Here's a map of U.S. earthquake zones:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2008/1128/

Here's a map of nuclear reactors:

http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/map-power-reactors.html

Looks scary to me

In the wake of what is happening in Japan, that question is being asked if the U.S. can be hit with the same fate. The thing is, we NEVER know until it is too late. Who would expect a 9.0 earthquake to hit? Would would expect a mega tsunami to hit right after a 9.0 earthquake?



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42103936/from/RSS/


What really bothers me is the fact that a lot of these nuke plants have issues WITHOUT dealing with a 9.0 earthquake. There has been leaks on many occasions and the NRC think that they are acceptable. I'm surprised that they don't hire Art Robinson who thinks that the U.S. should sprinkle low-level radioactive material over the land because he thinks that low-level radioactive material is good for you. (You know, it gives you that certain glow.)

We really need to be investing in cleaner, renewable energy. And please don't tell me that nukes are clean. Look at Chernobyl & look at Japan today.



Cat

Such as Vermont Yankee.  Lots of these plants, including the ones in Japan, were designed to go off-line in 40 years 45 years ago.  If a quake busts up a reactor there isn't much folks can do in any case but get the hell out. 

They're saying Fukushima is getting as bad as Chernobyl.  However, Chernobyl was in the boonies of the Ukraine.  It's like the difference between a nuclear disaster in Wyoming and a nuclear disaster in New Jersey!
:o

Well Chernobyl was simply a situation of absolutely gross negligence and an absurdly poor design. Not a good example, I think, to use for the dangers of atomic power.

3-Mile and Fukushima however are more realistic scenarios. In the end it was not the quake that did in Fukushima, but the tsunami and apparently an extremely poor evaluation of tsunami risk mitigation. Japanese and GE screwed the pooch big time.

The whole notion of atomic safety has to do with risk prevention... Forseeing what can go wrong. Fukushima shows us what can happen. How many other unexpected disaster modes are out there?

Well Chernobyl was simply a situation of absolutely gross negligence and an absurdly poor design. Not a good example, I think, to use for the dangers of atomic power.

3-Mile and Fukushima however are more realistic scenarios. In the end it was not the quake that did in Fukushima, but the tsunami and apparently an extremely poor evaluation of tsunami risk mitigation. Japanese and GE screwed the pooch big time.

The whole notion of atomic safety has to do with risk prevention... Forseeing what can go wrong. Fukushima shows us what can happen. How many other unexpected disaster modes are out there?


Cost-benefit analysis?
???

Suppose the NRC ruled any plant built X miles from an active fault line must be able to withstand a 9.0 Richter quake but the cost would be so high no contractor would touch it?

OK, so the US Geological Survey concludes the chances of a quake greater than a 4.0 striking a given fault line in the next 40 years are one in a million and the city really needs the power plant.  Sooooo....are we going to take our chances or not?

And please don't tell me that nukes are clean. Look at Chernobyl & look at Japan today.


I am.

But first, let's close down those plants that were built in the days before automobiles had seat belts.  We've learned the hard way that BWRs may shut themselves down, but they aren't passively (no power to pumps, you still have a problem) safe, so let's upgrade them to something like GE's AP-1000, which was designed to solve this problem.  Oh, wait, we can't, because we haven't built a new reactor on US soil in 15 years.

And about those spent fuel ponds, one of which is sitting on damn near every reactor in the States?  If we're going to be dumb enough to ban the IFR and leave 95%+ of the energy in the used fuel without reprocessing or burning it, why do we have it sitting in pools of water that - in the event of a week without power - will eventually run out of water?  I mean, why don't we take all the spent fuel and put it into a big deep hole in the ground, you know, like we we promised the reactor operators we were going to do 30 years ago?  Oh, that's right.  Because Harry Reid is from Nevada, and elections have consequences.  

(Which is a moot point.   The anti-nuke folks won the PR battle the day the hydrogen blowout in Fukushima #1 gave you such awesomely-memorable footage, and everything else since then has been icing on the cake.  You guys won.  #3 was just overkill, and #4's fuel pool would be adding insult to injury.  The nuclear industry's now dead, even though the risks are being blown out of proportion, because something measurable is also being blown over the Pacific :)

So, fine, you guys win - no nukes.  

How many mountaintops bulldozed and people killed every year mining "clean" coal?  I mean, the ones that don't get dug out after a few weeks of TV coverage in Chile.  And what's the worst-case scenario with coal mining?  It's been 45 years, I hear Centralia is still a hot spot for tourism!

