What is wrong with the world... and what can we do about it?

[vexx32]

Awaras:

Keep in mind that no fuel source is ideal, and they all have drawbacks - the product of burning hydrogen is water vapor, which is by itself a serious greenhouse gas. There is no telling what would happen to the climate if we suddenly start pouring billions of tonnes of water vapor in the atmosphere, but there would certainly be consequences. As for fusion, we have been \'almost there\' for the last 40-50 years and by the looks of it we might be 'almost there' for another 50. Also, fusion does not leave any radioactive waste but the walls of fusion reactors become intensely radioactive after a relatively short period of time, and would have to be disposed of periodically in the same manner radioactive waste is disposed of now...

Also, keep in mind that in order to have that much fuel ready for use, we\'d need to first pull the water it out of the atmosphere or hydrosphere. It may balance out, but I suspect it will not, due to inefficiencies and such. As to fusion reactors and the radiative walls... can you provide a source for that info? I hadn\'t heard anything about that before.

I am having trouble discerning the truth about thorium reactors, but if the positive things i have been reading about them are true, the radiation released is orders of magnitude less intense than in standard fission reactors, the temperatures are much lower, practically eliminating risk of meltdown and radioactivity of the waste products drops below background radiation intensity in around 10 years. Another plus is that the fission products of the thorium reactor are supposed to be lithium and other rare earth metals that are used in modern electronics and which are starting to run out right now.

... and while thorium may be rather common now, if we all start to use it for reactors, I can guarantee that it will be in very short supply within a few years.

I agree with this completely. Barring a large war or a cataclysm of some sort, the population of the earth is not going to decrease significantly in our lifetime and we will need more energy in the future, not less. Looking on the whole, nuclear seems the safest option. I was surprised to learn that a typical coal energy plant produces more radioactive waste than a nuclear plant - all coal contains a small amount of uranium and other radioactive elements, and when you multiply that small amount with the thousands upon thousands of tonnes of coal a coal plant burns over the course of one year, you end up with a couple of tonnes of uranium that stay in the ash that has to be dumped in an ash pile or is released in the atmosphere...

Nuclear is not in any way safe... but then again, neither is anything, really. Sure, they have loads of controls and restrictions, but it is likely that if too many exist, they\'ll start to become targets for terrorists, because of the damage they can cause. Also, if the whole planet becomes run off of nuclear power, where does all the waste go? We can\'t use it for anything, and it\'s too dangerous to let it run into the environment anywhere. The amount of waste would be phenomenal if all countries decided to use nuclear power... and neither we nor the Earth possess the capabilities to deal with it.

Those thorium reactors sound too good to be true. Seriously.

The largest thing holding back any technology is money, it\'s always money. If you can\'t make a profit, investors won\'t invest.

I was leaning for hydrogen cell technology in cars, but someone raised a very good point of dumping millions of tonnes of water vapor into the air.

That would probably have far more severe and immediate repercussions than CO₂ emissions.

However, I don\'t see why it\'s not possible to collect water 'waste' and dump it somewhere safe, i.e. down the drain into city sewer system.

Yeah, they do. No doubt there\'s some catch they\'re keeping quiet to avoid bad press. It\'ll get out eventually.

And yes, you could dump all the water into a sewer system or such like, but the problem first exists of obtaining enough hydrogen. Imagine if everyone on the planet used hydrogran-cell cars. That is an awful lot of hydrogen. It has to come from somewhere. If we take it out of the atmosphere, we run the risk of destabilising the atmosphere. If we get it from electrolysis of water, we have to take an awful lot of water out of the Earth\'s ecosystems.

RedDwarfIV:

More than two thirds of the planet\'s surface is ocean, in some places reaching many miles deep. No matter how much hydrogen we find is needed for our vehicles, there aren\'t enough vehicles to make a difference. Compared to that, the fuel taken would be insignificant. Your point, whilst true, is practically invalid. And if it was significant, wouldn\'t that help combat rising sea levels? With the ice caps melting, water will be getting less salty.

Oh no, only several billion vehicles. But yes, the actual amount of hydrogen isn\'t as significant as I make it sound (sorry). But it could still pose a problem. It depends, I suppose. However... if we take water from the ocean to use for this, it will have some effect, as the amount of hydrogen required for several billion vehicles is by no means negligible. Also, in order to get hydrogen from water, energy input is required... and that alone can be quite a phenomenal cost, considering the sheer volume of hydrogen you would require. As to whether it would be beneficial or detrimental... nobody can say. It depends on far too many things... but it could potentially be either.

Your previous reply had many a sharp barb in it. All I said was that you were not providing solutions, and you were giving less than adequate responses to offered solutions, which gave a naive impression. I do not intend to start a mudslinging session - I intend to point out that like myself, you do not have perfect knowledge, and in many cases your arguments were flawed. I used the same/similar level of criticism that you used for me.

If you wish for me to elaborate, just ask. I would be very surprised if my arguments were not flawed. That\'s one of the reasons I started this - I wanted to know what others thought, and find out what I did not know. Sorry.

Population limiting is difficult. In countries where it is a problem, it is very difficult to police.

Aye, that\'s just it, though. The problem with population arises mainly because, well, to be quite frank, modern medicine keeps people alive longer than they used to live. To be honest, I fail to see any point in keeping people alive if they\'re too old to care for themselves. Yes, people get all sentimental (I understand that much as well as anyone else), but people really should accept that at some point, we all will die... if they accept that, we\'ll all be better off, I think. Imagine this: you are a ninety years old. You have Alzheimer\'s. Is there any point in living a frail existence that is never remembered? It\'s just like you\'re sitting around waiting to die. I realise my perspective on this is likely skewed, as I cannot truly imagine what those living like that actually think, but that is how I see it... but again, it\'s almost certainly wrong in some way. But even so...

What lead to the Chernobyl disaster was poor reactor design on the part of the Soviets. No one assumed that it was entirely safe. It was not a result of a stupid viewpoint, it was the result of a city needing a lot of power and a nuclear plant being the most efficient was of providing it. The Soviets just didn\'t put enough research into it. Also, failures such as Chernobyl have lead to the exemplary safety of nuclear plants today. Natural disasters are difficult, but the Fukushima plant is on the side of Japan that has the least tsunamis. it should also be noted that gas-cooled reactors such as widely used by Britain are less susceptable to flooding than water cooled reactors. Fukushima\'s containment building was damaged by hydrogen explosions. The reactor\'s primary containment was undamaged and there were no large radiation leaks.

