- It was hit by the largest earthquake in recorded human history
A small point, but what? It wasn’t even the largest earthquake this century.
Timex
1922
It was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, which was the strongest earthquake to ever hit Japan in recorded history.
You’re right though… it wasn’t the largest earthquake in the entire world, ever… it was just the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded.
It was a combination of really unfortunate things, but certainly small (geographically speaking) countries, especially near plate fault lines will be more carefull with their site placements now, one hopes?
‘Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF’:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/18/fossil-fuel-companies-getting-10m-a-minute-in-subsidies-says-imf
Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments.
The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.
Quite something!
magnet
1925
Greg Boyce, the chief executive of Peabody, a US-based multinational with mining interests around the world, included a slide on Ebola and energy in a presentation to a coal industry conference in September last year. … “Lack of electricity impairs ability to fight crises like Ebola,” the headline to Boyce’s powerpoint said.
It went on to quote Rubin – misidentified as Harry not Harvey – on the importance to public vaccination efforts of a reliable electricity supply.
“Let’s say someone does develop an Ebola vaccine. Distributing a vaccine would require continuous chain refrigeration,” Rubin said.
Seriously? We’re getting this worked up because of an overly optimistic claim in someone’s PowerPoint slide? Has the Guardian writer ever watched a TED talk?
And I’m sure he will be horrified to find that there are lots of companies that are attempting to fight Ebola by addressing energy shortages in Africa. No doubt they would personally gain from their efforts, as well. Of course, they are doing so with solar energy, so their long-term environmental costs are lower. But that’s a separate issue. In terms of underlying logic, those solar power vendors are in full agreement with the coal guy’s PowerPoint slide
Agreed. I grew up near Palo Verde, which is AFAIK still the largest nuclear plant in the US. I remember all sorts of protests when it was being built. My parents still live there. My sister and her family, too. Safety of the plant has never been a concern.
Tim_N
1927
Semi-stupid question from someone who isn’t too knowledgeable about the science/engineering of nuclear plants: What is the potential for someone (for whatever motive) to intentionally sabotage a plant that causes catastrophic damage in the surrounding area? If someone were to blow up a solar farm, nothing would much happen beyond a reduction in supplied power. I don’t believe it’s that dissimilar with a coal plant too, you could start a bad fire perhaps.
I’m pretty agnostic on the topic of nuclear, but a common argument I hear against nuclear beyond the standard safety concerns is that if solar/wind/misc renewable sources were just subsidised properly (or fossil fuels taxed) the amount of advancement you’d have in the technology could make the manufacture/install cost low enough to be fairly competitive on their own. Of course, running costs aren’t an issue. A good example in Australia (and most likely elsewhere in the world) is the dramatic decline in the cost to install solar panels on residential roofs following the rebates and feed-in tariffs that were deployed over several years.
If this downward trend can continue, combine that with advancement in home batteries like what Tesla unveiled and there might not be a need for power plants of any kind in the future.
I agree with you with a caveat. We are too far into climate change for renewables to be able to stop it in the short term. Nuclear could be ramped up in 5-10 years and our dependency on fossils eradicated (except for transportation). That’s a short term fix that I think should be defended. Then we can ramp down again when possible. It’s not like the economic costs are anything compared to the projected costs of continued change, and if we fail to address this quickly and stop it in 20 years or so, the only recourse left might be ecological-engineering, something that, while promising, has pretty terrible fail states should we make a mistake.
Expecting renewables to provide most of the power in such a small time frame is too optimistic, as far as I know (have family working in the field). Not that they shouldn’t be encouraged, but they are a longer term stabilization mechanism rather than a shock measure.
As for the ability for a nuclear power plant to be sabotaged, I’m skeptical, but im far from an expert. My understanding is that you might need a small army to be able to do it properly, since you need to have enough force for the physical security measures not to make an emergency shutdown, and enough force to hold the plant until the process goes really critical (your are talking about catastrophic damage). Fukushima took a Earthquake throwing the plant into emergency mode plus a tsunami taking out the emergency power. And still it was relatively controlled, and we were hearing about it for days.
Just to touch on this - it sort of depends on your idea of “catastropic.” IANANuclear engineer, but from my understanding of the design and radiation: if security and oversight became particularly lax, it’s possible that someone could sneak in a modest amount of explosives and cause venting into the atmosphere. It wouldn’t devastate the region, but it could create a significant exposure for some people. In order to make something horrific, I think you would need a concerted effort against minimal resistance. Thankfully, security is pretty tight in these places.
