nuclear fuel that can resist explosions, kerosene fire for hours, and even something as crazy as a train ramming right into it. A rocket-propelled train.)

$5.8 trillion. Which is specifically referred to in that article as having a lot of fudge added to it. So, yes, and you confirmed it for me. And what about all the things we still don't understand about wind power, or hydroelectric, or solar? Human knowledge is incomplete; that isn't an argument against using what we have That's a tautology. "Something is safe until it isn't safe." Well, that's nice, but meaningless. No they aren't, but as I've said before, they get retrofitted with better equipment as time goes on. Chernobyl prompted the Soviet Union to retrofit all of their RBMK reactors with better safety systems and modifications that made them all much safer. Not perfect, but better than leaving them with the original design. Containment vessels are purpose-built to withstand that sort of attack (a missile, or plane). As for some sort of "rogue employee", that has to be one of the most patently absurd notions I've heard regarding nuclear power. One person, even an employee, would be hard-pressed to cause a meltdown in a reactor without anyone noticing. On top of that, lets say that this actually did come to pass. Well whoop-dee-doo, they caused a meltdown. Reactors are designed to deal with them. Pump water in, cool it, done. You can't just tinker around with a reactor a bit and somehow make it explode. And again you quoted so that the meaning was lost. I thought this would be clear. This is an illustration of just how broken a line of thinking that was. You can't say "that device has never had an accident, therefore it's 100% safe". Nor can you say "I used that device once, and had an accident, therefore it's 100% prone to failure". That's not even close to how probability works. And as I said in my original post, and at great length, that article conflates different reactors, even ones that are very different in design and regulatory oversight as if they were all the same. Back to your post: Really? We've had a major accident? I certainly haven't heard of it. CANDU reactors have an exemplary safety record, and so far that's even regardless of which country they're being operated in. Yeah no. Canada's a big place, and has more than enough room for nature to be a pain-in-the-ass: Volcanoes in Canada Recent Earthquakes Tornadoes Tsunamis (Very rare, but known to happen, and thus is part of Emergency Preparedness in BC) Hurricanes As part of basic operation of our nuclear facilities, they must be prepared to deal with all of those risks. The reactors in Ontario are prepared to deal with a severe earthquake, even though the area is very unlikely to see a severe enough earthquake to damage any of them, or at least within our lifetimes. And as I've said before, this is par for the course for good management of nuclear power. If you screw-up your policy, you are doing it wrong. Ohhhh, yes we do; we're part of NATO. We might be slightly less hated than the Americans by some groups, but there are plenty of countries that don't like us, and when it comes to Islamic extremists, there's no distinction between us and the USA beyond "it's easier to get into the USA if you spend time in Canada first". During the Cold War, it was commonplace for Soviet aircraft to enter Canadian airspace and prompt us to intercept them. And they're still doing it today, even if it's a little less common. Already have, and if I had argued that nuclear power is perfectly safe no matter who is running it, you'd have a point, but I didn't, and I've specifically said many times that adequate policy is a requirement for safe use of nuclear power. Given this, I think its absurd to suggest that nations fully capable of maintaining the required amount of security and safety should hamper themselves.

You meant to say you "wouldn't" live near a nuclear power plant, right peadar?

Probably, yes.

