StrangeSox Posted March 16, 2011 Share Posted March 16, 2011 QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 16, 2011 -> 03:20 PM) In other words, it's probably pretty analogous to what is going on in Japan, with the exception that this country does have some ability to reprocess the stuff so they're not necessarily stored forever. Well except that most of our plants aren't susceptible to a tsunami. The earthquake isn't what caused the problem here. SONGS' VP was on TV yesterday defending their emergency plans and saying they have back-up back-up diesel generators off-site that can be shipped in and hooked up in the case of a similar emergency there. They also have a 30 ft seawall in front of the plant. That said, I think the NEI, NRC, INPO, DOE and whatever other acronyms are appropriate need to review these plants' emergency plants and design assumptions ASAP. irrelevant note: ABC used some camera angles that were identical to pictures I took when I was there last fall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 16, 2011 Share Posted March 16, 2011 QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 16, 2011 -> 04:28 PM) Well except that most of our plants aren't susceptible to a tsunami. The earthquake isn't what caused the problem here. SONGS' VP was on TV yesterday defending their emergency plans and saying they have back-up back-up diesel generators off-site that can be shipped in and hooked up in the case of a similar emergency there. They also have a 30 ft seawall in front of the plant. That said, I think the NEI, NRC, INPO, DOE and whatever other acronyms are appropriate need to review these plants' emergency plants and design assumptions ASAP. irrelevant note: ABC used some camera angles that were identical to pictures I took when I was there last fall. The ground motion at this site was also less than you'd get with some magnitude 7-8 events near U.S. nuclear plants, and others sit on 500 year floodplains of rivers. Anyway, my general point I think still stands. Engineers are great at responding to the last calamity. They're not very good at predicting the next one. After this, I'll be confident that every plant in the country will be able to deal with a cutoff of pumps due to flooding. That doesn't translate at all into the conclusion that disaster is impossible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kapkomet Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 16, 2011 -> 03:23 PM) eta also there's not a containment building around spent fuel for a variety of reasons. Maybe that needs to be reevaluated along with other design-basis assumptions, but the doom-and-gloom spewing from some of the anti-nuke people right now is pretty ridiculous. I know you disagree, but I see nuclear power as the only feasible short-to-mid-term alternative to more coal and natural gas. The risks of ever-increasing AGW far outweigh the risks of nuclear power. Even in the face of the worst potential natural disaster that could hit an older plant of the most susceptible design, it's still not that bad right now. This could turn much worse in a hurry, of course, and I'm not diminishing the environmental impact of what's occurring in Japan right now. What do you know, we actually agree on something. All sarcasm aside, the so called experts on this whole thing have been people who have extreme anti nuclear agendas. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (kapkomet @ Mar 16, 2011 -> 09:29 PM) What do you know, we actually agree on something. All sarcasm aside, the so called experts on this whole thing have been people who have extreme anti nuclear agendas. On TV, from what I've seen, all of the guests have been anti-nuclear except the one guy form the USGS who was just stating facts about seismic zones in the US. The real experts do need to step back and reevaluate their design assumptions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 Which estimate for deaths from Chernobyl is being used there? The 4000-ish direct deaths or the estimates of up to a million cancer deaths in Europe, or something in-between? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NorthSideSox72 Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 02:28 PM) How the hell are there any death related to biomass and peat? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 (edited) I dunno, I'm trying to find the source. FWIW the official reports from UNSCEAR and the IAEA have 56 direct deaths and about 4,000 cancer deaths. But a million? Even Greenpeace's reports are something like 250k. And we all know how generally terrible and ignorant Greenpeace is when it comes to nuclear power. edit: I personally think the UN/IAEA/WHO number is laughably low. Edited March 17, 2011 by StrangeSox Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 02:36 PM) How the hell are there any death related to biomass and peat? Industrial accidents would be my guess. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 where the graph is from: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-pe...rgy-source.