Robert X Cringely Predicts More Mininuke Plants 430
LandGator writes "PC pundit Robert X Cringely had a life before writing 'Triumph of the Nerds' for PBS: He covered the atomics industry and reported on Three Mile Island. In this blog post, he analyzes the Fukushima reactor failures, and suggests the end result will be a rapid growth in small, sealed 'package' nuclear reactors such as the Toshiba 4S generator considered for Galena, Alaska. He thinks Japan may have little choice, and with rolling blackouts scheduled, he may be right."
I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone els (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be fine with it. I think it's a way to go.
But nuclear power still has the stigma of Chernobyl. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to scream NO at the top of their lungs and most will probably point at Japan's current situation and say "You see why it's a bad idea".
Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream. Instead of pumping tons of crud into the air I'm fine with some barrels of toxic waste so long as they don't cut costs on the storage.
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Thousands died from the quake, and all they are writing about is what's happening in those reactors.
Every summer more people die of heat stroke than have died from ALL NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS COMBINED since the nuclear industry began.
With all this melodrama, priorities will be shifted in the public's minds. They will believe that reducing the, so far inexistent, deaths from the Fukushima reactors is more important than reducing the emission of greenhouse effect gases.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
There are some indications of radioactive cesium and iodine.
Yeah, great. "Some indications" is evidence enough to make them want to shutdown nuclear power entirely, while overwhelming evidence for catastrophic global warming is disputed as "unconfirmed" or something like that.
If the same criteria were used for CO2 generation as is used for nuclear power, burning fossil fuels would have been outlawed long ago.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:2, Insightful)
And that's a completely appropriate response. When weighing the pros and cons of nuclear energy, it's crucial to ask yourself if you are personally willing to live next to a nuclear dump. Otherwise you're really weighing the pros (for you) against the cons (for someone else), which is like apples and oranges.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
Joe Sixpack should also look at the current mess in Libya and Bahrain. Count the number of lives lost there and compare that to the number of lives lost to the reactors in Japan. How many lives have been lost in wars over oil? Tell me again which energy source is a better choice?
At the end of the day, we can learn from what's happening in Japan and build even better reactors. What can be done about the despots ruling oil rich countries?
Re:Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
comparing a homemade wasteland for decades with a heatwave is just retarded.
It's not a heatwave, it's a heat *ocean*. It will take thousands, if not millions, of years for all that carbon to be reabsorbed by natural processes. That is, thousands of years after mankind has become extinct, of course, because humans show no sign of even trying to limit their production of CO2.
"Homemade wasteland", indeed, that's what global warming is all about.
Re:Cognitive dissonance (Score:5, Insightful)
My reading: older, better known reactor designs are safer.
My reading: reactors built by capitalist corporations who face massive financial loss when something goes wrong are safer than reactors built by communist dictatorships to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
A nuclear dump? Well I wouldn't want piles of crap sitting around in a vacant lot, but if it was miles below ground I wouldn't have a problem with it. And if I was next to a nuke plant instead of a coal plant, I'd get less radiation...
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
Re:Cognitive dissonance (Score:5, Insightful)
The only loss experienced by corporations will be lost opportunities. If you actually bother to look at how the nuclear industry is subsidised, you'll see that in every country the risk is underwritten by the state. In the event of a massive catastrophe, all the company loses is the capital invested in the plant, the state is left cleaning up for potentially hundreds of years.
There's no way you could make nuclear power companies liable for the cost of cleanup in the event of catastrophic meltdown. That would require them to put extraordinary amounts of capital into escrow - hundreds if not thousands of times the cost of the plant - and would mean nuclear power would become economically unviable. Even if you mandated insurance, who would underwrite it? The payout in the event of a serious meltdown would cause a meltdown in the insurance sector and.
Financial service companies were dumb enough to play hot potato with sub-prime mortgages, but even they're not dumb enough to underwrite the risk of nuclear power.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pro-nuclear but i'm sick of this downplaying bullshit. Reactors that require actively powered safety systems ARE flawed.
