Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

[Auxin]

Yeah, cars kill, and sedentary lifestyle kills. So why the hell not try to reduce the number of cars!?

People dont have to return to caves to start riding a bike and quit buying absurdly overpriced faulty plastic cars from neon abominations of car lots and surrounding them by 400 watt lights to reduce chances someone will bust the window with a rock to steal their iphone.

I live in a city of 300,000 people and I routinely go on 10 mile hikes through the city, not to mention frequent 3-4 mile dog walks and its rare that I will actually pass by another person who is not in a car. Some times weeks pass without it happening. Thats just not right man.

[Halcyon Daze]

just for the record.

Japan raises severity rating for Fukushima leaks

Japan has raised the severity of the latest crisis to strike the Fukushima nuclear plant, classifying the leak of hundreds of tons of radioactive water as a "serious incident".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/10256128/Japan-raises-severity-rating-for-Fukushima-leaks.html

Edited August 21, 2013 by Halcyon Daze

[SunChaser]

We are not going back to the caves any time soon so we better just close the gap between theoretical safety and actual fact.

Are you positive about that? When I think of nuclear power, I tend to think about how lucky we are that we aren’t all living in caves right now suffering the effects from extreme fallout.

The nuclear bombs that were dropped on japan were the equivalent to nearly 15 kilotons of TNT and instantly killed 70 thousand people. 20 years later the Russians detonated the Tsar bomb, which was the equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT and would have instantly killed everyone within a 30 km radius and flattened most buildings. To put it into perspective, if the Tsar bomb had of been dropped onto the centre of Melbourne, then within seconds everything in the radius of Mooroobark, Craigieburn and Werribee would be destroyed and even people living out of this radius zone would be effected by fallout.

Now just for a second imagine the energy that could be released by the nuclear weapons we are capable of making 50 years later. It seriously just blows my mind that we would even consider working with nuclear technology within the earths atmosphere, once you put it all into perspective. What business does such a primitive creature as us humans have with technology of such power?

I can’t help but agree with what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, (paraphrasing) either nuclear power is right and all countries should be allowed to use it, or nuclear power is wrong, in which case no country should have the right to use it.

It really is a scary thing to think that a life form, which is still running around slaughtering each other over petty religious and idealistic beliefs have access to something so powerful. Not to mention that if we spent less time running around like wild animals building metal killing devices, then we would have figured out by now that there is a perfectly good source of nuclear fusion energy that shines in our faces every single day that could easily supply us with all the energy we could ever need.

[bℓσωηG]

 

[bogfrog]

Is This Fukushima? Pacific Herring in Canada Bleeding Eyeballs, Fins, Tails. Government Ignoring Problem:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/is-this-fukushima-pacific-herring-in-canada-bleeding-government-ignoring-problem/5351845

[Halcyon Daze]

Personally I'm starting to hate nuclear power.

[whitewind]

Mystery steam rising over reactor 3

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2217953/fukushima_meltdown_mystery_steam_rising_over_reactor_3.html

TEPCO quietly admits that reactor 3 could be melting down

http://nsnbc.me/2013/12/30/tepco-quietly-admits-reactor-3-melting-now/

[frozenthunderbolt]

Cars kill hundreds of thousands every year and maim millions more but nobody would contemplate trying to eradicate them.

Nuclear technology has much to offer for the future. Almost every country except Australia has dozens of these things. Australia

just supplies the fuel. Now there's hypocrisy in motion.

We are not going back to the caves any time soon so we better just close the gap between theoretical safety and actual fact.

This is a straw-man argument.

Motor vehicle deaths are high - i grant you that, but they will be self limiting in that there is not enough oil left that can be economically recovered for people to continue destroying themselves with it in cars for more than about another 100 years, tops.

Further, the effects of a vehicle collision will not last more than a generation (for any given event) and as above can be expected to decrease as fossil fuels become increasingly harder to recover.

In contrast to this, nuclear melt down has the chance to kill hundreds of thousands to millions outright (in a severe event) BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY

1. Create and disperse isotopes with half live measured in the 10's of 1000's of years that will cause premature deaths, illness and mutations for multiple 1000's of years.

And to a lesser extent

2. May cause a breakdown of food chains and thus famine or malnourishment as the dead zones in the pacific ocean (and radioactive contamination effects more widely) destroy vast swaths of marine life that people rely upon as an important part of their diet

[ballzac]

This is a straw-man argument.

A straw man is where someone misrepresents the opponent's position. You didn't demonstrate how weedRampage misrepresented a position, but instead appeared to defend the position that weedRampage was attacking, implying that it wasn't a straw-man at all

Chernobyl was pretty much the worst-case scenario, and events like this are pretty rare. Even using the most grossly overestimated death-tolls for an event like this, the number of people who have died as a result of nuclear accidents since its inception pales in comparison to the number of people who have died in motor vehicle accidents in the same time frame.

It's also worth noting that focussing solely on half-life can be misleading, because the longer a material's half-life, and the more widely dispersed, the lower its activity. If you have a material with a half-life of 1000s of years and it is widely dispersed, it's activity will be so low that it will be basically harmless. On the other hand, if you have a material that has a half-life of a year being highly concentrated in a local water supply, its activity will be high enough to cause radiation poisoning, but its lack of dispersion will mean fewer people will be affected, and its short half-life will mean that the cross generational problems will not occur.

