In the wake of japanese nuclear power-station issues, german public and political parties have (once again) engaged in heated discussions about the use, value and safety of nuclear-power.
Germany, seeking the exit out of that power, has ever since the 80s been deeply devided between the supporters and those that would like the power-stations to close rather yesterday than today.
What is the situation in your country?
To me, it's kind of obvious that there's no passionate discussion and activism (we've had a 45km long chain of people from Stuttgart to Neckarwestheim, site of a nuclear power-station this passed saturday) comparable to the german one in any other country, but what is the exact consensual situation?
Do people in your country as well put up that amount of pressure, or is there any comparable division between supporters and those wanting to exit?
You Germans should also be concerned with the French... Why do they like to put their reactors on the border with the prevailing westerlies?
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In my country, the US, there hasn't been a lot of active debate since three mile island scared the bejeezus out of everyone in 1979. We haven't built any new civilian reactors since.
In my host country, Kuwait, one of the richest countries in the world for oil, they are building a nuclear reactor with the help of the french. Considering that due to lack of proper maintenance the city's sanitization system exploded last year and left huge parts of the city smelling like sh!t, I'm really scared for them having a reactor.
BTW, nice number one nuclear safety inspector avatar you have.![]()
Nuclear energy is actually very efficient and for the most part safe. The problem being the dangers of radioactive materials and waste.
Even if nuclear reactors were 100% guaranteed safe, the waste from such reactors has dire consequences.
Read up on dirty bombs and the apparent potential of radioactive waste in the wrong hands.
In the US, there never seems to be much debate until a disaster or scare occurs somewhere in the world.What is the situation in your country?
The mistake of the nuclear debate has always been comparing them to coal or past alternatives.
Its like comparing cars to horse drawn carriages. They both have their purpose but it is clear that nuclear energy is an advancement on coal energy and for many reasons. The debate should draw attention to further advancements in technology, such as solar energy and storage cells.
From what i've read/heard solar energy rarely addresses how realistic it would be as a replacement for nuclear power.
It usually focuses more on the issue of oil and ending the US dependency on foreign oil. That's a whole 'nother issue that i won't spoil this topic with.
This is a loaded question.Do people in your country as well put up that amount of pressure, or is there any comparable division between supporters and those wanting to exit?
The problem with activism in the US is that its misplaced or in someways more destructive to the original message.
Its hard to dispute something with out appearing to be a nut bag, or anti-American. In someways i think the country is socially fractured.
I say activism is misplaced because people sooner make issue, (or at least the news covers it better) of gay marriage and not take issue with nuclear energy and solar alternatives. They then flock to the street over a sideshow, when the lake they drink from reeks of sour chemicals and tumors.
It isn't until a nuclear reactor is being built in their back yard that someone might actually make an issue of it and by then usually their disputes are snuffed out by a lobby running ads on the safety of nuclear energy (again comparing to coal, natural gas, and oil consumption).
Bill
We only have one in Australia which is used for research and producing medical isotypes.
Its old, poorly maintained, very dangerous and mismanaged. This article is typical of the sort of controversy surrounding it:
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...frg6nf-1226014907843
All I can say is, don't put them anywhere at risk from earthquakes and tsunamis, seems like Japan shouldn't have, but they have a huge population and not many domestic resources and this new quake is really a once in 1000 years sort of thing so they took the gamble.
Three Mile Island did freeze nuclear energy in the US, but that means our plants are really old now and probably need replacing. The nuclear industry and their paid-off pals in Congress have been pushing a rebirth of nuclear energy for a while. Any time you see it brought up online or in the news you get a bunch of pro-business bobbleheads claiming that it's 100% safe and anyone who questions it is ill-informed (i.e. a moron).
It's a decent alternative to burning oil and coal (which are huge electricity providers in the US) but it's not anywhere as safe as its supporters often say. Advocate it if you want but don't act like it's 100% safe. Deploy it responsibly and don't half-arse it. After decades of corporate mismanagement and corner-cutting I don't have much faith that corporate energy companies will be as responsible as they say they will, and I don't have much faith that the government, whose power is watered down at the will of corporate America, will ensure the safety of civilians. See the PG&E gas blast in San Bruno or the BP oil spill. Or see the reactors in Japan or everyone in first world countries who have been harmed by living near nuclear reactors.
ib4tl, btw.
