But I can see a "therefore, we should not dismiss nuclear power due to some shoddy planning". And, I can see a "therefore, we can expect some degree of shoddy planning in any engineering project, given that it happened even with a nuclear plant, where the risks were well-known ahead of time."
Nuclear safety is a multifacted issue and only the news media would take one fact (Fukushima was avoidable) and reach a conclusion (proving that nuclear is completely safe / completely risky).
I'm personally an advocate for fission, because power storage has a long way to go before wind/solar can handle baseload. I especially like the newer designs such a Moltex (http://www.moltexenergy.com/). But that one fact about Fukushima isn't enough to support that position so I didn't bring that into the discussion.
Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact.
Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.
The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously enforced.
Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusion.
Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen.
Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.
Specifically, mildly radioactive ash, large amounts of smoke, sulfur and nitrites. These leach into groundwater easily (unlike fallout) and are also biomagnified like fission products.
Only natural gas is comparatively clean and there are major problems with dependency and delivery infrastructure. (Plus it is about just as environmentally friendly to mine as coal.)
Contrary to your post, Japan has a strong reputation for safety and reliability in engineering. That kind of cultural explanations are very spurious anyway. I can come up with similar ones for many countries.
And yes, this is very easily explained by culture. Specifically the culture of not questioning anyone with higher status in society. It's the downside of the importance of respect. The combination of this cultural aspect with the status of engineers being very low compared to western countries, leads to situations where management or regulatory decisions can become completely decoupled from what engineers communicate, if they even dare to communicate. If you want to solve this problem you need a rather different attack vector than the one you need in the US for example.
"why" is actually a hard question to answer. Might have to do with math skills being more abundant. Most certainly has to do with how the economy was modelled after WW2 (using American blueprints). Basically, imagine the way the job market in the US worked in the 50ies and then think of it as a top-down enforced policy rather than something that fell out of the need of the time. This worked very well (exceeding US growth) - until it didn't anymore, and Japan basically is still in a very slow process of adapting to the post-bubble reality. It seems like their economy was boosted so high that the bubble economy big corporations were able to survive until now and we're still in the process of getting rid of these encrusted structures. The government is certainly not helping by getting ever more in debt just to prop up dead industries. Low status of engineers, and even worse, entrepreneurs is probably one of the biggest detrimental factors to Japanese economic growth. And I really mean low, as in it is very hard to even find an apartment if you don't have a recognisable employer, even if you can show millions of revenue for your company and a high salary for yourself. Marriage market works much the same way.
The more important concern would be immense noise pollution and interference with migrant birds.
I can also see you have never worked or lived next to a wind turbine. I worked a few yards away from one for a year and the noise was imperceptible inside the building. (Mostly because, when it's moving fast, it's very windy, i.e. very noisy already due to the wind).
Finally, the migrant bird issue is an issue, but it's not hard to solve. Radar and Sonar systems exist to detect migrating flocks of birds and slow down the turbines [3]. But more importantly, buildings, skyscrapers and cars are the number one killer of birds (not turbines). Numbers would change, of course, if we truly tried to extract all accessible, high yield winds. But careful planning and technological solutions would mean that migrant birds would not be more affected than they are today by the human infrastructure.
[0] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/0150...
[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10933.full.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_pro...
[3] http://www.detect-inc.com/wind.html,http://www.dtbird.com/
Fukushima's obvious issue was known before it before it became a mistake. We aren't discussing unknowns.
> Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere.
Right; fortunately we have reactor designs now that are intrinsically failsafe (ie the failsafes rely on physical laws, and thus can't fail). Why don't we use them? Funding/politics. As you said, nothing is black and white.
> Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.
What other forms of energy? Chemical energy is limited and is just as hard to make safe (coal/oil is really bad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_co...), which are arguably just as bad if not worse than nuclear power). Wind/solar is limited without storage; even with storage it's still limited.
We really need to be working on Solar thermal energy. It combines the renewable energy with the consistancy of gas/coal/nuclear plus its safer then either of those. I don't understand why its not used as much (Their are a number of theories).
As the article says, Fukishima killed nobody, and wind power energy generation has killed more people than nuclear power generation.
I don't know how much more controllable you want?
