Environment argument Continued ( Split from QuoVadis Versus Pandora Thread)

[A2000]

@ekianjo


In fact Germany still exports energy. Sure some energy is bought in France (made from nuclear plants) but that's just how the spot market works, as electricity is traded at a "stock exchange". The next day/minute/second it is vice versa. But as energy from renewable resources is increasing rapidly the share will grow from the 23% in 2012.


BTW I am really amazed how a japanese citizen considers atomic energy to be safe, green and unlimited after Fukushima.


In my opinion it's worth to save every quantum of energy one can to get rid of dangerous (nuclear) or environment polluting (gas, coal, nuclear) power plants!

 

[patrick295767]

@ekianjo


In fact Germany still exports energy. Sure some energy is bought in France (made from nuclear plants) but that's just how the spot market works, as electricity is traded at a "stock exchange". The next day/minute/second it is vice versa. But as energy from renewable resources is increasing rapidly the share will grow from the 23% in 2012.

But will Germany stop with producing nuclear energy, which is actually contaminating for long? They said they would stop with atom kraft energy

 

[thatgui]

But will Germany stop with producing nuclear energy, which is actually contaminating for long? They said they would stop with atom kraft energy

At least it is planned - till dear madame chancellor thinks that its time for a pullout from the pullout of the pullout from the pullout to win her more votes for the next election :wacko:

But back to topic:

Seeing there aren't much really usefull PIM solution readily available for the Pandora, I'd say either look wether your mobile phone has the capabilities or just go the good old fashioned road.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Its not about how to reduce our energy footprint, its about how to produce more in a cheaper and cleaner way.

A lot of people would say it is about both. Why leave on lights all the time if they aren't being used? Why leave all the office computers on all night when no one is in the office? Why have the air conditioning on, and the window open and the heating on? 

Because it does not matter. I mean it can matter on an individual basis if you want to save a few dollars on your bill, but if you think that this helps the world being "greener" in any way you clearly misunderstand how energy is produced. 

In most developed countries most of your energy is of nuclear origin (and Germany pretends to be green by not having nuclear plants on their territory but buy electricity produced by its neighbors with nuclear plants!), and you don't stop a nuclear reactor at night. A nuclear reactor runs until its uranium pellets are depleted (enduring multiple series of fissions) and that can take a very long time depending on their quantity and concentration. Basically, nuclear plants almost never shut down and keep producing energy continuously. It does not matter if you stop your light at night or not - you will be charged more but you are not "saving" electricity. The electricity produced and not used is actually going to waste, so you shouldn't feel bad about using it. Overall there's always more electricity produced than what is actually used (and that's precisely why you don't have much power outages these days).

And by the way, I am in no way advocating waste - I myself tend to avoid wasting stuff when I can, but sometimes it just does not make sense if you think two seconds about it, especially in the case of energy.

And don't feel bad about uranium depletion, I think we have enough uranium for like the next 30 000 years, so it's nowhere near a "fossil resource" like the others. And by then we will have cleaner thorium reactors (already started in norther europe in small scale) and probably fusion of deuterium or tritium down the road (which is uber-abondant on Earth).  

Hmm... your statement "...there's always more electricity produced than what is actually used..." is not correct at all.  Electrical systems are interconnected synchronously.  This means that the moment the energy is produced, it must be consumed.  Otherwise you will have system unbalance and if this unbalance is large enough, you will have system stability issues which will lead to voltage collapse.  This balancing act is mostly done through Automatic Generation Control (or AGC).  In addition, Electrical System Operators work around the clock to monitor the state of the electrical system in real time to ensure the unbalance between loads and generations are within limits in order to prevent overvoltage or undervoltage on transmission lines.  These System Operators work closely with each Generator Operator in other to increase or reduce generation as necessary to meet the load demand in real time.  Nuclear power plants and other big fossil power plants are running at base load meaning that since their inertia are so big, they will not be able to change their output quickly to load changes, so they run full output to serve the base load demand.  Smaller fossil units react faster and are mostly used for peaking hours since their ramp rate is good.  So what I am saying is you cannot produce more power than you consumed. The system must be balanced at all times, and so you cannot have more electricity produced than consumed.  You could but then you have to store this large amount of energy (MW or even GW) somewhere.  The technology for storing this large amount of energy is not here yet.  So what people they build large dams high above near lakes or rivers and then buy power at night time because power is generally much cheaper at night and use that power to pump water from the lake/river to fill up the dams above.  So in the morning next day or when in the afternoon when the energy demand is high, they will use the water from these dams and run the hydro generators to shave off the high energy peak hours.

