Is there such a thing as safe nuclear power?

No. Because humans are fallible.

What we have to consider is that there is no such thing as safe power production, period, unless we’re talking about a system that is wholly renewable.

This is the first incidence of a nuclear plant facing a meltdown scenario in about 30 years. And it took a tsunami and one of the strongest earthquakes in history to start it.

I mean, as @AdamF says, humans are fallible – but that seems like a testament to the safety here.

Okay, First: There is ONE group of nuclear reactors that has been damaged in Japan and it’s in the Fukushima prefecture, which is within spitting distance of both the sea and the centre of the earthquakes. Secondly the reactors are 40 years old and still they haven’t had a meltdown (yet) after being hit by a tsunami and two earthquakes and thirdly, Japan has the best seismic countermeasures in the world and this particular catastrophe still caught them with their pants down, I’d call these “extraordinary circumstances”.

That said, no, obviously there is no “safe” nuclear energy. Just like there is no “safe” hydroelectric energy (Ever heard of the Vajont dam?), no “safe” car and no “safe” trip to the grocery store. When life wants to fuck you over, it does.

The good thing is that, considering how old the reactors are, how strong the quakes were and how close to the sea the plant is, the fact it hasn’t molten down despite the cooling system failing twice (or thrice, I’m not sure) so far and it being not working yet is quite good proof of how safe nuclear power plants have become. If we stopped building them on earthquake hotspots we’d be all set.

There is no such thing as anything that is ‘perfectly safe’. But accidents and disasters help us learn engineering better than we thought we did, and the places where the margins of safety are too narrow – or breached – get re-engineered and improved.

The US commercial nuclear fleet was improved after Three Mile Island. One of the major problems with that accident was that there was no effective way to bleed off excess pressure that developed inside the reactor. A pressurized water reactor (all of the commercial nukes in the US that I know about) is a closed system: the reactor generates heat from the controlled fission of the fuel rods, which is carried off by water circulating around the fuel bundles. That water is then pumped through the closed primary system of the steam generators, which are huge heat exchangers: the water flowing through the tubes of the steam generator heats the tubes, and that heat is carried off by the secondary cooling system, which generates the steam to drive the turbine / generator set. The “primary” coolant is never allowed to vent or escape.

When the system is working and all the parts function properly, the heating of the fuel rods is carefully controlled by the coolant flowing around them, then giving off its heat in the secondary system. But when the system breaks down as it did at Three Mile Island the primary coolant in the reactor / steam generator system can’t give off its heat, so it just builds pressure – a dangerous situation.

After Three Mile Island the NCR required the operating nukes in the US to add a Reactor Coolant Gas Vent System: a “simple” 1-inch vent line added to the reactor head which would allow excess pressure to be bled off into the containment vessel in case of a similar catastrophic system failure. (There were other improvements made to controls and training, but I’m not in that field so I didn’t pay such close attention – but assuredly changes were made elsewhere to prevent catastrophic failures in the first place – and that will happen in Japan, too, and their experience will likely result in more changes for the US fleet.)

Unfortunately, this is one of the ways that engineering, materials and science improve: we have a catastrophe and learn from it. It’s how the species evolved, after all.

Of course I understand that nothing is guaranteed 100% safe, but considering the potential devastating long term damage to humans and the environment is it really ok to make the argument that this only happens every so often?

@SuperMouse – yes – but how much damage has there been from nuclear power – and how much from oil drilling?

@SuperMouse Let’s see:

Relatively non polluting, potential (although very unlikely) long term damage to the environment and to those who live in the nearby areas, high energy/material ratio;

versus

Polluting, guaranteed long term damage to those who live near it and lower energy/material ratio (and using materials that are on short supply, too)

or

Polluting (a dam is damaging to the landscape and radically alters the habitat of most of the animals that live near it, that’s a form of pollution) potential (although very unlikely) damage to the environment around it (See: Vajont disaster) and very low energy production, considering the damage to the landscape.

I’d say “Go nuclear!”

Complete safety is impossible for nuclear power generation or for when you cook a meal in the kitchen. There is always the possibility of an accident The consequences of a nuclear accident are potentially so very extreme that I personally don’t feel it will ever be worth the risk.

I am not advocating for tapping more of the energy sources we are use now. I would certainly argue that there are forms of green energy without the potential devastating long term damage that nuclear energy has. For the record I think deep water oil drilling such as the kind that caused the Gulf oil disaster is just as inappropriate as nuclear power plants. I posit that there are plenty of sources of renewable energy without the potentially horrifying outcomes of nuclear power that need to be explored with urgency.

