Has Commercial Nuclear Power been "Regulated" Out of Existence in the U.S.?

[Maxdeath]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

Things can really go wrong. For example, Russians can invade Alaska. No nuclear power means no military industry, no military power means the possibility of the foreign invasion.

No unicorns might mean that hill trolls might invade.

 

[Silver Cat]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.

Thats what we call "risk management". Chernobyl is at the one of the last places in the list of Ukrainian problems.
So if we have a choice - to raise nuclear industry, be wealthy and powerful, and have one another accident; or to be powerless and poor, lost Alaska but live in the "green" environment - what would you choose?

So give me an exact number of lives that your " risk management " is willing to sacrifice. A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million? Give me a number.

How many lives we can lost in a big war against China and Russia? Tens of millions.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

The "problem" of nuclear waste (spent fuel) is self-imposed and largely political. Spent fuel can be reprocessed and re-used indefinitely. We have CHOSEN, for political reasons not to re-process spent fuel, because the process can also be used to produce weapons-grade material (as the Iranians are currently doing - or threatening to do).

Nobody will ever build a nuclear power plant in an active seismic zone again.

Nuclear waste can safely be stored "forever" in underground salt deposits such as WIPP. Last I checked, WIPP was closed to additional storage due a "marx brothers" type episode due to storage of materials in the wrong type of kitty litter. (which spontaneously combusts).

We are all aware - are we not? - that we are all surrounded by nuclear radiation ALL THE TIME, more in airplanes, more in certain geographical areas, etc. As with all poisons (1) it's completely harmless until it isn't, (2) it may be beneficial at certain levels, and (3) too much will kill you.

Where on earth is there NOT an active seismic zone?

 

[Silver Cat]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

Things can really go wrong. For example, Russians can invade Alaska. No nuclear power means no military industry, no military power means the possibility of the foreign invasion.

No unicorns might mean that hill trolls might invade.

You're beggining to understand. If we don't demonstrate the progress in the bioengeneering, our enemies might do it. Any decision have its own risks.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.

Thats what we call "risk management". Chernobyl is at the one of the last places in the list of Ukrainian problems.
So if we have a choice - to raise nuclear industry, be wealthy and powerful, and have one another accident; or to be powerless and poor, lost Alaska but live in the "green" environment - what would you choose?

So give me an exact number of lives that your " risk management " is willing to sacrifice. A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million? Give me a number.

How many lives we can lost in a big war against China and Russia? Tens of millions.

A big war with China and Russia will eradicate almost all of human life.
That is why the prospect is unthinkable.

 

[Silver Cat]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.

Thats what we call "risk management". Chernobyl is at the one of the last places in the list of Ukrainian problems.
So if we have a choice - to raise nuclear industry, be wealthy and powerful, and have one another accident; or to be powerless and poor, lost Alaska but live in the "green" environment - what would you choose?

So give me an exact number of lives that your " risk management " is willing to sacrifice. A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million? Give me a number.

How many lives we can lost in a big war against China and Russia? Tens of millions.

A big war with China and Russia will eradicate almost all of human life.
That is why the prospect is unthinkable.

It's just another environmentalistic nonsense and nucleophobia.
Even if both sides will play "Mad butcher" plan, both sides ABD is blinded, it means death of 200-500 millions. Less than 10% of the world population. In more realistic and useful scenarios the first nuclear exchange takes away much less lives.

 

[Silver Cat]

And yes: less weapon we can make - more chances to be attacked.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.

Thats what we call "risk management". Chernobyl is at the one of the last places in the list of Ukrainian problems.
So if we have a choice - to raise nuclear industry, be wealthy and powerful, and have one another accident; or to be powerless and poor, lost Alaska but live in the "green" environment - what would you choose?

So give me an exact number of lives that your " risk management " is willing to sacrifice. A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million? Give me a number.

How many lives we can lost in a big war against China and Russia? Tens of millions.

A big war with China and Russia will eradicate almost all of human life.
That is why the prospect is unthinkable.

It's just another environmentalistic nonsense and nucleophobia.
Even if both sides will play "Mad butcher" plan, both sides ABD is blinded, it means death of 200-500 millions. Less than 10% of the world population. In more realistic and useful scenarios the first nuclear exchange takes away much less lives.

Where did you come up with this bullshit? I served on several nuclear capable ships during my time and nukes are no joke.

 

[Silver Cat]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.

Thats what we call "risk management". Chernobyl is at the one of the last places in the list of Ukrainian problems.
So if we have a choice - to raise nuclear industry, be wealthy and powerful, and have one another accident; or to be powerless and poor, lost Alaska but live in the "green" environment - what would you choose?

So give me an exact number of lives that your " risk management " is willing to sacrifice. A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million? Give me a number.