 

[patrick295767]

But will Germany stop with producing nuclear energy, which is actually contaminating for long? They said they would stop with atom kraft energy

At least it is planned - till dear madame chancellor thinks that its time for a pullout from the pullout of the pullout from the pullout to win her more votes for the next election :wacko:

But back to topic:

Seeing there aren't much really usefull PIM solution readily available for the Pandora, I'd say either look wether your mobile phone has the capabilities or just go the good old fashioned road.

So, after election, back to nuclear for the country, you think? damn  

too sad for our childrens

 

[Morn]

BTW I am really amazed how a japanese citizen considers atomic energy to be safe, green and unlimited after Fukushima.

In my opinion it's worth to save every quantum of energy one can to get rid of dangerous (nuclear) or environment polluting (gas, coal, nuclear) power plants!

1. Fukushima's reactor was pretty old. Actually it was planned to be decomissioned in a couple of years. Every new generation is safer (less prone to overheating and so).

2. Nuclear waste are quite nasty but there's not so much of it so there's quite easy to handle. 1MW plant produce half dozen barrels per year. Coal plants produces couple thousand times mote.

3. Renewable power sources has it's limitations. Not every country has sufficient insolation, handy rivers, areas of stable strong wind etc. And even if so, some of those installations like solar cells or batteries are built of materials that are not environment friendly at all.

4. Even considering Fukushima or Three Mile Island acccident nuclear plants are quite safe when you remember people dying in coal mines every year all over the world, not to mention Banqiao Dam.

5. This should be separated into a new thread and moved to off topic

 

[ekianjo]

Re nuclear and fukushima, even though it turned out to be a worst case scenario （ no one had ever seen such a huge tsunami in history, letnot forget that） the consequences in terms on contamination are pretty minor and there are still no death reported linked with the incident. Natural disasters kill way more people and there are way more deaths for all other forms of energy production out there. Nuclear is pretty safe and conceived with multiple layers of risk contingency.

 

[thatgui]

1. Fukushima's reactor was pretty old. Actually it was planned to be decomissioned in a couple of years. Every new generation is safer (less prone to overheating and so).

While this is certainly true to some extent (I doubt that every new generation gets automatically safer), I don't see the point. As far as I know the Fukushima incident didn't happen because of some kind of material fatigue, but a natural disaster of such a scale, that simply wasn't put into planning (for more or less good reasons). While this is no contra argument per se, I guess we can agree that there are zones on this planet were it is simply not sensible to put a nuclear power plant into it.

2. Nuclear waste are quite nasty but there's not so much of it so there's quite easy to handle. 1MW plant produce half dozen barrels per year. Coal plants produces couple thousand times mote.

While this is also certainly true, storing/containing nuclear waste tends to get very spacey, and costly (especially because nobody wants that stuff near his/her home - for valid or invalid reasons). Its also true that coal plants produce more waste volume, but that is a contra coal plant, and not automatically a pro nuclear power argument.

3. Renewable power sources has it's limitations. Not every country has sufficient insolation, handy rivers, areas of stable strong wind etc. And even if so, some of those installations like solar cells or batteries are built of materials that are not environment friendly at all.

But this is true regardless of wether there are nuclear power plants in that country or not. Some countries are just not able (anymore) to still their energy hunger with their own resources. Energy has to be imported one way or the other - Japan is no exception in that regard.Regarding renewable ernergy I think this is "halfright". Sure they need some environmental unfriendly materials, but so does most of the electronics that are daily produced/used/dumped. If this is such a big factor should we not alter our usage behaviour for electronic devices first, as the numbers are probably way bigger, and shouldn't having a stable and less environmental unfriendly power supply get a bigger priority than the next iteration of some eletronic device ?

Effeciantly storing energy (from whatever source) is another beast, that I do not want to tackle in this context.

4. Even considering Fukushima or Three Mile Island acccident nuclear plants are quite safe when you remember people dying in coal mines every year all over the world, not to mention Banqiao Dam.

I think this is a killer phrase (hope this is the right term to use) as this mixes up security concerns about the technology itself and security concerns about the technologies "working conditions".I could start arguing that mining uranium is a very dirty Job in many ways (especially when its mined on the african or the south american continent), and that the number of accidents in coal mines probably correlates with the safety regualtions on the site, but I think that this doesn't not get us anywhere.

5. This should be separated into a new thread and moved to off topic

definately agree

Re nuclear and fukushima, even though it turned out to be a worst case scenario （ no one had ever seen such a huge tsunami in history, letnot forget that） the consequences in terms on contamination are pretty minor and there are still no death reported linked with the incident. Natural disasters kill way more people and there are way more deaths for all other forms of energy production out there. Nuclear is pretty safe and conceived with multiple layers of risk contingency.

