With the systemic failure of the Japanese nuclear power industry, it looks like the industry is going to have to activate its busy bees to flood the internet and airwaves with apologists. Talking points will have to include:
1. No one could have imagined…
2. The Japanese are stupid and do things all wrong.
3. It would never happen here.
4. Nuclear energy is clean and safe.
5. What? Do you want Gaddafi heating your house?
Warning: Do not engage in dispersing these talking points unless you are being compensated handsomely, as all your acquaintances will assume you are insensitive and either stupid, a whore, or both.
Is is possible to actually do a cost-benefit analysis and still post stuff like the source here? No.
We have 7-8 power technologies available. None, not one, is clean and pure and ADEQUATE.
So, since you are a Professional Smart Guy, what’s your non-nuclear industrial policy?
^^^Pretty much this. Regarding wind not being adequate, my design team and I, with a group from MIT, are trying to develop a wind turbine that captures wind energy 500-700 meters in altitude so it’s consistent and always blowing.
However, like you said…no source is perfect, and the one we’re developing is no exception. Under the assumption that it will work — and I’m one of the people in the team who is very skeptical of our design — it will only be economically sufficient in the developing world and for the armed forces in remote areas.
Nuclear MUST be part of the equation for now.
OK, that sounds interesting. 500-700 meters – are you building a structure that tall? How are you stabilizing that? Isn’t that getting near the height of the tallest free-standing structures in the world?
How much will it cost to build a single structure? Payoff on this sounds long-term.
Nonetheless, an interesting notion.
dataguy,
I haven’t looked to see what this MIT project might be, but the usual altitude-enhanced wind power designs are some sort of intelligent kite (sometimes with a balloon component).
You’ve already got a power connection as part of the tether, so power to get the platform aloft is no problem. The designs I’ve read about were all higher than a few hundred meters, though…
-Jay-
While I agree in general with the substance of your comments if not the tone, I have to call you on #5.
Every producing wind plant has be offset by other generation that can respond to regulation and produce on demand. In practice that means a variety of generation sources that come and go as needed based on merit order, as they would for routine fluctuations in load or other contingencies.
At the utility where I work, that can range from state of the art fast-start gas turbines, less efficient but capable of going from offline to full output in a matter of minutes, through fairly efficient combined-cycle gas-fired units, to old reliable though less efficient conventional gas fired steam plants. On rare occasions we find ourselves with all the online gas units bottomed out and get to back down our coal-fired base-load unit. In every case, the wind power represents a net savings in marginal cost as well as a reduction in adverse environmental impact.
So yeah, we need a lot more wind and solar and geothermal and tidal. And in my opinion more nuclear power as well, though we need to move as rapidly as possible to newer technologies that are fail-safe by design. And we need to be looking for other viable renewable sources of energy at least as hard as we’re currently looking for ever dirtier, ever more expensive fossil fuel sources.
Yeah, like we could do any better than the Japanese can? These are Katrina conditions I recognize, times ten. We didn’t have no nuclear plants near Nawlins, though.
Evidence shows that tests to one of those reactors were not done to the extent of an 8.9 earthquake. Their own technicians, it appears, betrayed them. Somebody got lazy.
They’re trying everything short of using horses and wagons to get their people to safety. That’s more than what I saw in New Orleans during the first few days of the levees breaking.
One more thing. What if, not the San Andreas and the Hayward Faults went off, but the New Madrid here in the Midwest went off with an 8.9? There are reactors up and down the Midwest. Mark Twain mentioned it in his Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which means that people were still talking about it even during his childhood, and he was born in 1835.
GOP/Bagger cuts to emergency spending is going to make things far worse if the Big One finally decided to hit Cali…or the Midwest. I’d like to see how these idiots will spin this one, and it won’t just be black folks who will be affected.
It’s easy to say “they didn’t plan for an 8.9 earthquake.” Of course they didn’t. This is the 3RD MOST MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE EVER RECORDED ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD.
