Why are so many people opposed to nuclear energy?

[Drunkrobot]

Grand Central Terminal in New York City is made of a lot of Granite.

Granite is partly radioactive, containing traces of Uranium and Potassium. There is so much Granite in Grand Central that the radiation emitted by the structure is higher than what is legally allowed by US nuclear plants.

[lajoswinkler]

Why do they oppose it? Because they're uneducated and stupid. I honestly don't know anyone knowledgeable of nuclear power technology that is against uranium fission. It's the safest, cleanest and most plentiful source we have which could become almost renewable with heavy employment of MOX and breeder technology one day. I cringe when people talk about burying nuclear waste. It's not waste, it's precious.

There are multiple factors that make the average population fear nuclear energy:

• The potential to go really, really, really bad. Chances of that are of course astronomically small, but for the same reason people play the powerball, they don't understand probability with very large numbers. Coal plants don't blow up. Gas/oil plants might blow up but seriously, what can happen. But in the rare event a nuclear plant goes haywire an area in a radius of 10km or more is made uninhabitable for decades.
  
• It's witchcraft. At least, that's how it's perceived. People don't understand it and it's a natural tendency to fear the unknown.
  
• The notion of "it's safe when dealt with properly" is there, but the nuclear industry has a history right from it's inception of taking regulatory shortcuts, running dangerous experiments and when something goes wrong plainly lie to the public in practically any event (Fukushima showed that once again).
  
• Combine the previous two: you know when a coal/oil plant has problems. Or when a windturbine has issue. You can see it, hear it, feel it. With nuclear energy you'll have to trust what management of the local plant is telling. And once again, the track record is not very encouraging.

Now I'm not saying I agree with or support the above point, but the OP's question was why people in general don't trust Nuclear power, not what I think about it.

How bad are we talking about? If it's total disaster like Chernobyl, that's impossible even with, for today's standards, old power plants because they have containment domes.

Fukushima was not "really, really, really bad". It was very serious, and don't forget it was the tsunami, and don't forget thousands died because of the sea, nobody died because of the power plants.

PR lies are a large problem, I agree, but remember that the worst disasters (Chernobyl, Mayak) happened in USSR which was a highly corrupt country. Fukushima happened in Japan, which is a traditionally fu*ked up society when it comes to being open about facts and exposing corruption. Whistleblowing and sincerity is just not a part of Japanese society as it is in the West. I'm sure that there would be much, much less PR problems if Fukushima had happened in France or USA. Granted, the PR problems with Fukushima were nothing compared to USSR in 1986.

Remember TMI? The population was unharmed, yet the media and the society went all hawkeye on them, and it was in the 70s.

The situation today is that when an ant farts in the vicinity of a Western nuclear power plant, the media goes crazy.

[Kerbart]

Because people are stupid.

You say potato...

People are not that stupid. What people do know is:

(a) something they understand not very well

( "specialists" who, for whatever reason, misinform the public and understate the risks

© nuclear plants that are run, without exception, by either government or large coorporations who have a proven history of having a total disregard for the well-being of those who live nearby a nuclear plant.

What might be a little point of light for reactors is Fukushima. I know that went terribly wrong during the 2011 Earthquake / Tsunami. But to date no one died of the effects of the meltdown / radioactive leak. Granted that Tepco currently has a lot of problems cleaning it up.

I would invite you to camp out a few weeks on the Fukushima site if there's no radiation problem "because nobody died". The lack of short-term radiation deaths has more to do with extreme measures taken than with "overstated risk"

But for such a unique situation, Who would do well?

Well, there's the issue. The nearby Onagawa nuclear plant did excellent in the aftermath of the disaster, because it was "overengineered" in regards to Tsunamis. When the Onagawa plant was built the executive in charge insisted on building the plant on an elevation higher than any Tsunami in history. The Fukushima plant, on the other hand, was built based on "reasonable" assumptions and of course the drive to keep expenses down.

In the USA public safety statistics tend to be "reasonable" because after all, we need to make a profit. You should know as a Dutchman. New Orleans levees were designed for less than storms that would statistically occur once every 50 years. The Dutch deltaworks are based on, what? 1200 years? 1500? People distrust the nuclear industry because it tends to favor profitability over safety by coming up with "good enough" statistical standards. They may not know nuclear science, they do know when their safety is taken for a ride in the name of the mighty dollar. We've seen in Fukushima how well that works.