How many lives we can lost in a big war against China and Russia? Tens of millions.

A big war with China and Russia will eradicate almost all of human life.
That is why the prospect is unthinkable.

It's just another environmentalistic nonsense and nucleophobia.
Even if both sides will play "Mad butcher" plan, both sides ABD is blinded, it means death of 200-500 millions. Less than 10% of the world population. In more realistic and useful scenarios the first nuclear exchange takes away much less lives.

Where did you come up with this bullshit? I served on several nuclear capable ships during my time and nukes are no joke.

I don't say that millions of killed can be a joke.
But you can count it by yourself.

 

[Andylusion]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

I guess you are unfamiliar with the radioactive water leaking from Fukushima.

insignificant.

 

[Andylusion]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

I don't think there is much need for heat in the mud huts of the Congo. Just saying!

Otherwise, you are spot on!

 

[Silver Cat]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

I don't think there is much need for heat in the mud huts of the Congo.

They need heat to melt metals.

 

[Admiral Rockwell Tory]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

I don't think there is much need for heat in the mud huts of the Congo.

They need heat to melt metals.

Do you melt metals in your house, dumbass!

 

[Silver Cat]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

I don't think there is much need for heat in the mud huts of the Congo.

They need heat to melt metals.

Do you melt metals in your house, dumbass!

Sometimes yes (not steel, of course). But a mud hut can be not only a house, it can be a smithy too.

 

[Maxdeath]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.

Thats what we call "risk management". Chernobyl is at the one of the last places in the list of Ukrainian problems.
So if we have a choice - to raise nuclear industry, be wealthy and powerful, and have one another accident; or to be powerless and poor, lost Alaska but live in the "green" environment - what would you choose?

So give me an exact number of lives that your " risk management " is willing to sacrifice. A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million? Give me a number.

How many lives we can lost in a big war against China and Russia? Tens of millions.

And yet you have not placed a number on how many you are willing to sacrifice?
We could also go to war against Switzerland. So why bother with the idea that war is a be all end all?

 

[Maxdeath]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

So I will ask you how many are you willing to sacrifice for nuclear power?
If you had kept up you would have seen that I said that renewables were a cottage industry. You would also see what I proposed in stead of our current nuclear program.
But I guess that is too much for a short attention span.
But I am not going to repeat myself just for you.

 

[Andylusion]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

I don't think there is much need for heat in the mud huts of the Congo.

They need heat to melt metals.

Do you melt metals in your house, dumbass!

Sometimes yes (not steel, of course). But a mud hut can be not only a house, it can be a smithy too.

Well right, I was watching a video from the Congo, where the government banned the use of gas powered generators, because that causes pollution.

So this local doctors office, again, funded by the government, had a set of solar panels.

The result was, they could either plug in their doctor equipment, or they could plug in the refrigerator, that held the medications. But they couldn't do both.

Additionally, if it wasn't sunny out that day, sometimes fridge would run out of power at night, since the battery didn't charge during the day.

Otherwise they had no lights. So at night, they either lit candles, or.... the doctors office was closed. Don't get sick at night.

My point is, if you want to backward in time, then we don't need nuclear power.

But if you want anything resembling modern civilization, then we need nuclear power. There is no known alternative.

 

[Maxdeath]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

Things can really go wrong. For example, Russians can invade Alaska. No nuclear power means no military industry, no military power means the possibility of the foreign invasion.

No unicorns might mean that hill trolls might invade.

You're beggining to understand. If we don't demonstrate the progress in the bioengeneering, our enemies might do it. Any decision have its own risks.

So you actually think that there are unicorns and hill trolls?
I have read funny but that is extremely funny

 

[Andylusion]

While it is never acknowledged by the political Left, the American Commercial Nuclear Power industry has the best safety record of any industry in all of human history. Since its inception in the early 1950's there has not been a single radiation-related fatality - or even sickness - in the entire industry. The safety precautions that are mandated and followed in nuclear power stations are SO thorough and SO all-encompassing that the cancer rate for nuclear power employees is lower than for the general population (same for the Nuclear Navy).

You might ask, "What about THREE MILE ISLAND???" Well, what about it? Not a single injury or fatality, not even a mild case of radiation sickness. Nothing. Just a lot of hysteria, largely fueled by the unfortunate coincidence of this relatively insignificant accident with the film, "The China Syndrome."

There is no doubt that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission takes great pride in this accomplishment, and in a sense it should. Many of the precautions that maintain this incredible safety record come directly from that august body.

But the NRC has, in its neurotic enthusiasm, created a situation where a new nuclear power plant is, for all practical purposes, infinitely expensive. Permitting alone can take ten years. Manufacturing and construction are so restrictively managed that they are at least 2-3 times more costly than would be building exactly the same facilities for some other normally-regulated purpose.

