Minor nuclear power plant incident in Slovenia

BBC

Nuclear energy scares the bejeebus outta me. I know it's claimed to be very safe lalalalalala...but if it goes bad, it goes really bad. I give nuclear energy a 9/10 in the "fuck this shit right up the ass" scale.

Nuclear energy is safe, and this non-event proves it better than anything. If something does go wrong, things get dealt with.

Nuclear energy is the only solution we have that can supply the demands of humanity for energy without threat of destroying/irreversibly polluting the planet and that is based on a sound and proven method. I think anybody that holds an extremist view on a subject like energy as you do, should spell out his alternatives before shutting off our light bulbs, or otherwise just stop using anything electrical.

The problem with Nuclear energy is: All plants are considered nuclear plants.

So when one fails, all nuclear energy is looked at as dangerous. It's almost like saying: "drive a car? do you know how dangerous motorcycles are?!" There are indeed, some designs which are fail safe.

Safe like Chernobyl, or safe like 3 Mile Is.? How is all of the waste taken care of in a safe and non destructive manner? What sort of fallout does one get from solar energy and windfarms?
My views are hardly extreme, many nations are anti nuke

Timmeh, you illustrate my point exactly. The design I linked to in inherently safe. Living next to a windfarm would probably be more dangerous.

Anti-nuke people might also want to take note: Coal plants release more radioactive material during their lifetime than Nuke Plants.

Coal is shite, highly pollutant. Ok, so you've provided a "fail safe" nuke reactor. What about the waste? Is that also disposed of in a non destructive manner?

For waste, I'm a big fan of breeder reactors, or just burying it. There are a lot of naturally occurring nuclear waste sites

In all honesty, yes solar, wind, and tidal are great and should be incorporated into an overall energy policy. But they can not supply a nation's energy needs. Nuclear is a great 50-100 year solution before we achieve fusion

Fusion.

Reagan shut down both the Breeder Reactor Project and the Fusion Reactor Project at the Oak Ridge National Lab in the early '80s. Very bad move!

While solar, geo, wave, and wind are wonderful, they simply cannot produce as much energy as we (humans) currently consume. Nuclear is the lesser of the many evils. Coal, oil, and gas being the top three evils.

So you can debate how bad nuclear is, but you cannot claim its worse than coal, oil, gas.

And you can't claim that "good" energy sources will alllow us to phase out those bad 3.

And you can only dream that we'll consume little enough energy to allow the above to be possible.

Edit Yes fusion will be wonderful when it works. But it might never work. At least high oil prices are making it attractive to throw massive quantities of money at trying to make it work.

I don't honestly think burying nuke waste is a particularly great long term solution. I'd take hydro over coal, oil or gas.

Two problems. Only Norway had the landscape to produce enough energy for its needs from hydro. And hydro is very environmentally destructive, not in pollutants, but in modifying the eco system.

However I'll take heart from the fact that you're not proposing gas as clean. CO2 in large quantities is our biggest pollution problem, which gas produces same as oil or coal.

Not necessarily. Micro-hydro isn't destructive on the environment and small generators can power whole townships. Some people have their own generators in their backyards to power their home, completely non destructive. Obviously that's not viable for all, but I think that there is much more to come from hydro than is what is being currently exploited.

With billions being poured into renewable energy sources, smart investments into developing more robust technologies for nuclear waste disposal are a good value for money spent. Solar, wind or hydo is for sure clean, but on a value for money basis I'd argue that nuclear is cleaner.

As I said, what are your alternatives? I consider this opinion extreme even if many countries are against it. Remember that the horizon of a western politician is at most 4 years (some say the memory horizon of a western citizen is 4 days), so they basically don't care what happens after that. If they go for nuclear people like you would scream and screech murder, and so they opt out for gas, coal and oil. It's extreme because it's disregarding tomorrow and avoiding important decisions while screwing tomorrow slowly to death.

Tell me which would you consider better. As mentioned by others, solar, wind and hydro can't scale large enough.

Chernobyl was an example of piss poor construction (and caused ~4000 deaths.. how many deaths did the piss poor half assed use of other technologies you regularly use cause in their infancies, I shudder to think of how many people died as modern medicine was developed, I suppose we should toss that aside as well). Three mile island had no major effects:


The cessation of US nuclear power development is a tragedy owed to the ignorance that the concept of anything with the word nuclear brings. It boggles my mind how environmentalists whine about global warming and the demonize the most viable method to replace fossil fuel energy generation we have at our disposal.

But if you hate nuclear power, you should really hate hydro power - i mean chernobyl killed 4000

The Banqiao Dam disaster in China killed an estimated 26,000 people from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine.

Oh, well... Canada continues to develop and improve its CANDU reactor, which is arguably a better design than the US reactor anyway.

And it runs off of poutine!

See? Poutine is very environmentally friendly, and none of it goes to waste, either. We just ship it all to Quebec once we're finished with it

Or is it closer to 500,000?

Even if these allegations are true the facts still remain 1) the Chernobyl disaster was an example of an uncontained nuclear reactor and gross human error and 2) disasters from hydro electric dam breakdowns have killed far more people.

But no, your right, we should ignore our best chance at alternative energy because soviet russia fucked up. Screw science and the relative safety of breeder reactors - nuclear means bad.