@SuperMouse – The thing is, I think the deep drilling is more dangerous and damaging, and the transport, and the land drilling, etc.

So I think that a move to more nuclear with an eye forward to green infrastructures is our best approach. Diversify – but mostly, let’s get off foreign dependence.

Let’s also consider that even a nuclear plant that runs exactly how it is intended is going to produce radioactive waste that will be around for generations.

@incendiary_dan – too true. However, one of the good things about nuclear power is that there is such a public concern over containment that it’s been researched and will continue to be with a good amount of oversight.

Despite the loss of the plant(s) in Japan, I don’t think that there have been any direct casualties from the plant failures themselves, have there?

Compare that to the toll of coal miners lost worldwide every year. The difference, aside from the amount of fallout in the press (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one) from the nuke failures, is that coal mining disasters are old news. We’ve been having casualties from coal mining for hundreds of years. Ho hum, what else is new?

Even when coal fired power goes ‘right’ – and since I’m involved in that industry I know that it “goes right” around the world, day after day in many hundreds of coal-fired plants around the world, it still produces pollutants that unfortunately do kill people. But no one says (seriously) that we should ban coal-fired power plants completely and irrevocably, and never build another one. (This is to offset the “but we don’t know the long-term effects” of long term exposure to low-level radiation. We know enough about those long-term effects to know that they are minimal and may even be beneficial.)

I can’t wait to see fusion plants become a commercial reality, and all of the chicken littles who will claim the sky is falling when the first of those things goes kerflooey. Because both of those things will happen someday, too. I predict that the death toll when it does will still be less than from a year’s worth of “normal” coal mining operations.

No. because the consequences of an accident last for thousands of years and are irreversible.

Candu reactors are about as safe as a nuclear reactor can get.

There’s a lot of fear mongering and intellectual dishonesty being spread since the problems with the reactors in Japan. I’m not a big fan of nuclear power, but I’d love for someone to explain to me how we’re supposed to get by without it since the world needs more power ever year. Especially if we all want to switch to electric vehicles, that power has to come from somewhere.

The only safe nuclear power source is the sun

@WasCy I totally agree with your point about the dangers of coal mining. I am not sure about comparing one source of dangerous energy to another as a way of making one look better.

@SuperMouse You can’t have your cake and eat it. You want something you have to trade something off. Let’s face it: energy can’t be wished into existence out of sheer determination, the only way to have it is to produce it and whenever there’s matter to energy conversion there’s a risk. @flutherother said “The only safe nuclear power source is the sun” and i happen to disagree, a lot. UV radiation is a consequence of the sun’s activity, and it’s dangerous to the human body, even with the ozone layer intact, plus it will one day go supernova, so there really is no form of energy that can be considered “safe”. Mainly because energy has the power to modify things, for better or for worse. All we can do is find a way to reduce as much as possible the impact of our energy production and plants that can produce more than others in roughly the same space and with less material are a part of it, IMO.

Nothing is safe. Oxygen is essential for life yet flammable. You can drown, so water is dangerous. Are you aware how many people die driving every year?

The dangers of nuclear power are overblown. I have yet to hear from people who actually know about nuclear reactors that they are as dangerous as people think, though I know quite a few that had their fears disappear once they learned more about them than “Uranium is radioactive!”.

Education is a wonderful thing :)

No. In spite of the glowing (no pun intended) reviews of nukes from the nuclear industry, they are just dangerous—the biggest problem (not counting accidents) is getting rid of the plutonium waste, for which there is no good-long term plan (it has to be secure for 25,000 years for the half life of plutonium).
Helen Caldicott has written extensively about this topic. She has been talking about this since she was 15 years old, when she read “On the Beach.” Here is an interview with her. Caldicott’s recent books: “Nuclear Power is Not the Answer” and another one, “If you Love This Planet.”
http://www.shareguide.com/Caldicott.html

I think WasCy puts it beautifully: how many people have actually demonstrably died from nuclear power in the last ten years? How does this compare with the deaths directly attributable to fossils fuel excavation and conversion?

Yes, solar and other renewables are the way forward, but we need a bridging solution.

What troubles me about the reporting on the Fukushima plant’s travails is that journalists just talk about release of “radiation”... If that’s the case, GREAT! – energetic subatomics flying off into the universe with an indescribably minuscule chance of actually causing anyone any harm! Ever!

