How much is "large amounts"? And yes, measuring long term effects is hard, my point is that it's not the end of the world when a nuclear accident happens and long term chemical poisoning is also a thing, the same applies to air pollution, it might not kill you today, but it can kill you next year.
General / Off-Topic Recycle or Die! (the elite environmental thread)
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How much is "large amounts"? And yes, measuring long term effects is hard, my point is that it's not the end of the world when a nuclear accident happens and long term chemical poisoning is also a thing, the same applies to air pollution, it might not kill you today, but it can kill you next year.
I don't think an air cannon can do that, maybe a traditional cannon could but it'd need to be extremely large and AFAIK nothing like this has been built, the closest thing to it that I remember is the Paris Gun which shoot 106 Kg shells up to 43 Km into the air.
It seems, when you do the numbers as I wrote earlier in this thread, that living in a polluted city is roughly as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. Real estate in cities should be marked with warnings similar to cigarette packages. I live in the city and I smoke, so hopefully I'll be gone before everything snaps. When people tell me to quit, I normally say "I've seen the future" and puff, but they don't understand what I mean.
Still, I feel bad every time I see a kid.
Edit: I think the question everyone should ask themselves before supporting nuclear energy is: "If it blows up or melts down, would you be willing to be one of those going in to clean it up?". If not, then nuclear energy is not an option.
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Didn't they send machines to do the cleaning in Japan? I would think for the next disaster, something would be build to do the job.
This article tells about some of the recent challenges, and again remember this is from TEPCO:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/15/18225233/robot-nuclear-fuel-debris-ushima-reactor-japan
If it doesn't work, who volunteers?
Edit: I know the statistics are "shaky" and the numbers are rough, but in half a century we have had two major incidents, and we still only get 10% of our energy from fission. If, disregarding the lack of uranium, we were to replace fossil fuels with nuclear power plants, then we could expect an accident like Chernobyl roughly every second year?
Also, if cleaning up was just a question of making robots, why start after the accident? Why doesn't TEPCO have an army of robots already?
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I was still in school when Chernobyl happened and the area where I live had some of the last farms that still had to check for radiation before produce could be sold.
Then the government (rather arbitrarily) decided that levels were too low to worry about and stopped testing.
Certainly the fission route is at best a stop-gap as we still don't have a suitable decommissioning method.
With Solar there is the Desertec project, though this has rather stalled due to the political instability.
With regards to how to store energy we have the Dinorwig plant though that has its limits.
California has developed a system of weighted trains to store energy.
In Sweden they solved the problem with contaminated reindeer meat by raising the limit. That one was already arbitrary, since we don't know what is unsafe. Abracadabra. Problem solved...
One thing that the Chernobyl series mentions was that the core melting through the containment onto the filled water tanks beneath the reactor, was hours away from causing a major explosion, that presumably would have caused enough fallout to have rendered a considerable part of the USSR and most of Eastern Europe uninhabitable. It didn't happen, because three people (two in the series) went in and manually opened the valves to enable pumping the tanks. They all died. Without their heroic action, I probably wouldn't be able to live where I live today.
A Chernobyl 'suicide squad' of volunteers helped save Europe — here's their amazing true story
Less than two weeks after the infamous reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, officials decided to risk the lives of three men to potentially save millions of lives. A larger disaster could have spread radioactive fallout across Europe.
www.businessinsider.com
I know the World is a tough place, but we don't have to make it worse.
The weighted train idea is pretty cool, but it also shows how far away we are from an actual solution, and that such a solution will demand high amounts of energy, resources and time to build. It won't happen if we wait.
Edit: The three workers are claimed to have survived. I find that highly unlikely, given the amount of radiation they received, and that other workers died after being in the same area.
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The tobacco lobbies perhaps, who want to keep their privileges ?
And for the legislation concerning vaping.
Is forbidden :
Anything that looks or is designed to look like a tobacco product.
Is able to be smoked.
Can be used in such a way that it can mimic smoking.
Have the packaging looks like or is designed to look like the packaging typically associated with tobacco products.
But i think the point with Chernobyl was, that it happend because of the experiment they were conducting at the time. If they didn't do it, than it would have worked until this day, i assume. Its not like there was a fault with the plant it self that would cause it to explode.
And In Japan was due to Earthquake.
I think building Nuclear reactors near tectonic moving plates is a terrible idea. And they should put a ban on building Nuclear Reactors in areas with Earthquakes.