The radiation risk was large enough to cause a great deal of international media attention, and some scientific journals reported high risks of radiation burns for anyone nearby... I dunno where you got your information from, but from what I\'ve seen, there was enough of a risk to attract a great deal of attention. Also, you misunderstand. The 'stupid viewpoint' is not that they were stupid to be building it... it\'s that they were careless. Too often, carelessness or rushing things for the sake of money or convenience (or even necessity, from a different viewpoint). Necessary or not, the risk of something going wrong when not enough is known is rather large.

Explosions in a nuclear power plant are never caused by the fuel having a nuclear detonation such as a nuclear warhead could have, they are usually hydrogen explosions or sudden increases in pressure. Radioactive material is more likely to melt its way out of a reactor than make it explode, and it is usually the coolant that causes explosions. Under standard running operation of a nuclear power plant, a containment building will contain fallout during a meltdown. That Fukushima\'s containment building was damaged was unusual, but it was handled, and less than a tenth of the radiation of the Chernobyl disaster escaped Fukushima. No more than 100 people around Fukushima are said to have increased cancer risk.

A hydrogen explosion can be quite destructive as can a pressure-induced explosion. But yes, I realise it\'s not like somebody dropping a nuclear bomb. Just keep in mind that just because not many people were said to have increased cancer risk, it does not follow that the people who reported that were in any way correct. We still know very little about the levels of radiation required to cause cancer. It\'s pretty clear that excessive levels will cause cancer in the short term, but long-term effects and/or increased risk is very much just a guess. We haven\'t been studying it long enough to know for sure.

Radioactive waste is not an 'I\'ll deal with it later' problem. We have dedicated treatment facilities, such as Sellafield [ironically, a renamed Windscale] which process nuclear waste, and store it in a way safe for the environment. True, its still there, but if well maintained the site could keep the radioactive waste contained indefinitely.

It\'s stored away, yes, but if we\'re going to be using nuclear power extensively, we\'re going to need some way of making it useful or at least entirely harmless in and of itself to the environment.

I\'m 16, and my sources are varied, though they include UKTV History, Wikipedia, Bang Goes The Theory, TVTropes, BBC documentaries and numerous Internet sites.

Trust very little of what you see on TV. Especially when it concerns controversial issues where there\'s lots of argument such as nuclear power. That sounds really paranoid, but when something big\'s going on, I\'ve noticed that just about everything on the news and even some documentaries is misreported, especially in comparison to the proper scientific journals. I rely largely on New Scientist, since it\'s a very reputable source, but also Wikipedia and some other online articles, but only so long as I can confirm their information with other sources as well.

You say my problem is blindly following people who say nuclear power is safe. I know the risks, I know the problems, and I know the scale of the problems. What I say is that your problem is that you are one of the majority who believe the ideas formulated by ecowarriors, politicians, oil companies, and Hollywood, who all for their own reasons are biased against nuclear power. Because these beliefs have majority, believers can use that as evidence. There is so much propaganda against nuclear power, and so few sources to defend it because the majority believe it to be dangerous. Germany had the highest nuclear safety rating in the world, and yet Angela Merkhel had them shut down so that they could build wind farms. wind farms. A turbine spends 90% of its time taking power from the grid just to keep itself turning.

Oh really? That\'s interesting, because here in Australia we don\'t have any wind turbines taking any power from the grids to keep themselves turning. Wind turns them, and they don\'t have a motor of their own, only a generator, thus they cannot turn themselves. Dunno what kind of turbines you\'ve got, but the ones we use here don\'t do that. Also... I believe nothing the government says. They hide far too much. My ideas are my own, and I do not believe others\' ideas without significant backing behind them.

I\'m not talking carelessly, and nuclear power does not endanger millions. More people have died from teacosy related incidents than problems with nuclear power.

Only because nuclear power has not become widespread. If it ever does, I\'m sure you\'ll find a whole lot more danger will ensue. The more widespread something is, the more danger it poses. The number of people it kills is immaterial at this point because of this... there is no true measure for what it could do at a global scale, but I\'m sure they\'ll find out if they ever attempt it.

And thorium isn\'t too good to be true. It was just research that was abandoned in favour of uranium plants so that the US could discover more about it for its nuclear bombs. Thorium has the added bonus that most of its waste becomes fuel, and what waste doesn\'t become fuel has such a fast half-life that it would be Low Level Radioactive in just 100 years time as opposed to 200,000 years for uranium waste.

A century is still a very long time for something to be poisoning the environment. By the way, what is left when it has become low-level radioactive? Is the resulting waste useful in any form for anything, or is it just going to be something else that just sits around?

And... what kind of fuel are you talking about? Gas? Fossil? Or something else?

[Johno]

Yeah, they do. No doubt there\'s some catch they\'re keeping quiet to avoid bad press. It\'ll get out eventually.

And yes, you could dump all the water into a sewer system or such like, but the problem first exists of obtaining enough hydrogen. Imagine if everyone on the planet used hydrogran-cell cars. That is an awful lot of hydrogen. It has to come from somewhere. If we take it out of the atmosphere, we run the risk of destabilising the atmosphere. If we get it from electrolysis of water, we have to take an awful lot of water out of the Earth\'s ecosystems.

Okay, couple of things here.

1) The problems with Thorium reactors are already well known; it\'s no secret.

It\'s simply that the process of making them happen will be hideously expensive. We already have a nuclear energy infrastructure based around Uranium (Which Australia should be taking advantage of far more, by the way, but that\'s another story!); to get Thorium reactors going will require duplicating a lot of that, and developing a whole new mining industry.

When it\'s all said and done, much as I like the Thorium reactor concept, I think Uranium reactors are perfectly fine. The safety issues are WAY overplayed - every year coal power-related accidents kill six times the number of people that nuclear power-related incidents have EVER killed. Put simply, for every person who dies from a nuclear accident, we lose FOUR THOUSAND people from coal. We have a Uranium industry in place, and the next generation of reactors are brilliant. Why muck around?

2) There\'s a lot of talk about Hydrogen. Let\'s get this out in the open.

The problem is that Hydrogen is an excellent energy CARRIER but it is not an energy SOURCE.

As things stand today, the most efficient way to get hydrogen is by performing some chemical tricks on hydrocarbons, which are obtained from (you guessed it) coal or oil! Unfortunately, this is an inefficient way of using fossil fuels; it\'s better to burn them.