But also Fukushima is plagued with misinformation. The spend fuel rods are being stored in water containers. This is just like normal reactors do because water is quite the isolator. Yet people misread this and think Tepco is poring 'radioactive' into the sea.(...)Long story short. Radioactive stuff is really complicated

Well yes, storage tanks were overflowing because they were not built on level terrain so when filled to the rim water started flowing over the sides. AND THESE ARE THE F####NG PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF A G###MN NUCLEAR PLANT. "If it tilts the cup, water floweth outs" is apparently too complicated for these propeller heads. And you're wondering why people don't like having a nuclear plant in their backyard, given the complexity of nuclear power?

Don't get me wrong, nuclear power has the potential to be safer, cleaner (in operation and for the environment) than most other power sources. And certain technology (like the "baththub" thorium reactors that Toshiba is developing) look like great alternatives. But the nuclear industry as a whole is shooting itself in the foot by sustaining a culture of covering up incidents (not just big ones, but also smaller incidents like leaving powertools inside cooling circuits) and downplaying incidents (Fukushima was a meltdown from day #1 but for two or three weeks we kept hearing how they were "preventing a meltdown"). If anybody should be blamed for the atmosphere of distrust it's not "stupid joe sixpack" but rather the industry itself.

Edited October 30, 2013 by Kerbart

[lajoswinkler]

Another thing about nuclear: virtually all commercial reactor is built with one objective: make plutonium for bombs. They were designed and built during the cold war, and electricity was just seen as a useful side product. The development of the thorium reactor was dropped they would not produce plutonium but U233, which is not as good for bombs (risk of fizzle, shorter half life), and because the USA wanted to pay off the development costs on PWR. Other countries either didn't care for such a reactor, or didn't have the will to invest the huge effort and money required to make it a reality.

But the thorium reactor has a lot of advantages over PWR, producing much less waste, burning waste from other reactors, using a very common resource. The best advantage is that they don't use pressurized water as a coolant, which means no need for a pressurized vessel that can explode. If the chosen coolant is a molten salt, waste cannot burn and be carried by the wind as it binds to the salt that solidifies when the reactor stops. And with dissolved fuel schemes, entirely passive safety mechanisms can completely stop the reaction and remove the fuel from the reactor.

Actually commercial uranium fission reactors can not produce weapon material. They produce waste useless for nuclear bombs unless you do a lot of something with it. Even the fresh fuel is not suitable for bombs because it's composition is wrong. You can't initiate a nuclear explosion with it. The best thing you could do is a messy criticality accident.

Nuclear power plant in Chernobyl was different. It could produce weapon grade material so it was partially a military industrial installation. One could insert stuff into the reactor while it was working.

Thorium is not as good as Youtube preachers would like it to be. It has lots of disadvantages. It needs a uranium fission primer because thorium by its own won't work. Also the technology is experimental (problems with fluoride salts corrosion have never been fully solved), and uranium fission is something we have decades of experience with. Abandoning uranium would be insane.

Uranium fission can also be stopped. The problem with meltdowns is not because the reaction doesn't want to stop. It stops readily as soon as the water coolant boils away because water is a moderator. It's a negative void coefficient system, unlike Chernobyl which is moderated by graphite.

In modern plants meltdowns can occur because the highly radioactive fission products decay and produce lots of heat which elevates the core temperature to the point it loses structural stability and starts collapsing under its own weight, and then if hell breaks loose, through the iron pressure vessel.

The problem is heavily reduced by the containment dome, and also by the geometry and the composition of the receptable beneath the vessel.

Thorium can experience meltdowns. Oh yeah.

The vessel can not explode due to pressure, but the fuel produces similar nasty stuff and needs to be cooled down after shutdown.

Uranium fuel is not flammable. It's pellets of uranium dioxide, a ceramic material not even the allmighty himself can set on fire. What can burn is zirconium cladding, but you need oxygen for it. Zirconium can react with water to form hydrogen which can detonate (Fukushima). I'm sure there are some flammables in thorium setup, too. It's not perfect as the preachers say.

[PakledHostage]

Why do they oppose it? Because they're uneducated and stupid. I honestly don't know anyone knowledgeable of nuclear power technology that is against uranium fission. It's the safest, cleanest and most plentiful source we have which could become almost renewable with heavy employment of MOX and breeder technology one day. I cringe when people talk about burying nuclear waste. It's not waste, it's precious.

