At MOHANADHASSAN….

You might want to check your meaning of “safe”. Also, in effect it doesnt really matter if a nuclear fission power plant is very safe, what matters most are the consequences in a “what-if” scenario. It baffles me how people can belittle the radioactive danger from fission power plants after all the incidents.
Fukushima shows us how “uncontrollable” nuclear power plants as of now can be.
These issues will be mostly gone with fusion power plants, but till these become available around the globe (2050+?), I foresee at least a few other nuclear power plants with critical incidents.
It’s really not a matter of how safe they are, its more a statistical issue. Humans make mistakes and we need to rely on technology that is relatively mistake-friendly. Fission reactors definately are not.

Dont get me started on nuclear waste. To this day, there is not a single final storage place for nuclear waste established on earth. Just recently, the US raised the requirements for such a place on their soil.

I dont understand why you are saying wind power is stupid?
Wind power could provide for the energy need worldwide times 3 (or something like that). Norway receives most of its power by water power plants.
Green energy is by far the most logical thing to exploit and I cannot understand why people keep bashing it. Maybe because its not “cool” or something like that.

Green power plants are relative non-green - either they need utterly big areas or they soil the landscape. Sure positive its a regenerative energy source and mostly we don’t waste resources of our planet. But there are also disadvantages if you ask me.
Nuclear power has its disadvantages - we all can recon that now on the Fukushima catastrophe. But i tend to believe the reaction against nuclear power is a bit tooo overreacted. Driving by car has as well its risks, we pollute the air. Driving by plane even more.

What should be done to evaluate all pros and cons is firstly to write them down. Weight them and consider the consequences. Every energy production may it be green or non-green has its risks as well as disadvantages. It must be weighted and evaluated to what extent they can or should be used…

It’s not because it’s “not cool” as you put it. It’s because wind powerplants generate 2MW each at most. Compare that to an almost 40 year old reactor over at Fukushima generating 750MW…

I know Norway runs on water powerplants, they generate 60% of our powerusage and I live here. Each of them generate 350MW at most, but there’s not enough waterfalls to supply whole Norway with them. 20% of our powerusage comes from fissionplants “imported” from the European network.

The Fukushima reactors were not upgraded in 15 years, and at that point we did not have the safe reactor designs we have today. Fissionpower is a a fully plausible way to go with our current safer designs. Most our fissionplants have not been upgraded in a long while and can be thought of as unsafe.

Fusion is even more dangerous, if one of them were to fail controlling the fusionprocess the amount of heat would be insane, and it would do much more damage than any fissionplant can possibly do today.

Don’t bring up solar powerplants. Their maintenance costs are way too high, the cells can’t use more than 20% of the energy, theoretical max of 30%…

Oil based solar powerplants are not “green-power”, as the oil has to come from somewhere, and extracting that oil is not a green process.

What about the literally tens of coal powerplants that went on fire the last 50 years? They’re not dangerous? The fires from those can be impossible to stop for a very long time, and by that time it may have killed much more people than a fissionplant can kill in the same timespan if the fissionplant fails.

Not only do coal powerplants pollute the air a lot even with filtering, but they pollute the air to what probably will be toxic for human beings if they go on fire or something.

Geothermic powerplants is a genious idea, the only problem about them is that they literally destroy every geyser out there.

EDIT: I feel like pointing out that in a liberal society you can’t trust fission or fusion to anyone running such a powerplant. Such powerplants require some extent of governmental control, for example forcing the corporation to shut down the plant if they do not upgrade when they are “ordered” to.

EDIT2: In fact, scratch that, all powerplants require some extent of governmental control. There’s no safe powerplant tech out there, not even wind can be considered safe.

Does this mean we have to cut off nuclear power for ever - because there is a risk that might happen?

In such cases i would ask myself - would you under such considerations do any step inside a plane and have a thousands of kilometers travel? Isnt there the risk to die too? I could name many more examples that you do each day - that have their risk as well.

Imo we all can talk that nuclear power is bad due to its risks and the radiation (that we have to bear thousands of years any further). We face several risks each that where we are not aware that much of any bad results. Its often kinda overreacted and discussed in affect. What are always bad conditions to constructive solve any problems.

(PS: I do not like the nuclear waste and the imagination something like Fukushima happening again anywhere on the world - but we should not act in a hurry. Lets calm down and weight each pro and cons with its connected financial aspects and everything that must be considered. And not only rely on the fact that nuclear power plant are not safe (they never will be).

Perhaps we should start building powerplants filled with bicycles driving dynamos, now that would create some jobs!

The irony is that the anti-nuclear proponents are shooting themselves in the foot.

Wait, what?

Well think about it for a second. Your electricity doesn’t come from magic. The only thing your protestation does is stop the construction of new plants. The old plants will keep running because they cost millions to safely dismantle and would not easily be replaced by another powerplant of the same capacity. Solar and wind are just a pipe dream, they cannot sustain baseload power generation. Only hydro, fossil and nuclear can. Hydro’s nice if you have the space and the money and don’t care too much about destroying the environment around the dam, but all those conditions are rather limiting. Fossil I think we can all agree is not the way to go; between pollution, scarcer resources and risks associated, they easily kill more people than all other sources combined.

So that leaves nuclear, but the thing is, yes, the plants we have right now are bad. You shouldn’t be basing yourself off designs from half a decade ago when thinking about nuclear! Do we still measure car security by what a 1950s American car had?

Modern nuclear designs, as I’ve repeated countless times, are passively safe, recycle burnt fuel to extract about 99% of fissile material and produce so little waste it’s not even funny. You couldn’t notice the waste if you weren’t looking for it.

