earthquake in japan

tcc wrote:

To the question whether he still believes in nuclear power, he nods and says that as a scientist he believes that there is no other option for mankind.  "It is so efficient, so clean, so powerful.  But plants must be well organised and run according to strict safety measures. That is really the only option.”  He also adds: “People need to educate themselves to separate fact from fiction rather than panicking needlessly about the current situation in Japan when they are miles away.”

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God help us if we never truly get past using plutonium to literally boil a kettle.  That said, he's not alone in that opinion so that possibility must be factored it to policy right up until it doesn't have to be anymore.

Zebonka12 wrote:

Yeah, exactly.  It bugs me because beyond a certain point in a crisis, ordinary people should start to realise that their politics and ideologies really aren't all that important *in the grand scheme of things*.  Who (seriously) gives a shit about my views on gun ownership, right after there's a mass shooting?  Can you imagine a bunch of people having a spirited debate on alternative energies while standing around outside a fizzing nuclear reactor?  Just because we're not in the affected area doesn't really alter how we should be thinking about this - the thing is still there, and still hazardous to people.  'Out of sight, out of mind' I guess.
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I have read this literally 10 times, and I'm still struggling to understand what you're trying to say.  That it's inappropriate to be discussing this at all?  That it's not the time to be thinking about anything beyond compassion for those affected? That some opinions are okay right now, but not others? I'm genuinely interested, and genuinely confused.

I was in something of a hurry when I wrote it, and to be honest I can't quite remember what disparate thoughts I was trying to tie together!

More or less, I just feel that in the face of the current situation, some of the discussion is a bit on the nose (on both sides).  Personally, I feel that anyone still tooting the nuclear horn at this point is asking me to accept a power source that is proven to be more dangerous than the renewable energy that we should be investing in at this point in history, on the basis of "don't worry, it won't malfunction".  

What I was getting at is that, well - it's only my opinion.  It's not really worth much at the moment, and it's certainly not helpful for me to say "duh, nuclear bad!" in the face of such a messy situation.  On the other side of the coin, I don't see how nuclear is really a defensible technology at the moment, and I can't fathom anyone taking that line seriously.  I can appreciate what that Chernobyl jumper has to say about this current situation, but I'm a bit dubious about it for one or two reasons.

I am unfortunately in a bit of a hurry again so I really can't sit and try to put this right.   Ah well!

Zebonka12 wrote: More or less, I just feel that in the face of the current situation, some of the discussion is a bit on the nose (on both sides).   ========================= I hate this discussion, and I have for some time.   It bothered me to the point of actually losing a wee bit of sleep over it last night.  I knew I disliked the tone and the futility of it, but I think you've focused a nagging sense of something else for me - against the backdrop of the nuclear crisis there is just nothing that feels good about arguing about it on the internet for the sake of arguing about it on the internet, which is all it's become for me.

Personally, I feel that anyone still tooting the nuclear horn at this point is asking me to accept a power source that is proven to be more dangerous than the renewable energy that we should be investing in at this point in history, on the basis of "don't worry, it won't malfunction".   ======================== Almost everybody  *is* investing, and investing, and subsidizing, and investing some  more.   Green tech is a big, booming business and that is very exciting. Ontario is two years away from the final phases of decommissioning North America's largest (and most environmentally disgusting) coal plant.  It will be switched to biomass and the generation shortfall will be filled in by various green energy projects.  By December 21, 2014 no coal will ever again be used to generate electricity in Ontario. It's just been cancelled for now unfortunately, but there was an ambitious 1.5 billion dollar offshore wind project slated for one of the Great Lakes that would have matched the world's largest  at a rated 300 MW.  Actual capacity is significantly less than this because of fluctuations in wind speed, but I'll be unrealistically generous and credit it the whole thing.  At 300 MW (and for 1.5 billion) it would have offset just 2% of Ontario's 15,000 MW nuclear generation capacity, or about 1% of our entire energy mix.  It is this reality that means that nobody is going anywhere anytime soon without either coal or nuclear as part of the mix.   It will take decades for most developed countries to get there, if they ever do completely.   Even with committed and generous investment in green tech it really is a choice between coal or nuclear (or both), despite what been implied here, and will be for some time into the future. Even Germany, who couldn't have a better political climate or more committed populace will take 10 or more years to fast track the replacement of  the 23% of their mix that comes from nuclear.   It is my understanding that at the end of that they will still be dependent on coal for 40%.  The German government has just recently directed their leading energy companies to heavily invest in modernizing coal and gas plants.  Coal will be around in Germany for at least the medium term.

