martybegan
Diamond Member
- Apr 5, 2010
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I just saw on PBS "Beyond the light switch" Even hardcore environmentalists are now supporting Nuke power, as long as extreme safety measures are taken into consideration. They had a segment on the close call at the Davis-Besse plant in Ohio, where there was only 3/8" of liner preventing a disaster, and the company fought to keep the plant open until its next maintenance check 2 yrs. away. It wouldn't have made it.
And there is another plant that has been on hold for decades, and they are going to push to finish it with an analog system to save costs of upgrading to digital.
I guess as long as the power companies submit to safety measures it would be better for the environment (green house gases), but if something goes wrong like Chernobyl, or Fukushima then what??
Also the costs to build one plant is in the billions??
The result will be higher bills right? Seems like a no win situation.
http://pbma.nasa.gov/docs/public/pbma/images/msm/9_11_06.pdf
This is a serious lack of imagination on their part considering where Japan is in relation to tectonic activity.
Understood but the "deny everything" response is not limited to other countries, and the flooding, if it worsens like many are predicting,Remember at chernobyl the idiots were running a test that required them to go outside normal operating procedures. That coupled with a poor control rod design, high void coefficient, and a complete lack of a containment structure lead to the disaster. Add in the good old soviet "deny everything" response plan and you get the most massive nuclear clusterfuck we have seen.
could inundate the NE. plant and cause serious contamination to the waterways. It's potentially very serious problem if the water can't be contained.
If we are to allow new nuclear power plants, then the worst case scenarios for a failure should always be taken into account and planned for accordingly, the repercussions are no laughing matter, or wacko "conspiracy theories".
How will they be able to keep pumps running to get rid of the flood waters? There are reports that the river water is already being let in to cool the reactor, but I have not been able to confirm this....Wouldn't this render the reactor useless, or does that only apply to sea water?
The reactor is in cold shutdown. I dont have the design specifics, but usually you use outside water all the time to cool the primary and secondary cooling systems, as well as the used fuel pool cooling system. heat exchangers keep the radioactive water and any outside water seperate.
As for japan, they have not published a report on exactly what happened, so any current theories are speculation at best. From what I have heard the plant survived the quake just fine. It went into SCRAM and shut down. What was the killer problem was the entire secondary power infrastructure being borked by the tsunami wave. Add in the fact they could not bring in outside help fast enough due to the general devestation in the area, and you get the situation we have now.
Hopefully they get some sort of preliminary report out soon so everyone knows what happened.