Nuclear power stations

[bunn]

Have I missed something? Has there been some change in the technology that means that putting new nuclear power stations on a small crowded island that is a target for suicide bombers is a good idea?

Why is it better to make radioactive waste than carbon dioxide?

I thought the whole idea had been more or less written off after Chernobyl.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

.Why is it better to make radioactive waste than carbon dioxide?
Because, paradoxically, the carbon dioxide is a lot more likely to kill us all. At least that's what Lord May (outgoing prez of Royal Society) said when I heard him speak recently. He seemed convinced that global warming was a really serious threat to mankind, and that it was worth a few problems with radioactive waste to avert it.

Everyone agrees renewables would be great, but I assume they don't actually produce enough power. Otherwise we'd use them, right? I'm sure Tony Blair would much rather announce a new generation of maize-powered stations than nuclear ones.

I think we can more or less ignore Chernobyl. The Soviet system was so terrible and so utterly contemptuous of human life. Nothing like that has ever happened in the West -- OK there've been a few small leaks, but considerably less damage has been caused to human health by Western nuclear power than by, say, Western coal-mining -- not mention cars!

That's my take on it anyway..... - Neuromancer

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I take your point - I'm a bit reluctant to trust that other routes have been properly explored though. Some of the ideas coming out recently seem to have been so ill thought out... I must do more reading up.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I meant to add that I deeply distrust the 'if that worked someone would already be doing it' thing.

Even in my line of work, I see plenty of examples of that argument being disproved - it seems that often what's really meant is 'it does work but the people who tried it last time were idiots/had a baby/ didn't have the funding/had horrible BO and no communication skills/were ahead of their time and there was no audience/ got discouraged and became accountants instead'.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that doesn't really help.

There are masses of power sources, and all of them have problems. Either they don't produce much power, they do produce waste products, they're non-renewable, they might upset birds/whales/butterflies etc, or people don't want them next door.

Wind power was popular a few years ago, but it's being NIMBYed out of existence (some of my clients are in the field).

The demand at the moment is for something that will produce non-polluting power cheaply without requiring any visible structures.

The alternatives that fit that bill are:

a) off-shore tidal and wind farms (assuming the dolphins don't mind)
b) magicking the energy out of nowhere
c) nuclear

a) is immature technology - no-one knows how well it'll work as yet, and it won't at all for a good few years.
b) has no problems apart from being impossible
c) has a PR problem, but otherwise seems the least bad

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I thought wind farms were too unreliable? It's hardly immature technology - there are wind farms round here that are many years old, and there was one in North Devon when I was at school - but my understanding was that you'd get brownouts in calms?

Your A B C analysis ties in with the last time that I did any serious reading on the subject, but that was (counts hastily on fingers and comes to truly horrifying conclusion) 17 years ago: surely things have moved on a bit?

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

They reckon that they're by no means as unreliable as people suggest. You don't get calms across the whole country at the same time very often, and when you do you kick in some other stations to pick up the slack. Some of the newer designs can keep generating at very low wind speeds.