Okay, I hear you ask, so why not use solar energy? I remember electrolysis from high school science!

Yes, but electrolysis is incredibly inefficient. It would take way more electricity than we could ever produce from solar power to produce the hydrogen we need for a hydrogen economy.

There IS a solution, however - Generation IV nuclear reactors can produce hydrogen during off-peak times. This would mean that for the first time in the history of generating electricity for industry, homes and businesses, we will have a method of storing the powerplant\'s energy for later - and a very useful method it is too!

Incidentally, there are a lot of people who are very keen on solar energy as it is. I love solar energy. I have panels on my own roof (and now I get PAID for electricity instead of paying for it, which is very nice!). But much as I like it, we can\'t produce enough panels to generate the electricity we need for our entire society. Solar electricity might JUST be able to offset the power used by homes; but most of our electricity is used by industry, and solar hasn\'t got the moxie to handle that. Also solar energy is unreliable; it\'s a cold, wet, miserable day in Sydney today, and my panels won\'t be producing jack. And even on days with perfect weather, as soon as the sun goes down, you\'ve got no electricity.

No, we need more than solar. We really need nuclear.

[Ydoow]

Hydrocarbons don\'t have to come from underground.

Hydrocarbons are any extended Carbon-Carbon bond.

You could use fats, fatty acids, and oils naturally produced by animals or microbial life to get the Hydrogen if you are to only use hydrocarbs as a source of H.

Solar/Wind power I see as being great sources of energy-income in places that are ideal or otherwise inaccessible/unnecessary for larger more efficient plants.

e.g. your house roof. Nothing else goes there but shingles, so why not slap a solar panel on there?

Large Solar Farms/Wind farms aren\'t very efficient, like you said, space/cost wise. Solar Panels only collect like 30% solar energy, right?

But they are very ideal in locations nothing else can really get to. Travelling out West I saw hundreds of Wind Turbines scattered across rocky hills. Flat out unreachable for any other type of structure, so again, why not put something there?

Those are the kind of places solar/wind belongs. It\'s adding surface area for energy absorption so to speak.

This discussion has definitely made me much more pro-nuclear. I wasn\'t particularly against Nuclear beforehand, but this discussion has risen issues with other energy methods I hadn\'t realized existed.

Would you think the cost of converting to Thorium reactors would be outweighed by the cost of handling the nuclear waste from current plants? (uranium, right?)

[vexx32]

Johno:

Okay, couple of things here.

1) The problems with Thorium reactors are already well known; it\'s no secret.

It\'s simply that the process of making them happen will be hideously expensive. We already have a nuclear energy infrastructure based around Uranium (Which Australia should be taking advantage of far more, by the way, but that\'s another story!); to get Thorium reactors going will require duplicating a lot of that, and developing a whole new mining industry.

There\'s good reasons we aren\'t wasting time building nuclear reactors, which most seem to be happy to ignore, but meh. Developing industry wouldn\'t really be much of a problem... but yeah, it would cost a fair bit. Thanks for clarifying.

When it\'s all said and done, much as I like the Thorium reactor concept, I think Uranium reactors are perfectly fine. The safety issues are WAY overplayed - every year coal power-related accidents kill six times the number of people that nuclear power-related incidents have EVER killed. Put simply, for every person who dies from a nuclear accident, we lose FOUR THOUSAND people from coal. We have a Uranium industry in place, and the next generation of reactors are brilliant. Why muck around?

As I said before, the only reason there are less people dead from nuclear power plants and subsequent happenings than most other causes of death is because they aren\'t as widespread. Four thousand people die each year from coal, sure. The reason the number is that large is because of the sheer amount of coal-station workers and stations themselves.

2) There\'s a lot of talk about Hydrogen. Let\'s get this out in the open.

The problem is that Hydrogen is an excellent energy CARRIER but it is not an energy SOURCE.

As things stand today, the most efficient way to get hydrogen is by performing some chemical tricks on hydrocarbons, which are obtained from (you guessed it) coal or oil! Unfortunately, this is an inefficient way of using fossil fuels; it\'s better to burn them.

Thanks for that. Basically, while hydrogen burns for a lot of energy, it ultimately takes more energy to extract it -- whether you extract it from water, the atmosphere or hydrocarbons, our methods are too inefficient to make it worthwhile. Figured I better mention that hydrocarbons aren\'t the only inefficient source... in fact, they\'re probably the easiest way to get hydrogen, and they\'re still not worth it.

There IS a solution, however - Generation IV nuclear reactors can produce hydrogen during off-peak times. This would mean that for the first time in the history of generating electricity for industry, homes and businesses, we will have a method of storing the powerplant\'s energy for later - and a very useful method it is too!

Let\'s see how that pans out, hmm? Should be quite interesting...

Incidentally, there are a lot of people who are very keen on solar energy as it is. I love solar energy. I have panels on my own roof (and now I get PAID for electricity instead of paying for it, which is very nice!). But much as I like it, we can\'t produce enough panels to generate the electricity we need for our entire society. Solar electricity might JUST be able to offset the power used by homes; but most of our electricity is used by industry, and solar hasn\'t got the moxie to handle that. Also solar energy is unreliable; it\'s a cold, wet, miserable day in Sydney today, and my panels won\'t be producing jack. And even on days with perfect weather, as soon as the sun goes down, you\'ve got no electricity.

That\'s why there\'re batteries with solar panels, because you always produce more than you need. Unless you take advantage of the electricity grid to offload some of it and get money for it, in which case you won\'t be storing any. If the grid goes down, though, you can always store energy for later and for use at night.

No, we need more than solar. We really need nuclear.

No, even that wouldn\'t truly be sufficient, sadly. It\'s an excellent source of energy (notwithstanding the waste and other such problems), but we already have seven and a half (or is it more now? I forget) billion people on this planet. Our societies are geared for growth, and that means that we will continue to grow, unless our societies are radically altered (which, let\'s face it, is probably never gonna happen)... and the result is we\'ll always have too many people for our infrastructure to deal with.

Mind you, it could take a long time to get really bad, but who knows?

Hydrocarbons don\'t have to come from underground.

Hydrocarbons are any extended Carbon-Carbon bond.

You could use fats, fatty acids, and oils naturally produced by animals or microbial life to get the Hydrogen if you are to only use hydrocarbs as a source of H.

Fossil fuels are the most efficient ones as energy goes. Extracting hydrogren from any others would be even more inefficient.