I worked in Purchasing for a nuclear power company for a few years, and imagine the cost impact of buying a normal commercial item - say a large industrial valve or pump - for which the warranty will not start for three or four years, and even that date is highly speculative, given the regulatory environment. We were paying 3-5 times the Catalog Price of standard commercial equipment, mainly so that the manufacturer could cover the expected warranty risk.

But this regulatory micro-management is not necessary. Even though the current designs are "new," they are all based on proven designs, and the improvements simply make them safer than the existing plants that have been in service - some of them - for more than thirty years. The latest major innovations render "meltdown" impossible, as the cooling water continues to flow even when the reactor is dormant (but still hot).

Having virtually given up on building a safe, proven nuclear power plant of conventional size, the industry pins its hopes on Small Modular Reactors ("SMR's") which can be pre-manufactured and delivered to a site, and combined with other similar reactors to meet the needs of that utility. Good luck with that.

But it represents the Industry just throwing up its hands and acknowledging that the regulatory framework makes building a nuclear power plant impossible, even though we have the technology to do it in an economically feasible manner - even with natural gas breathing down its figurative neck. The actual cost of nuclear power is microscopic; you are simply controlling a natural phenomenon and siphoning off the heat that it generates.

Mark it well: we have foolishly and neurotically regulated this industry out of existence at a time when "we" claim to need sources of energy that do not generate greenhouse gases.

We have met the enemy and...well, you know the rest.

The biggest problem with nuclear is the waste. You can not go near it for thousands of years. We are leaving a trap for our prodigy. Will they have any idea not to enter an area so full of nuclear waste? We have no idea.

The waste is usually manageable, and what is created per unit power generated is miniscule compared to other waste streams for other power sources. (remember combustion products from fossil fuel power generation is a waste stream).

The key is proper labelling, design of containment, and location of containment. If we get to a point where the labels aren't maintained or understood we are probably looking at a planet of the apes level collapse of civilization anyway.

Look back a couple thousand years what language was spoken here? What language was spoken in Italy? I don't seem to remember a planet of the apes style collapse in my history books.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to point out my lack of education on that matter?
How many cities have been discovered over the last hundred years that were unknown to us? Care to guess that it was more then one? If we can forget the location of even one city than how would it be such a stretch of the imagination to forget the location of even one depository?

They didn't have the level of technological ability we have, both with regards to the storage of, and dissemination of, information. Also you are talking about cities, not intentionally designed isolation facilities for nuclear waste. Waste Depositories would be placed in the middle of nowhere, probably buried deep inside a mountain, then re-enforced with tons of concrete and steel. Access would be limited, and multiple layers of warnings and control methods would be used for any access.

In a few thousand years one would hope anyone "stumbling" into something like this would still have the cognitive ability to recognize warning signs and giant radiation symbols all over the place if they decided to dig into one of these repositories.

So did recognize any of the languages spoken two thousand years ago at first sight? A lot of waste is being stored in an old salt mine. Remember the Washington state spill a few years back. If you really want to learn do a quick search of nuclear waste accidents.

If in 1000 years they are too dumb to ignore the visual warnings, and the fact they have to dig/cut/burn through several containment structures and vessels, i say fuck em.

That's assuming some one never makes a mistake or we don't have a leak into the ground water.

If you create impossible conditions for something you make it impossible. The concept is risk mitigation, not risk elimination.

The idea is to layer the defenses so just one or two mistakes or incidents don't lead to total failure.

If you look at most disasters, one bad thing isn't usually enough, it requires a sequence of bad events for the worst to happen.

Sometimes it isn't just layered defenses.
Love canal comes to mind.
The release of chemical gases in India.
Chernobyl, three mile island. Fukushima.
Numerous leaks of radioactive waste.
We have been lucky. Can we hope that we can continue with luck?
Even if it is not completely man made, nature has shown us that we are not masters of this world no matter what we think.

TMI doesn't belong with the other two, hell even Fukishima doesn't belong with chernobyl.

In all the cases, multiple mistakes had to be made before anything really bad happened.

If you are that afraid of everything I suggest you find some place in the woods and build a concrete cabin with 4 ft thick walls and hide until you die of old age.

The funny thing is you can argue until you are blue in the face but they were all problems at nuclear facilities or man made problems as in love canal.
Lol. Actually I am not afraid of much at all. I understand that you want to believe that you understand things but I think you are going to find out that there are others in the world that will put a halt to nuclear energy.

1 catastrophic accident caused by a shitty design, shitty management, and shitty culture. 1 bad accident caused by a 40 ft tall wall of water and incompetence, and one overblown accident caused by poor operational awareness.

I'll put my engineering degree up against whatever basketweaving education you have any day of the week.