Incidentally, light is a form of radiation.

The questions are:

What kind of radiation is being released? In short, what leftovers from the uranium oxide-driven fission process are being released? Iodine 121? Caesium 121? What are the amounts? What are the half-lives of the elements released? What is the probability of harm – individual and widespread – from the release of these isotopes? Which containment was breached – the 1st, 2nd or 3rd level? Are we really all going to die?

There’s much more going on here than the mass media report; they go for headlines and little real analysis. I’d be genuinely surprised if even one of the journalists churning out heir copy could actually answer the questions I put above without Googling it, and they haven’t even bothered (in the large part) to do even that.

What I really want to know is: why did the Japanese government choose to locate their reactor cooling backup systems – diesel generators – at sea level? I highly doubt they’ll do that again, but for the country where the term ‘tsunami’ comes from, I’m genuinely surprised.

@SuperMouse I’m glad that you’re cognizant of the relative risks of different kinds of power generation. Many people not involved in the industry (or science, construction or engineering in general) fail to consider that.

The fact is that if “green” power (of whatever generation source you want to consider) were cheaper than nuclear, coal, oil or natural gas, then it would be built up and promoted and those others would… go away. And if the costs to insure nukes in coastal or quake-prone areas (or the overall risk costs in general, if the government “insures” them) rises to unsustainable levels, then they will be replaced by “cheaper” generators, which may very well be the currently-still-too-expensive “green” generators. Probably by coal or natural gas, for now though, because those nuke plants produce a lot of power and no power plant is run that doesn’t “need” to be. There’s demand for the power on the grid, so the plants run if they can produce power economically.

If you have a wind farm or solar photo-voltaics or solar furnaces to replace the “missing” power from a nuke, then you can use that to replace some of the base load of the nuke plant. But the sun only shines during the day, and the wind doesn’t blow all of the time (or sometimes it blows too strongly for a wind farm, paradoxically), and there’s demand for power 24×7 x 365. So the power has to come from somewhere, or the lights go out, and then people really start to howl.

Yes, solar and other renewables are the way forward, but we need a bridging solution.

INCREDIBLY well put. I actually believe that we need this in combination with local drilling (for now). And I think that the disconnect between the left and right positions on this would be easily remedied if the right started steering the argument towards the frame of “this should be the interim solution while we develop other technologies should they prove in the end to be effective” rather than “nuclear is better than [insert green energy solution here], so we should choose nuclear.”

Renewable energy can be dangerous as well

@skfinkel Not entirely true. CANDU reactors and actinide incinerators can deal with Plutonium quite nicely; no storage required.

Sort of. You still have the problem of how to dispose of the spent fuel after the device’s useful life. This is why U.S. spacecraft, except for certain deep space probes, use solar arrays instead of RTEGs.

@iamthemob We can only hope…

@the100thmonkey That is what I am talking about! Nitrogen-16 is technically radioactive, as are isotopes that have half-lives measured in days, hours, or even seconds.

@jerv – oxygen is poisonous!

Besides, nuclear power hasn’t killed me yet, and if it does, at least it will be a modern death: a testament to the triumphs and limitations of modern science and engineering – not one borne of scarcity, disease and scratching out my life in rocks and mud.

I imagine my views on this are somewhat… in the minority… It should also be said that I don’t actively seek death but that I find the reports coming from Fukushima sensationalist and inaccurate.

@the100thmonkey – you find them to be sensationalist and inaccurate because like most disaster coverage stories, they are.

Nuclear power is an easy target. What people need to realize is that nuclear power compared to oil is like airplanes compared to a car. When the former crashes of fails, the story is big, and people start to panic. Then the latter fails, people sort of think of it as the status quo – forgetting that when you look at the averages, the former is exponentially safer compared to the latter.

The management of multiple failures is simply too complex. And as @marinelife pointed out it’s technology with longterm consequences if it fails.

for an extra emergency backup could a really deep hole be made below plants to flush/dump material
and with oil just don’t put it in the air

@mattbrowne I congratulate you for being more cynical than me for once. And it really isn’t as complex as you think; simple enough for anybody that knows engineering can figure much of it out intuitively. Hell, my wife doesn’t know engineering and she knows quite a bit of it just because she has common sense.
Basically, imagine the worst that could happen, what to do in that case, what to do if that fails, repeat that last part until you cover all the bases, then do it a few more times just to play it safe. Simple.