Solar/Wind power I see as being great sources of energy-income in places that are ideal or otherwise inaccessible/unnecessary for larger more efficient plants.

e.g. your house roof. Nothing else goes there but shingles, so why not slap a solar panel on there?

Large Solar Farms/Wind farms aren\'t very efficient, like you said, space/cost wise. Solar Panels only collect like 30% solar energy, right?

But they are very ideal in locations nothing else can really get to. Travelling out West I saw hundreds of Wind Turbines scattered across rocky hills. Flat out unreachable for any other type of structure, so again, why not put something there?

Because we don\'t need to (and shouldn\'t) be covering the whole planet in buildings and artificial structures. The other things living here need room to live, don\'t forget that. The minute we ignore that, it all starts to die... and believe it or not, those animals are helping keep the plants alive, too, in their own ways, and eventually the plants die out as well (if we haven\'t destroyed them all already) and by that time, if we don\'t have our own solution for the atmosphere, we will die too. Or at least, that\'s one way it could go.

Those are the kind of places solar/wind belongs. It\'s adding surface area for energy absorption so to speak.

This discussion has definitely made me much more pro-nuclear. I wasn\'t particularly against Nuclear beforehand, but this discussion has risen issues with other energy methods I hadn\'t realized existed.

Would you think the cost of converting to Thorium reactors would be outweighed by the cost of handling the nuclear waste from current plants? (uranium, right?)

Possibly... but even then, the initial cost is probably currently too high for investors to care about long-term counterbalancing.

[Johno]

Great question.

Actually, people like GreenPeace are a little naughty regarding their views on nuclear waste. They say that nuclear waste is one of the great unsolved problems of nuclear reactors. What they DON\'T say is that it\'s only unsolved because they have consistently worked against those trying to solve it! We know how to deal with it safely; it\'s a matter of getting the solutions through various parliaments.

The wastes of Uranium cycle reactors go into three main categories:

Low-level wastes; used nuclear suits and goggles, filters, etc. These can be disposed of fairly safely in normal landfill.

Intermediate level wastes; cladding from fuel rods, building materials removed from decommissoned reactors, chemical sludges, resins (and, for example, the contaminated water that has come out of Fukushima Daichi). This stuff is a little more difficult to deal with, but again you can bury it (though it\'s wise to use deeper burial than low level wastes).

High level waste; used fuel rods. These are the tricky one.

Now, the first thing is to understand that a nuclear reactor only uses a tiny fraction of the fuel in the rod. When you dig Uranium out of the ground, less than 1% of it is the U-235 atom that can be used in a nuclear power plant; most of it is U-238, which is currently useless (but more about that in just a moment). So a bar of natural Uranium can\'t be used in a nuclear reactor; we have to enrich it (that is, collect a lot of U-235 atoms together)[1].

The reactor splits atoms of U-235, releasing energy. It also releases 3 neutrons, which fly off and hit other atoms. Some of the neutrons are absorbed by control rods, which is why a nuclear reactor can\'t become a nuclear bomb. The other atoms split, and so on.

The problem is that neutrons from traditional reactors move fairly slowly. Therefore if the neutrons hit anything other than a U-235 nucleus, they are lost. Therefore once a fuel rod has too much crud (U-238 atoms, and the FISSION PRODUCTS - the left over nuclei formed when you split U-235 atoms) in it, it doesn\'t work any more.

Now, most of the U-235 is still there. Only a small fraction has been used. So the logical thing to do from every possible angle would be to extract the waste products (a couple of grams from each fuel rod) and recycle the rod.

Enter the Green Movement.

Such nuclear fuel reprocessing is BAD because it\'s, like, nuclear and stuff. So they block fuel reprocessing plants. Meaning we have to do two things: 1) We need to get new fuel rods; and 2) We have to find places to store used fuel rods.

If we reprocessed all used fuel from all the world\'s reactors, we\'d end up with a lump of nuclear waste every year that could FIT INTO A SINGLE FILING CABINET DRAWER. This is therefore an extremely small problem!

However, there\'s more to it than that. Generation IV nuclear reactors, which have now been designed and the pilot plants built, are what we call breeder reactors. In simple terms, their neutrons are faster, which means they can use a wider range of fuel.

Fast neutrons can split many fission products. They can EASILY split U-238. So a fuel rod that was used in a Generation III or earlier reactor could be slotted straight in to power a Generation IV reactor! We can use natural Uranium in some designs, or even depleted Uranium[2].

Now there are still ultimately wastes from breeder reactors. But the high-energy wastes that cause us real problems are, by their nature, things we can burn in a reactor; meaning that the wastes at the end of the process are far more benign, bordering on intermediate level.

Basically, once we start building reprocessing facilities and Gen IV reactors, nuclear waste is largely a solved problem.

[1]The waste product of this process, incidentally, is called depleted Uranium. Up until now it has been useless except for its mass, which makes it a good anti-tank bullet or tank armour. But see the stuff about Gen IV reactors above!

[2] A small amount of enriched Uranium is still needed. However, that\'s just to start the reaction going. You can think of it as the 'match' rather than the 'petrol'.

[Johno]

There\'s good reasons we aren\'t wasting time building nuclear reactors, which most seem to be happy to ignore, but meh. Developing industry wouldn\'t really be much of a problem... but yeah, it would cost a fair bit. Thanks for clarifying.

Yes. It\'s not insurmountable, but it\'s expensive.

As I said before, the only reason there are less people dead from nuclear power plants and subsequent happenings than most other causes of death is because they aren\'t as widespread. Four thousand people die each year from coal, sure. The reason the number is that large is because of the sheer amount of coal-station workers and stations themselves.

Fair point. Then another metric is needed - deaths per terawatt-hour produced. This normalizes the numbers to account for the fact that coal is much more common.

There will always be some accidents, and given that this is industry, some of those will be fatal. Therefore all electricity sources come at a cost in lives.

So let\'s say you and your city purchase a terrawatt-hour of electricity. How many lives will be lost to pay for it?

If it\'s coal, and if you live in the more developed parts of the world such as the USA or Australia, that terrawatt-hour will come at the cost of 15 lives. In china, the cost is horrific - 278 lives lost per terrawatt-hour.

What about oil? 36 lives lost for that one.

Hydro electricity? 1.4. It would be 0.1, except for a massive accident in China that wiped out at least 175,000 people and possible up to a quarter of a million.

Solar and wind are both fairly safe. Most of their deaths come from people falling from heights while installing or maintaining systems. Solar is 0.44, wind is 0.15.