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 so he's using the 4k figure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 03:37 PM) I dunno, I'm trying to find the source. FWIW the official reports from UNSCEAR and the IAEA have 56 direct deaths and about 4,000 cancer deaths. But a million? Even Greenpeace's reports are something like 250k. And we all know how generally terrible and ignorant Greenpeace is when it comes to nuclear power. edit: I personally think the UN/IAEA/WHO number is laughably low. A book from a couple of Eastern European Scientists which came out last year from the New York Academy of Sciences estimated 986,000. Whether their procedure is accurate or not I'm not going to speak to, I only cite them as a way of noting the 2.5 orders of magnitude that could be missing from that chart. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 even if we want to drop nuclear from the debate on that graph, we can use it as a good argument against coal/oil. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 04:10 PM) even if we want to drop nuclear from the debate on that graph, we can use it as a good argument against coal/oil. How are they counting deaths from coal? Are they counting the fact that I can't stop coughing right now, or just mining accidents? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 03:13 PM) How are they counting deaths from coal? Are they counting the fact that I can't stop coughing right now, or just mining accidents? It includes the WHO's 1M/year estimated deaths due to air pollution. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 The fact that they'd use the WHO estimates for one type but deliberately not use an available WHO estimate for another type of electricity makes me more than a little uncomfortable, even if I think they're right regarding the fossil (cough) fuels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 I'm far too lazy myself, but a graph like that should include error bars on the estimates for all deaths and compare to reasonable worst-case estimates from Chernobyl, not the lowest estimate available. I'd imagine it's very sensitive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 03:24 PM) The fact that they'd use the WHO estimates for one type but deliberately not use an available WHO estimate for another type of electricity makes me more than a little uncomfortable, even if I think they're right regarding the fossil (cough) fuels. Huh? The WHO estimates for Chernobyl are the Chernobyl Group 4k estimates. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 04:25 PM) Huh? The WHO estimates for Chernobyl are the Chernobyl Group 4k estimates. My mistake, I didn't realize UNSCEAR was speaking for the WHO. Alphabet soup. Cough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 03:35 PM) My mistake, I didn't realize UNSCEAR was speaking for the WHO. Alphabet soup. Cough. Yeah it was a rather large body of organizations getting together for that report. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 17, 2011 Share Posted March 17, 2011 WASHINGTON—Responding to the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sought Thursday to reassure nervous Americans that U.S. reactors were 100 percent safe and posed absolutely no threat to the public health as long as no unforeseeable system failure or sudden accident were to occur. "With the advanced safeguards we have in place, the nuclear facilities in this country could never, ever become a danger like those in Japan, unless our generators malfunctioned in an unexpected yet catastrophic manner, causing the fuel rods to melt down," said NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko, insisting that nuclear power remained a clean, harmless energy source that could only lead to disaster if events were to unfold in the exact same way they did in Japan, or in a number of other terrifying and totally plausible scenarios that have taken place since the 1950s. "When you consider all of our backup cooling processes, containment vessels, and contingency plans, you realize that, barring the fact that all of those safety measures could be wiped away in an instant by a natural disaster or electrical error, our reactors are indestructible." Jaczko added that U.S. nuclear power plants were also completely guarded against any and all terrorist attacks, except those no one could have predicted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kapkomet Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 03:24 PM) The fact that they'd use the WHO estimates for one type but deliberately not use an available WHO estimate for another type of electricity makes me more than a little uncomfortable, even if I think they're right regarding the fossil (cough) fuels. QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Mar 17, 2011 -> 03:24 PM) I'm far too lazy myself, but a graph like that should include error bars on the estimates for all deaths and compare to reasonable worst-case estimates from Chernobyl, not the lowest estimate available. I'd imagine it's very sensitive. Good call, because it seems like that graph has all sorts of cherry picking going on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NorthSideSox72 Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 barring the fact that all of those safety measures could be wiped away in an instant by a natural disaster or electrical error, our reactors are indestructible That is one of the most logically assinine sentences I've ever read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrangeSox Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Dude, check the link. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balta1701 Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 Balta FTW! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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