This entire crises we have had absolute dickheads claiming that the radiation levels are safe at a time when people in the immediate vicinity are being encouraged to evacuate by the authorities. There is a radiation leak. This is a fact. Up to 400mSv/h near the reactor has been confirmed (noticable radiation sickness will happen at 800 and above, but 400 is still very, very dangerous). People need to be acknowledging that fact. Much smaller than Chernobyl but there's no reason to downplay it. There are some heroes right now working in the irradiated zone trying to keep things under control. There are people in the immediate area who should leave for the next few days.
Assholes like the guy who wrote the following "even if you were standing at the top of the cooling tower you would be fine" and "fukushima is currently safe and will stay safe" should be sent to help maintain the reactors without any protective suit. Link: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/ [bravenewclimate.com]
Enough with the downplaying. The design WAS flawed. People ARE risking their lives to contain it. We should learn from this.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
I know. How stupid that "Joe Sixpack" would not want what's happening at the Japanese reactors to happen here.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the primary...wait for it...containment chambers! in the No 2 Fukushima reactor has been breached. Not because of the earthquake (if I'm reading this correctly) but because of the tsunami which overwhelmed the cooling systems causing the fuel to be exposed to air, causing a hydrogen explosion. That's what caused the mini-mushroom cloud that the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier. But that couldn't happen here because the corporations that build our nuclear plants would never cut any corners on safety because the "free market" insures that every possible safety measure has been taken.
Personally, I'm going to wait a few months and then eat a bunch of imported Japanese pickles. Maybe I'll get superpowers.
Seriously, I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other about nuclear power. But it bothers me when I hear proponents ridiculing "Joe Sixpack" for being a little alarmed about fuel rods exposed to the atmosphere and breaches in...wait for it...containment chambers!
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
The quake is done, people are already dead. Reactors are still having problems and hence are news.
A quake and tsunami is a purely natural disaster. Nuclear reactors having issues, being man made, can be blamed on people and people's decisions. That makes it news. You know like how a murder is news but someone dieing of old age is not. The story that involves people being bad will win over the story involving nature every time (look at Katrina in the US, the story was mostly about all the human errors and stupidity not that nature made a storm.
And this sets nuclear back just like TMI did. That's how human's work. Just like every year more people die in car accidents than by terrorist attacks, but guess which one people worry about most. Parents worry about strangers abducting the kid more than crashing the car on the way to soccer practice. "The Science of Fear" has huge numbers of examples.
There haven't been any direct deaths from the emission of greenhouse gases either, so how is that any different?
Re:Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a silly comparison. How many people died the last time the hydroelectric plant ran low on water? Your comparison yields no comparative advantage for any generating technology.
Yeah melodrama. Because the people that do die, die horribly, and large swaths of land become uninhabitable for decades.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I'm divided. I recognize that coal is terrible and disperses its own radioactive elements, but the whole atmosphere of nuclear power boosters makes me think of over-confident people with a deficit of prudence. I could get behind a system that would shut itself down rather than require active cooling, but there would have to be a whole lot of honesty displayed about the risks from its proponents, otherwise I'm going to be incredibly skeptical.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you personally willing to live next to a toxic waste dump from a coal fired plant or a petroleum refinery or even a solar panel manufacturing plant? There's this think about the word "nuclear" that makes people automatically assume the worst.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:2, Insightful)
Carbon cost of nuclear? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's a lot of heavy equipment, shipping of yellowcake, and processing of yellow cake before it gets to a nuke plant. I don't think they're as "green" as a lot of other people seem to think.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
Grow up? Fabulous argument, but I digress. You can provide facts, evidence, etc. all day long. The general public is full of fools who will side with whatever talking point is on the news that day. It is black and white. Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop. There is no grey area, and you do a disservice not only to the nuclear energy sector, but to science and technology as a whole by allowing morons to debate using emotion instead of fact and scientific fact.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:5, Insightful)
There are competitive reasons to avoid a core meltdown, namely that the reactor would need to be replaced at incredible cost.
And how is that a problem for the senior executives and the shareholders who built and profited from a reactor 5, 10 or 40 years ago and have since cashed out?
