The Japanese nuclear tragedy perfectly illustrates one of the problems with nuclear power in general

[MadHound]

Namely that you can't eliminate human error.

This tragedy didn't wasn't caused by an earthquake, nor was it caused by the tsunami that followed. Nope, this catastrophe was caused over forty years ago by human error, namely the stupid, idiotic decision to locate the reactor not just in one of the most tectonically active areas of the world and then compounding that error by placing right on the coast.

What caused this error forty years ago? The same thing that causes lots of industrial fuck-ups, money. The genius designers forty years ago recognized that it would be cheaper and easier to have the reactors on the coast, for quick, easy, and cheap fueling, and likewise, quick, easy, and cheap waste disposal.

Human error is the number one cause of nuclear incidents and accidents. We are seeing the result of gross human error being played out, tragically, before our eyes.

Nor can we eliminate human error, there is simply no way of doing so. And since that is the case, then we simply shouldn't play with an energy source where the consequences of human error are so dangerous, so catastrophic.

Let us hope that we've finally learned that lesson, and consign nuclear power to the dust bin of history. If not, then we are doomed to watch as human error continues to lead to massive destruction and human misery, at least once every single generation.

[Zoeisright]

1. I simply don't understand why anyone supports nuclear power.

It's about time we admit that we just can't control that shit. How did we go so wrong anyway? Wind turbines were used on farms for centuries. And look at the Netherlands!

The only thing I can conclude is that dirty energy (nuclear, gas, coal, oil) made a few people very, very rich. And they controlled the message, the media, and the politicians.

[MadHound]

3. You've pretty much hit the answer straight on,

Converting to wind, solar and such means the birth of decentralized power generation. Those corporations who are invested in centralized power generation would be out of a job, and lose their big bucks. So they are fighting tooth and nail to keep centralized power generation in place, even if it kills thousands.

[PoliticAverse]

13. Wind really isn't decentralized like solar.

Small wind generators aren't really that effective and locating them by individual homes
usually doesn't provide near enough wind.

[JDPriestly]

10. You are correct. I heard it myself from one of the leaders of the

Canadian nuclear energy industry in January 1974. I will never forget. At the First International Energy Conference in London, UK, he stood up and said that the reason he did not like solar energy was that there is no product to sell.

That is the reason that the nuclear energy industry exists -- to prevent individuals, not just nations, from become energy-independent.

[cascadiance]

14. Remember a time when salt was about as valuable as oil...

When it was used as a way to help move armies around because it was the main way to preserve food, etc.

If we had big companies controlling salt production then instead of family farms, etc. Imagine how our nation would have "developed" if they saw refrigeration as a threat to their existence and inhibited their development by buying up all of the patents of that technology and putting them on the shelf. That's kind of what we're dealing with no with the centralized power / carbon fuel companies trying to still keep their oligpolies in place.

What would it be like now if besides fresh food we had to salt everything else we ate. Think of the health problems we'd have with that extra salt intake.

[JDPriestly]

22. cascadiance, you are so right

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. Windmills were a fairly low power option

which the Netherlands used because they're so flat, they couldn't build decent water mills. The same goes for the one area of Britain that used windmills much - East Anglia and The Fens. And both areas turned away from using windmills once steam and internal combustion engines came along.

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/history-of-industrial-windmills.html

Modern turbines can give decent power; but the intermittent nature of the power doesn't make them attractive. When people were optimistic about their engineering, it's not surprising that nuclear looked good. There were also massive government subsidies for the research and development, because they wanted the plutonium produced for nuclear bombs.

[MadHound]

17. Wind turbines aren't the only wind solution out there however

An array of windbelts, which can be mounted on your roof, can provide power even in winds as low as four mph.
<http://www.humdingerwind.com/>

[Sugarcoated]

2. Hear, hear!

Recommended

[Tx4obama]

4. Another mistake was putting the back up genrators on ground level...

the should have been put up on higher ground.

Here in Houston around ten years ago, we had some major flooding due to too much rain, some of the hospitals in the medical center had their emergency generators in the basements - and the basements flooded. They have to move patients to other hospitals all around the city. Since that time the generators have been moved to the rooftops.