OK, coal's out.  How 'bout oil?  Now that Mardi Gras is over, anyone wanna head down to the Gulf of Mexico for some local shrimp gumbo?  (On the other side of this, there's no permanent ban on drilling in the deepwater Gulf, but there haven't been any deepwater GOM drilling permits issued in the 9 months since the "moratorium" ended.  You can drill, baby, drill, as soon as we get around to approving your permit, which is stuck in a filing cabinet behind a disused lavatory with a sign on it saying "Beware of the Leopard".  That's the permits department!)

OK, fine, we'll use natural gas.  It's even got the word natural in the name, right?  Just don't drink the frackin' water around here.

If you can figure out how to make the wind blow and the sun shine 24/7, there's a Nobel Prize in it for you - if you can get it past the environmental impact studies.

Disclosure:  No financial bias here - I own shares in solar (going way up this week, and consumer-available photovoltaics are cheap enough now that a decentralized power grid is no longer fantasy), nuclear (ouch!), and oil and gas (pick a random number and flip a coin to see if it's up or down from one day to the next).  I should probably pick up some coal miners (which have gone way up along with solar) just to round things out.  Japan's going to need to import a lot of energy and raw materials to make up for lost capacity (and to rebuild hundreds of thousands of housing units) over the next few months.  At least one of their oil refineries has melted down into slag, and 2 gigawatts of capacity at Fukushima's a trillion-yen paperweight.

I am.

But first, let's close down those plants that were built in the days before automobiles had seat belts.  We've learned the hard way that BWRs may shut themselves down, but they aren't passively (no power to pumps, you still have a problem) safe, so let's upgrade them to something like GE's AP-1000, which was designed to solve this problem.  Oh, wait, we can't, because we haven't built a new reactor on US soil in 15 years.

And about those spent fuel ponds, one of which is sitting on damn near every reactor in the States?  If we're going to be dumb enough to ban the IFR and leave 95%+ of the energy in the used fuel without reprocessing or burning it, why do we have it sitting in pools of water that - in the event of a week without power - will eventually run out of water?  I mean, why don't we take all the spent fuel and put it into a big deep hole in the ground, you know, like we we promised the reactor operators we were going to do 30 years ago?  Oh, that's right.  Because Harry Reid is from Nevada, and elections have consequences.  

(Which is a moot point.   The anti-nuke folks won the PR battle the day the hydrogen blowout in Fukushima #1 gave you such awesomely-memorable footage, and everything else since then has been icing on the cake.  You guys won.  #3 was just overkill, and #4's fuel pool would be adding insult to injury.  The nuclear industry's now dead, even though the risks are being blown out of proportion, because something measurable is also being blown over the Pacific :)

So, fine, you guys win - no nukes.  

How many mountaintops bulldozed and people killed every year mining "clean" coal?  I mean, the ones that don't get dug out after a few weeks of TV coverage in Chile.  And what's the worst-case scenario with coal mining?  It's been 45 years, I hear Centralia is still a hot spot for tourism!

OK, coal's out.  How 'bout oil?  Now that Mardi Gras is over, anyone wanna head down to the Gulf of Mexico for some local shrimp gumbo?  (On the other side of this, there's no permanent ban on drilling in the deepwater Gulf, but there haven't been any deepwater GOM drilling permits issued in the 9 months since the "moratorium" ended.  You can drill, baby, drill, as soon as we get around to approving your permit, which is stuck in a filing cabinet behind a disused lavatory with a sign on it saying "Beware of the Leopard".  That's the permits department!)

OK, fine, we'll use natural gas.  It's even got the word natural in the name, right?  Just don't drink the frackin' water around here.

If you can figure out how to make the wind blow and the sun shine 24/7, there's a Nobel Prize in it for you - if you can get it past the environmental impact studies.

Disclosure:  No financial bias here - I own shares in solar (going way up this week, and consumer-available photovoltaics are cheap enough now that a decentralized power grid is no longer fantasy), nuclear (ouch!), and oil and gas (pick a random number and flip a coin to see if it's up or down from one day to the next).  I should probably pick up some coal miners (which have gone way up along with solar) just to round things out.  Japan's going to need to import a lot of energy and raw materials to make up for lost capacity (and to rebuild hundreds of thousands of housing units) over the next few months.  At least one of their oil refineries has melted down into slag, and 2 gigawatts of capacity at Fukushima's a trillion-yen paperweight.