Have you got a source for that claim? I'm genuinely interested to see how that stacks up, given that Chernobyl alone killed about 50 people directly, and a handwavy amount from increased cancer rates.
Most deaths seem to happen by people falling off the things. Or turbines falling on people during installation.
I think maybe people take nuclear plant maintenance more seriously or something.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
According to this data, nuclear is far safer than other sources.
But I'm guessing you didn't read the article, because it also puts your handwavy number at roughly zero.
Given that we have designs for modern nuclear power plants which are not cooled by water and are impossible to meltdown, we can have our cake and eat it too. Now let's do that.
Any plant that works, or is it the same old "in 5 years it will work, this time really"?
What we do know, is that all current states able to build nuclear reactors, have suffered from incompetence, corruption and other systematic errors when it comes to large contracts. I've seen no evidence that this has changed.
So it would seem that effective disaster mitigation should account for our current reality: We can't store nuclear waste safely, we can't transport it safely, and we can't build nuclear reactors that are safe enough, given the high risk of disasters.
I don't think there are any obvious solutions to world energy supply; higher efficiency, less waste are a given (easy to say, hard to implement). Fundamentally, we need to move away from "thinking oil" -- I don't think highly concentrated liquid fuel traded on a (physical/geographic) global market is part of a sustainable future.
On the other hand, I don't think we'll replace air freight with Zeppelins - so clearly we'll need some kind of combustion. Maybe hydrocarbons created with electricity, or in combination with biofuels - some manner which is more carbon neutral. And in a way that doesn't destroy our food chain. Local transportation in the form of electric trains and cars, in preference to hydrocarbons. The US is a parody of efficient transportation, but I'm not very hopeful for reform. Even in little Norway, car-sharing hasn't been particularly successful -- poor city planning and habit means that people waste time sitting in long traffic jams, one person to a car. There are quite a few areas ripe to be made more effective with existing technology. But if we can't muster the will to kill the idea of one car per adult, I don't see much hope for other areas.
Efficiency can help, and long term I'd love to find even safer sources of energy. However, we need to start building more nuclear power plants to reduce pollution and global warming so we can prevent even bigger catastrophes.
I'm not convinced "large power projects" are a good idea in general. I think many small power projects are a better idea. Depending on the geography, micro hydro-electric can be a great power source, with little ecological impact, and no disastrous failure mode.
The difference being that even the most gnarly multi-car pile up doesn't directly involve more than a few dozen individuals. The worst macro-level effect is making everyone 30 minutes late when the interstate backup.
"Catastrophic" failures in cars are very localized when compared to the catastrophic failures we've seen in nuclear plants, which cause the permanent emergency evacuation of millions of residents overnight and quarantine zones that must be kept in place for decades.
Nuclear power is no joke. Look through the pictures of Fukushima or Pripyat if you don't believe me. Nuclear is way too dangerous to be trusted and doesn't have a place in civilian power generation, no matter how many times people swear "this time we've got it guys, I promise we didn't overlook anything obvious, I promise that we have a super-stable cool new design". These promises can't be trusted when such catastrophic failures are a realistic risk.
This doesn't really matter though since it's a meaningless safety measure to compare "worst accident per machine" between a single car and a power plant serving a million people. By this measure biking is much safer than train riding.
Here's some more useful stats and trivia about death tolls and power generation:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5783526/what-is-the-worst-kind-of-pow...
By "death toll per single machine", hydro would be the worst energy source, beating nuclear by 3-4 orders of magnitude.
The worst catastrophic failure of a dam killed 170k people and displaced 11 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_...
The problem with nuclear power is not the danger, but the fear of the uneducated and the misinformation that is ironically spread by environmental advocacy groups.
If it had been a heap of solar panels and wind turbines that got hit by a wave, at worst they'd lose some generating capacity and find the odd solar panel washing up in Hawaii.
Every accident "would have never happened if...". the point is to reduce the consequences when things do happen - we know damn well we can't stop every accident.
Honestly nuclear power had plenty of issues to solve before the Fukushima accident.
Edit: Really, downvotes?
| An unexpected and undesirable event, especially one resulting in damage or harm
| An unforeseen incident
So... your solution is basically to invent real-life, legit 100% accurate fortune tellers?