As I said in an earlier post in this thread, rather than calling those of us who are cautious about increasing our reliance on nuclear power "stupid", can you please educate us? Why is nuclear waste precious? In what quantity? How do we deal with the problems that Mr Shifty mentioned? What do we do with the radioactive waste that we can't use? How do we prevent future Fukushima's and Chernobyls, given that humans and human built systems are fallible? Nuclear energy is great when everything works, but there are real risks that need to be taken into account before we expand our reliance on it.

[Wahgineer]

Let's look at a minecraft IC2 reactor. They're inherently unstable, prone to overheating, and make huge explosions when they have a meltdown. That is, of course, if you don't take the proper precautions: Loads of cooling cells, heat vents, and water surrounding the reactor keep it cool ( the water also dampens the affect of an explosion). A reinforced stone pressure jacket 3-4 blocks thick is enough to severely dampen an explosion. Hence, if companies stayed on top of maintaining their reactors, like your average Joe in minecraft does, maybe people wouldn't be so afraid of them.

[lajoswinkler]

As I said in an earlier post in this thread, rather than calling those of us who are cautious about increasing our reliance on nuclear power "stupid", can you please educate us? Why is nuclear waste precious? In what quantity? How do we deal with the problems that Mr Shifty mentioned? What do we do with the radioactive waste that we can't use? How do we prevent future Fukushima's and Chernobyls, given that humans and human built systems are fallible? Nuclear energy is great when everything works, but there are real risks that need to be taken into account before we expand our reliance on it.

Stupid is a word for describing people who don't know nothing about certain stuff. Yes, general public is stupid when it comes to nuclear technology and science in general. It's not their fault. It's the educational system's fault.

Nuclear waste is precious because it contains almost the same amount of fuel as it contained before its life cycle in the reactor. Very little, I think few percent at most, of the uranium-235 has been fissioned. The fuel can be reprocessed. You don't even need to remove the plutonium from it. You leave it inside and you've got yourself MOX fuel (mixed oxide fuel).

You can do that on and on, each time adding a bit more uranium, instead of throwing everything away and starting fresh.

And if you include breeder technology, which is not yet economically insteresting, but will be one day, you've provided the society with lots of energy that would last for centuries at this rate of consumption.

But even without breeders, reprocessing is great. France does it and they are energy independent. They even sell it to nearby countries with stupid leaders who gave up on nuclear (Italy) because they think that in the event of huge disaster in France, contamination stops at nation's borders.

Mr. Shifty mentioned material degradation. True, steel pressure vessels are becoming brittle after longterm intensive neutron bombardment. That's why you dismantle the plant after 30-40 years of service and you build a new one, with even better safety systems (France, 4th generation reactors). You don't succumb to politics and hippie pressure and abandon new technology and work with decades old plants, squeezing every possible megawatthour of juice, praying that someone doesn't go wrong. That's the current USA situation after Three Mile Island and growing "green" paranoia. Don't get me wrong, I'm actually pro-environment, but the loudest green movements are either morons or paid to lie.

There is always waste we can't reuse. For example lots of cesium-137 and strontium-90 is formed. Luckily, the worse the isotopes are, the faster they decay.

The permanent solution is to bury it underground in a stable geological layer.

Chernobyl can't happen again. It had a RBMK reactor - a pile of graphite that is more active with the water coolant removal (unlike PWRs in modern plants). When it blew up, everything went in the air because commie smartasses never built a containment dome. All modern plants and all plants in USA have them.

Fukushima was caused by a huge wave. Again, I'll remind you that the total death toll from the plants itself was 0, and from the wave and the earthquake was, according to wikipedia sources:

15,883 deaths, 6,149 injured, 2,652 people missing.

So why the fixation on the power plant? 18,535 people are gone because of the nature.

Yes, systems we build are fallible, but if something is fallible, it doesn't mean it will fail in the most spectacular fashion possible. It's an argument similar to "cars hit people who exit their apartments and go the street so I'll never go out again" or "if get out from my house, a meteor will hit my head and kill me". If you go outside, there's a low probability something will go wrong, and if something hits your head, it will be bird poop.

