[rlbell]

Originally posted by gregor@Apr 18 2006, 01:53 PM

the only con problems i see are nuclear waste and possible accident. but accidents can be prevented and nuclear waste can be stored safely or perhaps in later stage be launched into space (moon seems like a good target )

Let us examine the worst nuclear accident in the history of nuclear generated electricity-- Chernobyl.

What caused the accident?

Misoperation of the reactor forced upon the plant operators by people who did not work there.

Someone decided that it was important to know if the latent heat of the core could produce enough energy to complete a plant shutdown, in the absence of offsite power.

Performing this experiment required the reactor to be operated in a manner that its designers knew could cause a devastating explosion, so there were multiple safety systems that would shutdown the reactor before it got to the unstable operating point. As the powers-that-be insisted on the experiment, the safety systems were deliberately sabotaged. It would be a very ticklish task to run the reactor without the safety systems, but it could be done. Unfortunately, the experiment could not be completed before the shift change, and the soviet work ethic completed the job that the offsite manager had started. The workers pretend to work and the government pretends to pay them. Not only did the operators coming off shift not put the safety systems back in operation, they did not even bother to tell the operators coming on shift what they had done. The operators tried to ramp up the power to normal operating levels, and the safety systems did not stop them. To make matters worse, instead of the massive steel reinforced, concrete containment buildings favored in the west, the structure housing the reactors at chernobyl was designed merely to keep out the weather. It was nothing more than sheet metal over a steel girder frame.

As a result, one hundred and seventy people were killed, and a large wildlife park was created. The only health effects that can be attributed to the radioactive contamination is an increase in thyroid cancers, a cancer that is so easy to treat, even the poor folk of Belorus can afford the treatment, and the mortality rate is almost nil.

Most of the damage attributed to Chernobyl were caused by people reacting in irrational fear. I met a woman in Fance who was sure that it was not safe to buy Italian cabbages, due to potential contamination. Other fears were much worse. Hundreds of women aborted their unborn children for fear of birth defects, and there was the great reindeer cull in Lapland. Finally, most of the people not actually tied to the land in Belorus, particularily all of the health professionals, left, and no one would buy the produce grown by those that could not leave, making their poverty even worse.

This is the worst accident, so far, and it required a reactor with no containment and very real design flaws, with most of its safety systems disabled. Compared to other industrial accidents, like Bhopal or any burst dam, it was a non-event grossly overhyped by fearmongering anti-nuclear activists.

The biggest accident in the US was Three Mile Island. Some backup systems were down for scheduled maintenance, and a failed pressuriser valve was realeasing primary coolant into the containment dome. Basically the operators managed to do the absolutely worst thing at the absolutely worst time. In fact, a band of terrorists with nuclear engineering degrees would have been hard pressed to have caused more damage, without the application of high explosives--that is how bad the plant operators were doing. To supply an example what they did, when coolant pressure fell to the point that the coolant pump started to cavitate, the operators shut off the only operable coolant pump to the reactor, to prevent damage to the pump. That is right, they saved the pump, at the cost of the reactor core. All of the damage from the accident was financial in nature. The people that owned the reactor lost their investment, and the people that worked there lost their job.

President Carter, a former US navy nuclear engineer, with first hand experience of what a real nuclear meltdown looks like (he was sent up to observe the meltdown at the Chalk River Nuclear laboratories, in 1959), told his fellow americans that there was nothing to worry about, not that anyone believed him, thanks to fearmongering antinuclear activists.

The serious problem with nuclear accidents is that there are not enough of them for underwriters to offer liability insurance, as the antinuclear activists keep saying 'if nuclear power is so safe, why can't powerplants buy insurance against accidents?'.

Disposing radioactive waste, as a technical problem, has been solved for some time. As a political problem, it continues to be an issue. Nuclear waste disposal in the US is a thorny problem, because the government has been collecting disposal fees, but never built a disposal site. Nevada was the chosen victim for political reasons, not technical ones. Minnesota, or Wisconsin (whichever one shares the geology of the Canadian Shield) would have been a much better technical choice, but they had the political clout to get the disposal site moved.

An indian tribe with geologically suitable land offered to host the site but racist lawyers employed by environmentalists convinced a court that the indians could not possibly be making an informed choice, so the native americans were patted on the head and told that only white people were wise enough to site waste disposal facilities. That the native americans did not get the American Civil Liberties Union involved tells me that the environmentalists have the ACLU in their pocket.

Nuclear power will have a rosy future, once people realise that the fearmongering antinuclear activists are a bunch of manipulative liars who want to dictate how we live our lives. They see nuclear power as a threat as it would produce enough cheap power to maintain our consumer lifestyle and conserve the environment, so the antinuclear activists would have to go out and work for a living.

Putting nuclear waste on the moon is a bad idea, just look what happened to Moonbase Alpha .