When you plan for something, you can’t plan for very remote and unlikely things. Why not? Cost. I think that we all agree that if a huge meteorite hit a nuclear power plant, that would be terrible. It is also very very very very very unlikely, and protecting against it would cost a HUGE HUGE HUGE amount. Similarly with earthquakes. Remember that the Richter scale is a log scale, so going from a 8.6 to an 8.9 is not just .3 increase, it’s like a 30x increase. The cost of planning for a 8.9 would be astronomical. The last earthquake from this location occurred in 1874. So, I think that it is not reasonable to criticize them for failure to plan. It’s plan AGAINST WHAT that is the issue.
You need to define a level of disaster against which you can plan, and then hope you get nothing worse. I think that the Japanese have done as well as anyone could be expected to do. The only criticism would be the notion of the backup generator seems to have been problematic.
Minor correction: a magnitude 9 is 10x the power of an earthquake at magnitude 8, so 8.9 wouldn’t be 30x 8.6, closer to double. But your main point is correct, this was a huge quake.
Of course, the 8.9 rating applies to the epicenter — the shaking felt at the spot of the nuclear plants was far less severe. Still bad — according to what I’m reading it was roughly equivalent to what it would have been if the epicenter had been at the same location as the nuclear plants and the magnitude in the low 7s.
Of course, being 8.9 and offshore is much worse than 7.3 and on-shore due to the tsunami effect of an offshore quake.
If there is a lesson to be draw at this stage it is is that we can design for what we believe will be the worst disaster conditions but we can’t really test until the disaster occurs. For example, in California there are a whole bunch of newish buildings with special technology designed to withstand “the big one”. The main support pillars are actually on bases that allow the building to move laterally on the pillars with the force of the quake rather than rigidly trying to resist the shaking. The result is that people in the buildings tend to feel more motion during smaller quakes, but the motion is less jarring so less apt to knock things down or cause damage. I was in one in 2005 during a minor (5) earthquake and it was something like you might experience in an amusement park.
Will those buildings withstand an 8.0 or higher quake on the San Andreas or Hayward faults in the bay area? The designers think so — but we won’t know for sure until it happens.
That’s all well and good, but I hope you will agree that if a magnitude 11 quake occurred, these buildings probably would go down. Again, you need to do a cost-benefit analysis, and define a level of disaster against which you will prepare, under the clear knowledge that if something bigger hit, you would not be able to preserve the integrity of the structure.
The notion that you can prepare against everything is simply wrong. There’s a limited amount of money, and you have to balance costs against likely outcomes. This earthquake is the 3rd largest on record.
@dataguy – you are totally right. I used to do high-level disaster preparedness work. This earthquake is simply off the charts as a disaster. The last time there was an earthquake this strong, over 200,000 people died (Indian Ocean tsunami). It looks like 10,000 people might die here. It’s a horrible tragedy, but you can’t prevent everything, you just can’t.
@blksista – this is NOT Katrina times 10. This is Katrina times 1000! There shouldn’t have been more than 100 deaths from Katrina (if that) – if the levees were built right they wouldn’t have failed. OTOH, it’s to Japan’s credit there haven’t been 100,000 deaths from this earthquake. The earthquake was just enormous.
In a practical sense, of course you’re correct. The problem is that it makes the occasional nuclear containment problem pretty much inevitable.
Say the world has reactors in 100 dispersed locations operating for 50 years. That’s the equivalent of 5000 years of operation, so I’d expect about 5 once-in-a-millenium events to affect them.
I can accept that 5 adverse nuclear events in 50 years may be better than any available alternative — but I don’t see that as a very strong political argument. Just as people fear plane crashes more than automobile crashes even though they’re way more likely to be in a car wreck, they fear nuclear contamination more than the effects of carbon burning.
And the nuclear apologists are going to hurt rather than help that argument, because they don’t acknowledge the real risks at all.
Watching the Japanese handling this and hearing the detailed (and often struggling to reach a level of misinformation) descriptions of what’s going on I am struck by what this scenario would look like if this were to be happening in N Korea or Iran.
In a closed society the concept of containing a nuclear disaster, certainly with fewer tools than the Japanese, would lead to international intervention and then all hell would break loose, simultaneously.
Excellent point.
If McCain were prez…
The comment was intellectually bankrupt, rather an odd sight here. Saying that everyone who disagrees with you is in the pay of the enemy is cheap and unworthy.