We can't abandon technologies because there is a chance of something bad happening and it's not just nuclear policy. Every power plant works like that, every chemical plant, every factory. People take risks. People go in mines to return with valuable ores. Large numbers die each year. Should we stop mining ores?

Death toll from nuclear industry is extremely low even if we account for every possible detail in the whole life cycle.

Fukushima showed us how incredibly good nuclear fission power plants can be. All the reactors withstood an absolutely huge quake and were plowed by a 10m wall of water. Electrical and diesel systems some moron decided to put on the shore was washed out so cooling options were depleted fast and meltdowns occured.

Can that happen in France? No, unless a comet falls into the Mediterranean sea or Atlantic ocean, but if that happens, I don't think anyone will care about any meltdowns.

Unlike at Chernobyl, only harmless traces of the fuel escaped in Japan. What went out were the fission products and not the total amount.

In fact we can celebrate the structural response of the plant to the horror it had to endure. I was amazed.

Only the closest land will not be habitable for some time (that does not mean standing there will kill you even in a few months, it just means the doses are above legal limit). Areas populated before the accident are already nearly clean but people are reluctant to return. I don't blame them. PR was bad and they've lost trust, also the region doesn't function as before because there aren't many people left.

My guess is that the Green Peace gurus are complaining about Nuclear propulsion. Even if it's clean, efficient and safe, the word NUCLEAR is so scary to them! So they start complaining and they start demanding regulations.

Not all of them are like that. Unfortunatelly, the green movement is plagued by loud morons who gave it a bad image.

Edited October 30, 2013 by lajoswinkler

[Superluminaut]

Relevant XKCD (references are given on the lower left corner of the chart):

Cool chart. It's funny in a way, how it uses comical examples, yet ironically displays our limited understanding of actual biophysical consequences. I'd love to see a nanodosimetry chart displaying types and degrees of molecular damage.

[WestAir]

People are terrified of radiation.

At my job I have coworkers who are absolutely terrified and feel vilified about TSA's body scanners. They tell me how the radiation is going to give them cancer and how air crew should be exempt from them even when not on duty for safety reasons. I *want* to tell them that the TSA body scanners use radiowaves, which are non-ionizing radiation and aren't powerful enough to knock electrons out of their DNA. I *want* to tell them that joining me on a flight from Vegas to Phoenix is giving them a REAL ionizing, health-hazard occupational radiation dose of about ~20µSv (just about the same dose of a chest CT scan), and several hundred thousand times more sieverts than the TSA body scanner.

Then I realize that explaining the electromagnetic spectrum, or photons, neutrons, alpha particles or sieverts and their different effects on the body is a mute point because no one will listen because they've already made up their minds about its risk to them.

So I don't.

EDIT: I feel like this is the same problem the Nuclear Community faces.

Edited October 30, 2013 by WestAir

[lajoswinkler]

Let's look at a minecraft IC2 reactor. They're inherently unstable, prone to overheating, and make huge explosions when they have a meltdown. That is, of course, if you don't take the proper precautions: Loads of cooling cells, heat vents, and water surrounding the reactor keep it cool ( the water also dampens the affect of an explosion). A reinforced stone pressure jacket 3-4 blocks thick is enough to severely dampen an explosion. Hence, if companies stayed on top of maintaining their reactors, like your average Joe in minecraft does, maybe people wouldn't be so afraid of them.

I had no idea there's a mod for that.

I'm reading about it right now and I've got a real hankering to go and mine some uranium.

Cool chart. It's funny in a way, how it uses comical examples, yet ironically displays our limited understanding of actual biophysical consequences. I'd love to see a nanodosimetry chart displaying types and degrees of molecular damage.

There isn't any such chart. When you come to really small doses, problems with predicting the outcome arise, so you need a purely statistical approach. If you go really nerdy on it, you get something like "1 picogram of cesium-137 dilluted in Atlantic ocean will cause 20 deaths in the next 500 years". Crap, but that's how statistics behaves at weird values.

[Nuke]

i think fear mongering about the carbon content of the atmosphere will eventually trump fear mongering over nuclear stuff. 15 minutes later the first fusion power plant will open. and 2 years after that fear mongering about fusion will cause us to switch back to fossil fuels. we never do anything cool that makes sense.

as for me i want a nuclear reactor in my truck.

[dharak1]

I am all for nuclear but I never thought about this... What happens if war breaks out and one of these things gets bombed? Are they bomb-proof? Would a meltdown happen? I really want to know.