We shouldn’t be discarding a technology based off the batshit insane USSR experiment that was Chernobyl or how a 40 year old plant didn’t fully resist a 9.0 earthquake followed by a 10m tsunami. Well dang, how surprising!

The problem is not the % likelihood of a nuke power station accident, but the number of people that can be wiped out and the number of more millions who will be affected by radiation from severe burns to nausea for the rest of their lives.

Yesterday the British media told us that above-normal radiation has been detected in this country and it originated from Fukushima. Is this just scare mongering, since there are so many miles between us, or has the radiation been also detected in Russia, China, Asia and the rest of Europe too, which are between us and Japan? If yes, then the range of the problem is so great that it may threaten all of the world. And the Japs can’t get close enough for long enough to plug the hole, it is killing their people who are trying to fix the problem!

Fukushima is not over yet.

And my suspicion is that all of the tremors and quakes and natural disasters that we are seeing around the world are leading up to a really big shift or jerk of the continental plates which will threaten all of us. And there is nothing we can do about it.

Maybe this old world has had enough of the human race. We need to look for the seven-headed monster that will destroy mankind - Fukushima may well be the first head.

Severe burns? Probably just those two who already got that. Rest will get on perfectly fine.

I think you’re not really understanding how this thing works. You can’t get burned from phantom magical particles or something. You get burned by something exceedingly energetic, like err fire. Not by small particles in the air.

There is absolutely nothing to fear about this outside of Japan. I hope you realize the magnitudes involved here. “Higher than normal” means what, 10-100x? That’s still many orders of magnitude below any possible danger to humans. Because of the nuclear arms race, we have developed exceedingly sensitive detectors for this kind of stuff.

If one year, 5 people get killed by lightning and the next year, 10 people do, that’s “higher than normal”. Doesn’t mean everybody will get toasted by lightning overnight, now does it?

Now please, stop with the dramatic “WE’RE ALL IN DANGER” lines, everyone. This is grave… for the immediate area next to the plant. If things get worse, it could be bad for the entire province. But it will not affect anything more than Japan in any meaningful way. Eating a banana everyday will get you more radiation than that.

FF is right, even about the banana-thing actually…

Speaking on purely medical terms here, since I just finished my MD, the severe burns that people who have received excess amounts of radiation are extremely similar to the ones that people get after radiation treatment, except are more systemic. The burns occur because radiation causes death to quickly growing cells; ones in your skin, GI tract and bone marrow. This causes the upper layers of the skin layers/GI layers to slough off causing the “burn appearance”. In terms of your GI tract, because the upper layers of tissue are critical for absorbing nutrients, not having them there causes certain chemicals to cause the body to have nausea, GI upset and diarrhea.

For the majority of people, they will be fine. Most of the leaked radioactive content is I 131 which has a half-life of approx 8 days. In a few months the radioactive content will be negligible. There definitely will be an increase risk of cancer amongst the population closest to the nuclear plant but no where near the levels we saw in Chernobyl.

The real concern comes from release of plutonium which has a half-life over over 40 years and could cause permanent effects to the Japanese food chain. But, they haven’t detected this in any great extent.

As for people outside of the country, you have nothing at all to be concerned about. And this scare mongering with radiation leaks is a bit absurd…

Actually they found a little bit of plutonium right outside reactors, and if I remember correctly Pu-239 has a half-life of several thousand years (we’re talking somewhere around 24k years), which is what they end up with after running U-238 through the reactors.

Pu-239 is highly radioactive and IMO they should shut the plant down and bombard the thing with cement, the reactors are destroyed now anyways.

The rest of the world is not threatened by this, but Japan is.

They are shutting them down. That’s the thing.

CLICK ME

They did the obvious thing. They tried their best to bring them under control, cause reactors are sort of an expensive thing to lose. When it became clear that they could not, they made the decision to strike reactors 1-4. Reactors 5 and 6 are still up in the air as of that news article, which was a few days ago. These are professionals here.

I don’t recall anyone ever saying they are not professional, neither do I recall anyone saying reactors are cheap?

Might’ve misunderstood what you meant.

one thing:
d(-_-)b

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Run for your lives, the mutants are coming!

My previous post referred to the possible next nuclear powerplant incident causing burns to many people. Isn’t this the third incident already?

The people trying to kill the plant are not succeeding, are they.

And it is not a good idea to gloss over the hazard to the Japanese people, who are next to this thing and whose population is already in the millions.

Percentages are all very well unless you are the percentage. But there is not much we can do about it anyway.

The UK media mentioned radiation levels 3,000 times more than the normal, wasn’t that over Europe?

Yes Timmy, we are all going to die - in our predefined time and way? Ha! Guess my preferred?

I’ll repeat what I said: 3000x is still orders of magnitude below danger levels. It’s safe.

Also, the people are still trying not to wreck the entire thing because they’re well aware it’ll make the decontamination process harder. You’d rather have the reactor mostly contained than crushed under concrete that gets irradiated over time.

Finally, you’re doing projection here. I could very well say the same of any energy source. The next dam collapse is going to do victims, BAN DAMS! The next coal plant will catch fire and kill dozens! The next solar panel will crush the person installing it!

You catch my drift

(And it’s also worth pointing out that nuclear has the lowest death per GWh of all current energy sources)

Only time and the next event will tell.

If this is one of the “Seven Heads” predicted in the Bible (and Omen 2 or was it Omen 3?) then… we’re DOOMED, DOOMED, I tell you! Moooaahahahahahaaaaaa!!!

Go grab the nearest single unattached blonde you fancy and - do your thing! There’s no more time!

Mind you, I hope I’m addressing normal single unattached and unirradiated males…