It’s certainly a great time to gut the EPA and get rid of various regulations to curb pollution.
No energy technology is substantially carbon neutral to construct.
Depending on how you figure time available, no new energy regime can be effectively scaled in time. The bottleneck is partly in expertise, but also in parts, new grid management techniques, and just plain old fashioned fabrication. Late is bad, but better than never.
Any realistic carbon neutral future is a portfolio of energy options, and nuclear energy has fairly robust support among scientists for a reason. Hell, even the Union of Concerned Scientists acknowledge it’s an option. I have no idea why people lose all sense of proportion when it comes to nuclear power. Coal fired plants outkill nuclear by orders of magnitude since they release hazardous waste with very little containment. They killed more people last year than Fukushima will ever kill.
We can save ourselves 80-240 Gigatonnes of CO2 by 2050. Wind and solar should be built, but are not enough. And realistically, it makes climate change mitigation more politically and economically palatable–which means that getting everyone on the same page becomes more realistic. Climate change doesn’t get solved with our personal choices, but at the higher policy levels, and failing to understand that you must pay a political price to literally survive (well, your kids anyway), or worse–understanding it and whining about it, is supreme folly. Climate change and greed are real, and greed isn’t going anywhere fast. Narrowing the economic options unnecessarily helps no one. I’ve seen people rule out wind turbines because they fucking kill birds. There is no perfect energy source that will be 100% environmentally friendly. They all have benefits and drawbacks, and I reiterate: The benefits of one must be pitted against the drawbacks of the other in a complex and diverse energy portfolio.
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To further add to your excellent post, Fukushima was caused by chronic mismanagement and corruption by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, not by flaws that are inherent to nuclear reactors generally.
Modern nuclear reactors managed by organisations other than Tepco have multiple layers of fail-safes in place to ensure meltdowns can’t happen. Tepco have been shamelessly corrupt since their inception (watch the documentary Nuclear Ginza if you want an idea of how comic-book villainous the company is) but that doesn’t mean that properly managed and regulated nuclear energy itself is unsafe in any way.
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We still need power, no matter the politics of it. Fresh water requires power. Cleaning up previous industrial messes requires power, the Haber-Bosch process feeds most of the world and requires silly amounts of power. We’re probably going to need large scale desalination before long. That requires silly amounts of power. Right now most of the planetary infrastructure runs on fossil fuels. We need to replace that with electricity, and that’s yet more power.
We can’t go back. There’s seven billion of us. The carrying capacity of a low-power world is far, far less.
The way out is thorough and for that we need more, cleverer technology and we need nuclear power. Vast amounts of it. It’s going to be messy and expensive but humanity gets to live.
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I can recommend Greg Palast on the Fukishima disaster. Apparently, (and admittedly, I’ve no means to check his work) the problem with old-school reactors[1] is that even if there’s no power because of damage you still need to run the coolant loop or your reactor melts. The standards on that say that you need X hours of independent operation and the way you do that is to keep some sort of fossil-fuel burner on-site to provide power for the coolant loop in the case of disaster. The trick with that is that making an engine that goes from nothing to huge power output is possible, but requires specialized engineering and is expensive. What Tepco appears to have done (and what is done often) is take marine diesel engines (which are cheap) and turbocharges them to have sufficient power (something like 800 bhp per aggregate, if memory serves). This fulfills the requirements on paper, however, in the case of an actual emergency you need to get your marine diesel engine to go straight to maximum power output very quickly.
Marine engines, in general, are designed to creep up to their full output by slowly adding load to them as you rev them up very, very carefully. They are designed with this assumption in mind. The result is, when you crash-start them you get trans-axial vibrations which invariably shatter the axle of the engine rendering them useless. There is reason to believe that’s why the coolant loop failed in Fukushima.
[1] Pebble-bed is walkaway failsafe, i.e. if you just walk away from the plant and abandon it, it’ll die down and stop on its own.
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That’s really not surprising for a company that used homeless elderly day-labourers to work in the high radiation parts of their plants because they’re cheaper than engineers and you don’t need to pay for hazmat suits for them because they’ll probably be dead before the radiation poisoning manifests itself.
Every time I hear conservatives argue that deregulation and unfettered capitalism are good things, I want to make them watch Nuclear Ginza…
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I’m resigned to accepting we need nuclear power. I’d rather have had something else, but that needed to be working 40 years ago, not now.
I used to volunteer at an animal sanctuary. The guy who runs it claimed there was no evidence for this at all, and he has seen some pretty horrific animal injuries.
Sadly he hasn’t seemed to have said this to any newspapers, or when he was elected to his local council.
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the track record for the timely and cost-effective new gen plants sucks, though
but wind turbines are rather dangerous for bats, less because they collide with the blades but because of the sudden pressure change before and after the mill - bats killed by barotraumatic shocks are not uncommon.
nature conservation organisations here propose not to build wind parks in wood land, or build the turbines there really high
(side note: Bavaria found an excellent way to hamper with the construction of turbines: they created a regulation prohibiting turbines near settlements, with the rule distance = 10 times the height. efficient land-locked wind mills need a total height of some 180+ meters, so more or less all of the state is a forbidden zone)
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You should see my bathroom.
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Humans cannot handle power. Humans are slow learners and have major cognitive issues. Stop building and allowing simple laddered social structures and pyramids that reward our brutal ape instincts. Basically, stop the stupid, and no, communism failed because it is WAY too simple, and only amplifies the issues at play, I’m not talking about communism. I’m talking about responsible division of power, cycling GROUPS of QUALIFIED individuals, no dynasties, no “in” club made of mostly the elite and babbling shit-wizards. No more “I WANT GIANT CASTLE BECAUSE I WAAAAAAANT!!!” mentality, it’s pure insanity, to say it’s childish and infantile would be a major insult to both children and infants, it is far worse then that. You want this fixed? No more excuses, we have non, anything that is not facing how monstrous this species is, and making any and every attempt to improve, is simply ridiculous.