It costs more to deal with the ashes than you get from the burn. What's so efficient about that? The only way it accounts as efficient is if you don't consider the waste.
What TMI showed is that no one is responsible enough to run such places in the US. Disaster due to bad engineering struck and everyone involved just walked away until they were given a pass on the past and paid more money to come back. I had a friend who was hired to look into automating parts of the system and what he saw was 5 nuclear plants including TMI and Salem that all had one common set of plans yet each were different due to the piecemeal changes made at 1 to 3 at at time and the plans reflected none of them.
When 2 parallel pipes carried water, one radiated and the other clean, with each having pipettes to let air bubbles exit and a bit of water with it there was a V trough underneath to collect the water. That let the water mix so a fix was needed. Did they put a divider down the center of the trough? No! They cut all the air drain pipettes off and sealed the control lines! And how did the malf occur at TMI? Air bubble locked a valve! That's not engineering. That's disaster making for big bucks. And it's only possible because...
no one is going to be held responsible. There is no incentive to get it right and big money in it to keep 'fixing'.
Foxes billions, hen houses 0.
No plant in my country (Croatia), there is a power plant in neighboring Slovenia right on the border 50-ish km away from me, joint venture between Slovenia and Croatia and we both get 50% power from it.
I like nuclear power, it's much less polluting than the mainstream alternatives, and statistically looking, out of thousands of nuclear power plants in the world serious accidents can be numbered with the fingers of one hand, and you won't even have to use all of them. The only accident with widespread consequences was Chernobyl (not counting Mayak since that was military-related). That and the fact that technology has become much more advanced since 1986 means that a disaster on the scale of Chernobyl is very, extremely unlikely, at least with new reactors. Here in Japan you have a power plant that has been hit by an earthquake AND tsunami and is still, for now, holding its own.
Make them safer, build a few thick layers of containment around the reactor, a core cannot melt through as much containment material as you can put around it.
Nuclear waste? Put it in containment underground. Guard it so that terrorists don't obtain it. So much for that problem. It will stop being radioactive in a few hundred years or we will send the stuff into the sun soon enough. The future brings great things
I'd much rather have radioactive waste in underground containment than smoke and pollution in the air that I breathe or the ecological destruction associated with hydroelectric installations.
Surely it's not the definitive solution to the energy problem, but until we come up with something better it will do a nice job. The problems associated with nuclear energy are not at all complicated, they just require rigorous safety and security standards being put into place and enforced.
By the way, trivia: Austria is the only country to have made the use of nuclear reactors for producing energy illegal by law. They have complained and I think even offered money to Slovenia to shut down its (and our) nuclear plant.
Blah blah blah Nuclear is perfectly fine if A) Your not a vodka swilling Russian engineer B) You don't place them on fault lines or forget to build adequate tsunami defences.
Put the damn things underground. Radiation is not some scary monster that can't be dealt with, all you need is a lot of concrete or rock surrounding your plant and your fine in the worst case scenario.
Chernobyl was a testament to human stupidity and I'm sure this Japanese incident probably will be as well.
I think the real trouble is that scares like this, although legitimate, get people to steer away from nuclear technologies completely. The types of reactors are in most cases decades old in design. I was reading that the reason that nuclear technologies have developed the way they did is because back when they were developing atomic weapons using uranium and plutonium were the ideal options. I'm no nuclear physicist but I've read lots of interesting things about other types of fuels and other types of reactor designs where these kinds of disasters are not possible.
Nuclear isn't 100% safe and neither is any other energy generating technology. But I'd rather people not freak out and avoid nuclear again... It may be the mid-short term solution until we can come up with something better. Worst case scenario in my mind is that in 50 years crude oil is too expensive to drive modern economies so we'll have a greater need for electric everything to get around. Nuclear is the way to go here.
Until we have a breakthrough somewhere else. Even then... nuclear may lead to the breakthrough. So I'd rather see it used and developed rather than stagnant.
As for the Japanese ... again I'm not an expert but I was watching an interview tonight and the experts were saying that the Japanese facilities have survived a dual disaster and come through extremely well considering.
The Japanese haven't placed their reactors on fault lines... except to say that the entire island is surrounded by faults and stress fractures. So no matter where you build in Japan... major earthquakes are a potential. It's a credit to their engineers that these reactors weren't totally destroyed in the first place.
As for Canada... we've got plenty of nuclear power around here. Nobody seems to have brought it up much. Maybe next week if the media latches on to it.