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Comments: 260 +- News: NRC Relicensing Old "Zombie" Nuclear Plants on Friday November 27, @10:09AM
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kdawson
on Friday November 27, @10:09AM
from the old-and-in-the-way dept.
from the old-and-in-the-way dept.
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mdsolar writes "In the Dec. 7 edition of The Nation, Christian Parenti details what he considers to be the real problem with nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions in the US: Not the high cost of new nuclear power, but rather the irresponsible relicensing of existing nuclear power plants by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The claim is that the relicensed plants — amounting to more than half ot the 104 original 1970s-era nukes in the US — operate like zombies beyond their design lifetimes only because of lax regulation spurred by concern over carbon dioxide emissions. But these plants are actually failing, as demonstrated by a rash of accidents. And some of the ancient plants are now being allowed to operate at 120% of their designed capacity. There is a video interview with Parenti up at Democracy Now."
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Yawn.... (Score:3, Insightful)
We can't build new nuclear because of the NIMBY crowd. We can't build new coal fired because of the eco-nuts. We can't drill for more oil because of the morons in congress. We don't have to wait for Obama to ruin this country, these groups are doing it for us.
Hey
Re:Yawn.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Yawn.... (Score:4, Insightful)
+1 insightfull, please, for timeOday ...
do nothing
indeed, the perfect solution, because:
fossil fuels are harmless
plan on increasing the population exponentially
... no harm in planing, except it won't work: population never increased exponentially.
no more worries about Iran
are there any worries about Iran and concerning the energy supply ? The worry is about a regime that does not do well with openness attempting to develop nuclear technology.
Right?
Absolutely right.
Parent
Re:Yawn.... (Score:4, Informative)
Iran trying to get the bomb was pretty much unavoidable after they let Israel have it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"pretend fossil fuels are harmless, and plan on increasing the population exponentially forever."
And yet you seem to be the one with the buried head.
Nuclear fuel ain't fossil fuels.
Many people wanted more nuclear plants, more people stopped them. If would hose the nuclear plants, there would be more coal and gas burning plants.
The US does not have an exponentially growing population. We have been around 2.1 to 2.2 children per household for decades. (In fact, the last government report I read on populati
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup, and about a million other things that aren't as perfect as a little baby. You realize though that you played into the OP's point perfectly...right?
So let's be realistic for...oh...30 seconds or so. The NIMBYism in the US has left us in a position where energy demand is outstripping production (well, it has but we import). Sure, an oil rig isn't ideal for your romantic sunset on the beach but if it's that have gas up at $10/gallon maybe we should give it some though. Sure the teary case of a child w
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nuclear power - PLEASE put one of these in my back yard! http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news-toshiba-micro-nuclear-12.17b.html [nextenergynews.com]
Mercury - Here are some mercury FACTS from the department of energy... http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/pollutioncontrols/overview_mercurycontrols.html [energy.gov].
Drilling for oil - So while the rest of the world goes out and drills for oil, going so far as to cro
The sky is falling! (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh no, nuclear energy is being used, the world will end! Must stop this at all costs, or mother nature will be unhappy. Nuclear is evil because it has the word nuclear in it and somehow related to the military! Now that thats settled it's back to firing up some more coal power plants to meet the needs of society....
What do you mean the greens are the ones stopping the building of new nuclear power plants? The FUD power trip on nuclear is so much more important than letting people have clean power.
New stations NOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Greenes did huge damage to this country by instilling fear in nuclear power. While Greens mostly support good things to protect environment their opposition and fearmongering of nuclear plants caused us to build economy on oil.
Besides that we canceled all large-scale development of next generation reactors (breeders, lead-cooled, etc.) capable of burning 99% of fuel and leaving almost no waste.
On the bigger picture in the last twenty-thirty years people became more comfortable and lazy and unwilling to take any risks. This affected everything in the society - cancellation of Space Shuttle program, public safety even kids wearing helmets on the bicycles. If there is no risk there is no reward but it seems we kind of forgot about it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I see and understand what you're generally saying, but how does that follow from Space Shuttle and helmets?