Radiological contamination doesn't show its impact on the affected population instantly, we just have to wait and see how worse it will be in the end

 

[KickAss]

ekianjo, on 05 Aug 2013 - 4:41 PM, said: Re nuclear and fukushima, even though it turned out to be a worst case scenario （ no one had ever seen such a huge tsunami in history, letnot forget that） the consequences in terms on contamination are pretty minor and there are still no death reported linked with the incident. Natural disasters kill way more people and there are way more deaths for all other forms of energy production out there. Nuclear is pretty safe and conceived with multiple layers of risk contingency. Radiological contamination doesn't show its impact on the affected population instantly, we just have to wait and see how worse it will be in the end

From a biological/medical point of view that's totally correct. There might or might not be a significant impact on people's health over time.

Monitored spontaneous mutations in genomes of fish populations close to the fukushima area imply that there probably will be an impact.

Im not throwing this in to blame anyone, but japan has some history of keeping environmental scandals secret for a while.

go google "minamata".

nowadays it's a medical term for mercury poisoning.

i've got a book about it, it's terrifying.

i believe it's out of print, but maybe you'll find it in some library.

 

[Klumpen]

To introduce this thread in few words, would you rather use a Pandora or simple QuoVadis (- yeah paper) for time management?

Although I seem to be the only one here, that does not understand this, I finally have to ask:

Why do you say "quo vadis" for paper?

"Quo vadis?" is latin for "Where do you go?".

What does this have to do with paper?

 

[A2000]

1. Fukushima's reactor was pretty old. Actually it was planned to be decomissioned in a couple of years. Every new generation is safer (less prone to overheating and so).

But there is one factor that will never improve: human beings. Look at all the (nuclear) accidents, there were safety measures ad infinitum. And if you look closer you will realize that the case of emergency was practiced a dozen times. But when it was the real case literally all action were taken just the opposite. And lets not forget all the secretiveness and lies. Meltdown, what meltdown? 1 week later: Yes, we had to admit there was a meltdown but environment is safe. 2 years later: radioactive water is pouring into the sea from the meltdown? Let's see how to fix it. As if anybody could have known that this could happen...

BTW: Last time I heard your argument was 1987: Tschernobyl is just an old model behind the iron curtain. That could never happen to a nuclear plant in the western world. Probability calculation doesn't only tell you the likelihood of a nuclear disaster they also tell you that it will happen inevitably. A chance of 1:1000000 years means that an event can occur in the first year with the same likelihood as in the 1000000th year.

2. Nuclear waste are quite nasty but there's not so much of it so there's quite easy to handle. 1MW plant produce half dozen barrels per year. Coal plants produces couple thousand times mote.

 
Easy to handle? With a half-life period of 704 million years for uranium 235? In Germany a permanent repository site for nuclear waste (Asse)  didn't even uphold two generation. If you look forward you have to cover times that are further afar from now than the stone age!

Interestingly there are no plans near any state of realization in any developed country to build a new nuclear power plant. Not because of political pressure but economic reasons: New nuclear power plants are way to expensive if the operator company has to be responsible for all risks and the management of nuclear waste. (TEPCO has lost about 25 billion US$ until now, the only exist because they get government aid paid by all taxpayers)

4. Even considering Fukushima or Three Mile Island acccident nuclear plants are quite safe when you remember people dying in coal mines every year all over the world, not to mention Banqiao Dam.

Yes you are right, other technologies bear other risks. That's why we should look for the one with the least risks and the least impact on humans and environment. Many problems derive from their size. Maybe local production of energy is the future?

5. This should be separated into a new thread and moved to off topic

Agreed.

Re nuclear and fukushima, even though it turned out to be a worst case scenario （ no one had ever seen such a huge tsunami in history, letnot forget that） the consequences in terms on contamination are pretty minor and there are still no death reported linked with the incident.

Do you really think that anyone from the emergency responder teams will survive the next years? Do you expect to read about direct deaths? The cancer rate will increase, people will die earlier but few will have solid enough medical evidence to get compensated. As ever.

 

[ekianjo]

A2000, most of your claims are just showing how ignorant you are about nuclear energy. Stop reading tabloids. U235 is a natural isotope, by the way, and naturally radioactive. People have been living next to uranium rich lands without knowing it for thousands of yars and do not suffer from high cancer rates. Besides, U235 emits alpha particles which are blocked by a piece of paper, and do not go throw the skin barrier. The main radiation risk is gamma particles.

