What was the fallout from Fukushima? | Environment | The Guardia..
I apologies if this is too close to an opinion piece.
I'm not going to post a snippet because I think everyone should read the full article. There's a lot to cover.
It's staggering how much misinformation was shared in the first few days and how it has completely destroy any ability to get facts and reason out. Cries of "shill" if you report what has actually been observed and published in journals instead of the fearmongering published in newspapers. All the people who lost their lives in the evacuation when no deaths have been traced (and probably will never be) to the radiation.
Yeah, Fukushima's impact is honestly far over-exaggerated. Most nuclear stuff is fearmongered over because most people don't actually understand the science and that makes the industry and plants easy targets for reporters looking for sensationalist titles and pieces, as well as anti-nuclear groups looking to spread propaganda to try and bring down the field (which is just sad, given how nuclear's by far our safest baseload power generation method and is very clean w/ no emissions).
I have my reservations about nuclear power.
It's not the science behind it, or that I imagine a series of failures bringing the planet to it's knees.
It's humanities ability to maintain the facilities, the fuel and the waste in a safe and consistent manner throughout hundreds of years. Say if Europe and the US have switched to about 80-90% nuclear energy and war breaks out and destabilizes these regions the possibility of mass contamination goes up by a huge amount. Mishandled or heaven forbid misplaced nuclear waste could be a country killer.
Would a smidge of faith in your local nuclear engineers and automated systems kill you? Also you have suggested war in the two powers that have learned that sharing is caring and starting any form of war in them is a ridiculously Herculean task with how stable they are.
The fear against nuclear is the stupidest thing in the world.
More people die every day, EVERY DAY, from coal mining and coal factories, coal pollution, coal related illnesses. This death toll is a daily death toll that is 10 times the death toll of nuclear over the entire span of nuclear powers life. Even if you decided to throw in the deaths of every person from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Cherynobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukisihima, and the variety of tragedies that the Russian government created, you would still have less than the daily death toll of coal.
How the fuck can you be against nuclear power in light of the fact coal kills more people constantly and always has, and always will
Read about the subject from experts. It's not dangerous.
The harm of fossil fuels is so immense that the dangers of nuclear are utterly minuscule in comparison. Nuclear power could cause ecological damage when mismanaged, yes. Fossil fuels are literally causing the greatest ecological disaster in human history right now.
I'm obviously not leaning in favor of fossil fuels here, I'm voicing concerns for a dominantly nuclear powered future based off of mankinds consistently violent history, WW2 wasn't in the far past, it was practically yesterday.
A bucket of faith in potentially low funded and crumbling future plants might well kill me. We can't predict the future, if everything goes well, sure, all is good.
It likely won't, I'm not sure if you've paid any attention to the news lately but proxy wars are being fought daily by these 2 biggest powers that love each other so much. We don't know what tomorrow brings.
Modern nuclear reactors cannot, and I mean seriously, cannot go off the way worst case scenarios like Cherynobyl did.
They're not even remotely similar designs anymore. We're talking about Gen 3 and Gen 4 designs, when Cherynobyl was a prototype by the soviets, they explcitly rejected safety philosophy to have a working reactor. That's why that one broke.
If war broke out, you’d more than likely die from nuclear exchange before nuclear meltdown from your local power plant. If anything, the struggle for oil is fueling conflict and tensions. If nuclear energy curbs the need for gas, then it’ll probably curb aggressions. And as HumanAbyss said, current generators are way safer than Chernobyl’s poor excuse for one.
Attacking nuclear reactors is unlikely to be a serious strategic move anyway. The radiological effects are minimal and only occur over the long term, long after the conflict has ended so it doesn't have much military value, and it needlessly escalates a conflict. Nations are far more likely to attack a reactor's associated infrastructure because you won't need to use several 2000lb bunker-busting bombs to pierce the radiological shield. Transformers and switchyards are very soft targets. Hell, you could probably airburst a 500 kt nuclear warhead over a reactor and not cause a meltdown while trashing everything else in the plant, knocking it out long term.
I'm not sure if you're paying attention to the most peaceful time in human history. Faith and money go hand in hand the more faith the populace has in something the more money that something receives, a bucket of faith is not near enough, we need dump trucks, neigh! pipelines of faith streaming into our nuclear industry!