Geeks seem to have the quaint notion that corporations will somehow protect themselves from exposure to massive liabilities in order to preserve themselves. But - in spite of the recent United States Supreme Court ruling to the contrary - corporations are not people. Corporations - especially the really big ones - are a vehicle which really rich and powerful people use to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Think of them as big Saturn V rockets - they burn up all of their fuel and discard most of their structure and mass in the process of delivering their real payload into financial orbit; the rich goons and wealthy investors running the operation.
There are plenty of billionaire psychopaths who are more than willing and able to destroy their "own" corporation if it can make them an extra few million dollars, provided they can skip away without being held responsible for any of the mess they leave behind. It's perfectly rational behavior, if you're a psychopath.
Mozillo over at Countrywide made $500 million dollars in a single year while shoveling fraudulent mortgages out the door like they were McDonalds hamburgers. He still has the billion plus dollars he made during his tenure running Countrywide, and he's protected by an army of lawyers and bought-and-paid-for representatives in government. He doesn't care that Countrywide was destroyed, as it served his purpose - it made him rich. The taxpayers and the customers of and investors in Countrywide have been left on the hook to clean up the mess.
You wanna trust these guys with nuclear power plants and - worse - tons of nuclear waste? Good luck with that!
I was modding but decided to answer this bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Japan *automatically* evacuate people as a precaution, not as a need ! Just like tsunami drill this is something Japan implemented to be on the SAFE side.
3) radioactivity , a doubling of the normal background rate of Tokyo was measured. Big Fucking Deal. if an inhabitant from tokyo was moving to my region it would take *FIVE* time the background radioactivity they get now per year : about 10 millisievert. And if they were moving to those naturally radioactive hot spring in iran they would get about 80 times the dose.
While i agree that downplaying the problem is not so good, UPPLAYING it as you made is adding to the fucking media circus fear mongering.
It is a bad situation at the moment, but not a catastrophal one. The likely scenario at the moment, is that the fuel goes into containment, a bit of radioactivity might escape, but basically the plant will have to be written off, and the REAKL environmental catastrophe will be all the chemical from chem plants washed inshore over crop field by the tsunami, the destroyed towns, and the dead people. The reactor at the moment isn't even a BLIP compared to that.
Re:NO.. just NO. STUPID IDEA. (Score:4, Insightful)
You fail sir. The 4S reactor is placed 30m underground in a concrete and steel containment vessel. The sodium is encased inside the reactor and cannot come into contact with anything outside the vessel. It's a sealed unit.
Only until there is an earthquake strong enough to unseal it. The current reactor was also placed within a concrete and steel reinforcement vessel....
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:2, Insightful)
Because I know how to compare a distributed risk with a concentrated risk. Renewables like wind and solar aren't able to provide base load yet. Maybe in the future they will be able to, but right now they can't. So replacing this nuclear plant with a renewable is not a viable option.
Instead, it would most likely be replaced by a coal plant (importing gas is difficult). The problem with that is: the pollution those put out is hundreds of times more harmful than nuclear. Coal emissions worldwide are estimated to kill 1 million people every year. That's the equivalent of 250 Chernobyls every year. The U.S. has some of the cleanest coal plants in the world, but it's still estimated that coal emissions kill 30,000 Americans each year. That's more than 7 Chernobyls every year. But because the contamination from that pollution is distributed, there are no evacuations, no land closures, no keep out signs, no media coverage, no hysteria over those deaths.
No thank you. I will take 1 Chernobyl worldwide every ~25 years with the contamination concentrated in a small area everyone can avoid, over 250 Chernobyls every year where the contamination is distributed and unavoidable.
Re:I'd be open to it, but good luck with everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, stop comparing the number of deaths caused. Every single death is one too many. You sound like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and cancer. Stop ignoring the dangers in case large amounts of radioactive particles leak and spread. One time is too many.
Every single death is one too many? Whilst that's a nice ideal, it's entirely impractical because life is inherently risky. You also make it sound like contamination is solely a nuclear issue. Couple of events for you to ponder:
By your logic we should also ban coal mining and oil drilling, a hell of a lot people die from accidents whilst extracting these and they contaminate the landscape with carcinogens galore. Frankly we have to manage the risk, because nobody wants to give up their car or central heating quite yet.