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| quote: | Originally posted by Theresa
Earthquakes cause tsunamis. They are in a very volatile region, living on a fault line, on the water.
While I get what someone else said that it was more efficient, it's still a massive risk to take considering how likely they are to experience catastrophes like this one. I think using a safer, more expensive or less efficient source is better. All you need is one disaster to fuck up the lives of every single person around the plant... not worth the risk in my opinion.
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Catastrophes like this one? You mean the single largest earthquake in that region in recorded history and 4th largest globally? Yeah, things like that happen all the time there.
If the plant had better protected backup power generators we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. A design flaw insofar as you cant plan for every possible and impossible scenario.
A safer, less efficient and more expensive source you say? Well lets break it down. Nuclear power, despite the radioactive waste it produces is much much cleaner than any fossil fuel burning plant. Not to mention the enormous cost it would take to import said fuels since as ive said, japan doesnt really have enough resources to switch away from nuclear power. If youre looking for a good way to bankrupt the country, that would be it. Hydropower? Well for starters its effect on the environment unlike nuclear power isnt theoretical, its immediate and severe, and if hit by a 9.0 magnitude quake theres a very real danger that the damn dam could brake. Imagine the devastation if for say the Hoover damn would break. Speaking of Hoover dam, its a damn bid dam with an installed capacity of just over 2000MW. Most hydro plants have a significantly smaller output. The Fukushima plant alone had an installed capacity of over 4500MW, way over twice of that huge hydroplant. Wind and solar share the same problem. Nowhere near the capacity. The output of the current largest wind plant is about 700MW (if theres enough wind...which there usually isnt)and for solar about half that. A fraction of what Fukushima plant produced. And on the issue of sustainability, if the backup generator would have remained intact the Fukushima plant would probably be ready to come back online by monday, in contrast a wind/solar plant that gets hit by a tsunami is gone forever. Not a nice prospect taking into account the startup costs.
So, which of these do you propose to replace the 34,5% of power provided by the nuclear plants in japan?
| quote: | Originally posted by Theresa
Also, it really does leave the country vulnerable. In a case of terrorism or war, all you gotta do is blow up a nuclear plant and you win. Again... risks outweigh the benefits from the way I see it. |
No it doesnt. Let me put this as clearly as i can. You cannot simply blow up a nuclear power plant. You can not make a power plant go nuclear. It was not designed to do that and nothing any terrorists does can change that. The containment dome is designed to contain the worst case scenario, a full scale nuclear meltdown, a few bombs dropped from a plane, or even a plane crashing into it would barely put a scratch on it. You would need specially designed bunker busters to puncture that and why would you want to do that anyway? In a war, why blow up a single powerplant and potentially endanger the lives of your own men, when even a stray bomb around one of the power distribution centers has the same affect without the devastation and the huge rebuilding costs.
Chernobyl, despite being used as a scare word just about everywhere did not go nuclear, despite the fact that just before the reactor died due to the brilliance of cold war soviet engineering the very control rods that were supposed to tame it made it jump to about 30GW which was the final blow to the abused core and it could take no more. And even then it did not go nuclear, because it cant.
Also a little bit of trivia. When reactor no.4 blew up in 86, the other three reactors at that plant remained intact and in operation producing power until they were subsequently taken offline in '91, '96 and the last one, reactor no.3 in 2000.
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