 

[ekianjo]

BTW: Last time I heard your argument was 1987: Tschernobyl is just an old model behind the iron curtain. That could never happen to a nuclear plant in the western world.

Nothing like Tchernobyl ever happened again, in case you didn't notice. There was no efficient containment chamber around the reactor in Tchernobyl. All later nuclear plants integrated much better containment facilities. Fukushima included.  

 

[ekianjo]

Probability calculation doesn't only tell you the likelihood of a nuclear disaster they also tell you that it will happen inevitably. A chance of 1:1000000 years means that an event can occur in the first year with the same likelihood as in the 1000000th year.

Bullshit. So, what are you doing about meteors destroying the Earth ? Why are we waiting for a big one to come by if the probability is the same every single day ? 

In case you didn't understand probabilities: 1/1000 000 chance of something happening means that every year, there is 999 999/1000 000 chances that it will not happen. 

And probability does not say anything at all about certainty. It's like saying when you roll a dice you can get a 6 with 1/6 probability. This does not mean you will get a 6 for sure if you roll it 6 times. For all you know, you could be rolling it 100 times and still not get a 6. Probability does not give you any indication about certainty. 

Interestingly there are no plans near any state of realization in any developed country to build a new nuclear power plant.

I guess China does not count as a developed country, with the 2nd GDP in the world.  

New nuclear power plants are way to expensive if the operator company has to be responsible for all risks and the management of nuclear waste.

Bullshit, again. There are contracts between government and energy companies and in case of major disasters the companies are not liable for all expenses. If not they would all go bankrupt. In exchange for that state liability, the companies have to follow very strict regulations on how to build nuclear plants. It's way more stricter and heavily regulated (and frequently audited) than any other energy production facility out there.  

That's why we should look for the one with the least risks and the least impact on humans and environment. Many problems derive from their size. Maybe local production of energy is the future?

 

It's been assessed, and nuclear is indeed the safest. Look at all the records in terms of death/accidents per MW produced, there is nothing else as safe as nuclear power out there. And if you believe in the CO2 global warming theory, then you should strongly be in favor of nuclear energy because that's probably the production source that produces the least amount of CO2, all included. 

 

[ekianjo]

Do you really think that anyone from the emergency responder teams will survive the next years? Do you expect to read about direct deaths? The cancer rate will increase, people will die earlier but few will have solid enough medical evidence to get compensated. As ever.

Again, you lack some sense of proportion here. More than 15 000 people died on that single day from the Tsunami. To this day nobody has died from the 2011 Fukushima accident. And OH YEAH, I expect the media to carefully report all deaths of the team involved in the rescue operations. Something like that will certainly not go unnoticed. They went for protected suits, and their exposure was limited to very short amount of time per person, so I seriously expect they will survive. 

Besides, even among the Liquidators who operated to fix the Tchernobyl plant following the disaster (for many years, not just on the day), I quote this : 

Ivanov et al. (2001) [9] studied nearly 66,000 liquidators from Russia, and found no increase in overall mortality from cancer or non-cancer causes. However, a statistically significant dose-related excess mortality risk was found for both cancer and heart disease.

Rahu et al. (2006) [10] studied some 10,000 liquidators from Latvia and Estonia and found no significant increase in overall cancer rate. Among specific cancer types, statistically significant increases in both thyroid and brain cancer were found, although the authors believe these may have been the result of better cancer screening among liquidators (for thyroid cancer) or a random result (for brain cancer) because of the very low overall incidence.

We know radiation is extremely deadly at very high exposure (look at the military incident for the SL1 facility in 1961 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1) but there a lot of uncertainty about whether or not it directly affects health in low to medium ranges of radiation exposure. 

And people do get a lot of radiations nowadays from number of medical examinations (Xray, scanners, biological tracers, etc) and still don't die from more cancers than people who don't get them. 

ANd you don't have to believe me. Check what professionals say:

There were no deaths caused by radiation exposure, while approximately 18,500 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Future cancer deaths from accumulated radiation exposures in the population living near Fukushima are predicted to be extremely low to none.[145]

Following the power station accident, two Stanford University professors, Mark Z. Jacobson and his colleague John Ten Hoeve, suggest that according to the linear no-threshold model (LNT model) the accident is most likely to cause an eventual total of 130 cancer deaths.[14] Radiation epidemiologist Roy Shore contends that estimating health effects in a population from the LNT model "is not wise because of the uncertainties".[146] The LNT model did not accurately model casualties from Chernobyl, Hiroshima or Nagasaki; it greatly overestimated the casualties. Evidence that the LNT model is a gross distortion of damage from radiation has existed since 1946, and was suppressed by Nobel Prize winnerHermann Muller in favour of assertions that no amount of radiation is safe.[147][148][149]