[WestAir]

I am all for nuclear but I never thought about this... What happens if war breaks out and one of these things gets bombed? Are they bomb-proof? Would a meltdown happen? I really want to know.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 26 countries combined. The entire worlds military capabilities, collectively, would not be enough to even invade the US. There was a very interesting article on the very subject earlier this year by one of the US Military Generals who said that while a "World vs US" scenario would succeed in forcing the US defeat (In other words, ruin its capability to mount an offensive), the rest of the world completely, 100%, lacks the capability to even land ashore. There aren't enough Aircraft carriers and amphibious warships outside the US to break through a US fleet and reach shore. An invasion through Mexico would be met with the worlds largest Tank and artillery base which happens to be in Texas. Long post brought to an end, the scenario of "enemies invading and bombing the nuclear plant" is impossible if we're discussing a US invasion, and every country with nuclear plants is an ally of NATO or the UN - again making such a scenario extremely unlikely.

[Nuke]

didnt israel once blow up someone's (i want to say iran but too lazy to look it up) reactor?

[Galane]

I wonder if there's a video of this? http://life.time.com/culture/hubert-alyea-the-science-teacher-you-wish-you-had/#1 Princeton Professor Hubert Alyea apparently gave some very entertaining presentations in the 1950's on how nuclear reactions work.

"Breeder" reactors that make more nuclear fuel than they consume (by transmuting Uranium into different radioactive elements) were well started on the R&D path, until the "greens" got that whole field of inquiry stopped off in the USA. Instead of recycling "spent" fuel we waste it by pulling it out and holding it in big pools of water and have a criminally wasteful on-again off-again plan to permanently discard it under Yucca Mountain (or not).

It doesn't matter to the "greens" that there's no water for thousands of feet beneath that mountain, and the tunnels have been carved into a layer of solid rock. The material might somehow, possibly escape, sometime, maybe in a few thousand years. I'd like to think that long before then (if the facility ever gets used) that sanity would return to this and the nuclear material would be recovered for use.

There already is a perfectly safe, non-explodable, type of nuclear reactor. The "pebble bed". The "pebbles" are about the size of softballs and have many small spheres of enriched uranium embedded in a graphite sphere. Around that sphere is a layer of ceramic and another layer of graphite - repeated to seven layers. There's not enough uranium in one sphere to be able to reach melting temperature and the shells are thick enough so that no matter how many are packed together, melting temperature cannot be reached. The heat transfer medium is Helium gas. If there should be a leak, it goes *up*. "But what about cracks?!" "There's no such thing as a nuclear pebble without cracks!". Yup. There's not. That's why the seven alternating layers. The odds of even one pebble getting a crack straight through all its layers to the center is very tiny. That's why pebble bed reactors have a system that pulls pebbles from the bottom, tests them for radiation leaks and if none is found the pebble goes back into the top of the reactor. If one is found to be leaking radiation (has one ever?) it's shunted to a shielded storage area. One of these reactors in Europe did have a problem with that system. IIRC a pebble got stuck but instead of calling in the people who knew what to do, the people on site decided they could fix it but instead damaged the pebble extraction system. Big stupid anti-nuke, media fueled broughaha followed and the reactor was shut down instead of being repaired. There was no radiation leak, nobody was in danger. The only people who should've had any problems with it were the ones who didn't follow the procedures they were told to. "This is your job. If something happens with anything not your job, you call in the people whose job it is."

As for Fukushima, if you've seen some of the pre-tsunami file footage of the control room, you may have noted that it looks like it's technology from 40 years ago. That's because it *is* technology from 40 years ago. These plants were built then the anti-nukes have beset them ever since with lawsuits and regulations that have blocked any progress and technology updates. The damage caused by the tsunami and the results must've been like a ******* ****** to some of the "greens" so they could say "See? I told you it was a disaster in waiting!". They care more about being "right" in their wrongheadedness than actually improving people's lives. Some have wised up over the years, look up what the two guys who founded Greenpeace got into after they quit their own organization.

Part of the problem Three Mile Island had was due to the even then aging technology. The control room had walls encrusted with controls, gauges and indicators. The lamp indicating the stuck open vent valve was on a different wall from where everyone was clustered, trying to figure out why stuffing more and more water into the thing wasn't working. When someone noticed the light and hit the manual override to force the valve closed, problem over but the reactor core was trashed. Only a small amount of radioactive steam escaped the buildings. The radioactive water was all contained.