Timex
1930
With existing, old plants, you could MAYBE do some damage if they had no security at all. The damage would likely be minimal though, with a low likelihood of any actual radioactive material being released into the environment.
With a modern reactor like the AP1000, it’s unlikely you could really do anything at all to it that would cause a radioactive release, short of actually dropping heavy weapon payloads onto it. The core is protected to such an extent that it’d be almost impossible for anyone other than a military force to do anything of consequence to it.
Further, with modern reactors, the safety mechanisms are such that even if you somehow managed to gain complete control of the facility, you couldn’t force the reactor to melt down even if you wanted to. It simply can’t do it. So there isn’t really any way to actually CAUSE a meltdown.
The most vulnerable aspect of the nuclear facilities is really the spent fuel storage tanks. If you managed to get onto the facility and blow up the place where they keep the spent fuel rods, you could potentially create a kind of dirty bomb effect, but given that it’d not be really designed for dispersal, it wouldn’t actually contaminate a large region or have much impact.
The vast majority of all nuclear power plants are old gen2 designs built in the 70ies and 80ies though, there’s a dozen ‘modern reactors’ under construction and maybe a handfull already online.
RichVR
1932
Ever seen an oil refinery explosion? I’d rather live next to a nuclear facility.
Timex
1933
Or a containment pond for fly ash failing.
The TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill occurred just before 1 a.m. on Monday December 22, 2008, when an ash dike ruptured at an 84-acre (0.34 km2) solid waste containment area at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant in Roane County, Tennessee, USA. 1.1 billion US gallons (4,200,000 m3) of coal fly ash slurry was released. The coal-fired power plant, located across the Clinch River from the city of Kingston, uses ponds to dewater the fly ash, a byproduct of coal combustion, which is then stored in wet form in dredge cells. The slurry (a mixture of fly ash and water) traveled across the Emory River and its Swan Pond embayment, on to the opposite shore, covering up to 300 acres (1.2 km2) of the surrounding land, damaging homes and flowing up and down stream in nearby waterways such as the Emory River and Clinch River (tributaries of the Tennessee River). It was the largest fly ash release in United States history.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) initially estimated that the spill released 1.7 million cubic yards (1.3 million m³) of sludge, which is gray in color.[1][2] After an aerial survey, the official estimate was more than tripled to 5.4 million cubic yards (4 million m³) on December 25, 2008.[1][3] The spill covered surrounding land with up to six feet (1.8 m) of sludge.[4] The EPA first estimated that the spill would take four to six weeks to clean up; however, Chandra Taylor, the staff attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the cleanup could take months and possibly years.[5] As of June 2009, six months following the spill, only 3% of the spill had been cleaned and is now estimated to cost between $675 and $975 million to clean, according to the TVA.[6]
Quaro
1934
Off the top of my head so I might me misremembering, but in the event of a disaster the AP1000 still requires driving a fire truck up to it something like once every three days and flushing water through the cooling system. It is possible to build reactors that use containment strong enough that they won’t breach even if everyone walks away and forgets about it, but doing so raises the price so much that it’s still not typically done in modern designs.
Timex
1935
Well, that would be in the event of a disaster, AND one which caused damage to the reactor core to the extent that they were unable to shut it down I believe. And the likelihood of that happening is fairly infinitesimal.
‘Antarctic Peninsula in ‘dramatic’ ice loss’:
'Massive India heatwave ‘kills 500’:
update the numbers are upto 1000 now for that heat wave in India thing. Crazy.
‘Most glaciers in Mount Everest area will disappear with climate change – study’:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/27/most-glaciers-in-mount-everest-area-will-disappear-with-climate-change-study
update the numbers are upto 1000 now for that heat wave in India thing. Crazy.
Without wishing to diminish so many lives lost, as many as 15,000 people died in France’s heatwave back in 2003. 1,000 for a country the size of India with so much poverty seems like getting off lightly.
True, i had forgotten about that european heatwave event, yeah that was pretty extreme too. Maybe more died in that as in europe we are generally not that used to high temps (say compared to certain parts of the usa, or India even?) so that event caught us by surprise? Still climate change is having a huge range of global weather effects in terms of more extreme events.