In 2013 (two years after the incident), the World Health Organization indicated that the residents of the area who were evacuated were exposed to so little radiation that radiation induced health impacts are likely to be below detectable levels.[150] The health risks in the WHO assessment attributable to the Fukushima radiation release were calculated by largely applying the conservative Linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure, a model that assumes even the smallest amount of radiation exposure will cause a negative health effect.[151]

And actually, evacuating the whole area forever for the populations leaving there should be considered a governmental crime, because we know for a fact that these people will die in more numbers vs if they had stayed in their homes. The evacuation around Fukushima should have been only temporary:

We know from Chernobyl that the psychological consequences are enormous. Life expectancy of the evacuees dropped from 65 to 58 years -- not because of cancer, but because of depression, alcoholism and suicide. 

You post is so misinformed that I strongly urge you to learn more about nuclear energy before posting your opinion. If you think you can spread such false claims here about nuclear energy you came to the wrong place. 

 

[ekianjo]

But there is one factor that will never improve: human beings. Look at all the (nuclear) accidents, there were safety measures ad infinitum.

Oh don't worry, we don't leave the safety of nuclear plants up to humans only. There are multiple redondant systems to ensure that even if humans make errors, the reactor core would not endure a meltdown. And even it does it should remain contained in the containment chamber, made of extremely large, reinforced concrete in all directions.

By the way, the Fukushima incident was caused by a natural disaster. Just a reminder. 

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Man!  This post is off to never never land 

 

[ArchiMark]

Man!  This post is off to never never land 

Well said!........

Yipes!.......

 

[thatgui]

People have been living next to uranium rich lands without knowing it for thousands of yars and do not suffer from high cancer rates. Besides, U235 emits alpha particles which are blocked by a piece of paper, and do not go throw the skin barrier. The main radiation risk is gamma particles.

I doubt you can compare "uranium ore" with nuclear waste:Uranium 235 itself (which has the potential for a spontanious fissin) has not even one weight percent on the mass of "pure" Uranium. The word "pure" is a bit misleading, I just wanted to hint at the fact the uranium does not come in big chunks that only need to be dug out.

I also would not recommend just a pice of paper to shield you from alpha or beta rays (depending on distance to, exposure time to , and mass of the source, of course). But even alpha and beta rays are unhealthy if you breath in particles that emitt them, which is something that could happen (and did in Fukushima) in an nuclear incident.

Bullshit, again. There are contracts between government and energy companies and in case of major disasters the companies are not liable for all expenses. If not they would all go bankrupt. In exchange for that state liability, the companies have to follow very strict regulations on how to build nuclear plants. It's way more stricter and heavily regulated (and frequently audited) than any other energy production facility out there.  

....

I guess we all need to remind ourselfs, that this is an international forum - "nuclear politics" aren't the same in every country.

It's been assessed, and nuclear is indeed the safest. Look at all the records in terms of death/accidents per MW produced, there is nothing else as safe as nuclear power out there. And if you believe in the CO2 global warming theory, then you should strongly be in favor of nuclear energy because that's probably the production source that produces the least amount of CO2, all included.

This is interesting, altough nuclear power plants are the safest way to produce energy - according to you, no one is willing to bear the responsibility alone. Seems odd, if it so safe, where is the problem ?

Again, you lack some sense of proportion here. More than 15 000 people died on that single day from the Tsunami. To this day nobody has died from the 2011 Fukushima accident. And OH YEAH, I expect the media to carefully report all deaths of the team involved in the rescue operations. Something like that will certainly not go unnoticed. They went for protected suits, and their exposure was limited to very short amount of time per person, so I seriously expect they will survive. 

...

While this is true, your original comment is still nonsense as no one would die instantly from an incident like that.

Besides, even among the Liquidators who operated to fix the Tchernobyl plant following the disaster (for many years, not just on the day), I quote this : 

...

I don't think it is a good idea to ride that horse as these numbers are highly political - even reading an article about the topics in a different language on wikipedia gives different results. But even then a conclusion can be made:
Does using nuclear power lead to "casulties" (beeing instant death or long term consequences): yes - maybe not as high as some people want it to be but they are there - its just a matter wether a society deems it worthy or not.

But I'm having a hard time "counting numbers against each other" saying that 15000 people died due to the Tsunami can't be an argument in this discussion as this would have happend anyway with or without a nuclear power plant.

 

[KickAss]

Oh don't worry, we don't leave the safety of nuclear plants up to humans only.

you're not on a tepco payroll, are you?