Space Shuttle is simply obsolete...or rather, was a marriage of advanced concept with inappropriate technology; way too early before its time. And helmets...is there anything negative about them?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I am a huge fan of Nuclear Power, however, I sometimes wonder if all the irrational fear of Nuclear Power was Good for the industry? I kinda think all the negative attention and scare tactics and stuff made the nuclear industry have to go over and above to continue proving, without doubt, that they were safe..
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well i'm with you on most of it...except the greens supporting good things.
All we seem to hear is 1) Stop doing this-and-that because it's bad and B) 'This' magical technology is the panacea ... at 10x the cost and in 5-15 years when it goes from laboratory process to initial commercial production ... and another 10 for large-scale usage.
I understand that cleaner generation plants, cars, etc. are a good thing but the cost-reward balance is often so far off I can do nothing but shake my head. Remember the f
If I understand it right (Score:3, Insightful)
...the most salient criticism raised by the "Greenes" was that we were not, as a people, disposed to live up to the "zero tolerance" policy for failure that large scale industrial use of nuclear materials really demands. We always make mistakes eventually. Even if it takes 50 or 100 years, then it means we only have 50 or 100 years until a major nuclear disaster and i.e. epic human suffering, unprecedented economic calamity, the depopulation of a major urban area, the success of a fanatical act of terrorism
The real problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Not so (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. While still in the research phase, Fourth Generation [wikipedia.org] reactors look very promising, waste that remains dangerous for decades rather than thousands of years and the ability to use waste from Gen III reactors as fuel.
Even current breeder reactors can use some waste as fuel.
Parent
Re:The real problem isn't really a problem. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually there is a solution for nuclear waste.
It is called fuel reprocessing.
With proper reprocessing the waste is much easier to handle. We are not doing it right now because it is cheaper to just let it sit and or to bury it.
The problem is most people have been fed a line of manure from the anti nuclear folks. Do you have any idea how much money some of them are making off of book deals, speaking fees, and "donations" that people make to keep the world and the coal companies safe from the evils of nuclea
Blame the EPA (Score:5, Insightful)
The EPA won't let new nuclear plants to get built. If the plants get decommissioned it will literally cut our energy production by 1/2. It takes 10-15 years to build a new nuclear plant by EPA guidlines, and the population in that zone won't let it get built just as they refuse to let wind turbines to get built.
So our only short term solution is to let the NRC extend the lives of the plants. It is either that or force new nuclear plants to get built but it isn't cost efficient to do so.
there is a real energy crisis looming. Simply because people won't plan ahead, the oil will start to run out roughly when all the fission plants have to go offline do to safety reasons.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"If the plants get decommissioned it will literally cut our energy production by 1/2"
According to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, in August 2009 Nuclear power produced approximately 0.758 quadrillion BTUs of energy, out of a total of 6.266 quadrillion BTUs produced across all sources. That's approximately 12% of total output. Thus, decomissioning nuclear power plants would not cut our energy production by half, either literally or figuratively.
Extensive stats from EIA available
Re:Blame the EPA (Score:4, Informative)
IAAEA (I am an energy analyst with one of the larger energy companies in the US), and I'd argue your math there. Nuclear is base-load power, meaning it's always there. Coal plants, natural gas plants, and the like have to be taken on and off line for maintenance and such pretty frequently. If you live in the PJM footprint of the Northeast, it's very likely that the only plant(s) providing off-peak, nighttime power to your house is a nuclear reactor. Half sounds about right for PJM, and the same probably holds true for most of the South and California.
Not to mention that replacing the nukes with oil or gas burning plants would cost squillions more in land, fueling pipelines, railheads, etc.
Parent
Maybe some truth there, but it's dubious (Score:5, Insightful)
According to him, if you're still running your car after the warantee expires, you've got a "zombie car"-- regardless of how much maintanance you put into it. He says a lot of scary things, but doesn't really have much real information.