[lob1]

5. Greed also comes into the mix. These guys really don't

like to fork out the cash for all those safety precautions that'll "never be used". I just heard on the news tonight that our reactors here in Souther California are only good up to a 7.0. That's scary to me.

[flamingdem]

6. They figure, so what if something happens, I'll be retired by then.. nt

[nickyt]

7. Absolutely agreed. As far as I can tell in my flurry of "studying" all this,

Chernobyl - though perhaps it had many "issues" and wasn't the finest damn nuclear plant on the planet - the catastrophe there was one hundred thousand percent human error.

I MEAN.

Thanks for posting -

[Arugula Latte]

8. Also, they made it to withstand a 6.5 earthquake at best.

[Name removed]

9. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Electric Monk]

11. FukUShima. Planned obsolescence revenge?

First time I thought of that was just now, honest.

I feel like I need a drink or two. This whole thing is making me really sad and pissing me off at the same time.

[Tumbulu]

12. Great OP, sorry that this thread was hijacked

and I have to wonder why?

[MadHound]

15. Oh, you don't have to wonder too hard,

I think it is obvious, not only from what went on in this thread, but in other similar threads.

[EstimatedProphet]

18. Not only that, you can't design a perfect system

Eventually something will break, or something unforseen will happen, and the results will be catastrophic.

[EstimatedProphet]

19. And why can't we seriously look into space-based solar?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power

It's not like we can't figure out how to get geostationary satellites in orbit!

[originalpckelly]

20. I couldn't agree more. That's the solution. It's nothing on Earth.

You fucker, I was going to do a big post on this.

:P

The only problem is that it costs a fucking fortune to get into a geostationary orbit, and you'd need a huge fucking satellite to do it.

BUT, I know something you don't know.

You don't have to launch a satellite into orbit in order to get more reliable higher output solar power. :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratellite

You can just put the solar collector on an airship at extremely high altitude. It can linger over a city for a long ass time, use the same kind of power transmission technology that's already been studied and proven to have a 95% efficiency when done right, and IT COSTS SO MUCH LESS THAT WE CAN ACTUALLY DO IT!

The only problem is that you don't get 24/7 illumination at the altitude you could get to with one of those, but you could conceivably build a network of airship to airship transmitters that within only a few hops power the opposite side of the world. After all you are high enough to see the curvature of the earth at such an altitude.

And really there is nothing keeping us from doubling that height, there have been research balloons that did that. The higher you get, the more line sight you have to farther away places, so you might be able to eliminate the hops needed and bring up the efficiency.

And because you would be at such a high altitude, you're above the weather, and you don't have to worry about the atmosphere scattering the light you're trying to collect, like with a terrestrial system.

Furthermore, you can use these big ass airships to launch rockets much more cheaply, because the engines don't have to be designed to work at both low altitude and high altitude, which I have heard dramatically reduces their efficiency and brings up the cost of fuel, and that means you need a bigger heavier rocket to carry more fuel.

And you can also use these same ships to transport goods around the world faster than a sea ship, and although they'd be slower than jets, you can carry a fucking large load in comparison to the jets.

Airships usually crashed because they were hurt by the weather. If you're above that, you don't have to worry about that. You can launch them like you would the shuttle, on a clear day!

And even though we're freaked about using hydrogen as a lift gas, these things could be unmanned and all repairs done robotically. Or you could send up people, but they would select the risk themselves, not be forced into it by an authority. You could pay them well, and it wouldn't be that big of a risk, because the amount of oxygen at that altitude is not as high as on the ground.

This is the actual realistic scenario for getting non-terrestrial based solar power, because as I said at the outset, space-based is just to expensive to do right now.

[EstimatedProphet]

21. That is really a great idea

I hadn't heard of that project. Thanks for the info.

However, one thing: expense is in the eye of the beholder. Why should it be prohibitively expensive to put a geostationary satellite up for power, but not for cable TV? IMO it's because our power industry doesn't want to put money into ANYTHING when they can sit back and collect cash for nothing.

[rdking647]

23. total nuclear deaths

how many people has nuclear power killed in the us?
how many people has nuclear power killed world wide?


total deaths from coal mining in the US 1990-2009 765

worldwide deaths from coal mining in the same period over 50k

seems to me that mining the coal for conventional power plants is a hell of a lot more dangerous.