In the end, the verdict on the reactors in Japan is more likely to be, “Even with old designs far less safe than modern ones, and an operator who was, at the very least, cutting corners on maintenance, there was no meltdown and no major breach of containment when the plant was hit with the biggest earthquake in Japan in at least 1,200 years.” (It’s been reclassified as a Category 9, by the way, which makes it one of the biggest earthquakes in the world.)
One of these days someone is going to go back and calculate just how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere because proposed nuclear plants were never built (or proposed major hydroelectric projects never went ahead, another activity liberals tend to evaluate with their lizard brain rather than reasoning powers). I’ve often wondered whether the nuclear industry was deliberately hung out to dry by Big Oil as a red herring to distract the environmentally minded. After all, studies such as Spencer Weart’s Nuclear Fear: A History of Images have documented how antinuclear campaigners not only lied constantly and shamelessly, but also were treated with astonishing tenderness by the corporate mass media, in particular television. At the same time antinuke types were making up fantasies about reactors, Big Oil and Big Coal were filling the atmosphere with pollutants just as deadly and far more difficult to control than nuclear waste, and no doubt laughing at the rubes running after the shiny object. (It was decades after the probable effect of a rising carbon dioxide level were scientifically known that the major players in the environmental movement noticed what was going on.)
We will have to wait to see what the outcome is in Japan.
But, remember, it’s people’s jobs to imagine. It can happen here. Nuclear energy is only clean in the sense that it doesn’t produce carbon. And when things go wrong the consequences are enormous and expensive and potentially catastrophic.
BooMan – I think you’re thinking about this wrong. I’m not a big fan of nuclear energy. But, understand that coal and oil cause hundreds of billions of dollars of pollution, climate change, health, and defense costs every year in just the United States. The Sendai earthquake was one of the most severe disasters in world history. It is, IMHO, 1000 times as severe as Hurricane Katrina. I actually did an analysis of Katrina (and other major hurricanes) for FEMA – unfortunately they have not released that analysis to the public because parts of FEMA are still a bureaucratic disaster area. The Japanese government is containing the meltdowns/near-meltdowns with minimal loss of life and economic damage. Compared to fossil fuel use, nuclear energy, even after this horrible disaster, is a good deal. I say that as someone who doesn’t believe that expansion of current-generation nuclear energy is a great idea, but for very different reasons.
Booman, your post and comment here neglect the role of history. Remember, the Fukushima reactors are 40 years old, and all of Japan’s reactors supply 15% of its energy. I, too, would like to see more wind other renewables, but 40 years ago, wind just wasn’t viable. Nuclear was. That’s just an historical fact.
Too much of the criticism of nuclear energy seems to assume that wind energy was a plausible replacement for nuclear in the 60s, when it’s just now coming into its own.
Another thing that critics do is ignore the sweeping technological advancements in the industry. The latest designs bypass the entire need to use control rods, and wouldn’t have failed in the current conditions.
I’m a greenie, I accept the overwhelming evidence of human-induced climate change, and I see we need to do something to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. For many countries, nuclear is going to be part of the solution.
As liberals, we really ought to making evidence-based arguments, not knee-jerk ones.
I’m not sure whether it’s good news or bad news that GE designed the Japanese reactors and we have 23 sister reactors in the US
Neither. It means that GE can provide some technical assistance to the Japanese. And what is learned in dealing with this situation will feed back into future engineering design of GE reactors and turbines.
Yes, the apologists for not doing anything with energy but what the current industries want will be pushing this line. But:
As for your warning. Yep, if you’re gonna sell out at least sell out at top dollar.
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It’s not truly a failure of the nuclear plant as much as the back-up diesel generators were washed out by the tsunami that followed.
The plant was shut down, contrary to the Chernobyl man-made disaster. The back-up generators were to provide electricity to the cooling pumps. When these failed the nuclear heart (reactor core) became overheated causing further problems of super-heated steam, increased pressure, venting steam to the outside world, hydrogen build-up within outer facility and explosion. When you can’t keep cooling the unit you definitely run into problems.
New York Times interactive model of the Crippled Japanese Nuclear Reactors.
Why is California planning nuclear plants on the Andreas fault lines?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."