Nuclear Powered Zombie Plants? (Score:4, Funny)
This will not end well
"Zombie nukes?" Puh-leaze (Score:5, Insightful)
I am a nuclear engineering/physics graduate student. Whether that makes me uniquely qualified to comment or just another industry shill is, I suppose, a question of which color Kool-Aid you drank with your Post Toasties this morning. That disclaimer out of the way:
This article is garbage. Others have noted the inflammatory language ("Zombie nukes?" really?). The author is misleading his readers on the issue of radiation-induced embrittlement and stress-corrosion cracking -- whether through ignorance or deliberately deceptive language, it's hard to say. You'll note that of the "shocking" lapses in power plant operations, ZERO led to significant releases of radioactivity. ZERO led to any worker deaths or major injuries. The worst of the bunch, the "six inch deep hole" in the Davis-Besse pressure vessel head, wasn't caused by lax regulation -- it was caused by deliberate fraud. Inspection records were faked, and the people responsible are currently serving time in federal prison. That does point out a legitimate concern: if the operator is willing to lie to the NRC, then bad things can happen. NRC could probably use a shot in the arm, but to suggest it's merely a lapdog of the industry is highly inflammatory, and evidence suggests, not especially accurate.
These reactors were licensed to operate for forty years because that is the maximum time permitted by law. Why was forty years written into the law? Because there was significant uncertainty as to how reactors would hold up in the long haul. The law was written conservatively. Designers built large safety margins into their designs to ensure compliance. Forty years of operational experience has demonstrated to everyone but the most anti-nuke environmentalists that there is sufficient safety margin to operate safely for another twenty years.
As for the 120% operating capacity... sheesh. These plants have had steam generator upgrades. More efficient heat removal allows the turbines to produce more electricity. The nuclear side of the plant is essentially unchanged. They probably drive the primary coolant pumps a little harder, but still well within their designed capacity. So yes, we're getting 20% more energy out of the same number of fissions. No, we're not jamming 20% more fuel into the core. Again: deliberately misleading, or poorly informed? Hard to say.
Re: (Score:3)
And is there some reason why that pump, now being "driven a little harder", can't be replaced when it wears out, just as you would any moving part on any sort of machinery?? I'd think that would fall under ordinary maintenance, not wild-eyed panic.
I'm sure there are spreadsheets that can tell us when maintenance is to be expected and performed under a given load level, so it's not like OMG it'll only be inspected when it's DUE to wear out under the lesser load. Something like an aircraft's airworthyness dir
It's the operators that are the greatest danger (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't feel like nuclear power itself is dangerous. I'm worried about the people who own and operate the plants. Most companies in this world focus on one thing: increasing profits at the expense of everything else. Forget safety. Forget responsibility. Whatever the industry just cut things to the absolute razor's edge to line the pockets of the owners and executives.
The repercussions of this attitude in the nuclear power industry are far greater than other energy producers. Mistakes (or outright negligence) in the handling of materials related to nuclear power production become the legacy of generations, and as usual we will only find out about these problems when it's too late.
Nuclear power can be clean. It can also be relatively safe. It's the people in the equation that make me anti-nuke. I just don't trust the owners, operators or regulators.
Wow, that is clever (Score:3, Funny)
Very disipointed in you, Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen some very un newsworthy crap on Slashdot before, but this blatantly one-sided and completely overstated editorial without any further investigation or counter statement is really pushing it. Shame on you, slashdot.
Now if you want, I'd be happy to write a rebuttal to this on my site, and you're welcome to link to that, but I don't expect you will, will you?
I expect that this article was read by someone at Slashdot with a background in computer science or something else that made them totally incapable of judging the merits of these claims. For example the statement "Radiation makes metal brittle, so old pipes must be routinely switched out for new ones." That's totally bogus. There is a such thing as neutron brittling but that happens to the reactor vessel, not the outside plumbing, which is never exposed to neutron irradiation.
Another lie in the article, which is a common political lie used by certain anti-nuclear energy interests is "The government has put up $18.5 billion in subsidies to build atomic plants." That is simply not true. The only thing the government put up is what are called loan guarantees, which basically is to say that the government has agreed to underwrite loans on nuclear plants, a common practice in many private public works projects. It's a means of assuring that the plant can get financing at a reasonable interest rate. The government is not handing out 18.5 billion dollars.
