02-22-2003, 01:01 AM
Hi,
I understand what you are saying. But there are two factors that mitigate the dangers, design and training. The plants themselves can be designed so that they are almost totally safe. I couldn't find a link to it, but a couple of years ago a plant in Canada did a cooling loss test. They expected that they would have to shut down after a few minutes. After the second or third day when all that had happened was that the core temperature went up over normal but not in the danger zone, they aborted the test. That is good design. Any power plant is dangerous. Even without the nuclear aspect, there are a lot of big powerful things that can bite you. Which is why all the people working in the power industry are trained. After all, it is their life, too.
Chernobyl, which you spelled as right as you can without using the Cyrillic alphabet, was a function of the Soviet system. Poorly designed, poorly manned. A disaster, yes. But the actual effect was, aside from scaring a lot of people, minor. You can find a fairly detailed report of the situation at http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/reports/2003/nea...8-chernobyl.pdf Note that the death toll from that accident (the only serious accident involving nuclear power) is less than 100 -- bad, sure, but nothing compared to how many miners have died getting coal or workers making dams.
In both absolute terms in in terms of megawatt produced, nuclear power is the safest of all. It is much like airplane travel -- safer than any other, so that when something does happen it becomes front page news.
Politicians can absentmindedly cut funding or underfund plants, that I'm certain of. Only there are the plants any more dangerous, as lack of funding just makes them less safe until they actually become dangerous.
Yes. Which is why power generation should *not* be a government function. The government's function should be to regulate, inspect, and investigate. Having the government do that and generate too is letting the fox guard the hen house. And a well run industry (which might be a fantasy nowadays) realizes that it is cheaper in the long run to do things right and keep things up.
The biggest spoke in the wheel that the politicians put in the nuclear industry is the agreements they made not to process used fuel rods because one "could" make weapons material from them. That one misguided regulation is primarily what makes the "nuclear waste" question important. If the material is processed, much of it can be reclaimed and reused. Some of it can be purified for medical and other applications (smoke detectors). The rest can be separated into very active short lifetime materials which require very special handling for a comparatively short time and long half life low activity materials which can be made into ceramic bricks and stored most anywhere (they aren't soluble and nothing short of a volcano or a nuclear weapon will melt them). And don't let people tell you about "very radioactive material that will last millions of years." Radioactivity is a means of liberating energy. The rate at which it is liberated (the half life) is a measure of power. If you have a certain amount of energy, you can use a lot of power for a little while or a little bit power for a long time. You can't use a lot of power for a long time, you just don't have the necessary energy.
--Pete
I understand what you are saying. But there are two factors that mitigate the dangers, design and training. The plants themselves can be designed so that they are almost totally safe. I couldn't find a link to it, but a couple of years ago a plant in Canada did a cooling loss test. They expected that they would have to shut down after a few minutes. After the second or third day when all that had happened was that the core temperature went up over normal but not in the danger zone, they aborted the test. That is good design. Any power plant is dangerous. Even without the nuclear aspect, there are a lot of big powerful things that can bite you. Which is why all the people working in the power industry are trained. After all, it is their life, too.
Chernobyl, which you spelled as right as you can without using the Cyrillic alphabet, was a function of the Soviet system. Poorly designed, poorly manned. A disaster, yes. But the actual effect was, aside from scaring a lot of people, minor. You can find a fairly detailed report of the situation at http://www.nea.fr/html/rp/reports/2003/nea...8-chernobyl.pdf Note that the death toll from that accident (the only serious accident involving nuclear power) is less than 100 -- bad, sure, but nothing compared to how many miners have died getting coal or workers making dams.
In both absolute terms in in terms of megawatt produced, nuclear power is the safest of all. It is much like airplane travel -- safer than any other, so that when something does happen it becomes front page news.
Politicians can absentmindedly cut funding or underfund plants, that I'm certain of. Only there are the plants any more dangerous, as lack of funding just makes them less safe until they actually become dangerous.
Yes. Which is why power generation should *not* be a government function. The government's function should be to regulate, inspect, and investigate. Having the government do that and generate too is letting the fox guard the hen house. And a well run industry (which might be a fantasy nowadays) realizes that it is cheaper in the long run to do things right and keep things up.
The biggest spoke in the wheel that the politicians put in the nuclear industry is the agreements they made not to process used fuel rods because one "could" make weapons material from them. That one misguided regulation is primarily what makes the "nuclear waste" question important. If the material is processed, much of it can be reclaimed and reused. Some of it can be purified for medical and other applications (smoke detectors). The rest can be separated into very active short lifetime materials which require very special handling for a comparatively short time and long half life low activity materials which can be made into ceramic bricks and stored most anywhere (they aren't soluble and nothing short of a volcano or a nuclear weapon will melt them). And don't let people tell you about "very radioactive material that will last millions of years." Radioactivity is a means of liberating energy. The rate at which it is liberated (the half life) is a measure of power. If you have a certain amount of energy, you can use a lot of power for a little while or a little bit power for a long time. You can't use a lot of power for a long time, you just don't have the necessary energy.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?