AFAIK, by far the largest part of deforestation is caused by the need for land to grow food, oil plants and sugars. Don't throw cigarettes in nature, and consider what happens to the ones you throw in the garbage bin.
Chernobyl was shutdown in 2000. Accidents happen all the time everywhere, from Windscale to Three Mile Island.
Even Trains taking material have been in accidents.
It's still amazing that 2 biggest dissasters were because of Human error and Nature force, and not the plant design it self.
Considering this is a totaly new technologie. It's not like we copied it from some Ancient text, this is (presumed
) our technologie made from scratch.It's like with Apollo mission, you would think there would be massive dissasters when attempting to land on the Moon. But no, 7 successful launches, and 6 landing, and no death, after they were ready to go.
According to the official story nowadays, the reactor type the plant used, wasn't welly designed. In the case of a leak in the cooling system, the turbine might loose the steam pressure, and because the cooling system needed to displace gigantic amounts of water, the pumps for that task needed equally large amounts of electricity to run. A non-coolled core quickly goes unstable when the water turns into steam caused by the loss of pressure. Therefore a backup generator was in place, but the fuel engines for that need roughly a minute to achieve their required output. This was a problem, since there were many such plants already running.
Therefore it was tried on several occasions before the accident to find a solution to the problem, but also keeping the plants running, knowing that it was probably only a question of time before a disaster would happen. The idea was to use the momentum of the spinning turbine to generate the electricity needed by the pumps, but at earlier tests the turbine didn't have enough stored kinetic energy. Therefore it was decided to spin up the turbine before the experiment, which itself is a potential major risk, considering the construction of the plant. That was definitely known on high levels.
Something went wrong. We still don't know exactly what, but it was something completely different than in Japan. The only common factor being the both accidents were unforeseen, and should not have been able to happen.
Radiation is scary because it's invisible and potentially deadly, so you take as much care as possible, but you still make mistakes. I can say that from personal experience. It is not currently possible to rule out human error. The thing about a risk is that it is only a risk, until the accident happens. It like driving with your eyes closed. It works for a while. We can calculate all the potential dangers we know of like material weakness, but we can't calculate the unforeseen. We can only estimate that.
Edit: The potential problem tested was not a steam leak, but a power grid failure.
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I was in the big house, at the time of Chernobyl. We suddenly started getting, loads of Lamb, for dinner.
In terms of energy storage we covered a few examples earlier in the thread (i don't know where), but things like that 'weighted train' is an example of such.
This sounds great, and from Australia no less (that country at the fore-front of being pro-coal and not caring about AGW):
'Australia to achieve 50% renewables by 2030 without government intervention, analysis finds':
www.theguardian.com
This sounds great, and from Australia no less (that country at the fore-front of being pro-coal and not caring about AGW):
'Australia to achieve 50% renewables by 2030 without government intervention, analysis finds':
Australia to achieve 50% renewables by 2030 without government intervention, analysis finds
RepuTex modelling suggests surge in state schemes and rooftop solar will reduce wholesale prices, making gas- and coal-fired power less competitive
www.theguardian.com
Even the US is reducing it's CO2 emissions despite the admin's efforts. It seems their businesses have different priorities though there has been a spike in 2018 the use of renewable energy etc. makes their operations more efficient and thus more profitable.
Where the US is really lagging is the development of new technology due to the lack of government support.
4 of the top 5 companies in the field are Chinese due to Beijing's investment in the sector and the tech gap is growing.
Relying on politicians to find a way out (in more than one situation) looks increasingly unlikely and it is coming down to businesses and individuals to deal with what's happening.
Where the US is really lagging is the development of new technology due to the lack of government support.
4 of the top 5 companies in the field are Chinese due to Beijing's investment in the sector and the tech gap is growing.
Relying on politicians to find a way out (in more than one situation) looks increasingly unlikely and it is coming down to businesses and individuals to deal with what's happening.
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Not sure where you read it, but even BBC showed the opposite data for the US: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46801108
Interesting fact, US, China and India countries are responsible for 50% of Fossile fuel emisions. And none of them really addressing it at all, even US current administration went the opposite way. Looks like they don't believe in doomsday theories either
Another fun fact? Nuclear Power is much Greener than even Solar PV
http://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-basics/greenhouse-gas-emissions-avoided.aspx
http://www.world-nuclear.org/nuclear-basics/greenhouse-gas-emissions-avoided.aspx
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Again the BBC data for 2018 shows opposite, so we have to wait until 2020 to see how it progress in 2019. But so far US emmision since new Administration took over, have increased last year according with new Administration policies.
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