If you read the article carefully, it sounds like that huge estimation had a massive amount of fudge factor in it. A kind of "what's the worst possible scenario we can imagine, and then assume all of the estimations of safety are lying and add a bunch to that number". As to the article itself, it has it's own major failing: This is very poorly thought-out; it's in fact hasty generalization with a nice disguise. This assessment of probability makes the critical mistake of lumping all nuclear fission reactors together, regardless of country of operation, country of origin, and the design itself. Chernobyl can actually be more-or-less written-out of safety assessments of current nuclear facilities. We learned from it that certain types of graphite-moderated reactors are bad, bad news, and on top of that, that any reactor with a positive void coefficient is really, ultra bad design (positive void coefficient means that when coolant boils in the reactor, there is an increase in reactivity, which makes the entire design prone to run-away operation and meltdown; a cornerstone of reactor design is having a negative void coefficient, or if you have a positive void coefficient, you have extremely robust quick-acting passive safety systems to accommodate it). Anyway, back to the generalization. I could say, with the very same logic, "There are currently 19 CANDU reactors in Canada, plus 5 decommissioned reactors, making for a total of 24. None of those reactors has ever had a meltdown. Therefore, the probability of a Canadian-owned CANDU reactor having a meltdown is zero." An incredibly simplistic and utterly worthless bit of drivel, just like that writer's attempt to assess probability. We can and should instead take a far more nuanced approach to assessing risk. What type of reactor is it? Has that particular type of reactor had failures in the past? How would such a reactor behave in a meltdown situation? (Not to toot my own country's horn overmuch but if you actually ask all those questions, you'll find that CANDU designs are remarkably safe and not prone to uncontrolled reactions at all. In a worst-case scenario the heavy water moderator in the calandria will evaporate, and while the core would be irreparably damaged by that point, the fuel isn't critical in light water, so pumping light water in to cool the reactor wouldn't positively effect criticality. This is actually one of the major problems that light water moderated reactors have, in that the fuel is critical in the water you're desperately trying to pump into the reactor to cool it, leading to something akin to a vicious tug-of-war.) The point I'm trying to make here is that saying that all nuclear fission designs are inherently unsafe based on two cases of really badly designed reactors is off-base. What that should be is more of a cautionary piece of data of what not to do. Strict oversight and public inspection of nuclear facilities is an absolute must. I'm practically beating a dead horse here, but Fukushima-Daiichi was what we get for having terrible regulation of nuclear facilities, and on top of that, choosing the wrong types of nuclear reactors because the other ones on offer aren't American enough. I'd use it as an argument for tighter regulation, not using light water as a moderator, and actually keeping your bloody containment facility up to scratch. The better reactors we've made all have a fall-back "oh hell everything went wrong" setup where pressure can be released in an orderly manner from the containment building while passing over activated charcoal filters to remove most of the radioactive material from the air before its released into the environment. Pretty simple lesson. Fission can be dangerous, treat with care. And build a proper containment building for pity's sake or you'll end-up just like Japan and Ukraine. ... Man, all that and I didn't even get to the whole "thorium salts will probably be even safer, since the thorium isn't even critical with itself" bit.

Oh yeah, sure, that's not going to make anyone defensive, is it? That said, you finally provided source material we can look at. Yay! Now we all get to read. Aka I'll get back to you later.

That's not how radiation sickness works. You either die because too many cells were killed and your body couldn't repair the damage, or you suffer through it and live because your body was able to repair the damage, albeit with an increased risk of cancer.

Indeed. Photosynthesis is pretty amazing, but boy oh boy is it ever over-designed (settle down, it's just an expression; evolution made this mess), and does some astoundingly stupid and inefficient things: "Complicated, inefficient, and confusing." A rather apt statement. The case in point is RuBisCo, which is just ridiculously bad at what its supposed to do. That and you'll see at the end just how remarkably little energy actually gets to leave the cycle and go do something useful. O.o Plants are amazing, because they work, despite what would be the engineering equivalent of building a bridge out of chocolate.

Aye, looking at the WP page about them the chimney solar plants are expected to get all of 200MW for something on the order of a 1,000m tower (I just...WHAT? That's a megaproject in-and-of-iteself, and only the Kingdom Tower is planned to reach such a height) and a 7km diameter around. That's one hell of an aviation hazard, which would necessitate restrictions on airspace (very much like how we deal with other tall buildings and mountains), along with a gigantic land footprint. For a measly 200MW. Plop a dozen nuclear reactors down in a fraction of that space and you could output 12GW of power. I certainly can't see China springing for that any time soon. These ideas about better storage tech are nice and all, but they don't exist yet. Cars being used as storage requires people to actually have electric cars in the first place and for so many people to have them that it makes sense to use them in such a way. We aren't even close to that yet, so at best its an interesting thought experiment of what could be. Nuclear power provides piles of power right now which enables developing nations to greatly increase the quality of life of their citizens, for a significant capital investment sure, but paltry operating costs. And yes, hydroelectric can indeed be used in a base load manner. It's actually quite reliable, but you still need the geography for it, and as has been mentioned before there are some nasty environmental impacts of flooding a huge portion of land.

Of the top of my head, the first wouldn't be murder, it'd be suicide...sorta. There's another you so not really, with the big caveat that this is only true in a completely naturalistic universe. It's rather similar to the trolley car problem.

