Nuclear Power: Celebrating 50 Years of Catastrophic Failure
Katherine Mangu-Ward | October 12, 2007, 4:17pm
Writing for CNN today, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and Harvey Wasserman share some thoughts about nuclear power (Note: Don't think about that last sentence too hard. You'll hurt your head or bring on the apocalypse or something). They're worried that the siren song of cheap, clean energy will seduce us once again, when we should be rightfully seduced only by Bonnie's dulcet tones.
These "new" reactors are the same as the old ones, with a few bells and whistles, and a proven 50-year track record of catastrophic failure.
On the brink of winning a green-powered planet, we intend to do all we can to avoid another radioactive dead-end. We hope you will join us
I must have missed the first radioactive dead end for the planet--perhaps it happened before I was born and my parents survived in one of those backyard bunkers? Chernobyl was horrific, to be sure, but I think you need a few more catastrophic failures to get a gen-u-ine "track record" going. Anyway, we should take this warning seriously--it comes from TV's Most Trusted News Source.
Via Fark
LarryA | October 12, 2007, 5:35pm | #
Isn't it the case that Three Mile Island could have been far worse than what eventually happened?
When TMI went red I was living in Lebanon, PA, about thirty miles downwind.
I note that I, and the rest of my family, are still living.
The biggest problem at the plant was the lack of a media person to explain what was happening. I remember tuning in one night and listening to the person the news reporter was interiewing say, "Well, I'm the janitor at TMI. What's going on inside the reactor is that..."
It's the only national disaster we've ever had where no one was injured, and no outside private property was damaged.
Unfortunately it did shut down nuclear power plant construction for lo these many decades.
Ironically during the weeks TMI occupied the front page, buried inside one of the PA newspapers was a story about a natural gas facility that blew, killing several people. But of course that was routine. Look at recent coal mine news.
Then there is the long-term waste issue.
Compare the difficulty of disposing of a few cubic yards of concrete-encased fuel to disposing of mountains (literally) of sulphur scrubbed out of coal plants.
All you need for the nuclear fuel is a good-sized cave out in the desert somewhere.
It is simply staggering to sit across from an otherwise perfectly lovely person and hear her say essentially that she believes the mass of the Earth's population needs to be kept in abject poverty for the good of the planet.
I don't know what your experience is, nor do I know of any studies, but anecdotally I've noticed that most people who espouse this particular solution have never been more than a hundred yards or so from a paved road. As a Hunter Education instructor I spend a lot of time explaining things like, "No. All the male deer aren't shot by hunters. You don't see deer with antlers in the spring because they've all fallen off."
I hope one of her more rational green friends straightens her out eventually.
Unfortunately both of the rational greens are busy.
whit | October 12, 2007, 6:24pm | #
"One doesn't have to be anti-nuclear to see that nuclear power comes with a number of significant economic and technical obstacles, etc. "
of course, but that is an entirely different thing than claiming a "50 year record of catastrophic failure"
frankly, i can think of few, if any, technologies of any importance that do not have "significant economic and technological obstacles" especially when they are newer.
a simple (and useful) metric is to compare the # of injuries/deaths per kilowatt hour produced to any other source of energy. that certainly doesn't support the myth of "catastrophic failure".
there are thousands upon thousands of people, for example, who have had their lives significantly shortened and/or ended by black lung disease.
now, there is AN argument that even though the track record of nuclear power is excellent (which it is), that there is a small risk of an extremely dangerous event, that doesn't exist mostly in other forms of power production.
that is at least a rational argument, even though it has never happened in the US, or ANY industrialized nation that uses nuclear power (and note that the USSR was pretty frigging far from an industrialized nation compared to any western nation that actually values worker safety, etc.).
but one doesn't expect rational arguments from nuclear power from histrionic ninnies like bonnie rait, graham nash, etc.
the same people who criticize nancy reagan for (the simplistic) "just say no" campaign, have a even more simplistic and completely fantastic (catastrophic failure, etc.) approach to nuclear power.
as for jackson browne. any woman in a relationship from him is far more at risk of death or serious injury from him, than they would ever be from nuclear power :)
tarran | October 12, 2007, 10:45pm | #
Other people have covered most of the aspects of TMI, save one.
Three Mile Island's damaged reactor
did melt-down. When they shut down primary flow to the reactor*, they drew a hydrogen bubble in the reactor vessel. the hydrogen acted as an insulator, allowing temperatures in the pressure vesel to climb from the decay heat. The temperature was high enough that there was melting of the fuel elements and sagging of structural supports within the pressure vessel.
this condition was allowed to last for hours until the incoming shift supervisor was being briefed on plant conditions and figured out what all the bizarre instrument readings were describing. he convinced the people on watch to restart the pumps.
the TMI accident was about as bad an accident as you could expect from that design.