There is more regulation and inspection of nuclear power plants than any other industrial facility on the fact of the earth. Commercial aircraft, chemical production facilities, massive gas storage facilities, explosives storage locations, trains that cary tens of thousands of tons of chlorine - these are all subject to far far less regulatory and safety oversight.
Shame on you again, Slashdot. Next time you go to publish something so obviously slanted and inflammatory, consider asking an expert in the field, who actually understands this stuff. My suggestion would be hps.org. They have excellent media relations and very helpful people who know their stuff.
I'd be happy to write a rebuttal to this, line by line, but I don't know if I have time to today.
Odd (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it is odd in this, our age of progress and technological prowess that we can no longer afford the infrastructure of the past.
New nuke plants are now somehow out of reach, as are new oil refining facilities, rail, bridges, sewers. Somehow in the last 30 years we lost the ability to undertake large infrastructure, which you would think given the wealth, technology, etc... that it would be easier.
I wonder if this is political or simply part of a new phase. It just seems to me that everything was constructed in the 60's and 70's and now everything is crumbling and falling apart around us, and we lack the ability or will replace it.
Re:Odd (Score:5, Insightful)
"Somehow in the last 30 years we lost the ability to undertake large infrastructure, which you would think given the wealth, technology, etc... that it would be easier."
I think Vietnam was the tipping point. A huge military expenditure forced the curtailment of domestic infrastructure subsidies. Which led to industrial stagnation, and those of us who were kids in the 70s remember it being a bit grim: strikes, inflation, gas price rises, quality problems, and so on.
Then came Reagan like the white knight, and his "solution" for Morning In America was to deregulate, which let private infrastructure companies morph into Enron-like shell games. Finance became the new "sunrise industry", alongside microcomputing and networking - the focus was on production of information rather than investment in the old crumbling infrastructure. It was easier and cheaper to make profits by repackaging ownership and debt than doing the hard work. Image, not substance, was what the free market rewarded, so that's what we got.
If you look at early 80s science fiction, like the cyberpunks, you see a lot of sunny optimism, even mixed in with terror, of how efficient private companies were going to be at building infrastructure. But that didn't happen except in computing, and I'm kind of surprised as to why even that occurred - I presume the Pentagon and Wall Street were the main drivers there.
Clinton slowed back a bit but kept mostly on the same privatisation track, and W accelerated it again. Now Obama's trying to reinvest in social infrastructure (healthcare) and gets called the worst of names for that. Far from Kennedy's space race era, half of the USA now sees the mere idea of national-level investment in anything but war as inherently evil. As an outsider, I don't understand why, but I can see the effects.
Space, for instance, was really all just about the ICBM buildout. Once the Minutemen were built, and the military got their spy and comms networks, and computers had shown that a manned space presence wasn't necessary to achieve the military objectives... there wasn't a whole lot left to do. Just more commsats.
Infrastructure is a hard problem to start with. When there's a political movement which actively believes even having a shared infrastructure to be a bad thing and that it's a moral duty to prevent those who don't have their own capital reserves from getting access to services... it gets a lot harder.
Parent
More great BS from people who have no clue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tritium laced water is bad in the water supply, I agree. But as the author said, these happened at one location which the original owner thought was going to be decommissioned. It should have been made know to the new purchasers that some maintenance was not done. I mean, really, would you put a new exhaust system on a 15 year old car which has over 250,000 miles on it? No, you would patch up the one you got and get ready to buy a new car, which is what the previous owner did. They did neglect to tell the new owner of the "car" about the issue and that there was only a temporary patch in place...
Considerable lack of knowledge (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bingo. Uprating is a standard practice after a controls upgrade, and is often the very reason you perform a controls upgrade.
~Sticky
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Insightful)
The cause of the Chernobyl disaster, however, was the poor design of Russian nuclear power plants.
Yeah, cooling your reactor by pumping oxygen-laden air through a red-hot carbon lattice is a really good idea. Excuse me, I need to go slap someone.
France generates pretty much all of its electricity from nuclear, with reprocessing, using pressurised water reactors. Not only do they have a number of handy engineering benefits such as isolating the water loop through the reactor from the water loop through the turbines, but they also have a particularly useful safety feature in that they're self-regulating --- temperature goes up, power output goes down. France has an excellent safety record; I can find only one major incident, which was a coolant spill in 2008.
