Instapundit has a bit up by a nuclear “expert” who says that Going Nuclear Is Safe and Right: Michigan Professor. If you follow the link to the original article, you will find video and text.
In the video the “expert” says that shutting down the nuclear industry in Germany, Italy and Switzerland is a very bad idea. On this point he is probably correct. I think closing the plants after their useful life is a good way to go. But he says one other thing that really got my goat. Something to the effect of “if people really knew what was going on they would feel better about nukes.” I don’t think so. So it is time for a Fukushima update. Let us see how things are going and how they have gone.
At the link are excerpts from an Arnie Gundersen Interview. I’m going to excerpt a few choice bits myself.
“I have said it’s worse than Chernobyl and I’ll stand by that. There was an enormous amount of radiation given out in the first two to three weeks of the event. And add the wind and blowing in-land. It could very well have brought the nation of Japan to its knees. I mean, there is so much contamination that luckily wound up in the Pacific Ocean as compared to across the nation of Japan – it could have cut Japan in half. But now the winds have turned, so they are heading to the south toward Tokyo and now my concern and my advice to friends that if there is a severe aftershock and the Unit 4 building collapses, leave. We are well beyond where any science has ever gone at that point and nuclear fuel lying on the ground and getting hot is not a condition that anyone has ever analyzed.”
Got that? Fukushima was a “lucky” accident. What happens if we have an “unlucky” accident. And it wouldn’t be hard. A reactor inland close to a populated area would do just fine. Know any? I live in an area that has a population of around 300,000 or maybe a half million within 30 km of the Byron nuke plant. Not to mention the agriculture. Or all the plants at the edge of the Great Lakes. A great heat sink there but not enough dilution in case of an accident. Which the industry assures us is unlikely (Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were just aberrations). And I used to believe them. Events have overtaken faith. And I assure you it is a bitch.
A few little tasties from a while back:
70,000 more people need to get out of Dodge.
TEPCO management…just keeps looking worse and worse.
Radioactive material detected in grass in Miyagi
France detects cesium in Japanese tea imports
And then there are the baseless rumors.
A group of fishing boats left the Onahama Port for katsuo fishing last month, but they’ve given up on hauling to the Onahama Port due to the “baseless rumor” of radiation contamination, according to Tokyo Shinbun.
The authorities seem to want to keep it “baseless rumor” by not testing. At this point, even if they start to test, no consumer will readily believe the official numbers.
One way to avoid unpleasantness is to “don’t look”. I thought we were supposed to outgrow that at least by age 18 if not sooner. Of course under stress people regress.
And how about the people of Japan? Losing their faith in the nuclear industry? That will be a blow.
The shills are out. i.e. why the Japanese are losing their faith in nuclear. As are The Germans and The Italians and even the quite sober and calculating Swiss.
It is stories like this that give nuclear power a bad name. 17,020 Becquerels/Kg Cesium in Dirt Cleaned Out from Elementary School Swimming Pool in Ibaraki Prefecture
And who did the cleaning? Children.
And for those of you into water sports. Just great – High levels of radioactivity found in Fukushima resident’s pee. Be careful out there. I think a few licks might be OK. But if not there will be some serious fall out from the accident. “Nuclear power screwed up my sex life” is not a phrase we would care to hear very often.
Until we get nukes designed to weather total loss of power accidents for a week or more we don’t have the nukes we need. And until the industry gets serious I’m not going to be a supporter.
Enough gloom and doom for today. No doubt we will have more tomorrow. In the mean time things will be getting better. Mostly.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Comments
8 responses to “Why Going Nuclear Is A Bad Idea”
Those who read your reports on Fukushima should respect your opinion. Like Gundersen, you have knowledge from being trained and working in the nuclear field. If people like you now have doubts then it only reinforces long standing public skepticism about the dangers of nuclear energy.
Crony capitalism and plutonium don’t mix.
The shills are out?
Hey! I wanted that job!
Early on in the crisis, I reserved judgement, but in the back of my mind I thought the situation would be resolved. The MSM was having its usual fit and if they said “A” then I suspected that “not A” was correct. If the pressitutes ever had balanced and knowledgeable reporting, this sort of mistaken assumption would be harder to make. They didn’t get much right, but this time overall it was bad. I wonder if they have the faintest idea of how a significant % of their potential readership/audience truly regards them?
Two counterpushes:
1) How exactly does an industry with 30-50 year product cycles improve? We already have better designs – the freeze will just make sure that progress doesn’t happen.
2) Since this is almost always a public utility scenario – what new approach can we take to the public/private mix, to insure proper oversight?
I’d love to see a layer of layperson oversight – regular radiation-level checks by local residents, et cetera.
First of all, it wasn’t an “accident.” It was a natural disaster that killed 30,000 people and incidently, ruined 4 reactors, killing 2.
Secondly, we have the technology to “cope” with loss of all AC and DC power for a week or more. My employer is investing $100k in prepping the product for market – I just got back from an industry conference on the device we would replace.
First of all, it wasn’t an “accident.” It was a natural disaster that killed 30,000 people and incidently, ruined 4 reactors, killing 2.
Secondly, we have the technology to “cope” with loss of all AC and DC power for a week or more. My employer is investing $100k in prepping the product for market – I just got back from an industry conference on the device we would replace.
Check out Thorium and pebble-bed reactors. In both of them a total power loss results in the reactor shutting down, not running away. Keep in mind too, it took a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami to cause Fukashima. That doesn’t mean nuclear isn’t safe. Just means mother nature trumps all.
It’s amazing that the massive loss of life, destabilization of society, and total chaos didn’t make a deeper impression on the intertubes, considering the voracious appetite of the 24/7, “if it bleeds, it leads” media.
…Unless it’s not nearly as bad as some would have it. Considering that we saw a 1970s-era reactor design stand up to an earthquake two orders of magnitude over design limits, and a tsunami that created waves twice the worst-case estimated heights, I think we did pretty well.
This is Three Mile Island redux. A great deal of hysteria over systems which -ultimately- worked.
Never mind modern 21-century designs which are several generations better than the Japanese plants in question.