Where do you stand on Nuclear energy?

[Crazy Guggenheim]

:shrug:

[N.U.]

For. Pretty simple. There are some interesting fuel rod designs the French have come up with in the past few years that expand as the radioactive bits get hotter, whihc reduces the amount of radioactive interaction. It's a fairly elegant way of maintaining safe operating temperature without running the risk of catastrophic failure.

[Schneibster]

For it. Pebble bed reactors are pretty interesting, too. And waste reprocessing will not only extend supplies by orders of magnitude, but also make the waste problem far smaller. We are, however, going to have to figure out how to prevent people from using nuclear explosives; pebble bed reactors and central reprocessing will help with that a great deal, particularly with the nuclear powers to police things.

[Xena]

No nukes is good nukes as far as I'm concerned.

[SubstituteTeacher]

I am afraid of what would happen if a natural catastrophe occurred.

[Schneibster]

I am afraid of what would happen if a natural catastrophe occurred.That's the point both of pebble beds and of the French designs N.U. was writing about.

[Schneibster]

No nukes is good nukes as far as I'm concerned.Why, in particular? And how much do you know about them, I mean how they work and how they're built?

[Schneibster]

Here's ([Only registered and activated users can see links]) a really good in-depth technical analysis of the Fukushima "disaster," and here's ([Only registered and activated users can see links]) a quick-n-dirty set of soundbites on it; I'll synopsize even further:

1. Neither the earthquake nor the tidal wave would have been enough on its own to cause the problem, and even then whatever problems ensued would not have exposed radioactive material; that happened as a result of hydrogen gas not being properly vented. So it took three different separate problems with different separate causes to cause the entire situation.

2. "Hardened" versions of the vents that failed have been retrofitted or were included in the original manufacture of almost all of this type of reactor. That they were not here led to the hydrogen explosions that destroyed the outer buildings and damaged the containments. Without these explosions, although the reactors would have ended up inoperable, there would not have been a radiation release. So the problem here is one of proper maintenance. The article didn't mention it, but though this particular research project did not go any further, there are obvious political ramifications.

3. Despite the radiation release, no one got radiation sickness or radiation poisoning, and the maximum exposure (which was by two nuclear engineers who went in to personally check on the situation and walked in contaminated water in their environment suits, exposing their feet and lower legs to radiation from the water) was less than 250 mSv, which is higher than the normal limit in force in normal operation, but is allowed one time for an individual worker in a rescue or disaster situation. It's probably about ten dental X-rays. These two went to the hospital, but apparently it was the company being anal retentive and they were released after 24 hours of observation.

Conclusions would include, maintenance would be nice, but it's not like we didn't have an Alaska Airlines aircraft with a hundred-odd people on board fall out of the sky because nobody ever bothered to grease the elevator lead screws. We seem to keep having to relearn this lesson, and it's getting tiresome. The overdesign of the facility prevented a true disaster, but there are some fine points, such as for instance that they recently doubled the tsunami prediction from 2.5 to 5+ meters, but the actual tsunami was 15 meters, about another factor of three larger. Obviously some additional hardening of the power supplies for the after-shutdown cooling would be another great idea. Overall, however, the plants performed well under the largest imaginable stress, well beyond their design criteria. There aren't any gaps being exposed in the design and location criteria for US reactors.