They even do their own waste reprocessing into plutonium, which is then reused to generate more power. Unaccountably, terrorists don't seem to have stolen any of it.
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:4, Interesting)
More specifically, modern safe reactors have a negative void coefficient. As water vaporizes in an critically hot reactor, it reduces the rate of reaction. The hotter the reactor gets, the larger the void(s) in the coolant, the less reaction occurs.
Chernobyl had a positive void coefficient.
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Interesting)
No. See, there's something important you need to understand about engineering, which apparently the submitter doesn't understand either:
The plants were designed back in the days of tables and slide rules. They were designed with large safety margins, because the understanding of the science and the engineering was imperfect. Today our understanding is much greater, and we have very advanced computer models to help the design process. Ever wondered why modern bridges and buildings are much more 'delicate' than older behemoths? Because we can compute the actual behavior of the structures to much higher precision and accuracy, so the needed safety margin is less. It's the same with nuclear plants.
The plants were built to a certain design that had large safety margins... not because they were needed per se, but because the designers couldn't prove they weren't. Today, we can model all the behavior of the plants to a high degree, so we don't need the same safety margins to keep these plants safe. You don't need a cooling system with 50% excess design capacity, since we can prove that 25% is sufficient. We know now that the containment wall is twice as big as it needs to be, for the original design load. So, we can use the safety margins to run the plants longer and to higher capacity than the original design.
In the engineering world, this is done all the time. The only 'news' here is that it's being done with nuclear power plants. But still, that's no big deal. This is just the new anti-nuclear luddite rallying cry.
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back to the TFA. Color me unimpressed. Using terms such as 'zombie', "decrepit" and 'unprecidented' without a shred of evidence makes me think that the article and the author have a bit too much bias to really believe. Sure, it could be true, but we run things past their design lives all of the time. With careful maintenance and modification it works well. Perhaps maintenance isn't being done correctly as the article suggests, but lets see a bit more evidence, shall we?
Even though the operators of nuclear plants are shielded from much of the liability of a reactor failure by the feds, no operator wants to Wilson a plant - it's just too expensive.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Using terms such as 'zombie', "decrepit" and 'unprecidented' without a shred of evidence makes me think that the article and the author have a bit too much bias to really believe.
On the other hand, maybe they're onto something.
Should I stop driving my 'zombie' car now that the warranty has expired?
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:4, Informative)
The article mentions the mishap-plagued Vermont Yankee, currently near relicensing and with a 120% uprate a couple of years ago. Entergy, the current owner, plans to spin off ownership of half its plants, including Yankee, to a new firm financed by massive debt. This way Entergy will no longer itself be financially responsible for any aspect of these plants, while pocketing most of the projected profits from their next two decades of licensed operation in advance.
So Entergy's got little reason to concern itself with whether Yankee will work as advertised after relicensing. Relicensing is merely a requirement to spin it off, and relinquish Entergy of any responsibility at all, beyond immediate, massive profit.
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comparing Chernobyl to any American commercial reactor and talking about what could happen, without mentioning the severe differences, is just like mentioning a prior dam failure, hinting at the imminent collapse of Boulder dam, and not mentioning the little detail that the prior dam was made of packed dirt and not concrete.
Whoops, it's Slashdot, better go with a car analogy:
It's like planting explosives under one make of car, claiming that model blows up more than another brand, and not mentioning the explosives part.
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Pripyat happened because one of its reactors was running at a higher capacity than allowed and after its designed life cycle
No.
The Chernobyl reactor disaster happened because the operators decided to run a test, and turned off the automatic safety shut-down.
Parent
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a perfect storm of design flaw and poor decision making that lead to the Chernobyl disaster.
The experiment the reactor was running was designed to test whether the pumps could circulate current through the reactor after a power loss on inertia alone (without using the backup diesel generators.)
It was surprising to find out that the direct death toll (discounting the increased cancer rates following the release of radiation) was 56 people, including the responders to the event, and workers on-site when the accident occurred.