Honestly I think this is all rather a moot point. There is no conclusive evidence for any sort of "soul" that is supernatural in nature. That said, rational understanding of the process of something doesn't necessarily lead to people being okay with it. What can be demonstrated as an irrational belief can still have very real detrimental effects on a person after they know its not real. To some extent this is true for people who have "lost faith" (aka left their church/faith they were brought-up with and become an atheist); that once fervent belief can still stick its ugly head in someone's psyche later in life. Much the same goes for radiation: You can sit someone down and explain to them in great detail how radiation works and why they should or shouldn't be concerned about some particular amount of radiation, but they may still be irrationally afraid of it. Or air travel: Someone can still be abjectly afraid of travelling by air, even if they understand that it is far safer than any other means of transport. If transporters ever became an actual thing, it's anyone's guess as to how people might react. I'd suspect some would never be able to reconcile the idea of them existing, however temporarily, in a different state. We're completely used to the continuity of our existence, beginning to end, but being turned into something else for a time (or even permanently if we find a way to move consciousness to some other medium) could have some very serious psychological ramifications. Questions like "Am I still me?" In any case, the whole topic reminds me of Alpha Centauri:

It means it's subject to the weather. You said that they don't depend on weather. And furthermore...what, we're supposed to have multiple sources of base load now? Is that what you're proposing? I makes little-to-no sense to invest in multiple power sources that can all on their own provide for all the power needed for an area, when instead you can have a solid base load generation like hydroelectric or nuclear supplemented with other sources. And still, the base load question hasn't yet been answered in this thread. The most I saw was "import it from someone else". That's short-sighted and naive. For one, you'll just end-up shuffling-off the problem of base load generation to someone else, which basically amounts to "No nuclear reactors in my backyard, but yours will do fine." It also assumes that nation-states will all get along perfectly. Nuclear power (be it fission or fusion) is an efficient means for a nation to provide its own power supply. Over-dependence on neighbours is both a security risk and just general bad practice as it leaves you at the mercy of foreign powers. Just look at how much the USA is trying to get out from under the boot of foreign fossil fuel dependency, especially when it comes to Saudi Arabia. The Solar Updraft Tower is on Wikipedia, but I don't see whatever point you're trying to make. Are you saying that if it's on Wikipedia people shouldn't know about it? Or that people never know about anything outside Wikipedia? Or...something else? Very confusing, and I get the sense you're just trying to get-out a snide ad hominem.

If you're talking about hydroelectric power, like hell it doesn't depend on the weather. That water comes from precipitation deposited over a vast area, and unexpected reductions in inflow to a dam's reservoir can mean the dam needs to be run at less than max capacity (in a really bad situation, possibly even only a small fraction of capacity, or if the area has a drought, stopped entirely).

More like lack of foresight. They would've been absolutely fine had TEPCO actually followed the advisories of regulators. They didn't, and this is the result. You can't have room in these systems for people to just say "Naaaaaah, that safety feature is too expensive, and I want a fifteenth resort home to choose from."

Nah. That selection process is just playing out differently.

A neat article, which also underlines the relative cost of thorium to uranium by pointing out the difference in how much of the oxide is actually useful in fission. (I argued that before in this thread, and pointed out that thorium oxide is cheaper than uranium oxide per weight, but this fact slipped-by. >.> )

BAH! You obviously think the earth is flat. Or are and agent of OPEC. Gotta be. Clearly.