Westinghouse might be a little upset that GE is now selling their AP-1000 design too.  ;D ;)

Spent fuel ponds?  Get rid of 'em.  Reprocess that fuel into MOX pellets and consume it in another reactor.  If we want to be "green" then we should not let 95%
of the energy in fuel rods go to waste.

I am.

But first, let's close down those plants that were built in the days before automobiles had seat belts.  We've learned the hard way that BWRs may shut themselves down, but they aren't passively (no power to pumps, you still have a problem) safe, so let's upgrade them to something like GE's AP-1000, which was designed to solve this problem.  Oh, wait, we can't, because we haven't built a new reactor on US soil in 15 years.

And about those spent fuel ponds, one of which is sitting on damn near every reactor in the States?  If we're going to be dumb enough to ban the IFR and leave 95%+ of the energy in the used fuel without reprocessing or burning it, why do we have it sitting in pools of water that - in the event of a week without power - will eventually run out of water?  I mean, why don't we take all the spent fuel and put it into a big deep hole in the ground, you know, like we we promised the reactor operators we were going to do 30 years ago?  Oh, that's right.  Because Harry Reid is from Nevada, and elections have consequences.  

(Which is a moot point.   The anti-nuke folks won the PR battle the day the hydrogen blowout in Fukushima #1 gave you such awesomely-memorable footage, and everything else since then has been icing on the cake.  You guys won.  #3 was just overkill, and #4's fuel pool would be adding insult to injury.  The nuclear industry's now dead, even though the risks are being blown out of proportion, because something measurable is also being blown over the Pacific :)

So, fine, you guys win - no nukes.  

How many mountaintops bulldozed and people killed every year mining "clean" coal?  I mean, the ones that don't get dug out after a few weeks of TV coverage in Chile.  And what's the worst-case scenario with coal mining?  It's been 45 years, I hear Centralia is still a hot spot for tourism!

OK, coal's out.  How 'bout oil?  Now that Mardi Gras is over, anyone wanna head down to the Gulf of Mexico for some local shrimp gumbo?  (On the other side of this, there's no permanent ban on drilling in the deepwater Gulf, but there haven't been any deepwater GOM drilling permits issued in the 9 months since the "moratorium" ended.  You can drill, baby, drill, as soon as we get around to approving your permit, which is stuck in a filing cabinet behind a disused lavatory with a sign on it saying "Beware of the Leopard".  That's the permits department!)

OK, fine, we'll use natural gas.  It's even got the word natural in the name, right?  Just don't drink the frackin' water around here.

If you can figure out how to make the wind blow and the sun shine 24/7, there's a Nobel Prize in it for you - if you can get it past the environmental impact studies.

Disclosure:  No financial bias here - I own shares in solar (going way up this week, and consumer-available photovoltaics are cheap enough now that a decentralized power grid is no longer fantasy), nuclear (ouch!), and oil and gas (pick a random number and flip a coin to see if it's up or down from one day to the next).  I should probably pick up some coal miners (which have gone way up along with solar) just to round things out.  Japan's going to need to import a lot of energy and raw materials to make up for lost capacity (and to rebuild hundreds of thousands of housing units) over the next few months.  At least one of their oil refineries has melted down into slag, and 2 gigawatts of capacity at Fukushima's a trillion-yen paperweight.



Yes, wind & solar power does help but it is not enough. However, I don't hear anyone talking about tidal power. The major problem with tidal power is the initial cost. There is also hydropower. Vermont is investing in cow power-yup cow doodoo is being turned into methane. There are so many other renewable/clean energy sources but with big oil & coal running our government, these sources won't see the light of day.



Cat

Well Chernobyl was simply a situation of absolutely gross negligence and an absurdly poor design. Not a good example, I think, to use for the dangers of atomic power.
After a work colleague came up with Chernobyl going bang as a result of some wacky scientists carrying out tests, I went reading up about this yesterday - turns out they had suspicions that their safety procedures weren't going to work properly, so they ran a test.. and, hey, they were absolutely right.


However, I don't hear anyone talking about tidal power. The major problem with tidal power is the initial cost.

There are a few places where tidal power would be *huge* and relatively inexpensive.. but then you have the competing interest of current wildlife: the Severn Bore (something that can literally be described as a "tidal wave") would be able to provide huge amounts of energy, but to dam the Severn would cause a very localized environmental catastrophe.

