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Post by jewel on Mar 16, 2011 15:55:52 GMT -5
That's what I understood. The spent fuel rods are in pools in reactors 4, 5 and 6, but they are NEXT to the primary containment, not in it. They didn't do this with 1, 2 and 3, which are newer.
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Post by pedro el leon on Mar 16, 2011 16:29:22 GMT -5
mike, please show me where I complained. I asked a question: Does pedro still feel this is no big deal? Second guessing the construction and voicing opposition to nuclear power is nowhere to be found in my posts. I want to know if this is Chernobyl II or not. Try finding a straight answer about that. Of course it's a big deal, to the workers there and the economy of Japan. But in terms of the public health? No, it is not a large threat. Chernobyl had a series of human errors; firstly they did a test that they knew they shouldn't have with the turbine, they were seeing if they could keep generating electricity while they were ramping down the core for a refueling outage. This resulted in a huge loss of pressure and the core's water instantly flashed to steam that blew the top off. Secondly, the design - an RBMK - is a graphite moderated, heavy water (H2O2) with a positive reaction coefficient, anything over 1 can go supercritical. No commercial plants can do that. They needed that coefficient because of the plants main purpose, create plutonium for the Soviets nuclear weapons arsenal. Most importantly, as typical with Soviet designs they were made on the cheap, with NO containment (commercial plants in the developed world have both a primary and secondary containment). This resulted in the blast scattering mostly short lived but nasty isotopes like Iodine-131 (goes straight for the thyroid). Again, of course it's a big deal, but considering what those plants went through being 40 year old designs and still no major public radiation exposure or the core not going super-critical? That's somewhat of a triumph for the operators there.
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Post by pedro el leon on Mar 16, 2011 16:40:08 GMT -5
While on the one hand, any casualty due to a nuclear mishap is too much, we are dealing with a budget. The power plant needs to be profitable for the utility or it won't get bult. the result is actually more of the same, and maybe even worse. The baseloads serviced by the nukes would have to be supplied by coal plants (more air pollution and certainly also a generator of low level radiation, to say nothing of the potential fly ash generated), oil fired power plants (skyrocketing fuel costs and more importantly, unavailable fuel), or green energy alternatives (smaller capacities, having power plants in every block just to serve the most basic of electricity needs). That's exactly why there haven't been any new nuke plants built in the u.s. for 25 years (until recently actually, new plants have started construction in Georgia and Texas). The upfront cost of building a nuclear plant is astronomical because of all the safety and backup systems and considered a serious risk to lenders, the Feds luckily have started a loan program though. The great part of nuclear other than the carbon free high energy production? The cost of Fuel is basically a laughing matter. A single pellet, maybe the size of the fingernail part of your hand, has a much energy in it as 149 barrels of oil, 1,780 lbs of coal, or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas... a single pellet. Also for consumers, Nuclear is cheaper than all by hydro power in terms of cost-per-megawatt hr.
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Post by Phaedrus on Mar 17, 2011 8:35:55 GMT -5
The IAEA and the NRC are saying some pretty dire things now, much less sanguine than the TEPCO. China and Europe are re-examining their nuclear plans. Rightfully so.
There is sense in just looking at the fuel cost, it is the overall cost of power generation, including the safety measures that will decide whether people are willing to pay for nukes. What is the ROI? If the cost keeps going up then it would kill nukes for another generation or so. The real question is whether this was a perfect storm or whether this was an avoidable accident. Not sure, we are going to have to wait for the investigation. There are people now doing a lot of CYA, saying that they knew about the design flaws from the beginning.
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Post by jewel on Mar 17, 2011 15:27:29 GMT -5
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Post by TheSantaBarbarian on Mar 25, 2011 10:49:00 GMT -5
Its looking more and more likely that there was some sort of containment breach.
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