Historically, nuclear plants have taken so long to wend their way through the process of being allowed to be built that they're technically obsolete the day they first start generating electricity. The designs had to be "locked in" years before construction could start. Looking at San Onofre and its premature steam generator tube wear, I'd bet it was an issue some engineers were concerned about before the first shovel turned dirt on the site - but nothing could be done to change the design without delaying it for years.

A modern system, as seen in many newer power plants and factories, puts everything in view of the operators on computer screens. If there's an alert, it doesn't depend on a tech making a circuit of a huge spread of gauges, the alert comes to the tech on his or her monitor. If TMI had had even the (what would now be primitive) best technology available at the time, someone sitting in front of a screen of green or amber text would've been flashed an alert about the stuck valve and there would have been no incident at all. Great idea but just try and get it added to an old nuclear power plant. Humans still have walk around and observe lots of separate and disparate things and make lots of notes. The 1977 TV series "Battlestar Galactica" likely had more advanced technology on its Galactica bridge set than TMI had in its control room.

As an analogy, compare the original flight deck of the first Boeing 747 with the flight deck of a Boeing 787. The old nuclear plants are still at first 747 level when they should have received complete control upgrades at least once a decade or even closer together. Big airliners get upgrades, ships get upgrades, the Space Shuttles got upgrades. But not nuclear power plants.

This "can't change a thing" craziness doesn't just affect nuclear power plants. In the 80's a company with a furnace they used to burn their waste to generate electricity for their plant needed to replace the refractory burner grates. The furnace manufacturer was long out of business. New more efficient burners could have been retrofitted but nope, wasn't allowed. either the system had to be restored to the same condition as it was when installed or the entire thing had to be replaced with an all new system. I don't how they came to talk to my father about their problem but he was able to take one of the old grates, made some forms from sheet metal and cast some new burner grates that passed muster with the regulators. Same shape, same or similar material, good to go.

Here's some real big booms...

Nice, safe, non-nuclear chemicals... I think somewhere there my be a video of the test where 25,000 tons of TNT were exploded - to see if the blast effects would be like those of an atomic bomb calculated to be equivalent.

[Galane]

didnt israel once blow up someone's (i want to say iran but too lazy to look it up) reactor?

Yes, they bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Iraq was building it with help from France. Osirak was a portmanteau of Osiris and Irak (as Iraqis tend to spell Iraq). IIRC Osiris was the name the French gave to the reactor design.

Iraq also benefited from American 1940's nuclear technology. As part of a periodic review of "obsolete" technology to be declassified, some genius threw a magnetic uranium separation system (one of three different processes* used to refine the uranium for the first atom bomb) on the declassify pile. Saddam Hussein's spies said "Hey, thanks!" and nuclear engineers in Iraq improved the efficiency of the process to the point where if some guy in the post 1992 Iraq inspection teams hadn't decided to buck protocol and actually do his job - catching the trucks rolling out the back of a building while the rest of the team was allowing themselves to be BSed at the front (the gotcha event is on video somewhere), Iraq would've had enough enriched uranium for a few "Little Boy" style crude a-bombs in a few more years or perhaps even one or two "Fat Man" style. It never pays to underestimate the ingenuity of people who want to blow you up with nuclear explosives.

*Three processes were used because the scientists didn't know if any of them would make enough. Turned out some calculations were a bit off and it took about 1/4 the enriched uranium they thought it should to go kaboom. "Oh, hey. We have some left over. How about we design better bombs to use it?".

[merlinux]

This is a very interesting subject. It reminds me of the hours long discussions I used to have with my late stepdad(he raised me up so almost like my dad), who passed away last year.

I have always been an advocate of nuclear energy, studied physics for 2 years at uni and it always was a favorite subject(after mechanics for sure heh heh). He was against, firmly against lol. Funny thing is I am originally french and he was a kiwi, so it made discussions even more interesting.

The guy was very clever and I have to admit that some of his reasoning actually made sense although it hasnt change my overall perspective in the matter.