So how does Nuclear stack up? Per terrawatt-hour, it\'s actually the safest again. For your terrawatt-hour of nuclear electricity, 0.04 people will die. Even during the Fukushima Daichi accident, which the media touted as the second worst nuclear accident in history, there were no deaths caused by the plant (and only two minor injuries). For completeness, we could include the worker who died of a heart attack (unrelated) during the cleanup, and the two poor guys who died on cranes when the Tsunami hit (Awful way to go, IMHO); but neither of those cases were actually related to nuclear energy or radiation per se, except that they occurred on site.

Mention should be made also that these stats don\'t actually include the unknown but presumably high number of people that will die from climate change impacts. If we were to factor those in, you can bet your bottom dollar that coal and oil will look worse still.

The thing is, nuclear is safe; accidents are the exception. By contrast, fatal accidents in coal mines and plants are so common that they are seldom reported unless the death toll is absolutely catastrophic.

EDIT: Whoops! Here\'s my sources:

Next Big Future

[Caesar15]

I think we should all make a time machine and go back to ancient rome, when you think about it, life may have been better there then it is now, i mean, we still have games to watch, butt ake out the entertainment factor theres no obese people around.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

I was wrighting a huge essay on this, but I think a few sentences will surfice. (note this isn\'t part of the debate, but I just wanted to say something).

The world will never be perfect. Murder, rape, and suicide will always be there, as people get pleasure from it. Drugs will always be in a economic system, as people like an easy way out of stress. And all of the discust topics will get worse, along with war, energy, resources, and everything else. I would bet my life on it that this will stay this way. There is the reason I stay up a night, play computer games to get away from, and think of hairbrain schemes, like changing myself into anouther creature.

[Ascensiam]

I was wrighting a huge essay on this, but I think a few sentences will surfice. (note this isn\'t part of the debate, but I just wanted to say something).

The world will never be perfect. Murder, rape, and suicide will always be there, as people get pleasure from it. Drugs will always be in a economic system, as people like an easy way out of stress. And all of the discust topics will get worse, along with war, energy, resources, and everything else. I would bet my life on it that this will stay this way. There is the reason I stay up a night, play computer games to get away from, and think of hairbrain schemes, like changing myself into anouther creature.

You\'ve caught my attention on that last line, can you deepen it out a little? Because imagining to be a tapeworm can\'t be all that exciting.

[Ydoow]

Because we don\'t need to (and shouldn\'t) be covering the whole planet in buildings and artificial structures. The other things living here need room to live, don\'t forget that. The minute we ignore that, it all starts to die... and believe it or not, those animals are helping keep the plants alive, too, in their own ways, and eventually the plants die out as well (if we haven\'t destroyed them all already) and by that time, if we don\'t have our own solution for the atmosphere, we will die too. Or at least, that\'s one way it could go.

Oh I didn\'t mean to imply 'COVER ALL THE EARTH!!! SCREW THE WILDLIFE!!'

[RedDwarfIV]

Oh I didn\'t mean to imply 'COVER ALL THE EARTH!!! SCREW THE WILDLIFE!!'

What you meant was \'Oh, here\'s a windy bit of sea just off our coastline, no boats go there, and there\'s no active seal population. Let\'s build an offshore windfarm.'

Which would be fine.

[Ydoow]

What you meant was \'Oh, here\'s a windy bit of sea just off our coastline, no boats go there, and there\'s no active seal population. Let\'s build an offshore windfarm.'

Which would be fine.

Precisely

Or like your roof. It\'s making use out of space otherwise unused

I brought up nuclear power on my ride home with my mother (yes my mom drives me to college LOL) and I kinda laughed because she went through all the same arguments we\'ve brought up here, all the incidents and such.

She\'s not very science or math canny (not that she\'s stupid, it\'s just not her career) and she kinda came down to the same realization made here as well.

It\'s just the idea the nuclear power is bad. It just has a bad rep. despite the statistics.

Her analogy was 'It\'s like how some people are terrified of riding in planes, despite the death/incident rates being far inferior. It\'s just a stigma I guess.'

[cardgame]

Everything that Johno said.

The ideal hierarchy would be something like this:

Wind/solar > Hydroelectric > Nuclear

And then, ideally, very few nuclear plants would need to be run constantly. They\'re just there as a backup, when the wind dies, when the sun goes behind the clouds or the horizon. They\'re the reserve.

[Johno]

Everything that Johno said.

The ideal hierarchy would be something like this:

Wind/solar > Hydroelectric > Nuclear

And then, ideally, very few nuclear plants would need to be run constantly. They\'re just there as a backup, when the wind dies, when the sun goes behind the clouds or the horizon. They\'re the reserve.

Okay, this is good thinking, but there\'s a little problem with it. It\'s this - a large scale power plant (be it coal, oil, gas or nuclear) can\'t just be shut down. It takes several hours to shut down any thermal power plant; they are what we call 'Load unresponsive'.

This is where your solar and wind come in. They are very 'load responsive' - you can switch solar panels off[1], and you can easily 'feather' a wind turbine so that it stops producing electricity.

Also, nuclear power plants have an enormous output - typical power plants are in the region of 850MW, and new plants have an output of over 1100MW. By comparison, a solar panel or wind turbine is fairly feeble - a turbine ranges from about 1-3MW in theory, but in practice wind is variable, and it\'s normal for turbines to usually operate at 15 - 30% of their rated capacity. So it takes over a thousand wind turbines to equal the output of one nuclear power plant. Solar panels are even weaker - my panels are 2.5 KW, which means it would take nearly half a million of them to match the output of the nuclear plant.

So, take your scenario and reverse it. The baseload power should be provided by a nuclear power plant, running 24 hours a day. During the night it produces hydrogen, which we use in aircraft and other vehicles. But during the day, when we need the most electricity, we supplement it with wind, solar and hydro electricity.

[1] Actually, you can\'t - the panels are still producing electricity. However, with the flick of a switch you can disconnect the panels from the grid, which produces the same effect. Only don\'t try working on the panels themselves if you don\'t know what you\'re doing!

[Johno]

Precisely

Or like your roof. It\'s making use out of space otherwise unused

I brought up nuclear power on my ride home with my mother (yes my mom drives me to college LOL) and I kinda laughed because she went through all the same arguments we\'ve brought up here, all the incidents and such.

She\'s not very science or math canny (not that she\'s stupid, it\'s just not her career) and she kinda came down to the same realization made here as well.

