Have to admit it is from greenpeace... but...
No comment.
Have to admit it is from greenpeace... but...
BTW... I am one that thinks we should be using more nuke energy, but it need to be better regulated more like France... NO skimping on maintenance etc.. I don't care what budget constraints you have...
I don't know where you are getting your numbers from .... but they are WAY off... I was in Kiev and wanted to get out to see the accident... it was not going to be easy to do so I blew it off... but, heard that many hundreds or even many thousand died. I was shown a fire station where every single person in that group died as they went in the first few days...
And there are many who died or gotten cancer who 'cleaned up' the site and build the tomb around it... (maybe these are the ones that the locals were talking about, but it was still related to the accident)..
Also.. there are many sq. miles of land that will not be used in the next few thousand years...
BTW... I am one that thinks we should be using more nuke energy, but it need to be better regulated more like France... NO skimping on maintenance etc.. I don't care what budget constraints you have...
Texas Proud:
The Chernobyl accident wasn't caused by a lack of maitenance, but by criminal stupidity on the part of the plant operators and a poor plant design. Because of differences in design, the same thing simply cannot happen at a US light water reactor, and the newer design pebble bed reators will be even safer.
absolutely. Criminal stupidity and poor design NEVER happen in the US. I'm sure of it....in fact, I'd bet your life on it!
I already have bet my life on US nuclear power plant design -- many times. How much do you actually know about the failure mechanism for the Chrenobyl accident, the design of that plant or the desiqn of a US plant? Or are you just a smart aleck?
Texas Proud:
The Chernobyl accident wasn't caused by a lack of maitenance, but by criminal stupidity on the part of the plant operators and a poor plant design. Because of differences in design, the same thing simply cannot happen at a US light water reactor, and the newer design pebble bed reators will be even safer.
To answer you question, however, yes I am a smart Aleck
Scaring people with the hobgoblin of NUCLEAR!!!! power is just not useful.
As an engineer, you know that life is about risk. We cannot eliminate it entirely, so we should soberly measure it and evaluate costs and benefits. If you could eliminate nuclear plants tomorrow, would you? Since they provide 20% of our electricity, which 20% of hospitals will close because they have no electricity? How much food will spoil because it can't be refrigerated? How many will starve as a result? Which 20% of the people should lose their jobs? Or maybe you would replace them with coal plants. In that case, how much more global warming are you willing to tolerate? How many more mountaintops in Kentucky and West Virgina must be strip mined, ruining far more rivers than any nuclear plant has ever done? How many deep miners must be killed?
Maybe we can have a reasonable discussion about the precise level of risk and the alternatives we are willing to tolerate. That would be useful. Scaring people with the hobgoblin of NUCLEAR!!!! power is just not useful.
What did the Europeans do to educate their people? Why couldn't we do the same, or better?
Why are you guys losing the public relation battle? Why is the majority of Americans so ignorant about the benefits of nuclear power? What did the Europeans do to educate their people? Why couldn't we do the same, or better?
In the US, the "no nukes" crowd, with scarcely a shred of technical underpinning, latched on to the cache and much of the counterculture membership of the anti-war movement. It wasn't really "about" much except wanting to be part of a movement.
Fail safe, fail secure is the name of the game.
Yes, I'm sure that's the goal. But computer geeks know that only the most trivial algorithms can be made provably correct. So, I'm fairly sure there's always a weak link in the chain. And we obviously have already seen human error contribute to catastrophic failure in commercial nukes, so it's not just an academic concern.