You only need one accident for stuff to go very wrong for a very very long time, affecting not only the people but a whole geographic area. For some the sole reason an accident like chernobyl could happen (even once in a 100 years) is enough to turn them off. You do not need to understand how a reactor work to understand the consequences of chernobyl.... And it is not right to downplay the Fukushima incident just because it wasn't as bad as chernobyl. The facts show that it is a catastrophic event and it is not gonna get much better for a long time to come....

This is democracy and people are allowed to not agree with a technology that can potentially be extremely dangerous (in which point they are right). And at the end the opposition is a good thing for the industry and the planet because without it, the electric companies wouldn't spend as much money as they do in safety... I take the exemple of France, where it is a huge business and have made EDF and the french gvt, billions of dollars and growing. However there is a huge list of incidents that have happened in france in the last 30 years, and although minor, were caused by insufficient safety. So the industry is fuelling the opposition in a way...

Now on a personal level, I believe in this economic downfall, and with the growth of the population, we have to keep using and researching nuclear.But I wouldnt want just any country to be able to use nuclear power just because it is cheap. It must be strongly regulated and those who do not abide by the international community must be punished. For many countries there are alternatives to nuclear (hydro in NZ for eg). But solar or wind power is not a solution for baseload power as many stupid greens believe...

Also I would be angry against the society if we ditched nuclear power because of the greens or 'activists'... Also I wish Australia wasnt so against nuclear when I see my electric bill (compare to what it was 10 years ago when I moved here).

Edited October 30, 2013 by merlinux

[Karriz]

I'm not opposed to nuclear power as a temporary solution, but I definitely do understand people who oppose it. Burying the nuclear waste underground simply isn't going to work long-term. Hopefully cold fusion gets invented soon, but until then we should go with wind and solar power as much as possible.

[brienne]

Three Miles Island, Tchernobyl, Fukushima, and so on...

Enough reasons to be suspicious about nuclear industry.

And for about 15 years, we really speak about closing first nuclear plants. Where do we put all that radioactive stuff?

Just to answer your question.

Imho, as we use more an more energy, nuclear power is part of the solution.

Unfortunately, solar, hydrolic and wind energies are not sufficient.

PS: I leave close to http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_de_stockage_de_l%27Aube, which belongs to ANDRA (french national agency for nuclear waste).

They put those "shot-to-midde delay" nuclear wastes underground (supposed to be dangerous during 300 years).

Edited October 30, 2013 by brienne

[bsalis]

traditionally fu*ked up society when it comes to being open about facts and exposing corruption. Whistleblowing and sincerity is just not a part of Japanese society as it is in the West.

...

You don't succumb to politics and hippie pressure and abandon new technology and work with decades old plants, squeezing every possible megawatthour of juice, praying that someone doesn't go wrong.

...

because commie smartasses never built a containment dome.

...

Electrical and diesel systems some moron decided to put on the shore

Your argument seems to be that Nuclear Power would be totally safe and incident free if the world was free of corruption, insincerity, politics, stupid decisions, and morons.

If anything, the major misconception about Nuclear Safety is that it is a technology issue. It's not, it is a people issue.

Edited October 30, 2013 by bsalis

[merlinux]

I'm not opposed to nuclear power as a temporary solution, but I definitely do understand people who oppose it. Burying the nuclear waste underground simply isn't going to work long-term. Hopefully cold fusion gets invented soon, but until then we should go with wind and solar power as much as possible.

I totally agree with you on the first part. But wind and solar power can't provide economically sustainable energy(as in base load power, not on a boat or spacecraft or country cottage). The alternative to nuclear is burning fossil fuel, or hydro where we can... Wind and solar power only works as "add-ons" (and it is also an add on on your bill) and the problem is getting worse as we are using more energy.

[running]

...every country with nuclear plants is an ally of NATO or the UN...

Yes Iran and North Korea are well known for their role in the UN....

The effects of Chernobyl are hard to measure, there was a rise in birth defects world wide though.

The effects of Fukushima will also be unclear. However make no mistake, it's a distaster still in progress, we might not have seen the worst of that disaster. They are still leaking large amounts of water into the ocean. There are still a lot of spend fuel rods that need to be cooled which are in the risk of becomming exposed to the air which will cause them to burst into flames and send radioactive clouds into the air. (They are laying in pools of water that leak and are in de buildings that are still in danger of collapsing.)