It\'s just the idea the nuclear power is bad. It just has a bad rep. despite the statistics.

Her analogy was 'It\'s like how some people are terrified of riding in planes, despite the death/incident rates being far inferior. It\'s just a stigma I guess.'

The trouble has its roots in the fact that the word 'nuclear' is ALSO used for terrifyingly large explosive devices[1] which produce an identifiable mushroom cloud. Naturally people get nervous.

However, it astounds me how much of the argument against nuclear energy is really shadow boxing. People fear it, and they can\'t bear to think they\'re being irrational; so they make up all kinds of nice-sounding but ultimately flawed reasons for their irrational belief.

Let\'s look here at the arguments against nuclear energy.

* It\'s unsafe - completely false. Nuclear energy is by far the safest form of electricity (discussed in detail earlier in this thread).

* Wastes are a major problem - largely false. We have the technology to deal with wastes, although efforts are being sabotaged by the Green movement[2] (discussed in detail earlier in this thread).

* Nuclear plants pollute the environment - Utter balderdash. The amount of pollution released by a nuclear plant is negligible. The idea of waves of nuclear radiation scattering off in all directions from the power plant, turning every living thing into three eyed mutants comes from watching too much 'The Simpsons'. In reality, crews and designers are extremely careful to avoid this.

I have to go now, but I\'ll come back with part 2.

[1] Even nuclear bombs are approached with more fear than they should be. There have been dozens of peaceful uses proposed for nuclear explosives - imagine how handy they could be in the mining industry, for example. However, because people fear them we have made blanket bans on peacetime use. *shrug* It\'s the way people are.

[2] I thought of a good analogy for what the Green movement do. They say 'Waste is a problem', then they block the establishment of waste reprocessing plants. It\'s like your brother coming in and messing up your room, then going to your mum and complaining that you haven\'t cleaned up.

[Ydoow]

It\'s true that anything with 'Nuclear' in it causes irrational fear.

MRI scans stand for Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

The technology for MRI come from a Chemistry tool developed in the 60\'s called NMR - Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

It took decades before the technology was able to become precise enough to make high resolution images. At that point some said 'If we can use NMR machines to flip protons and detect different molecular structures, then we could use that in humans to see inside of us'

And thus, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging - NMRI was born.

It was later decided that people would not want to be stuck inside of a machine that contained the word 'Nuclear' in it, so they dropped it to MRI.

My eye twitches everytime I tell this story because there is not a single part of the technology that ever involves anything remotely radioactive.

It only detects the frequency at which Nuclei flip T-T

[RedDwarfIV]

Its called \'perceived risk\'. Such as someone seeing a rail crash on TV, thinking how horrendous this incident is, and so deciding to take the car.

When the car is, statistically, massively more dangerous.

Where people hear of incidents like Fukushima Dachai [A plant which, lets face it, was as unequipped to deal with a tsunami as India was during the Boxing Day Earthquake a few years back, because it was deemed too expensive against the unlikelyhood of there being a tsunami large enough to damage the plant. Beuraucrats don\'t operate on \'well, in hindsight...\'] or Three Mile Island, they get a skewed idea of the kind of effort and planning that goes into ensuring nuclear plants are the safest they can possibly be.

And then they decide the feeble wind turbine is a far better option because it cannot conceivably explode.

Unless, of course, you don\'t lubricate it, in which case it can lose its brakes in high wind, rip itself to pieces, and perhaps throw shrapnel all over a nearby villiage. And don\'t forget, one damaged turbine can damage others. You could quickly end up with a field full of dead turbines.

[vexx32]

Yes. It\'s not insurmountable, but it\'s expensive. Fair point. Then another metric is needed - deaths per terawatt-hour produced. This normalizes the numbers to account for the fact that coal is much more common.

There will always be some accidents, and given that this is industry, some of those will be fatal. Therefore all electricity sources come at a cost in lives.

So let\'s say you and your city purchase a terrawatt-hour of electricity. How many lives will be lost to pay for it?

If it\'s coal, and if you live in the more developed parts of the world such as the USA or Australia, that terrawatt-hour will come at the cost of 15 lives. In china, the cost is horrific - 278 lives lost per terrawatt-hour.

What about oil? 36 lives lost for that one.

Hydro electricity? 1.4. It would be 0.1, except for a massive accident in China that wiped out at least 175,000 people and possible up to a quarter of a million.

Solar and wind are both fairly safe. Most of their deaths come from people falling from heights while installing or maintaining systems. Solar is 0.44, wind is 0.15.

So how does Nuclear stack up? Per terrawatt-hour, it\'s actually the safest again. For your terrawatt-hour of nuclear electricity, 0.04 people will die. Even during the Fukushima Daichi accident, which the media touted as the second worst nuclear accident in history, there were no deaths caused by the plant (and only two minor injuries). For completeness, we could include the worker who died of a heart attack (unrelated) during the cleanup, and the two poor guys who died on cranes when the Tsunami hit (Awful way to go, IMHO); but neither of those cases were actually related to nuclear energy or radiation per se, except that they occurred on site.

Mention should be made also that these stats don\'t actually include the unknown but presumably high number of people that will die from climate change impacts. If we were to factor those in, you can bet your bottom dollar that coal and oil will look worse still.

The thing is, nuclear is safe; accidents are the exception. By contrast, fatal accidents in coal mines and plants are so common that they are seldom reported unless the death toll is absolutely catastrophic.

EDIT: Whoops! Here\'s my sources:

Next Big Future

Excellent comparison metric! Thanks for that. However, I have one more bone to pick. Does this include deaths accrued from long-term effects of individuals inadvertently exposed to radiation (such as in Chernobyl, etc)? Specifically cancer and such.

Going from that, I\'d say solar, wind and hydro are the safest, because it\'s physically impossible for them to release any harmful radiation. Sure, in nuclear it\'s pretty much all contained, but there is still the possibility it can be released.

I think we should all make a time machine and go back to ancient rome, when you think about it, life may have been better there then it is now, i mean, we still have games to watch, butt ake out the entertainment factor theres no obese people around.

I\'d say medieval Europe would be pretty cool, so long as you weren\'t a peasant.

I was wrighting a huge essay on this, but I think a few sentences will surfice. (note this isn\'t part of the debate, but I just wanted to say something).