Although the nearby town of Pripyat was abandoned after the disaster, Reactors 1-3 continued operation. Reactor number 2 was damage in a fire, and shut down in 1991. Reactor 1 was decommissioned in 1996, and reactor number 3 was shutdown in 2000.
Personally, reading heavily into the Chernobyl accident has gone a long way towards improving my opinion on nuclear power. To see what it took to cause the most recognizable and most cited disaster, really puts things into perspective.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And they were using a HIDEOUSLY old technology for a reactor that would allow for a runaway reaction to happen. It is suspected the reactor was not a normal power reactor but a breeder reactor designed to make weapons grade.
Most of the American old reactors are NOT of a horribly bad design like that. Is there a risk? kinda. but if all we have are 3 mile island incidents that the worst was undetectable by most instruments then I'm all for it. Honestly the damned NIMBY and green idiots that kept us from c
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Pripyat happened because one of its reactors was running at a higher capacity than allowed and after its designed life cycle. It was in process of shut down, but it was too late already then.......
This first part is incorrect. The reactor (no.4) was almost brand new having been completed in 1983.
The Chernobyl accident occurred while they were doing a test to see if with the reactor shut down the steam turbine had enough momentum to produce power to run the main cooling pumps for the 60 seconds before the backup diesel generators kicked in.
As part of this test they switched off the reactors safety devices and the rest is history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster [wikipedia.org]
Re:Chernobyl again? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, no. The disaster happened because a test was carried out less experienced night operators who did every don't in the manual trying to follow a test procedure they did not understand. The last straw was removing more control rods completely from the core than was permitted for any reason in an attempt to brute force their way past xenon poisoning rather than scrubbing the test and allowing the iodine and xenon to decay before attempting to increase output as the manual required. At that point the reactor was in an extremely unstable condition.
They then made matters worse by reducing the coolant flow to the point that voids formed in the core (the reduced flow was part of the test procedure). In that particular reactor design, voids increase the reaction rate. That taken together DID "burn off" the xenon and suddenly the reacter was way over it's design limits. Compounding the problem, the tips of the control rods were inert but displace water (effectively a void), so when they tried to scram the reactor it exploded instead.
During all of this, several safety systems that would have scramed the reactor in time were manually disabled.
Put another way, they started with an intrinsically dangerous reactor design (not permitted in the U.S.), overrode a number of safety systems, mis-handled the power level, then attempted to recover by performing an absolutely prohibited operation. Finally now that the reactor was in an incredibly precarious state they further provoked disaster by performing an experimental test procedure (whose carefully planned pre-conditions were not in any way met).
Notably, the reactor went prompt critical rather than supercritical as a nuclear weapon would. The explosive yield was about a ton of TNT (compared to 10 kilotons for a small weapon).
So, unsurprisingly it shows that it's a bad idea to have insufficiently trained operators overide safety mechanisms and then ignore every rule in the book in order to carry out an experiment on a dangerously designed nuclear reactor. Particularly in a bureaucratic culture where supervisors would be more upset by a scheduled test being scrubbed than they would be at safety procedures being ignored. A deliberate plan to cause a disaster couldn't have come up with a better procedure.
Parent
Re:Sorry to say that, but you are wrong. (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong, it was an existing reactor (it was built in 1983 and the disaster took place in 1986) and they were testing the shutdown procedures. Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Reports into Chernobyl at the time of the accident were that the US had nothing to learn from it, reactor lifetimes have been extended because they underestimated the lifetimes when they were first built.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm a supporter of nuclear energy, but don't let anyone dumb too close a nuclear power plant.
It's good we have this guy [yfrog.com] in control of a nuclear power plant.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just a measure of fear arising in populace from understanding vs. not understanding something.
Coal powerplant is like a big campfire, right? So how bad can it be? People were doing it since forever and it's quite nice actually!
But nuclear leads them instantly to Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings, Chernobyl, that scary warning signs at roentgen lab, and so on. Also, "if I can't understand it, surely nobody else can either"
BTW, I remember a "debate" in national TV here few years back. Anti-nuke zealots d