Let this be a lesson! (Thread On Nuclear Power)

[ScottishProWrestling]

With Japan facing a serious and likely nuclear meltdown, shouldn't man learn from this awful disaster and not use Nuclear power due to its obvious dangers in situations like this? Yes it has its positives but the dangers are clear. What do you feel would be the way forward?

[James McCloud IS John Godot]

Nuclear. Srs.

How many people have died from this incident? Zero? The fact is, that battered by an earthquake and a tsunami, none of the plants have gone all Chernobyl yet.

I'm not going to claim this isn't a Bad Thing, but far more people have died during this incident from everything else and I don't see any proposing to dismantle the rail system there because it's obviously deadly to humans when an earthquake and tsunami smack it up.

[Drillbit Taylor]

Um... No. A freak Earthquake happened and disrupted the core. Most powerplants in earthquake zones are ready for around 7.5 Earthquake or higher. A rare one that was bigger hit and an accident happened.

France has had Nukes for YEARS and has anything like this happened? No. Has this happened in Japan Before when there was not an Earthquake near 9? No

Yes there are risks but Meltdowns are RARE. Its even more rare for this to happen due to nature. Can things go wrong? Yes. But so with every other power source. Coal power screws with the environment just as much and causes cancer.

Yes this should be a lesson so that they should be prepared for higher Quake ratings, but to go away from Nuclear energy just because one plant is going down due to a freak occurance of nature is foolish.

[Cranjis McBasketball]

More nuclear power. It's ridiculously safe. How many coal miners do we lose a year? Not just the ones you see on CNN, but overall? A few hundred? Maybe a thousand or a few thousand?

All forms of power for man are going to cause some form of disruption. This is under control and nothing has happened yet.

This is a lesson to move forward with nuclear power and upgrade safety standards and make sure they get into the plants that need them. Which is all. Because people freak out and they stop putting the cash into nuclear they should, so the plants become like SNPP and shit goes bad.

[Dr. T is an alien]

Nuclear energy, despite the potential dangers, are so much better than most of the alternatives. Just do it better and safer and we should be gravy.

Then again, whenever we can actually get fusion energy available instead of fission energy, we would be much better off.

[Cela]

Pretty sure this violates the politics rule, but if there is a lesson to be learned from all this, don't build anything that can melt down on a faultline.

[Cranjis McBasketball]

Mar 15, 2011 0:54:29 GMT -5 Cela said:

Pretty sure this violates the politics rule, but if there is a lesson to be learned from all this, don't build anything that can melt down on a faultline.

30% of Japan's power is nuclear and they rely on this heavily.

You're right, however, Japan knew this quake was coming and certain safeguards are in place.

This quake makes it safer for the next time. That fault is no longer under the pressure it once was.

[wcw]

Nuclear power is still safer than most power. If a reactor has a containment center you can always flood it with salt water and avoid a melt down. Japan's reactors have containment centers and are going to be ok although once a reactor is flooded with salt water you can never use it again.

[TripleMerc]

Nuclear power is AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWESOME.

[YAKMAN is ICHIBAN]

Here is a fantastic article on point

blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/03/14/the-japanese-nuclear-reactor-overreaction/

Again, I am not trying to downplay this. It’s serious. However, it’s not the doomsday a lot of people are playing it up to be.

This is a delicate thing to say, given we’re not through this crisis yet, but contrary to public opinion, nuclear power generation is actually vastly safer than other forms of energy production, including coal. As is pointed out at Skeptical Teacher, the world gets, on average, 5 times as much energy from burning coal as it does from nuclear power, but per kilowatt-hour coal burning has a death rate 4000 times higher than nuclear.

Karl Denninger, the author of the Market Ticker summary article, added this to his description:

The reality of our modern life is that we must have energy production if we intend to have a vibrant economy. All forms of energy production come with risk, whether it’s due to the risk of chemical exposure in various forms or radiation. When these systems operate normally they do not harm people, but industrial accidents happen, even without the forcing factor of Mother Nature coming into play.

That’s correct. I’m human, and I’m worried about this situation in Japan as well. But my fears are based on reality, and not the overblown rumors I keep seeing. People have an innate dread of radiation, leading them to think that nuclear power is more dangerous than, say, coal production. But that’s a fallacy.

It’s still too early, by a long shot, to know how this will play out, but in a sense this ironically shows how well those reactors were built. A huge earthquake and a devastating tsunami combined led to a (thus far) contained meltdown (which just means the fuel cells are melting — the dangerous radioactive materials are still contained in the reactor core and don’t escape into the environment). Layer after layer of procedures and protocols were in place for such an event, and apparently have worked as planned.

Of course, nothing is 100% safe. I’d love to see nuclear power plants built to withstand any reasonable disaster… just as I would for any power generation plant! But mind you, coal plants release more radiation than nuclear plants by a long shot, as an example, not to mention the disastrous environmental impact of burning it. How safe is that? Yet we use far more energy from coal than from nuclear plants.

We need to understand the realities of nuclear power: the advantages, the safety issues, and the danger based on the facts. What’s happening in Japan is truly awful, but in the long run we have to make sure we react to it reasonably, accounting for all those factors, and not letting our fears alone (especially magnified by misinformation) hold sway over us.

[Red Impact]

No, we shouldn't make a knee-jerk reactions and call it "learning from our mistakes." That's the opposite of learning from our mistakes.

If we stopped using a potential powersource every time something went wrong, we'd have no electricity and would only ever warm anything up from the sun.