You know what they say about assumptions, right? Funny, all the other nuclear power plants on that very same coast survived. Perhaps some internal damage, but they remained intact. As I already said, Fukushima-Daiichi was mostly caused by poor policy. Safety policy is an integral part of reactor design, and cannot be divorced from the engineering of the reactor itself. Much of the damage to the Fukushima-Daiichi plant was caused not by the earthquake directly, but the resulting tsunami, and again, as I have pointed-out, this failure stems from poor policy decisions. They knew the retaining wall was too short but did not immediately rectify it. Let's try an analogy. Let's say our nuclear power plant is a car. You find out that the car has a leak in the brake system and all the hydraulic fluid is gone (the retaining wall is too short); the brakes will not work. You then drive the car anyway and crash spectacularly. What was the root cause of the crash? Was it the design of the car? No. The car was designed with brakes. It was your failure to maintain that safety system that resulted in the crash. If you look back at my arguments, I haven't made a claim that a nuclear reactor left to its own devices is safe. These power systems require both intrinsic (things inherent in the design) and extrinsic (policy) safety measures to be used safely. We retrofit them. Fun fact, Russia still uses the RBMK reactors that they've built, and so far without incident (these are the same type of reactor that caused the Chernobyl disaster). Why? Because they recognized the inherent flaws in that particular design and acted to fix those problems in their other reactors, and they are far less prone to run-away chain reactions as occurred with Chernobyl 4. And in my country we pay for healthcare, and roads, the military, and a whole host of other social programs too. The high costs of nuclear reactors come from the capital investment in building them. Once built, if managed properly, they are remarkably low-maintenance and low-cost devices. As they can run for decades, this balances out in the long-term. I vaguely recall most of my high-school calculus. I could probably integrate a function if you gave me enough time. Why do you ask? Ah, see this is the problem. I'm talking about a timescale starting at the present day. Why? For one because that's what's most relevant. How long it took for a technology to finally be developed to a level ready for practical use is immaterial to its practical applications. Let's take the history of the battery. If you go back to the very first battery, one could say that the battery has been in development for over a thousand years! Why on earth should we expect anything more to come out of battery technology in a mere decade, when it took over a thousand years just to get from the most basic voltaic cell to the rechargeable batteries we use today? I hope you can see the problem with this reasoning. Applied to fusion power, we could easily go back and say "Well, fusion requires nuclear physics. Who was paying for nuclear physics research in the 1920s? The people!" We could go all the way back to humanity's harnessing of fire if we wanted to be really ****-retentive about it. This is at least partially why it is far more practical to speak in terms of development time starting from today's available practical application (or theoretical basis when talking about theoretically sound but unproven technology like the Alcubierre Drive). Furthermore, it seems that you are conflating all potential fusion designs into one. Just like nuclear fission, fusion isn't so simple. Specifically, the designs I was referring to were polywells and dense plasma focus. These designs have the very real possibility of reaching net power output within a decade. The tokamak design, as I've said before on these forums numerous times lately, is something of a giant drain we're throwing money into. There's little to no reason to expect that the tokamak will ever produce a net energy output. Why have we been slaving over this doomed design for so long? Bad policy. The US DoE decided, against the advice of many, many experts in the field of plasma physics (including proponents of the tokamak design) to pursue the tokamak design exclusively. It was a very stupid, very narrow-minded decision that prevented other far more promising fusion designs from ever being funded to anywhere near the levels that JET and ITER now enjoy. I'm not religious. I also didn't make any allusions to heaven or magic men in the sky. This is rampant paranoia and hysteria. I made a simple statement of fact, that all we'd really need to do is create an allowance for geothermal power plants to be constructed in Yellowstone, and you proceed to conclude that I "dont care nothing about the world, the nature, the climate change". Jumping the gun, aren't we? If I didn't care about climate change, why would I even bother arguing for nuclear power? Coal is a far cheaper source of power, and if we simply deregulated it entirely we could even burn it without those pesky limestone filters. Sure, we'd probably kill entire ecosystems with acid rain, but boy is it ever cheap. Quit jumping to conclusions about other people and attack the argument, not the person. You still haven't provided credible, robust evidence that all the assessments of cost made on nuclear power are wrong (and by the way, decommissioning costs are included in honest calculations of cost). You're making a pretty extraordinary claim. Back it up with evidence. Nuclear waste is a problem, yes, but a solvable one. As I said in that very quote you're replying to: Currently unprocessed nuclear waste usually will take thousands of years to degrade. However, there are solutions that can significantly reduce the half-life of the material, as well as reduce the total volume of material that must be stored. My point was that if you want to reduce the half-life of that waste significantly, you need to transmute it. To do that, you need a reactor. Decommission all the nuclear fission reactors in the world and stop developing it entirely, and we really will be stuck with waste that will last for thousands of years.

Elemental fluorine. That alone is enough to run away, fast.

Wait what? Is the power utility completely private in the States? Up here it's still largely public.

Compared to the millions of tons of CO2 we dump into the atmosphere from fossil fuel plants every year, a few hundred thousand tonnes of radioactive material isn't so bad.

Except the CANDU design is very sensitive to fuel balancing. I've never seen any credible evidence that trying to stick any old fissile material in one of the fuel tubes would even work; in fact everything I've read on them suggests the opposite. It's more likely that it'd prevent itself and the surrounding fuel from reaching criticality. The CANDU design has very little in the way of excess reactivity. http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/Whitlock_IAEA_conf_Oct_2009.pdf Gotta love that one of the arguments against trying to use a CANDU reactor for plutonium production is that you'd probably break the refuelling machines and the reactor too. Of course, if you are still concerned, you can always email the guy. Or call. The contact info is there in the PDF.

That's a common misconception. CANDU "spent" fuel has a fraction of plutonium about one half that of an LWR. Of that, only about 60-70% is Pu-239. The target for a plutonium-based fission bomb is at least 93% Pu-239, the rest being other isotopes of plutonium. In this respect, CANDU designs have no higher proliferation risk than any LWR reactor, and given the smaller fraction of plutonium in that output fuel, practically speaking, even less. You can't use a CANDU to cook-up plutonium at any reasonable speed. Certainly not fast enough for a weapons program. You want to use other reactors for that, and indeed, eventhough India has piles of CANDU-derived reactors, they use other reactors for plutonium production.