I also assume that since Soviet style socialism killed alot of people you are opposed to all socialism in general?

Chernobyl was an old fashioned graphite reactor, and Russians have never been known for their safety features. If anyone is interested in seeing photos of how the area around Chernobyl is recovering, here's a web site about a motorcycle trip through the affected region that I found fascinating. I suggest folks start at the beginning.

An excerp from Elena's photo diary

Why not? They get this stuff from the ground to begin with. All you're doing is taking it out, making it a lot less radioactive and putting it back in there.

I think Nuclear energy is good for all reasons except one. It is still not renewable. And if we go down this path of heavily investing in it, then we put renewables once again on the back burner. But instead of developing more coal plants, they should most certainly be building some nuclear ones, because we simply can't provide all the worlds needs with renewables right now. Germany is truly foolish in their banning of it, which purely came from uneducated opinions on the subjects from people who think they are saving the earth.

Uranium isn't found in dense quantities naturally, unlike when nuclear waste rods are buried.


Absolutely agree.

Germany plan to be 100% renewable by 2050, no nuke power & no coal power.

I still can't beleive you support hydro power after all the people it has killed throughout history. Planning to do something is one thing, making it feasable is another. Until we have developed fully feasable renewable energy, nuclear is a superior choice to coal.

The nuclear industry has been notorious for been wildly optimistic about its cost effectiveness. Electricity that was supposed to be too cheap to meter ended up being the most expensive you could buy.

Germany may be beginning to reconsider its nuclear stance. Or else they'll have to keep importing even more electricity from France which has a large nuclear program in place since the 1970's.

Italy Joins European Nuclear Power Revival


Nuclear power popular again as energy prices soar

No chance u can back this up with any stats perchance?

BTW The 4000 figure has now become regarded as being wildly pessimistic.

From wiki:

Good point. It's a bit rich for Germany to say they are taking the moral high ground (if it is at all) and shutting down all their stations, yet importing a whole shitload of power from other countries that is indeed derived from nuclear sources.

I suggest that everybody watch the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode entitled Nukes, Hybrids & Lesbians.

Found it on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

They are unabashedly pro-nuke (I have wavering opinions on the matter) but the show is very entertaining regardless of your stance. There's also a super-cute lesbian in the show which the whole family can enjoy.

I count myself as very green, but if another dumn greeny tries to explain that hydrogen is the answer and the ultimate clean fuel...

Its that kind of thinking that got the German nukes shut down. Germany might well plan to be completely renewable by 2050. Well I planned to be a millionaire and have fucked 1000 women by 2005, and believe me, neither have happened.

France may have very cheap electricity. That's nice but not important. What's important is that France and Norway generate the cleanest electricity.

Nuclear is the lesser of the viable evils. Comparing a modern nuclear plant to Chernobyl, is like compaing an Airbus to the Wright brother's plane. Technology gets better. And Chernobyl was the result of an unecessary, ill thought out experiment, that needed many safety systems to be overidden. Cool trip report from Elena though, cool girl. Got balls (hopefully not glowing)

Both pro and anti arguments in this article.

Didn't you also say you were a feminist somewhere? Does calling yourself a "feminist" get you more puss? Just a question for my research mind...

No but being a feminist might help. You have to actually like women, rather than just liking what they can do for you. And you can't pretend to like them in the hope of getting some. They have marvelous bullshit detectors.

Is this a tad off-topic? I was justing trying to point out that planning for something good, is not the same as guaranteeing to achieve something good.

I do like women , the problem being that most feminists hate men. I just don't see that planning to fuck 1000 women is being consistent with liking women , in fact quite the opposite...
EDIT : Of course it's off topic.

However Germany is a good candidate for being a country that would just do that. They have the saying "Who needs power stations - we get our electricity from the wall socket..."

If you ask folks in areas experiencing brownouts, they'll probably give a very different perspective. First priority is simply to have electricity.


Elena does explain a little about how and why Chernobyl blew up. But her photos capture the not just the aftereffects of the nuclear accident, but also how life was back under the Soviet regime. Call it a snapshot of communist living, frozen in time, unchangeable except by the elements and Mother Nature herself. Eerie in many respects.

Most feminists don't hate men. They just dislike women being considered inferior (to men). As for wanting to fuck lots of women, well that's because I like them so much. If I said I wanted to eat 1000 tubs of Ben & Jerry's icre cream would that mean I don't like either icecream or Ben & Jerrys?


Well from the envionment's perspective, clean is good, brownouts don't matter. But this is giving the wrong impression about France. Frace's electricity is rock solid. I've lived there for almost 2 years and never has a brown, black, or even blue out.

It would mean you dont value an individual tub of Ben & Jerry's in particular and just use it as a temporary method to sate your lusts.

Sorry, I was actually thinking of places like India, where having electricity 24 hrs a day is a problem for most factories that my husband has visited. Imagine textile factories running on big diesel back-up generators part of the time, with limited or no water treatment facilities. Not a pretty picture!

Also explains why the body count was so high. Dis- and mis-information that prevented people from farking the hell out of that place while they could still save themselves. Sending helo pilots and firemen into the blaze without protection and without them knowing that there was a meltdown (they believed it was just a fire in the beginning). Not having radiation suits at hand in case of an accident for the rescue crews.

Damn, communism sucks.