| reznor_ |
07-27-2021 11:02 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ennewi
(Post 3338859)
The original point of the thread, I assumed, was to cover all aspects of humankind's self-destructive tendencies, not to compare one form to the other and debate which was worse overall.
https://youtu.be/ZwY2E0hjGuU
|
John Oliver's piece was really a sensational hit job. People forget that nuclear is the newest science of power, compared to everything else. Mistakes were made at the outset, no one in the nuclear community denies that. Yucca mountain was perfect, but Harry Reid made a deal with Barack Obama (tinfoil-ish, I know) to give him the electoral votes if Obama supported the closure of Yucca mountain. Bottom line, humans don't do the necessary until it becomes a matter of life or death, and I fear we've hit the bottom of the barrel. Nuclear energy is a major part of the solution, but because most of the US and world are ignorant to science, and the facts of that science, we may not get there. I will never agree that other power sources are as safe and effective as nuclear.
I will chime in on Chernobyl, since every anti-nuke in this thread uses it as scapegoat. The brass tacks are: the design was flawed from the outset. The Soviets made a terrible design using POSITIVE VOID COEFFICIENTS, which are different (and bad) from NEGATIVE VOID COEFFICIENTS. What this means is: in a normal (well designed) nuclear reactor, as the fuel heats up, the fuel becomes less reactive, meaning that if there is some power excursion, the fuel's physics are leveraged to stop it from fissioning, and help mitigate any kind of accident. These are the PWR (pressurized water reactor) and BWR (boiling water reactor). Chernobyl was an RBMK model, and had POSITIVE VOID COEFFICIENTS. Every other reactor has NEGATIVE VOID COEFFICIENTS, which help safely shut it down in the event of an accident scenario. Chernobyl went into a catastrophic accident phase because as the fuel heated up and the cooling water evaporated, the fuel became more and more reactive. This led to the accident.
Fukushima was a bad geographic placement and poorly planed from TEPCO's perspective from the start. Because people wanted to save money (and conversely, MAKE MONEY) the TEPCO board ignored Japanese geological surveys which said a 100 year flood (in the form of tsunami) had a decent chance of occurring. A sea wall could have been built around Fukushima which would have mitigated the disaster. Furthermore, response authorities did not helicopter in diesel generators (which, as a young nuclear engineer, I said they should do) to counterbalance the power outage (so ironic, that a nuclear plant can't use the power it creates to power it's own pumps).
Keep in mind, nuclear is the youngest power source. You don't hear about the direct deaths from coal and gas and wind, but they're there. They just aren't as sexy as direct deaths from nuclear.
|