And yet all three of those were nuclear accidents. Unless you want to try and call them home accidents.
So how do you think that the next accident will go? Will we be lucky or unlucky?
Glad to see you are so upset. Do things always upset you when everyone doesn't bow down and fall in line with your way of thinking?

The thing with accidents is you learn from each one. It's why air travel becomes safer every year.

And to me Chernobyl wasn't an accident, it was willful negligence from design to operation.

Ok so what did we learn from Fukushima? Not to build nuclear reactors where they come in contact with nature. There are how many areas that could be hit by nature?

Place your emergency generators somewhere where they can't be flooded out. Place the fuel for them likewise. Increase your emergency fuel supply.

We also learned that a containment structure will keep most of the core material in place.

Place them where they can't be flooded out. On top of a mountain?
Yes indeed most of the core material. Got to love the most part of that. In other words loss of some is acceptable.

Or build a better sea-wall, another plant in Japan had a bigger one and came out just fine.

The containment worked for the most part, as opposed to no containment at Chernobyl. The only hotspot really remaining at Fukushima is the plant itself, similar to TMI, but larger in scope.

So we just need to fiqure out how to build something that nature can't tear down. Right... Again for the most part. So of course after two or three thousand years both will be safe.
We don't need to worry. We just need to build things that nature or man can't get into or destroy. Then if we don't we can be very happy and celebrate that only a potion of the core material is gone. Because only a portion is now considered acceptable. Then all we have to do is again try to build something that can withstand nature and humans for two or three thousand years.

Do you remember what was said about doing the same thing over and over again?

So The Nuclear Industry is the only one you want to apply a Zero Risk principle towards, while other energy generation methods are allowed a lesser standard?

No I would love it if everything man did was zero risk. But no matter what he does there will never be zero risk. We have had fire for centuries yet it is not zero risk.
The only thing is if you blow up and completely level a natural gas electrical generation plant there is little to no risk of the ground being uninhabitable for generations. There is no risk of wind blowing hazardous radiation to other areas.

Man is an inherently risk taking animal. If he were not he would never have done more the eat, sleep and shit. Every time we get on a plane, car or even walk across the street we take risks. We risked many times going into space or going to the moon. We risk many lives every time a submarine leaves port. But as I pointed out if an aircraft fails only those immediately affected are lost. And yes that takes into account anyone hit by it.
If a nuclear reactor fails how many are affected? What would be an acceptable loss? For how many years are we going to hope that the area affected won't be used, traveled or visited?

It depends on the level of failure. Based on US experience with our one accident, the affected area is the reactor itself. For Fukushima the long term impact is the reactor complex itself. Only Chernobyl has had quantifiable long term impacts over a wide area, and even those appear to be mitigating faster than we expected.

So we are always going to have success. There will never be a natural or man made disaster? No foreign or domestic terrorism successful cause of catastrophic failure?
I have no doubt that the Titanic, Apollo 13 and others felt the same way. No chance that anything could go wrong. I have no doubt that the most of the people that boarded and flew the planes that hit the World Trade Center felt that there was nothing that could go wrong.

The simple matter is things do go wrong. Hiding from that fact or trying to gloss over it does not make it go away.

I don't see anyone here, suggesting we blindly forest gump our way into nuclear power.

I don't see anyone saying that if we just do X then nothing will ever go wrong ever again.

What I do see people suggesting is that, Nuclear power is the future, because it is. It simply is. There is no other source of nearly unlimited consistent power. And the sooner the older generation with their backward beliefs about how horrible nuclear power is, the sooner life will improve for the world.

Will there be accidents? Sure.

Again, this like Corona. Yeah we can all live in the basements until we all commit suicide from isolation and depression... but at least no one will die of Corona.

Yeah, we can all live like we're in the Congo, and be backward people living in wood heated huts.

But that isn't what most people want, or are willing to put up with. People need power. And if you want power that does not pollute or have smoke stacks, then nuclear power is the viable option.

Renewables are a failure. Anyone can see this, if they look at how things are playing out. With hundreds of billions spent, if not trillions world wide, all renewable energy sources combined, is barely 6% of world wide energy production.

Nuclear is the magic source of power. There is nothing else.

So I will ask you how many are you willing to sacrifice for nuclear power?
If you had kept up you would have seen that I said that renewables were a cottage industry. You would also see what I proposed in stead of our current nuclear program.
But I guess that is too much for a short attention span.
But I am not going to repeat myself just for you.

No one in the US has died from nuclear power yet. I see no reason, anyone must die.

In fact, more people have died from conventional power, than nuclear power world wide.

The better question is, how many millions are you willing sacrifice to avoid using nuclear power?

Again, there is no alternative. We either use nuclear power, or million will die.

So, how many millions do you not give a crap about, and are willing to sacrifice on your alter of anti-nuclear bigotry?