Nuclear Energy... Still A Safe Alternative..aka.. Sorry Enviro-nuts, No Mushroom Clouds Over Japan

[Dave]

Most of our eco friendly friends and enviro-nuts are having a field day with the situation unfolding in Japan, making things sound like the end of the world and such, specially if their is a literal meltdown. As usual, they gloss over many many facts about nuclear energy and nuclear plants.

The most obvious would be the rarity of any major 'events' at nuclear power plants. When you think about it, most people can only name 3 or 4 incidents including the situation in Japan. Besides Japan, there was of course Three Mile Island (in which no one was injured or radiated) and Chernobyl in which a relativity small number of people died considering the type of event it was. A majority of the deaths related to Chernobyl were that of plant workers or emergency personnel trying to put the fire out. Chernobyl was an oddity and a exposure of Russian stupidity in the way the plant was designed. It did not have the safe guards that all American plants and most plants from other countries have, including Japan. The Chernobyl reactor literally blew up... this will not happen in Japan... main reason being that the reactors were built in totally different manners. The explosions that have been seen are that of hydrogen.. not nuclear material igniting or any such thing. Sorry to the enviro-nuts but there will be no mushroom clouds over Japan.

Another thing of note should be that Japan has been hit by a number of earthquakes over the years, some of them large yet all of the reactors made it though those quakes without any incident. The reactors were built to withstand quakes of over 8.0 on the Richter Scale.. a pretty powerful quake in its own right. Even the best thought out ideas can have their faults and trying to build things to meet events that might be once in a century occurrences has its limitations. Being that the quake in Japan was a 8.9 or a 9.0 as a few news agencies have reported, they could only plan for so much and with the Japan quake being designated as the 5th most powerful quake in history (as far as they know anyway).

Even in a worse case scenario in Japan, the chances of anyone dieing or even having any serious lingering health issues caused by radiation is remote at best. More people would die due to exposure to inclement weather in a normal season then will even become ill from radiation poisoning.

And before someone ask, no, i'm not a nuclear scientist.. I simply did the simple research found on the internet and elsewhere and my own memory of events such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

 

[Sweater Cows!]

hmm...there is some website that I can't remember now that has some pictures of abandoned town of Pripyat Ukraine and other cities and villages in the exclusion zone. Now a person can actually take a trip there with permission from some group  here is an artivle of a michgan natives trip to Ukraine. Really neat. It also has lots of other abandoned cities and places photographed. It's very intriguing.

[Guidothesemipsuedocaptitalistpig]

Chernobel was tragic... A reactor of a type built strictly for speed of production and little or no safty devices. The boiling water reactors causeing grief in Japan the same. But to take out one of the only options for relativly clean power rather than learning the facts about the new technology and improving on it makes about as much sence as if the Government would have had to deal with environuts back when oil was just cmming on line and regulating it out of exsistance. The net effect would be the world advances back in the 1940s stil,l as you cant produce silicon solar panels or anything else in the new clean energy department without expending far more of the already developed energy. By the way one of the reasons why those older plants are still in production and around to be dangerous to begin with... is how long the regulations cause the building process to take. 20 plus years in many cases.