After a work colleague came up with Chernobyl going bang as a result of some wacky scientists carrying out tests, I went reading up about this yesterday - turns out they had suspicions that their safety procedures weren't going to work properly, so they ran a test.. and, hey, they were absolutely right.


Yeah.  At Chernobyl they had some doofusses running a test with all the cooling and safety systems shut off, and essentially all of the control rods were pulled out at one time and the reactor went into a very unstable state.  At some point an operator saw that things were going awry and pressed a button to put the control rods back into the reactor.  But the design of the reactor was such that the control rods went into the reactor very slowly, and for the first 1/3 of their travel they actually made the reactor MORE active.  ;D

Long story short, the reactor went hypercritical and started generating the power equivalent to 30 gigawatts  :o , (or about 8x the entire Fukushima complex's at full power) , with the cooling system shut off, and it went kaboom.  Closest thing to an "atomic explosion" I think you can get in a power plant.  (The nature of the Chernobyl explosion was that water in the reactor superheated and blew the whole thang up.)

As safety tests go, you have to admit that it did prove a point, though.. They proved pretty conclusively it was a stupid thing to do.

There are a few places where tidal power would be *huge* and relatively inexpensive.. but then you have the competing interest of current wildlife: the Severn Bore (something that can literally be described as a "tidal wave") would be able to provide huge amounts of energy, but to dam the Severn would cause a very localized environmental catastrophe.




The Bay of Fundy has a 40 foot tidal variation, that's one hell of a lot of water moving around.

The Bay of Fundy has a 40 foot tidal variation, that's one hell of a lot of water moving around.

The Severn's at that kind of level, too - a full barrage across from Cardiff could theoretically produce 5% of the UK's electricity on its own..

I am.

But first, let's close down those plants that were built in the days before automobiles had seat belts.  We've learned the hard way that BWRs may shut themselves down, but they aren't passively (no power to pumps, you still have a problem) safe, so let's upgrade them to something like GE's AP-1000, which was designed to solve this problem.  Oh, wait, we can't, because we haven't built a new reactor on US soil in 15 years.

And about those spent fuel ponds, one of which is sitting on damn near every reactor in the States?  If we're going to be dumb enough to ban the IFR and leave 95%+ of the energy in the used fuel without reprocessing or burning it, why do we have it sitting in pools of water that - in the event of a week without power - will eventually run out of water?  I mean, why don't we take all the spent fuel and put it into a big deep hole in the ground, you know, like we we promised the reactor operators we were going to do 30 years ago?  Oh, that's right.  Because Harry Reid is from Nevada, and elections have consequences.  

(Which is a moot point.   The anti-nuke folks won the PR battle the day the hydrogen blowout in Fukushima #1 gave you such awesomely-memorable footage, and everything else since then has been icing on the cake.  You guys won.  #3 was just overkill, and #4's fuel pool would be adding insult to injury.  The nuclear industry's now dead, even though the risks are being blown out of proportion, because something measurable is also being blown over the Pacific :)

So, fine, you guys win - no nukes.  

How many mountaintops bulldozed and people killed every year mining "clean" coal?  I mean, the ones that don't get dug out after a few weeks of TV coverage in Chile.  And what's the worst-case scenario with coal mining?  It's been 45 years, I hear Centralia is still a hot spot for tourism!

OK, coal's out.  How 'bout oil?  Now that Mardi Gras is over, anyone wanna head down to the Gulf of Mexico for some local shrimp gumbo?  (On the other side of this, there's no permanent ban on drilling in the deepwater Gulf, but there haven't been any deepwater GOM drilling permits issued in the 9 months since the "moratorium" ended.  You can drill, baby, drill, as soon as we get around to approving your permit, which is stuck in a filing cabinet behind a disused lavatory with a sign on it saying "Beware of the Leopard".  That's the permits department!)

OK, fine, we'll use natural gas.  It's even got the word natural in the name, right?  Just don't drink the frackin' water around here.

If you can figure out how to make the wind blow and the sun shine 24/7, there's a Nobel Prize in it for you - if you can get it past the environmental impact studies.

