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Comment by yoster | Hacker News Reader

Good news for California. They should dismantle the radioactive material asap as it could always be a Japan rerun...

I disagree. It's bad news for California, and bad news for the environment long-term. It's not an ideal nuke plant, but the current alternative is to kill ourselves burning oil and coal.

Here's a former Greenpeace bigwig's account of switching to pro-nuclear: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04...

America has a power grid. California uses power from all over and supplies power all over.

Trivia: the discharge water from the plant raised sea temperature enough that surfers could feel it.

And? Can you show that oil/coal/gas powered plants heat less water per kWh electricity produced?

There aren't a lot of idled hydro, wind, or solar plants. Most of the idle plants are coal, with a small number of natural gas (higher construction cost per kw of capacity, previously more expensive fuel, but now natural gas is cheaper than the mitigated costs of coal, so they run gas and idle coal).

So, you'd be adding coal to the operating mix. The dirtiest plants are the ones which were idled, too.

In the 5 year timeframe, you could argue for building more natural gas, solar, wind, etc. to replace the nuclear, but as far as I can tell, wind and solar and being done as fast as they can, and the coal to gas transition is also happening.

There also isn't "one grid"; it's basically 3, and it's not like it has infinite capacity everywhere. Putting a bunch of wind in the Midwest or Texas doesn't really help California.

Are you saying we have to obey the law of thermodynamics?

And no travel faster than c.

But I want it now!

Also, an intuitive model of a single grid would be a bunch of ponds with small streams between them. You can't arbitrarily "wheel" power from one "pond" to another, you have to have in place sufficient transmission line capacity, which is not cheap.

What is the hydraulic analogy of reactance? inertial mass of pulsing water? (also, wtf does chrome on windows not include the word reactance in the dictionary?)

Considering the sheer energy that it makes available to us, if our main concern with Nuclear energy is that it makes water warmer, then I think I'm okay with that.

No, I meant trivia. I just thought it was interesting, my friends used to surf there. I think the biggest issue with nuclear power is the toxic waste with a half-life 500 times my lifespan.

It sucks 1,000 people will loose their jobs.

It's only 600 years before it's no more radioactive than the ore it was mined from, "toxic" isn't a binary property. And it's not like it isn't valuable stuff, we're just too stupid to reprocess it.

A lot more than 1,000 people will lose their jobs as the costs inevitably go up. Even more if the grid becomes flaky.

The current alternative is to keep installing solar and wind and (eventually) wave plants ... which the smart money has been investing in, which require no government-paid insurance, and which generate no waste-that-has-to-be-safely-stored-forever.

What's the total output of solar and wind in California?

http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/electric_generation_...

Time-averaged outputs are 1,045 MW wind, 175 MW solar. (2nd table, in units of gigawatt-hours per year. The 1st table shows peak capacities: 4,967 MW wind, 855 MW solar).

Marginal additional energy in CA (to replace the nuclear capacity) means either burning more natural gas in-state or burning more coal in the Pacific Northwest.

Coal (and even natural gas, surprisingly) puts more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear fission. Plus, all the other negatives of fossil fuels (particulates, acid rain, risky mining, etc.). And global warming.

So, yay?

For anyone who wants numbers - coal puts out approximately 100 times the amount of radioactivity as nuclear power plants do and is responsible for about 1,000 times the deaths. There is a good stackexchange discussion with more detailed statistics, nuances etc http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/1018/do-coal-pla...

But people just don't want to believe that. Renewable energy also has caused more deaths than nuclear power, even if you (completely unfairly) count the deaths resulting from the use of nuclear weapons. And the public reaction is to simply ignore this, and even deny it.

I find it easy to believe : mounting slippery glass panels on rooftops ... not very safe, maintaining and cleaning them, again obviously not safe[1]. There are also recorded accidents with solar panels falling off rooftops into people (they are large, heavy glass shards by the time they hit the ground, so you can imagine what happens, let's just skip the photos). Putting generators on poles 50m or 100m above the ground (or 150m above the sea surface) is not a safe occupation and those generators cannot be as safe as the ones on the ground. So maintaining those is generating a steady stream of death and disfigurement[2], and catastrophic failure means the tower collapses, you don't want to be below one, like a catastrophic failure in the UK where a wind turbine locked up and crashed into a school playground, thankfully an empty one. Or just search youtube [4][5][6]. And dam-based electrical power has the same problem as nuclear power : if it works, great. If it fails, it can fail catastrophically, taking a lot of people with it[3].