With that being said, I am suspicious of nuclear power's viability. Essentially, the liability involved in a catastrophic accident is so high that most insurers are not willing to take the risk. for that reason I think that Apollo type programs are actually a
bad idea. The governemnt is far less risk averse than private industry. The wisest course of action is to allow companies to build reactors if they want, but not to subsidize them on iota. This will compell them to come up with designs which canbe aduequately insured
and still turn a profit. Under the present scheme a safer power plant does not save the operator any money on liability insurance, so there is little incentive to improve safety (the government picks up the tab). If they had to bear the full costs of the risk and pollution control, then incremental improvements would benefit their bottom line.
*The reason why TMI operators shut down coolant flow to the reactor was because primary pressure had dropped below the minimum operating pressure of the main coolant pumps. Below this minimum pressure, operating these pumps would cause cavitation, pockets of near vacuum within the pump where the water would boil into little bubbles of steam. These bubbles collapse as they move out of the low pressure region, and as they collapse, they create a shock wave that damages the pump.
So, basically to protect their multi-million pumps from being damaged, they trashed their hundreds-of-millions of dollars' worth reactor.
TallDave | October 13, 2007, 3:26pm | #
Polywell may be the answer. It's the brainchild of the late Robert Bussard, of Bussard ramjet fame and a nuclear physicist par excellence.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
Essentially, Polywell fusion reactors create an electric-potential well by trapping electrons with a magnetic field and using them to accelerate ions, which fuse in the center of the device. A certain fusion reaction, p-B11, may actually be able to generate DC current at 3 million volts directly, without the need for a thermal cycle generator. This would probably result in energy costs an order of magnitude lower than today's, if Bussard was correct.
Bussard worked under a Navy gag order for 11 years, which ended along with funding in 2005, and got Polywell funded again just a couple months before he passed away. The next several months will see the creation of the last proof-of-concept test device, after which the Polywell team may be funded for an attempt to build a working 100MW polywell reactor for about $200M.
A team funded by Paul Allen is attempting something very similar.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9721240-7.html Tri-alpha gets $40M
More here:
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php?sid=b084a4526dd2f467693d161f6e64fd89
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/IEC_Fusion/
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=5367&mid=136500#M136500
http://www.strout.net/info/science/polywell/index.html
Mark Dorroh | October 14, 2007, 10:12am | #
Coal mining has killed many thousands of times more workers than nuclear power facilities, even after figuring in the deaths from Chernobyl. And that disaster happened on a type of reactor not used in the U.S. … and only after its operators deliberately shut down a large number of built-in safety systems as part of an ill-advised drill.
Chernobyl also occurred in the absence of a free press and under a totalitarian government which didn’t care much about the lives or health of its citizens but was obsessed with catching up to the West at any cost.
In the worst U.S. incident, Three Mile Island, not a single death was recorded. And after all these years, I’ve never heard of any clustering of radiation-linked diseases in or around the areas where the vented, radioactive steam from the damaged reactor drifted. Compared to fatalities over the centuries due to coal mine cave-ins, explosions and the myriad of slow, awful deaths caused by black lung disease, nuclear power is incredibly safe.
The reason Three Mile Island was so scary was, for a couple of days, scientists thought a red-hot radioactive “bubble” was brewing, a bubble which could not be reduced and which might eventually cause an explosion. In the end it turned out their math was flawed; the bubble never existed.
But human memory is selective; no matter how objective we try to be, most of us don’t remember the few minutes of relief so much as the two days of terror that preceded them.
Accordingly, in the wake of the Three Mile Island incident, some highly-principled people staged a number of confrontational rallies aimed at stopping construction and/or startup of every new or proposed nuclear power plant in the country. When power companies decided it wasn't worth the bad publicity to even attempt to build any new ones, victory was complete for a hyperventilating confederacy of the easily-spooked.
Can we blame corporate America for deciding to build, instead of nuclear power plants, coal-fired plants? It’s too bad, since despite all the expensive and highly-effective upgrades in pollution control, worldwide burning of coal still spews tons of toxic heavy metal vapors into the atmosphere annually. Whether or not coal contributes to global warming, the official public record proudly proclaims each medium-sized plant is within state and federal compliance limits as it adds to the air over a dozen pounds of mercury each year. Then there's the lead, the cadmium, the nickel ...
Still, the decision-makers at the energy companies probably figure the coal-fired plants are not really safer, but people perceive them as safer. And who needs a lot of concerned citizens camping out next to a multi-billion dollar construction site, raising Cain in the media? If perception is reality, it must be safer to build and operate the much more harmful coal-fired plants.
Of course perception and reality often have gaping, daylight filled gaps between them. But those who buy into the flawed perception/reality diad know what they think and choose to not be confused with facts.
It’s time for America to learn the facts about all the different energy alternatives, hire some French companies to safely dispose of nuclear waste (no fooling, they’re wizards at it, and have been for decades), and get back on the Sane Train.
All the facts on global warming aren't in yet, but if we wait until they are, it could be a little late to fix it. In the immortal words of Taj Mahal, "Let's go fission!"