"why bother if it's just going to break eventually" is a silly argument to make to a species that specializes in creating machinery to do its tasks for it. It's even sillier when said species comes up with the argument.
As I mentioned in my first post I'm really not concerned about meltdowns, I'm aware there are some amazing new safeguards against those, I'm not envisioning a meltdown.
My concern is that if nuclear power becomes wide spread, the waste will grow with it, first world countries can become 3rd world countries in the spans of decades if cataclysm hits. We're going to be imposing fossil fuel limits on 3rd world countries also in the future who will attempt their own nuclear power programs to make up for buying it from their neighbor. There are already entire ecosystems dead from neglected fossil fuel pipelines and drills in places such as Somalia which have literally brought the countries to their knees in terms of food self sufficiency.
The organization of regulation will be the only thing stopping disaster from striking in any of these situations and if a place is utterly wartorn (or even not) then waste will be disposed of incorrectly or not even really disposed of at all. We see this all the time, companies dumping gallons upon gallons of biologically decimating materials into rivers illegally, governments are not above this either.
Nuclear power is fantastic if everything is stable, and disastrous if unstable.
My faith in the tech is strong, my faith in humanities ability to manage it safely is not.
That's not how nuclear waste works dude.
You can spend 10 minutes googling to dispell the myths and the falsehoods you believe. I encourage you to do so.
Smarter people than you or I have thought about these issues and they're no where near as bad as green advocates worry they are.
It's the safest form of energy we have.
If you're worried about our nations becoming destitute hell hole 3rd world countries because of nuclear waste, then you clearly are ignorant about the amount of coal waste you breathe on a
daily basis, and the cost of life that has had over the last century.
There is NO reason to be against nuclear. None. Not one. Every single argument trumped up by the Green advocates is a lie, a misinterpretation, or a manipulation of the facts.
You seem to have spent alot of time arguing with these green advocates, I'm not one of them so please curb your high horse. I'm not against nuclear power, I said I have my reservations for the wide spread use of it.
Regarding your statement of "not one" reason to use it. The very people you are supporting disagree with you.
You're not reading also.
I didn't say that nuclear waste will make us 3rd world desolate hellholes. I'm saying what is going to happen to nuclear waste management if something were to happen to a well developed country.
Nuclear waste isn't even that big of an issue though! That's my whole point.
We act like nuclear waste is this horrible thing we can't deal with. It isn't. We can.
You know what's harder to deal with? Coal dust in the air, an issue our whole world globablly deals with, and dealt with. The cost of life to the world from that coal dust is enormous. It is so much larger than we can calculate. You know what we can calcuate? How many people got cancer from Fukisima, Cherynobyl, Three Mile Island, and we can count how many people were harmed by the nuclear waste that was stored. It's a small number.
So ultimately, my concerns about nuclear waste are the same as the professionals who've come up with plans to safely store it. Minimal. Absolutely minimal.
Nuclear waste is extremely manageable and realistically a non-issue to deal with. The amount of waste from a nuclear plant is pretty small compared to all of the other toxic wastes we have to deal with from other industries.
Thinking that having more nuclear power plants will cause some kind of first world to third world spiral from catastrophe is like the most far-fetched thing you could worry about. I'd be more afraid of radioactive mosquitoes bred in cooling tanks of a reactor than whatever weird twisted logic you just used.
As for third world countries, they aren't going to be on nuclear for a while. But they can also buy electricity from countries that generate excess power should they not be able to meet their needs via fossil fuel.
You would be quite surprised at the current state of nuclear waste storage, actually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU3kLBo_ruo
The plans are good, but to keep everything in order is costly. Again, my problem isn't nuclear energy when things are going well, it's what happens when it isn't.
Okay, for the last time I'll put it the only way I can.
The worst case scenario for nuclear power is better than our current reality using coal, natural gas, hydro, and geothermal. The death tolls of these are considerably worse, TODAY, in the real world, than the worst case scenario for nuclear power.
Wendover is great, but he's not remotely an expert on this subject. His video is based on the same false premises that the green movements have pushed as propaganda effectively.