@s321scba Why do you think the containment vessel is so over-engineered?

I am always curious, if one wants to use alternative energy sources, how does one create the energy to manufacture the windmills for the wind farms, the solar panels, the batteries. I have read that it uses more energy to create the alternative energy products than they save in their lifetime. Now I am sure that is up for debate but it is nonetheless food for thought. @WasCy points out another fact that is often overlooked, the # of lives lost in the coal mining industry over the years, the total is astronomical but happens in smaller numbers of lives at a time so therefore is less of a media event or assault to our sensibilities. And remember too the nuclear waste does not last that much longer than a plastic bottle!

No, I don’t think so. We’re not smart enough to handle nuclear power.

@jerv – Well, I wasn’t being cynical at all. In extreme cases we can’t handle nuclear power. That’s all. We can rebuild cities after tsunamis hit. But we can’t enter areas contaminated with radioactive isotopes with a very long half-life. Such as plutonium-239. Even with cesium-137 we are looking at 30 years. There are still many cases of inedible radioactive boars today in Germany. Because of Chernobyl. Hunters in contaminated areas shoot them all the time, then the pigs have to be treated as hazardous waste. Not all areas were contaminated though. It depends on the rainfall at the time.

Some Americans don’t see to be worried much. Well, I think the biggest issue if things continue to get worse will be marine life in the Pacific. The bad stuff will end up in the American or even global food chain.

@mattbrowne Watch Supersize Me and you’ll realize that the bad stuff is already in the American food chain. Look at LA smog and you’ll see that we allay do a fine job of making the environment hazardous to humanity even without nukes, and its been like that for decades.
In extreme cases, we really can’t handle anything anyways. A small town near where I used to live got washed off the map. You can rebuild a house that is damaged, or replace one that is destroyed, but what if the land the house was on is just gone? New Orleans got off easy :/

@jerv – People supersizing themselves exist in Europe too. Obesity is a worldwide phenomenon in developed countries.

Let’s hope that all nuclear power plants worldwide are shut down by 2040.

And we need to innovate like never before to implement alternatives.

@mattbrowne if we do the innovation, then the shutdown will be a natural economic consequence, sort of like we never had to do a lot of legislation to remove horses from cities.

I’m all in favor of the innovation. I’m only opposed to the mandates to “shut down” this or that working industry (however much we gripe about negative externalities) when it’s an industry that we currently depend upon.

@WasCy – The worldwide innovation rate is still far too slow. Crude oil is still too cheap and as long as there is no agreed plan with a clear timeline for shutting down nuclear power plans, investors are cautious investing in alternatives.

@mattbrowne Name a technology that can match the output of a nuclear plant that doesn’t take up enough land to hamper farming. Hydro-electric isn’t much good in many places, wind and solar have severe limits, so our best bet is fusion; something that is years away.
The alternative is to basically gut the industrial world and go back to riding horses. Nuclear plants exist for a reason.

Name a technology that can match the output of a nuclear plant that doesn’t take up enough land to hamper farming.

I think that this is important in considering the issue. Nuclear power as an alternative will reduce oil dependence to the point where we might be able to increase investment in other energy sectors, and in terms of the profound impact caused by oil, both environmental and in terms of human rights violations, it’s more important to look to what’s possible now in order to prevent compounding that harm.

The output, storage and delivery aspects of green tech needs time to develop. These are aspects of the science that need developing before we start to heavily invest in infrastructure. One of the things that could perhaps be the most devastating to the implementation of green energy production is if we start building the infrastructure too soon and it doesn’t return because the technology isn’t ready. That’s just handing ammunition to the other side. The economic failure has driven down solar investment in some areas as well – so if the product isn’t banging, it’s not going to be able to compete in an already-established market.

Geothermal right under buildings in suitable areas, offshore wind parks, solar thermal on every roof for hot water, photovoltaics on roofs in sunny areas, solar thermal for electricity in desert areas, saltwater micro algae plants for future airplane fuel in desert areas near oceans.

Above all: Triple energy efficiency everywhere. Better windows. Better walls. Better roofs. Better everything that matters. Just because of this we could shut down half of all nuclear power plants. It’s incredible how much energy gets wasted every year. Driving SUVs in urban areas is stupid, but when we look at buildings the potential for being less stupid is even greater.