What I was getting at is that, well - it's only my opinion.  It's not really worth much at the moment, and it's certainly not helpful for me to say "duh, nuclear bad!" in the face of such a messy situation.  On the other side of the coin, I don't see how nuclear is really a defensible technology at the moment, and I can't fathom anyone taking that line seriously.  I can appreciate what that Chernobyl jumper has to say about this current situation, but I'm a bit dubious about it for one or two reasons. ================================ It's only indefensible until you really look at the true human and environmental cost of coal (including the dubious 'clean coal') vs the true human and environmental cost of nuclear.   A nuclear accident, or the spectre of one, is so incredibly vivid that it washes this fundamental truth away. The information and data is there waiting for anybody who wants to look for it..

That is an argument based on a fallacy - that we are forced to choose between either coal or nuclear.  We're not; we haven't been in that position for some time.  A casual flip through "Billions and Billions" (written in 1996) makes me wonder why people are so damned slow on the uptake.

Bearing in mind that I have a tendency to think a bit too long term - I understand that in the interim, things like coal or nuclear can be reasonably expected to play a part in where our energy comes from; but we gain nothing from waiting.  The sooner the transition starts, the sooner that this discussion can be made moot.

God but I can't sleep as of late. It's making me crazy. Anyway, my post was about the 'interim'. Hard to gaze into the crystal ball too far, but say 30 to 60 years? Where's the fallacy? And in what way have we not 'started'?

"in what way have we not 'started'?"

I guess it's just a feeling, and feelings aren't always the easiest things to translate.  I'm stuck with the sense that not enough is being done; with the backwards attitudes of my politicians, with the fact that we're still in a world where there IS an energy debate, when to my mind the answers are already there - it's just a matter of making this crap and plugging it in.  Like any human endeavour, it'll happen when people get a sense that money can be made from it, or votes gained - until then, I imagine it'll be a long and boring road forward.

Unfortunately it's much more complicated than all that.  There are tremendous government incentives and subsidies to enter the green energy market, certainly in the province I live in at least, so there is money to be made and steady interest from potential developers.  But the projects are expensive - recall my 1.5 billion dollar wind farm example that would have supplied less than 1% of the current energy mix.  Clearly basic economics means that investment must be made over time, usually decades of time.

Green energy taps the gentler side of nature, and right now that comes at a price. Wind, solar and tidal all have very low efficiencies because of their intermittent nature.  There are only about 40 places in the world where the tides are strong enough to make projects practical, and even if every one was developed they would supply just about 6% of the global need.   There has been no real technological breakthrough on the storage of excess power from wind and solar during off peak production, which is the game changer the industries are anxiously awaiting. Until then, the real output of the most sprawling wind farm is probably a magnitude lower than the smallest fossil fuel or nuclear plant.  Add to that the fierce resistance that wind turbines encounter in many communities and you've got a recipe for only modest growth.  These limitations mean these technologies for the most part remain supplementary parts of the energy mix of any given country - usually about 20 or 30%.

Biomass is really great for use of material that previously ended up in landfills, but to be a big player their fuel will also have to be grown. With that comes sustainability challenges and pressure on food prices as crops compete for land use. We've already made mistakes here when vast areas were deforested to grow lucrative biomass crops because with the loss of the trees we lost huge carbon sinks.  There are also challenges to whether or not biomass is truly carbon neutral right now because of the need for transportation of huge quantities of this stuff to the processing plants, though that should be sorted out soon.  So biomass is again only going to be part of the solution.

You don't get something for nothing, and the fact is that green tech is just not ready yet. So it's coal or it's nuclear.  In 2007 a new coal plant was opening in China every 7-10 days.  I'm not sure what the numbers are now, but that is a shocking statistic.  And that's why even as the terrible catastrophe unfolds in Japan there are many, many people, including prominent environmentalists, insisting that the world still needs the nuclear option.

Something you fail to mention is that there is an extremely wealthy, powerful and influential lobby, internationally, for both nuclear power and fossil fuels. That, coupled with the fact that most politicians are thoroughly corrupt, is a recipe for habitual conservatism, i.e. maintaining vested interest.

"You don't get something for nothing, and the fact is that green tech is just not ready yet. So it's coal or it's nuclear.  "

In the short term, for sure.  It's important to add that neither technology can carry on as it has in the past.  With coal, we have to try to minimise the impact it makes, and with nuclear, we've got to ... I dunno ... stop building plants near fault lines.  Little things like that, haha.

ThomasQuinn wrote: Something you fail to mention is that there is an extremely wealthy, powerful and influential lobby, internationally, for both nuclear power and fossil fuels. That, coupled with the fact that most politicians are thoroughly corrupt, is a recipe for habitual conservatism, i.e. maintaining vested interest.