Heck, it doesn't even take a tsunami to destroy quite fragile solar panels - just a bigger hailstorm.
Plus, I think you didn't even consider how harmful the resulting battery chemical spill would be if such an accident happened.
If it had been a factory creating coco-pops the whole pacific ocean would have become a chocolate milkshake. We can make random "if it was.." statements all day, but most of the other things it might have been wouldn't require it to be so close to such a large body of water for cooling purposes.
Is there a potential environmental or human health downside?
Coal power causes millions of deaths a year. It causes hazardous living conditions in some of the most populous cities in the world. The coal power industry depends on mining which endangers the lives of miners, with many deaths every year, and wrecks the environment. There are huge swaths of land that are barren and uninhabitable. There are giant piles of mine tailings and giant lakes of sludge scattered around the world. Nobody lives on that land, nobody can because it's contaminated and dangerous. There are places in the US where the risk of dying due to the effects of coal power are 4x higher than the national average murder rate. And there are places around the world where it's much, much worse.
The difference between nuclear power and other sources of power or other engineer works is mostly that the hazards of nuclear power are still seen as unusual and frightening, whereas we've simply grown comfortable with those of other forms of power.
A bushfire in an open cut coal mine is an environmental and human health disaster and it's not a one off.
Here's the partial list of burning coal seams/mines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire#List_of_mine_fi...
A good summary of the health problems:
http://dea.org.au/news/article/coal-mine-fires-remind-us-of-...
Also, avoiding nuclear power will result in a much worse outcome in the long run, even in the face of stupid designs. A runaway greenhouse effect will be worse than dozens (perhaps hundreds) of Fukushimas.
If a whole farm of wind turbines falls over, its a huge fuck up, and its quite possible people will die.
It's pretty unlikely people will get sick and/or die if they visit the site the next day in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt.
Solar and wind will be a key component of the grid power source but they aren't afeasible replacement for baseload coal plants yet.
One Fukashkma every 20-30 years is worth avoiding global warming.
Well I'm glad we got all sciencey and shit. Fuck it, sounds legit.
> One Fukushima every 20-30 years is worth possibly avoiding global warming.
Fixed that for you.
I think that's pretty much the reason people seem "opposed" to them. It's not that people hate wind or solar power per se, but that waiting for them to swoop in and save us means sticking with fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, which people don't like.
But barrels of radioactive waste that need to be stored for 1000s of years are basically just marshmallows and titty sprinkles, right?
And we already have tons and tons of the stuff. All the existing reactors in operation produce it every day. The only way to actually get rid of it is to build new reactors that use it as fuel.
No barrels involved. (At least in the US).
In other countries they recycle the fuel in fast breeder reactors to make more fuel.
The real issue is what do to do with the steel from decommissioning reactors, as it is radioactive and can't be recycled into new fuel or non radioactive steel.
Tldr; nuclear plant operations are not like they are in cartoons.
If solar and wind power could meet energy needs around the world better than nuclear then great. The fact is that they're not even close and no good alternatives will be ready in the foreseeable future.
You talk like this is going to happen overnight. It won't and this is not how it works. Even in the recent articles, sea level rises in MILLIMETERS, not FEET:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
"Seas rose about 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) from 1900 to 2000, the new study suggests, for a rate of 1.4 millimeters per year. The current rate, according to NASA, is 3.4 millimeters per year, suggesting that sea level rise is still accelerating."
If you do the math, there's approximately 300mm in a foot. If you think its going to raise even conservatively another 2 feet, it would take close to 175 years for sea level to rise 2 feet. Not sure how old you are, but you, your kids, and your kids kids will never see the sea levels rise 2 feet. And in the event it does happen, I would hope that humanity had either solved climate change or found a suitable alternative on another planet by then.
"if emissions were to continue at a high rate over the next few decades, the ocean could rise as much as three or four feet by 2100"
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/science/sea-level-rise-glo...
http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2014/04/06/first-offic...
"Though some would blame the islands’ sinking on shifting tectonic plates, Australia’s National Tide Facility has measured an annual rise of 8.2 mm in sea level on the islands in every year they’ve monitored—which, coupled with climate change’s propensity towards making weather patterns more sever, places climate change as at least a major contributor to the island’s submersion. "