@mattbrowne Solar only works where the sun shines, so forget Seattle or where I used to live in NH, especially if you don’t want to clear-cut a few acres of forest. And in an economy where people ate losing their houses and sometimes can’t even afford food, I doubt spending tens of thousands of dollars on home improvement is an option. Our national budget is in no shape to subsidize that either. Desert areas near oceans… I don’t know if you know geography, but the US is rather large and our deserts tend to be pretty far inland. You’d probably use more energy moving the water than you would get in return.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice dream, but neither practical nor cost-effective, at least here and now. Of course, designing new construction buildings to be more energy efficient makes sense, so we do do that. Still, it will be many years and many billions of dollars (that we don’t have) before your ideas can be realized.

@s321scba You are aware that that is how our economy got screwed up in the first place, aren’t you? Also, the ROI for such things is not great; you’re lucky if it pays for itself in less than a decade.

As for “over-engineered”, imagine that you are building a chair for yourself and you weigh 200 pounds. If you over-engineer it, you’ll design it to hold 400 to make sure it doesn’t break even if you gain 100 pounds. Basically, it is building stuff stronger than it really needs to be just in case. The fact that the reactor is even standing after an earthquake of that magnitude should tell you how over-engineered it was.

@jerv – All good points, yet I still believe in a non-nuclear, non-fossil-fuel dependent world. It won’t happen overnight. We need to keep generating millions of ideas and discussing them. Now. Here’s a great quote:

“The rate of innovation is accelerating and we often fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered.”—Matt Ridley

I read about a “reactor” (I don’t think that the term would really qualify) that bombards a bit of hafnium with microwaves to produce gamma radiation. Should the microwave emitter lose power, the whole business shuts off, the gamma rays disperse, and what’s left is more or less safe for handling. Trouble is, there isn’t that much hafnium – in the right isotopes! – for that to really be feasible.

@mattbrowne Why do you think I am excited by the Tesla Model S?

@jerv Because it is awesome incarnate, and you know it.

To live we need clean water, relatively clean food, and relatively clean air. All forms of mass production of electricity are inimical to at least one of those. Mining for copper wires and rare earth minerals leaves rivers devoid of life and massive acreage leveled. Petro fuels obviously throw noxious waste into the air. Nuclear leaves behind deadly poisons for generations.

It’s all moot. We’ll either learn to get food and water without massive inputs of electricity and power, or we’re fucked.

@Nullo

I don’t know anything more about what you’ve read than what you’ve posted, but… I don’t think that gamma rays are where the energy lies in power production. Gamma particles are high-energy particles, but in a fission reactor the primary energy used to heat water for steam is released during the fission of the unstable U-236 atom into new elements, and the release of additional neutrons to enable the process to continue.

What you describe sounds like a way to excite the hafnium to emit radiation (which could be good when radiation is desired, such as in medical treatments or radiographic imaging, for example), but it doesn’t sound like a power source. For power it’s fission for now, and fusion for later, we hope.

@WasCy Which is why I was hesitant to call it a reactor – it’s not fission at all. The article itself (Popular Science, some years back) discussed the possibility of using it as a component in a jet engine, heating the air.
From NewScientist:
Instead of a conventional fission reactor, it is focusing on a type of power generator called a quantum nucleonic reactor. This obtains energy by using X-rays to encourage particles in the nuclei of radioactive hafnium-178 to jump down several energy levels, liberating energy in the form of gamma rays. A nuclear UAV would generate thrust by using the energy of these gamma rays to produce a jet of heated air.
So yeah. X-rays instead of microwaves.

@Nullo got it. Thanks.

How about if there are numerous ones like this, then if/when the “big one” comes, these individual smaller reactors would be much easier to contain.

More info here.

There are some who believe that this is the answer for remote aboriginal communities in Australia but the no nuclear greens don’t want any nuclear in the country. Some of the richest uranium mines are here but it is all sent offshore and we burn coal, kill the miners and pollute the air instead.

The U.S. and other countries have build portable nuclear power plants. They put them in submarines, cruisers, and aircraft carriers. There is no reason that one or a series of these small package power plants can’t be safely distributed throughout this country. It is probably possible for one power plant to supply a medium size city. We would be able to connect them to the energy grid but isolate them if a grid problem occurs. On top of that. the U.S. Navy produces hundreds of Reactor Operators a year. These highly educated technicians are a ready source to supervise these power sources.

So we get energy independence, good paying technical jobs, and immunity from terrorist attacks or natural disasters with the grid.