The world will never be perfect. Murder, rape, and suicide will always be there, as people get pleasure from it. Drugs will always be in a economic system, as people like an easy way out of stress. And all of the discust topics will get worse, along with war, energy, resources, and everything else. I would bet my life on it that this will stay this way. There is the reason I stay up a night, play computer games to get away from, and think of hairbrain schemes, like changing myself into anouther creature.

As it stands, you are largely correct. The only way this will change is if this way will lead to the end of this society... which, eventually, it will. It is statistically impossible for it not to; we\'re just gonna run out of space and resources. Short of finding a whole bunch of (very nearby) habitable planets, this society\'s pretty much doomed to failure. But that is, of course, an opinion. We\'ll see, hm?

Interesting idea, though. I\'ve had a fair few myself... lemme dig up that thread on the old forum we were discussing such things on... here:

http://www.sporebase.com/forum/index.php?topic=5106

In it, I detail various 'harebrained' schemes for surviving pretty much anything. Enjoy. I think I joined the thread a couple of pages in, and it just went from there. Take the time to read it, it\'s quite interesting

Oh I didn\'t mean to imply 'COVER ALL THE EARTH!!! SCREW THE WILDLIFE!!'

Okay, fair enough. But the thing is, we\'ve already covered too much anyway (at least according to some, there\'s still disagreement on this). Should be interesting.

Precisely

Or like your roof. It\'s making use out of space otherwise unused

I brought up nuclear power on my ride home with my mother (yes my mom drives me to college LOL) and I kinda laughed because she went through all the same arguments we\'ve brought up here, all the incidents and such.

She\'s not very science or math canny (not that she\'s stupid, it\'s just not her career) and she kinda came down to the same realization made here as well.

It\'s just the idea the nuclear power is bad. It just has a bad rep. despite the statistics.

Her analogy was 'It\'s like how some people are terrified of riding in planes, despite the death/incident rates being far inferior. It\'s just a stigma I guess.'

In a way, it is. I just keep wondering if there\'ll ever be a true 'worst-case scenario' if it becomes widespread... because if it ever does happen to cause a terrible calamity (because despite our best efforts, all our containment systems will be in some way flawed; we can\'t think of everything), I can practically guarantee they\'ll have to find something else. Which is why it\'s always good to be able to do alternatives. Also, it\'s a very good idea to be putting wind-farms on things like skyscrapers... I hear it gets quite windy up there

Everything that Johno said.

The ideal hierarchy would be something like this:

Wind/solar > Hydroelectric > Nuclear

And then, ideally, very few nuclear plants would need to be run constantly. They\'re just there as a backup, when the wind dies, when the sun goes behind the clouds or the horizon. They\'re the reserve.

It\'s a good idea, but from memory, once a plant starts working, it takes a fair bit to get it to stop, doesn\'t it? Can someone confirm this for me; I\'m not entirely certan of the mechanics of it, but since it\'s a chain reaction, wouldn\'t it be very difficult to just stop and start when needed?

Okay, this is good thinking, but there\'s a little problem with it. It\'s this - a large scale power plant (be it coal, oil, gas or nuclear) can\'t just be shut down. It takes several hours to shut down any thermal power plant; they are what we call 'Load unresponsive'.

This is where your solar and wind come in. They are very 'load responsive' - you can switch solar panels off[1], and you can easily 'feather' a wind turbine so that it stops producing electricity.

Also, nuclear power plants have an enormous output - typical power plants are in the region of 850MW, and new plants have an output of over 1100MW. By comparison, a solar panel or wind turbine is fairly feeble - a turbine ranges from about 1-3MW in theory, but in practice wind is variable, and it\'s normal for turbines to usually operate at 15 - 30% of their rated capacity. So it takes over a thousand wind turbines to equal the output of one nuclear power plant. Solar panels are even weaker - my panels are 2.5 KW, which means it would take nearly half a million of them to match the output of the nuclear plant.

So, take your scenario and reverse it. The baseload power should be provided by a nuclear power plant, running 24 hours a day. During the night it produces hydrogen, which we use in aircraft and other vehicles. But during the day, when we need the most electricity, we supplement it with wind, solar and hydro electricity.

[1] Actually, you can\'t - the panels are still producing electricity. However, with the flick of a switch you can disconnect the panels from the grid, which produces the same effect. Only don\'t try working on the panels themselves if you don\'t know what you\'re doing!

Ah yep. As I thought... the nuclear must, by necessity, be the main one, that runs constantly if we\'re going to use it.

It\'s true that anything with 'Nuclear' in it causes irrational fear.

MRI scans stand for Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

The technology for MRI come from a Chemistry tool developed in the 60\'s called NMR - Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

It took decades before the technology was able to become precise enough to make high resolution images. At that point some said 'If we can use NMR machines to flip protons and detect different molecular structures, then we could use that in humans to see inside of us'

And thus, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging - NMRI was born.

It was later decided that people would not want to be stuck inside of a machine that contained the word 'Nuclear' in it, so they dropped it to MRI.

My eye twitches everytime I tell this story because there is not a single part of the technology that ever involves anything remotely radioactive.

It only detects the frequency at which Nuclei flip T-T

Haha, radiactivity is generally dangerous because it releases alpha, beta or gamma radiation. Funnily enough, gamma (the worst) is the same type of radiation as light or radio waves... just a much shorter wavelength (i.e. the energy is just MUCH more concentrated). Just goes to show, too much of anything is not good for us. Even UV is the same sort of thing, and yet being only just a higher frequency (shorter wavelength) than violet light (hence the name 'ultraviolet'), it has the potential to cause cancer, or at least increase the risk. Funny, that.

Its called \'perceived risk\'. Such as someone seeing a rail crash on TV, thinking how horrendous this incident is, and so deciding to take the car.

When the car is, statistically, massively more dangerous.

Where people hear of incidents like Fukushima Dachai [A plant which, lets face it, was as unequipped to deal with a tsunami as India was during the Boxing Day Earthquake a few years back, because it was deemed too expensive against the unlikelyhood of there being a tsunami large enough to damage the plant. Beuraucrats don\'t operate on \'well, in hindsight...\'] or Three Mile Island, they get a skewed idea of the kind of effort and planning that goes into ensuring nuclear plants are the safest they can possibly be.

And then they decide the feeble wind turbine is a far better option because it cannot conceivably explode.

Unless, of course, you don\'t lubricate it, in which case it can lose its brakes in high wind, rip itself to pieces, and perhaps throw shrapnel all over a nearby villiage. And don\'t forget, one damaged turbine can damage others. You could quickly end up with a field full of dead turbines.