So, how 'bout them Mets?
Fukushima was a 40 year old reactor lacking modern safety features like gravity-fed coolant, try again.
properly designed nuclear reactors like what we’ve been building (a little) from the '80s on are pretty damn safe, the Columbia Generating Station has yet to encounter any issues.
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Which is why I am resigned to accepting it. It’s not what I want.
The animal sancturary is on the edge of the Lake District, so anything built around there is heavily restricted. Most of the turbines are by the coast.
Pebble bed? It has been tried, large scale. Complete disaster.
AVR:
[…] fuel temperature instabilities occurred during operation with locally far too high temperatures. As a consequence the whole reactor vessel became heavily contaminated by Cs-137 and Sr-90. Concerning beta-contamination AVR is the highest contaminated nuclear installation worldwide as AVR management confirmed 2001.
THTR-300:
As the English Wikipedia article is woefully incomplete, here my translation of some key parts of the article in German:
In 1984, the Institue for Nuclear Safety Research of the Jülich Research Centre showed that a loss of coolant would lead to extremely high temperatures (2300°C) causing, notwithstanding a core meltdown, a massive release of radioactivity.
A report from 1988 for the regional government of NRW (Nordrhein-Westfalen) indicates that accidents with water entry into the core of THTR-300 (due to failure of steam generator tubing) posed the risk of a runaway chain reaction, up to Chernobyl-like scenarios.
The general problem with nuclear power generation is that it is a technology where small mistakes and lapses can have truly catastrophic consequences. Furthermore, its necessary scale and capital requirements lead to power concentration and regulatory capture. This is what happened in Japan, besides the crass design errors made at construction (emergency diesel power units in the basement of a seaside power plant? WTF?) If a technologically advanced country with a highly skilled workforce cannot avert such catastrophic consequences, who can? Everyone else (well, except the people of Pripyat) has just been lucky so far…
There is an alternative to pie-in-the-sky nuclear technology: wind and solar (both photovoltaic and thermal). They can be rolled out now, very quickly. Yes, they won’t be enough if we insist on maintaining our current energy-wasting way of life, but that is something that has to sink in: we just cannot sustain this energy-intensive lifestyle.
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It is this hairshirt environmentalism that’s going to end up costing us so very, very much.
Over half of everything we spend, energy-wise, is industry and transport, and you need industry and transport if you want your fancy photovoltaics and wind turbines and, most importantly, if you want the vast, vast, vast amount of batteries needed to make this solar-and-wind magic work. We also need this vast infrastructure to manufacture more than just luxuries: medicine, disaster mitigation, and science rely on the ability to cheaply manufacture vast amounts of sophisticated machinery. All the cheap gadgets and gegaws are merely a side-effect.
I guess you could assume absolute central control of all manufacturing capacities on Earth and ration them according to some grand plan to make sure only things that are approved get made in the interest of saving energy.
Personally, I find nuclear power far less of a pipe dream.
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Well, somebody seems to have told The USA Today:
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I am not so sure. Within less than 2 decades the electricity production in Germany reached about a third for renewable sources - on a rather high cost level, but on par with the guaranteed MWh price for the British reactor Hinkley Point C, with one small detail: the operator of Hinkley Point gets inflation adjustment for 3 decades, the guaranteed 20 year feed-in tariff for facilities under the EEG act are lowered every year.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against solar, wind, geothermal, any of that. I just don’t think that ‘reduction in energy use’ is a viable strategy, and I don’t think renewables can pick up all of the slack, especially since we’ll need to wean the transportation sector off fossil fuels.
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I don’t have any answer but for what it’s worth you’re not alone in your fears, your actions or your despair. All I say to myself is that just because I don’t have an answer today doesn’t mean I won’t have one tomorrow.
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You are far from alone, and the number of concerned people are growing daily. My own response is to support what organizations I can, contact elected deciders, and be the change I’d like to see.
What do you think is the root cause of the Syria crisis? Middle East drought may have given rise to civilisation (the Adam and Eve story is possibly about hunter gatherers having to become nomads and soil cultivators) but the result was armed empires based around massive defensible cities. Resource constraints are already happening.
[citation needed]. Marine engines are not cheap - they have to handle very varying loads including shock propeller loading and there are a lot of other design constraints that don’t affect stationary gensets. You are describing main propulsion engines, of many thousands of horsepower, that do take a long time to warm up and must be revved quickly through vibration nodes. They are extremely expensive. But 800BHP is not a big engine, it’s a truck or shunting locomotive engine, which are also found as generators on ships. When I was involved in such stuff, the things we did to engines of that kind of horsepower on test were rather cruel. Generally it’s the other way round; truck engines aren’t designed for the same heavy duty cycle as marine auxiliaries.
No IC engine should go straight to full power, not because of vibration but because of the need to heat up to operating temperature. But Tepco should have operating plans to deal with this. One option is to keep the engines circulated with warm water at all times. Under those conditions and with fuel heaters, a Diesel, especially a marine engine, can run up to full power in seconds. Given the length of the warning there should have been ample time to do that.
I believe Fukushima was more of a Tay Bridge disaster; the Tay Bridge collapsed because the wind force was underestimated, at Fukushima the containment was not high enough, and the emergency equipment was not sufficiently elevated above sea level. During the planning for Hinckley Point many disaster scenarios were considered, and after Fukushima this area required a lot of attention and design changes.
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