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Nuclear usually lobbies for money and fossil fuel usually lobbies for the ability to continue polluting and avoid costly changes.  I certainly haven't seen either chasing after some wind project which is roughly equivalent to an atomic sneeze, and (editing to add) sometimes they're the same people anyways. That may change when the technologies can directly compete, but the anecdotal evidence certainly is that most countries have made significant and meaningful investments in green technology.

In my own province we're set to ditch coal completely by the end of 2014.  When the government was trying to figure out how to replace the output of the largest coal plant in North America, Ontario's Bruce Nuclear -  the largest nuclear plant in North America and the second largest in the world behind a Japanese facility  - proposed building two new reactors on the site of the coal plant.  This was swiftly and publicly rejected as an unsolicited speculative bid by a private company in which nobody was interested.  So coal plant closes, nuclear industry told to take a hike.  That's some influence they have there. The coal plant will be biomass supplemented by various green projects. 

Though not as entrenched as fossil and nuclear interests, there absolutely is a strong green lobby and intense public pressure on governments to provide leadership and stewardship on the environment.  And it's important to remember that we're just replacing an industry with another industry.  Ask any of the groups who protest the installation of turbines about Big Wind.  Big Lumber wants to be a player in biomass, and has been around and noisy for decades.

For now the problem remains that you can't lobby a tree into growing as fast as you can burn it, or the tides into coming more often, or the sun into shining all day and night, or the wind into blowing every moment.  Until we can store the power produced we're stuck with onshore wind efficiencies usually at 30% or less and most solar panel efficiencies still in the teens. That is a problem that is infinitely more pressing than the fossil fuel or nuclear lobby.

GratefulFan wrote:

Though not as entrenched as fossil and nuclear interests, there absolutely is a strong green lobby and intense public pressure on governments to provide leadership and stewardship on the environment.  And it's important to remember that we're just replacing an industry with another industry.  Ask any of the groups who protest the installation of turbines about Big Wind.  Big Lumber wants to be a player in biomass, and has been around and noisy for decades.

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That can't be right. According to the "green-only" enthusiasts, green energy is free, the windmills and water turbines will be built by handsome eco-warriors and wood nymphs, and green energy's only by-products are smiles and rainbows :)

Zebonka12 wrote:

In the short term, for sure.  It's important to add that neither technology can carry on as it has in the past.  With coal, we have to try to minimise the impact it makes, and with nuclear, we've got to ... I dunno ... stop building plants near fault lines.  Little things like that, haha.
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We just don't know the term. We don't know if it's going to be short, even with our best efforts. And that is why there are so many credible and measured voices saying that options must all be kept open and viable.

With regard to coal, we don't even know yet if carbon capture is even going to be economically viable on a large scale, and we certainly don't know anything about the impact of storing it all underground.  Scrubbers are expensive and energy intensive and therefore contribute even more to carbon emissions even while they help with particulate. While we all watched with dismay and anger as radioactive water was deliberately ejected into the Pacific Ocean,  coal plants were doing what they do every day: mixing highly toxic, carcinogenic and radioactive fly ash that on it's own would require classification and handling as toxic waste with the less toxic ash from the bottom and dumping it all in unlined pools scattered throughout the land.  It is stored wet, and almost certainly leaching into soil and groundwater.  In the United States the EPA was accusing of suppressing a report that found that one in 50 around living around these storage ponds would develop cancer.  Even though carbon emissions are down from previous highs through modernization and improvements to efficiency, minimizing the true impact that coal makes is something that the industry has successfully fought for years.

Nuclear plants can certainly be built to withstand earthquakes.  Fukushima withstood a 9.0, it was the tsunami that did it in.  I think the lesson from Fukushima will be better preparations for a one two punch.  Triple redundancy in backup power sounds good on paper, but it wasn't good enough here.  Planners can no longer assume that infrastructure or even a passable road to a plant will be there to support it post disaster, and backup systems must become more robust.  I also think that the nuclear industry should stop telling people that there is no chance of failure or disaster.  There clearly is, however remote, and the public should somehow have an opportunity to be actively engaged as safety watchdogs.  Communities should practice regular evacuation drills and above all be educated about radiation so that people in Kansas aren't clearing local shelves of iodine over a nuclear accident in Japan.  If more open, calm and frank dialogue is the result of Fukushima, something will have been salvaged from this terrible event.

Holly2003 wrote:

... will be built by handsome eco-warriors...
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Oooohhh!  Forget everything I said.  Nuclear energy is Dante's ninth circle of hell.  No, the tenth.  They need to build a new circle for nuclear, it's that bad.

GratefulFan wrote: Holly2003 wrote:

... will be built by handsome eco-warriors...
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Oooohhh!  Forget everything I said.  Nuclear energy is Dante's ninth circle of hell.  No, the tenth.  They need to build a new circle for nuclear, it's that bad.
I prefer nymphs myself. Can't beat a good nymph ;)