[1] http://asiancorrespondent.com/54571/green-deaths-the-forgott...; [2] http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100200909/...; [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWcdDwECZU0 [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMNqjirbWoQ [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ovHFTSBQ54 [6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCyQD83NLDc

Also keep in mind the EROI of the different solutions. Meaning how much energy is produced given input energy. Renewables (except hydro) are in the 0.5-2 range (and "small" renewables, like solar recharging bluetooth headsets, are 0.1 at best), oil used to be 20-30 but have dropped to 15 at best and is rapidly decreasing (a fact that has been accused of being the real cause of the global economic slowdown). Coal is also around 10-15 range average globally. Nuclear, is at least 150000. Whatever disadvantages nuclear power has is related to the amount of material used, and that amount is tiny.

> And the public reaction is to simply ignore this, and even deny it.

That pattern seems to apply to most risk. There is huge fear over rare plane accidents that affect up to a few hundred at once, while ignoring the traffic accidents that kill 3,000 people a month (US) in ones and twos. Even terrorism is rare, and 9/11 is a blip compared to those traffic accidents. A nuclear accident could affect lots of people at once, while coal/renewables are doing it in dribs and drabs for far greater totals.

If you want to include deaths from nuclear weapons, nuclear is way negative, in that nuclear weapons largely kept the cold war cold. A hot ww3 would have been in the millions.

I don't know the exact model of this plant, but I read about the Fukushima plant in Japan.

The Fukushima plants had control rods, they are inserted in the reactor to stop almost entirely the uranium fission. They were inserted automatically, so most of the heat creation was stopped in a short time.

The problem is that the fission creates some unstable atoms, that continue to decay mostly in a few days and create additional heat. The refrigeration must have continued for some days, but they couldn't because they lost all the alternative electricity sources. :(

So the reactor overheated and they must release steam and use sea water to cool it and things like that. Those measures released some radioactivity to the environment.

After a few days, the only active nuclear reactions are the spontaneous fission of uranium and the decay of the other radioactive intermediate products. This created very few heat and they wouldn't need any active refrigeration. They were able to put the other reactors in Fukushima in this state, so they didn't create any problem.

The power plant in California is closed since one year, so it's almost sure in a stable state that doesn't create too much heat, so the probability of a nuclear disaster is very low.

The issues here is what is your worst case when you loose your cooling. After Three Mile Island and Fukushima we have some answers for their respective designs: pressurized water reactors which have everything "hot" inside the classic dome also keep enough of that hot stuff in it, boiling water reactors that have things spread out in a rather complicated design don't.

And the insane Chernobyl design....

Ok, this is a safer design. Anyway, my point is that loosing the cooling system of an active nuclear plant is much worse than loosing the cooling system of the shutdown nuclear plant (but don't try that at home). So it's not necessary to rush to dismantle the nuclear material, because of the fear of a tsunami. Those material should be handled properly.

You missed the main part of the disaster where the cores of reactors 1, 2, and 3 melted down (fuel rods melting and collecting in a pool at the bottom of the core) after the cooling failed. This led to hydrogen explosions, the boiling away of most of the coolant, and some problems with the waste fuel pool (also lost cooling shortly after the meltdown I think).

Also it wasn't "after a few days." The site wasn't stable until almost nine months later (December, 2011).

Doubtful, these are pressurized water reactors, not boiling ones, an inherently safer design.

A Japan rerun? Among all the problems Japan has faced in recent history, matters related to nuclear power barely even register.

"Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick"

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/japans-radiation-disaster-t...

Contrast this with "The dam failures killed an estimated 171,000 people" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure

That's one columnist's opinion, and it seems like he's just trumpeting the W.H.O.'s story. I don't think it's safe to call this book closed. There are other opinions, and facts.

http://www.allgov.com/usa/ca/news/california-and-the-nation/...

Right now there's no cost-effective technology to create safe energy - just that some are worse than others http://www.energyjustice.net/coal

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