[-RC-]

Fukishima is fucked, so is Japan.

Their children are sick, therefore their future is questionable. For the record, and I repeat, their CHILDREN ARE SICK.

What the fuck are people talking about shit like "Oh, only a couple of small-scale incidents...." and "We need energy...".

This energy is not meant for us, and if you have any concept of human beings actually existing on this earth as a life-form akin to all other life on this planet, and therefore being totally reliant on this planet for nourishment and further life, then surely you can see that.

We don't need it, that argument is entirely intellectual and foolish, if it poisons us, the earth and there are clean alternatives.

Can't eat their food, children are going to live short and painful lives, and their land and economic infrastructure is in ruins, for who knows how long into the future.

Yep, nuclear must be the go then aye?

Good trolling topic though, maybe I should start with the counter-point that nuclear radiation is actually good for you....?

[dionysus]

to start, sorry to bring up an old thread.

next, you can have nuclear power without nuclear bombs. the two are not codependent even if not mutually exclusive. as bad as nuclear weapons are, the best foreseeable method to prevent such weapons being destroyed is increased free trade. if Australia provides uranium to Russia to make power who sends waste to China for the atoms with the longest radioactive half-life to be trans-mutated who then sends the waste storage cask to whichever next country for long-term storage and so on. each country becomes dependent on each other for its own power and survival and large scale, indiscriminate bombings of anyone else becomes detrimental to your own country.

radioactive isotopes with the longest half-life are only a very small fraction of the total mass of the nuclear waste, which as i mentioned, can be altered in a specific reactor to a less dangerous isotope. from memory, all bar 1 or 2 of the most dangerous atoms can be altered in this way to be MUCH more manageable.

the storage casks developed by the US to store and transport nuclear waste are ridiculously tough. they have crashed a train into one and set it on fire for 90 minutes with constantly burning jet fuel to only minor cosmetic damage. the amount of radiation the waste in these casks puts out, even if it was to fall from the truck, one would simply be able to go and put the waste back on the truck while receiving a smaller radiation dose than a chest x-ray. footage of the train crash tests is shown below.

also worth noting is that nuclear technology has improved almost infinitely since the 1970's in terms of plant safety, cost of operation, cost to build etc but many countries using nuclear power have not been able to build new reactors since the same time, meaning that every reactor in the U.S is the same technology as 3 mile island. they are considered safe by most knowledgeable nuclear physicists but it is ridiculous to be allowed still to operate those plants but not build new ones.

there is a facility that was to be the U.S nuclear waste deposit site in Yucca Mountain, Nevada that was essentially perfect for its purpose (storage of the waste casks). the site was specifically chosen because of its dry nature, meaning casks could be left down there undisturbed for a long time with minimal water corrosion. after the government succumbed to pressure and cut off funding for the development of the site, which would have almost eradicated the problem of nuclear waste in the US (at the very least until an even better solution was devised), the same waste sits in buildings ON SITE at the power plants, just like Fukushima. by getting rid of the problem through transmutation and proper long term storage you also eliminate one of the key components people use to protest nuclear power. it was seemingly known by extreme left Americans that there would be less chance of ceasing nuclear power if there was less problem and so used all sorts of silly arguments against Yucca mountain. a main one being, paraphrased, 'to transport the nuclear waste there it would have to go through 140 major towns and past our children' which was a clearly emotive argument. you would actually need to be in the direct presence of a storage cask for over a week straight to go above the annual dose limit; which as ballzac mentioned is much lower than the actual point of ill health anyway (because believe it or not, nuclear physicists are concerned with safety)

we are all exposed to radiation every day, eating bananas and Brazil nuts and carrots and watching tube TV's, why is it if a similar low dose of radiation comes from a "nuclear" source everyone shits themselves? in the 50's a young boy (Gordon Isaacs) was cured of retinoblastoma by pointing a linear particle accelerator into his face. it saved his vision. thank Jesus for radiation, but, only in that circumstance right?

the JET fusion test reactor in the UK just set a new record for output to input ratio and have worked on developing a new fuel mix that will now be implemented in the ITER reactor which is currently being built. recent speculation predicts ITER will have a real chance of becoming the first tokamak style reactor to output as much power (hopefully more) that goes into it as early as 2035. if this does pan out over the next hundred years, that will further solve waste and contamination issues.

in summary, there are lessons to be learned from 3 mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, but they definitely should not be 'nuclear power is the devil'.

-dio

[Sallubrious]

For the most part I agree, nuclear power can be very safe and a lot of the dangers are vastly overplayed by sensationalist journalism.

That being said I still don't trust it, mainly because of economic factors.

I've had a lot of first hand experience in the "power" industry and it's very corrupt and run by greedy corporations that try to milk the maximum profit from it.

When power stations have paid for themselves, the maintenance standards plummet and the power stations are pushed well past their maximum operating life. Some of the power stations in QLD in particular are in such a sad state of repair they are dangerous to be in.

One of the main motivations for incorporating is to create layers of abstraction from responsibility/liability so the board of directors is for the most part not responsible for any deaths or injuries they cause.Those managing the plants almost always have the typical management motivations -to create maximum profit for minimum input so as the plant reaches the end of it's shelf life it will typically be flogged to death and they just budget for the extra deaths that ensue.

I really can't see that being any different from what it would be if those same corporations were given the opportunity to build more nuclear installations.

I've been in bed those type of people and I just don't trust the bastards.