*ahem*. If it loses its lubrication, it\'s more likely to just stop outright, rather than just tear itself to pieces. The way it\'s designed makes it pretty hard for it to explode.

[Ydoow]

If it loses lubrication it may stop, but a few wind turbines have literally exploded. I know of at least two events.

I\'m not sure what the detailed reports were, but I\'d assume the excessive friction wears away at the brakes until nothing is slowing it down, and it just spins faster and faster until KABLOOEY!

[Awaras]

I think we should all make a time machine and go back to ancient rome, when you think about it, life may have been better there then it is now, i mean, we still have games to watch, butt ake out the entertainment factor theres no obese people around.

Keep in mind that the average life expectancy in ancient Rome was 22-25 years of age compared to today\'s 70-80. Then factor in the sanitary conditions, lead plumbing and the odds you would end up as someone\'s slave...

I\'d say medieval Europe would be pretty cool, so long as you weren\'t a peasant.

And that\'s the point, isn\'t it? The percentage of people \'that weren\'t a peasant\' back then is enormously small...

[Johno]

Excellent comparison metric! Thanks for that. However, I have one more bone to pick. Does this include deaths accrued from long-term effects of individuals inadvertently exposed to radiation (such as in Chernobyl, etc)? Specifically cancer and such.

Good question. The answer is that yes, to a degree they are included. But this is actually a tricky one.

The thing is that in most cases you cannot look at a particular cancer and say 'Yup, that was radiation that did that'. This is because radiation doesn\'t work that way. Radiation has what we call a cytotoxic effect - that is, it harms cells. It does so by ionising them, and that means that the damage that matters is to the cell\'s genetic material. This complicates things, because radiation is far from the only thing that causes such damage.

We live in a world that is liberally drenched in cytotoxic substances. There is natural nuclear radiation everywhere. There are cytotoxins in our food and drink, in the air we breath, in our homes.

Added to this, there is a massive panic factor for nuclear materials and disasters[1]. As soon as there has been a measurable[2] rise in radiation levels, people tend to assume the worst. Any cancer is attributed to radiation.

However, no cancer is exclusively caused by radiation. Even those that are predominantly linked to radiation do occur sparingly in people who are NOT exposed. Therefore, we can really only attribute causes to cancers statistically - rather than saying 'this patient\'s cancer was caused by radiation', we say 'This area had a 1% higher level of cancers X, Y and Z than the surrounding region; therefore A FACTOR here appears to have caused an excess of 1% in cancers X, Y and Z.

This is why there is so much controversy over the number of extra cancers caused by the Chernobyl accident. Reports from local authorities suggested thousands of cancers - but owing to the panic factor, nobody seems to have collected ANY data of what the cancers were beforehand!

Therefore the World Health Organisation did what any sane researcher would do - they took the average level in comparable populations worldwide, and subtracted that from the numbers they were experiencing. This was controversial; apparently in the world occupied by the anti-nuclear lobby, nobody gets cancer unless there\'s been a nuclear accident nearby. :S In any case, this number is described as the 'provable increase' in cancers. There is some increase, but to put it in perspective, it would be more than offset if, for example, a campaign managed to get people in the area to stop smoking. The provable increase is quite small - in the region of 2-3%. This makes it debatable as to whether it\'s statistically significant.

Going from that, I\'d say solar, wind and hydro are the safest, because it\'s physically impossible for them to release any harmful radiation. Sure, in nuclear it\'s pretty much all contained, but there is still the possibility it can be released.

It\'s the classic unanswerable question - whether it\'s worse to accept an extremely low chance of disaster (but which could cause serious damage) or a guaranteed number of fatalities which is low (but higher than that of nuclear).

*ahem*. If it loses its lubrication, it\'s more likely to just stop outright, rather than just tear itself to pieces. The way it\'s designed makes it pretty hard for it to explode.

Hard, but not impossible. The explosion of a turbine is uncommon, but nothing like as rare as a nuclear core melt.

[1] We had an example of this in Sydney just yesterday. Some earthmoving revealed some odd-coloured dirt in an area where there had been a truck accident involving a vehicle carrying some nuclear material. Within hours some of the workmen were complaining of headaches and nausea - the symptoms of radiation exposure. . . .

. . . but they didn\'t seem to know that these symptoms typically onset several hours AFTER the exposure, not during. Also when guys from the Nuclear technology group brought up a geiger counter, there was no evidence of radiation in the area. So if there was anything causing the symptoms that wasn\'t in their heads, it wasn\'t radiation . . . .

[2] And the nature of radioactive material is that it tends to be detectable in tiny levels, much lower than that which could conceivably cause health effects!

[vexx32]

If it loses lubrication it may stop, but a few wind turbines have literally exploded. I know of at least two events.

I\'m not sure what the detailed reports were, but I\'d assume the excessive friction wears away at the brakes until nothing is slowing it down, and it just spins faster and faster until KABLOOEY!

It\'s possible, I suppose. Two events is pretty damn low, though, compared to unexpected circumstances and things going wrong with other power generators.

Keep in mind that the average life expectancy in ancient Rome was 22-25 years of age compared to today\'s 70-80. Then factor in the sanitary conditions, lead plumbing and the odds you would end up as someone\'s slave...

And that\'s the point, isn\'t it? The percentage of people \'that weren\'t a peasant\' back then is enormously small...

Hehe, yeah. Sadly. Still, if we combine that level of technology with a smaller-scale society, with modern(ish) values and add a great deal of fairness, it could work. I\'m sort of making it up as I write this, and so far, it\'s pretty good. Gotta iron out the kinks though.

[Ascensiam]

It\'s possible, I suppose. Two events is pretty damn low, though, compared to unexpected circumstances and things going wrong with other power generators.

It happended in my country, actually

Creepy stuff, but trust me, our stuff is high quality, this is rare. The cause was failed brakes.

[Guest GroundHOG-2010]

It happended in my country, actually

Creepy stuff, but trust me, our stuff is high quality, this is rare. The cause was failed brakes.

The only reason for it doing this is an unfeathered prop and/or failed brakes.

[vexx32]

Interesting. The wind would have to be pretty high for that to happen, though.. since these contain generators, not motors. And while it is possible, the safeguards in place are quite effective. Wind-farms are very widespread, and only 2 accidents is a very low rate... although it is somewhat worrying. I suppose it\'s a good thing shrapnel will not fly very far, and wind farms tend to be very far from inhabited areas...