The big problem is how to clean up the mess. you can't just cover it up as it needs to be cooled. You can't tear it down piece by piece as you can't get near it and a robot can't do it either as the radiation fries its electronics. you might try to cover it, fill it with water and pump that water around to cool it. But you will have to make sure the water doesn't leak out at the bottom. How are you going to close the bottom part of the dome? It's a hard puzzle to solve.

I'm not against nuclear power, the alternatives also have their downsides. A lot of downsides of nuclear power refer to the older model reactors (of which there are quite a few.) But we need to be very smart in their construction. Placing them in an area know for earthquakes, on a shore known for tsunami's... well that doesn't sound to me like we are being very smart about them.

[Drunken Hobo]

Am i the only person who ENTIRELY blames the Simpsons for Nuclear Energy's stigma?

No, I've often thought that a lot of people get all their information on nuclear power from watching "The Simpsons" - particularly Greenpeace. They're even against fusion...

Whilst I understand some of the concerns about nuclear power, I think it's often unfairly treated compared to fossil fuels. Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but at least nuclear power plants do something about it. Most waste from fossil fuels is just vented into the atmosphere. How can carbon capture (burying CO2 under the ground) the answer to our energy problems, yet at the same time burying nuclear waste is seen as irresponsible? Many large cities are incredibly polluted thanks to fossil fuels and hundreds of thousands of people each year die because of it, but no-one seems to care.

People's assesment of risk is also way off; it's heavily biased against new technology. Fukushima's radiation killed nobody. In the same year, 53 people died & nearly 4,000 were made ill as a direct result of the farming practices used in organic food production. Imagine the worldwide protests if that had been contamination due to radiation, or even scarier, GM food!

Similarly, earlier this year a Canadian train carrying oil derailed & the resulting explosion killed 47 people. Imagine the reaction if that was a train carrying nuclear waste that had killed 47 people...

Not an argument to make nuclear more dangerous, but we let fossil fuels away with a hell of a lot. I think the costs of fossil fuel would rocket if we made them play by the same rules as nuclear.

[Seret]

Perhaps I have been reading too much Asimov, but nuclear energy seems to be a much better alternative to oil than wind power or solar power.

Let's clear up a couple of misconceptions here to start with:

• Nuclear is not an alternative to oil. Oil is mostly used for transport, very little is used for electricity generation. Our transport systems aren't significantly electrified at this point.
  
• Nuclear is not an alternative to wind or solar. Nuclear plants have to be run at relatively constant output, they can't be turned on or off quickly, so they can't follow demand. They're used for what's called base load generation. Base load is the proportion of electricity demand which is constant. The economics of base load generation are fundamentally different to those that can follow demand, such as wind or solar.
  

What nuclear does actually compete with are large thermal base load plants, such as coal. Compared to coal, nuclear is very clean and safe (but then so is everything else). Nuclear is undoubtedly low-carbon, but it does have some major drawbacks:

• Processing or storing waste is expensive, and there is currently no solution for long-term storage of high level waste anywhere in the world. For the last 50 years everybody has pretty much just stuck their heads in the sand and hoped the problem will go away. Which of course it won't.
  
• The plants themselves are expensive to build, operate and decomission. Much of this is due to the extremely strict regulatory environment they operate in. This is necessary for safety, but it means that nuclear is an extremely expensive way to produce base load power (which is the type that sells for the lowest price). Generally the economic case for nuclear only makes sense if the government sets up a very favourable subsidy system and/or guarantees an above-market price. This means construction of nuclear power plants is dependent on the local government being favourably disposed to it, rather than technical or economic reasons. Very little new nuclear has been constructed in the last few decades, due entirely to the political landscape.
  
• Despite having what is objectively quite a good safety record worldwide public perception of nuclear safety is very poor. This is because people are rubbish at assessing risk accurately, but means that politically nuclear can be a tough sell
  

Edited October 30, 2013 by Seret

[merlinux]

Let's clear up a couple of misconceptions here to start with:

• Nuclear is not an alternative to oil. Oil is mostly used for transport, very little is used for electricity generation. Our transport systems aren't significantly electrified at this point.
  

Not entirely true. Oil isn't used as much as coal for electric generation however it is used as a main source of power in many countries, you guessed it, in the middle east. Oil, coal, and gas are all fossil fuels, which can be used to produce base load power.

However in the transport sector I hope nuclear will never become an alternative to oil ahah.

Edited October 30, 2013 by merlinux