Disclosure:  No financial bias here - I own shares in solar (going way up this week, and consumer-available photovoltaics are cheap enough now that a decentralized power grid is no longer fantasy), nuclear (ouch!), and oil and gas (pick a random number and flip a coin to see if it's up or down from one day to the next).  I should probably pick up some coal miners (which have gone way up along with solar) just to round things out.  Japan's going to need to import a lot of energy and raw materials to make up for lost capacity (and to rebuild hundreds of thousands of housing units) over the next few months.  At least one of their oil refineries has melted down into slag, and 2 gigawatts of capacity at Fukushima's a trillion-yen paperweight.


Reid claims he's against the Yucca Mountain project because nuclear waste from all over the country would have to be transported to Nevada through all the other state to get to the disposal site.  I think his opposition has something to do with him being senator from Nevada, but he does make a good point.  What happens when a railroad car full of nuke waste from Pennsylvania explodes in Oklahoma? 

"Oh, we can make waste transport vessels 100% indestructible."

Right.  I'm so sure.

Western civilization has built up an unsustainable high energy consumption lifestyle over the past 100 years.  Cheap oil enabled it.  We might not be able to replace the convenience of cheap oil with any combination of wind, solar, nuclear, and French fry grease. 

Fortunately, it looks like Fukushima will fare better than Chernobyl.  Nuclear power isn't going away anytime soon, certainly not in Japan.  However, I don't think we can look to it as a replacement for cheap fossil fuels. 

Reid claims he's against the Yucca Mountain project because nuclear waste from all over the country would have to be transported to Nevada through all the other state to get to the disposal site.  I think his opposition has something to do with him being senator from Nevada, but he does make a good point.  What happens when a railroad car full of nuke waste from Pennsylvania explodes in Oklahoma?  


Probably something like this, and I barely had to look, and this is decades-old footage.  I'm lazy.  

1eJMY9MT4a8

Making waste transport vessels secure against any impact is pretty easy.  It was like Mythbusters, but with a bigger budget and bigger explosions.  (For a good time, find the one of the F-4 Phantom jet going full-throttle into the concrete wall!)  

Suffice it to say that we've gotten better at it since then.  (And those guys had the coolest. jobs. evar.)

There are reasonable arguments against Yucca, chiefly based in issues regarding groundwater.  But those would apply damn near anywhere.  Instead, the industry was forced to store its spent fuel in storage ponds (and dry casks) onsite.  At the very least (in the US), most of those buildings are safe against aircraft impact.  They may or may not be designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake.  (Which is probably only a real risk to plants on the West Coast.)


Western civilization has built up an unsustainable high energy consumption lifestyle over the past 100 years.  Cheap oil enabled it.  We might not be able to replace the convenience of cheap oil with any combination of wind, solar, nuclear, and French fry grease.  


Here's the crux of the issue - "unsustainable".  Some things are, some things aren't.  What are you willing to give up for a "sustalnable" lifestyle.  

(I can't answer that myself.  I reject the premise because I'm not interested in "sustainable" life on this rock until an asteroid comes along and wipes out the species a few thousand years hence.  I'm willing to give up nothing, and I'm willing to invest in anyone and anything that can produce more kWh per dollar.  The sooner we run out of oil, the sooner we come up with better ways - nuclear and solar are my two faves - to get the exponential gains in energy production and consumption that will enable us to get off this rock to the asteroid belt, and from there to the stars.)

I won't live to see us return to the freaking moon, let alone Mars.  But that's fine, as long as I go out believing that either (a) the species is doomed and I consumed way more than my share on our way back to the "sustainable" caves, or (b) the species will actually  manage to pull it off, and I did my little bit to help us make our way off this rock.


Fortunately, it looks like Fukushima will fare better than Chernobyl.  Nuclear power isn't going away anytime soon, certainly not in Japan.  However, I don't think we can look to it as a replacement for cheap fossil fuels.  


What's your alternative?

I used to be a skeptic about photovoltaic, but became an advocate over the past few years.  It's finally gotten cheap enough to become viable for peak-power needs (vs. base needs), and it'd provide us with a distributed/decentralized grid, reducing the probability of power outages like the one that took out New York in the 70s and much of eastern North America in the early 2000s.  I still think we're going to need nuclear as our "base" power supply, and that goes double if we're going to transition from the internal combusion engine to electric vehicles that can be charged during off-peak hours.  

I don't own shares in Tesla Motors yet, but I'm biding my time.  The Tesla Roadster kicks ass, and if I had an extra million bucks to play with it'd be the first $100K I'd spend.  Funny thing is, if I'd had the cojones to buy into the IPO. I'd have made enough to buy the car.  *facepalm*