[ale] OT: Nuc reactors and Japan

[Pat Regan]

On Fri, 6 May 2011 05:45:34 -0700
Damon Chesser <dchesser at acsi2000.com> wrote:

> As Pat pointed out, there was no discussion of the earth quake in
> Japan.  As a youth, I supported nuclear reactors for power.
> Green/renewable/save The Earth questions debate aside, I have totally
> changed my mind for the following reasons:

I still believe that nuclear reactors are a reasonable choice for power
generation.

> 1.        No where to put the waste

Everything generates waste that needs to be cleaned up and disposed
of.  I'm sure at least some of the components that go into nice clean,
green, renewable energy generation generate their fair share of toxic
chemicals that need to be managed.

Nuclear at least beats coal and oil in that it doesn't constantly spew
garbage into the air.

> 2.       What if something BAD happened?

Something bad happening has been pretty rare.  Chernobyl was the result
of a scary and known to be broken design.  Fukushima was the result of
some poor planning and pair of huge interrelated natural disasters.

> Well, #1 could be answered by a deep, deep hole (not including risks
> in getting the stuff there)

The scariest thing about nuclear reactors is that the fuel and waste
are both easily used to easily create terrifying weapons (I'm thinking
dirty bombs).

> But #2 was illustrated by the foobar that happened in Japan.

The Fukushima reactor was designed and built using technology from the
1960s.  Even though 40-50 year old technology is so antiquated by
today's standards the reactor probably still would have been fine if
they took more care maintaining their emergency water pumps, or
replaced them with something more reliable.

> Sometime, take a look at nuc plants around ATL on google.

I'd be curious to know what natural disasters the average reactor in
the US is designed to withstand.  There's not likely to be a 9.0
earthquake in the majority of the country.  

> Perhaps you should have a plan ready to execute in the event it is
> needed?

I'm not terribly worried about planning for a nuclear meltdown.  I grew
up less than 100 miles from Three Mile Island.  Do I just think that is
the worst nuclear accident in the US because it was fairly local to me?

A quick (inaccurate!) count of the reactors in Wikipedia's list makes
it look like there's probably about 80 reactors in the country.  Only
two of them are in Georgia.

> It would seem that the designs used here would actually make the
> chain of events in Japan not even possible (passive cooling systems
> in the event external power was cut).

I'm under the impression from recent news that our reactors that are in
major earthquake zones are all set up to use gravity to pump their
water in case of emergencies (I assume they use water towers).

> Any knowledgeable people want to chime in?

I don't think I'm very knowledgeable!

Pat