Nuclear is the greenest option we have available in terms of power output to emissions by far. It may not be renewable but it's pretty unmatched in cleanliness.
I haven't argued against any of this for a reason, if you were paying any attention to me at all I'm not against nuclear power. I'm just not burying my head in the sand screaming "SAFE" when there a multitude of things that can go wrong. We need to address these and consider them serious while moving forward with the technology.
I'm in this thread discussing the dangers of nuclear waste if certain conditions are met, not trying to tell anyone that nuclear power is inherently destructive and a bad way of doing things at the present time.
It is demonstrably untrue, as Wendover says in the video, that the Roman Empire was more powerful than the modern US empire. Implying because the roman empire fell, all empires must fall, and therefore we shouldn't use this technology because it's dangerous is a fallacy. And most dangerously of all? It ignores the real cost of life that other power sources have.
No one cares about the deaths from coal, because they're not coal miners. No one cares about the deaths of natural gas, because they're not oil drillers. But because nuclear has the chance to do something to the world around it, it's seen as super dangerous and not to be trusted.
50 years ago, if you lived in California, New York, London, or a major city anywhere in the world, more people died daily from the poor air quality related to coal burning, than have ever died from even the worst case real world nuclear scenario. I find it so hard to give a fuck that nuclear is dangerous when the ratio of danger is so huge. Coal is massively more damaging to life than nuclear is, and that's WITH the death tolls of nuclear bombs included. It's mind boggling dude. It really is.
https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak
Hell, that's one of the videos I watched that changed my mind.
Your conditions for nuclear waste disposal are so outlandish it's lunacy. You've been arguing about how will a first world country handle nuclear waste if said country goes to war/experiences a catastrophic disaster that causes that country to revert to a third world state. Really sit on that for a minute.
You're being delusional.
What are you even trying to argue? You are literally just creating these scenarios so you have some kind of boogeyman to fight against when someone brings up nuclear power.
I used to think Nuclear Power was some sort of fragile powerful energy source we created and could kill everyone thanks to the media and Hollywood but after looking into it more due to becoming more interested in it as I became more accustomed to it growing up, I learned that the alternatives we have are way worse and videos like the one OvB helped me realize nuclear power isn't this bad bogeyman that I thought it to be.
If I remember correctly, in the Fukushima meltdown, the tsunami flooded the emergency diesel gens which were built below sea-level, and the grid connections failed, such that the coolant pumps wouldn't run. There was a certain amount of water available for passive cooling, but without power they were unable to replenish that water, so when it all evaporated, the cores melted.It's something like that, in any case - I'm not a nuclear engineer, although I do work with them.
My point is that while we're pretty good at being able to design insane control systems for all sorts of natural processes (everything surrounding air travel, power grids, international shipping...), it can't be fool proof, and you shouldn't expect it to be.
Honestly I feel like my main contention with nuclear power is that in trying to convince everyone that it's safe, we spend 3x as much on safety systems (a lot of which is purely bureaucracy), and the internal culture means there's an inherent bias against introducing new technology (as in, it's incredibly difficult/expensive to introduce new processes, so incentive-wise it's complicated). This makes it madly expensive, and consumer confidence is somewhat eroded by being told "we've got 6 redundent systems, nothing can ever happen", before a meltdown happens because of an unforseeable occurence.
What is cool, though, is that there is a huge amount of work being put into reactor designs that are basically inherently safe, in that they don't require vast coolant systems, and also conveniently help the economics of nuclear power generation - see Small Modular Reactors (SMR), or Advanced Modular Reactors here in the UK - in that they're small, self-contained units. You start to build a generation plant, the SMRs are built off-site, and once assembled on-site, they can start to generate power straight away. No need to wait 10 years for everything to be finished before power gen, meaning you don't have to find quite as much of a vast amount of credit before you even start to build.
Wasn't the Fukushima plant warned that this could happen, and they ignored it? Pretty sure it was.
Fukushima disaster was preventable, new study finds
Lmfao imagine being worried about meltdowns during war, youre gonna be fucking nuked regardless.
Also, wastes these days can be dealt with properly and even reused if some governments pull their thumb out.
Just look at how Canada's north is empty and then tell me there isn't space to dig nuclear waste. What a joke.
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