Posts by SteveH
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Hard News: Kittens and puppies for happiness, in reply to Emma Hart,
I shall go and look for pictures of unicorns that don't also feature naked men.
How about pictures of unicorns on naked men (and women)?
http://www.holytaco.com/30-awesomely-bad-unicorn-tattoos-gallery/
Some of them are probably NSFW. -
Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
- loss of land use within 20km of plant for one year (100,000 hectares @ $200k/hectare) = $20 bln
Your estimate on the land area is too high. Being on the coast the amount of land within 20km is more like 70,000 hectares. Obviously it remains to be seen as to whether this amount land will in fact be unusable for a year. More to the point, is this land really generating $200k per year per hectare now?
- decommissioning of site (based on 50% of Sellafield estimate) – $15 billion
I don’t think Sellafield is a good template. It’s not just a power station but has a long history of civilian and military nuclear research, has reprocessing facilities, a lot of waste storage, and has experienced several accidents. The Wikipedia page you linked suggests £2B per Magnox site. Three Mile Island cost about USD $1B for one reactor. Fukushima I has 4 reactors which will need to be decommissioned so I’d expect at least $4B, probably higher as it looks like more radiation has been leaked than in the TMI case. But from what we know of the situation right now I’d say $15B is on the high side.
- loss of agricultural production due to contamination (10% of $71bln) – $7bln
Have you got anything to back up the assertion that this will cost Japan 10% of it’s agricultural production for a year? I can see that as a result of the tsunami but for the nuclear accident we don’t yet know of a radiation release that would cause such a loss.
- loss of earnings by evacuees (200,000 * 50% * $30k) – $6bln
100,000 people out of work for a year? I’m not how realistic that estimate is either. Though obviously there will be costs involved in the evacuation and support of these 200,000 people that you haven’t included.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
That renders the question of whether nuclear power can be made truly safe somewhat moot in the NZ context. I'm far from convinced that it can be.
I'm not sure it can be made truly safe economically (in NZ), which is probably what you mean. And I agree there is no convincing case for nuclear power in NZ, and even if it made sense economically, we don't want it.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Ross Mason,
Holy shit.
Indeed. It all gets a bit surreal when the buildings start floating away.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
It wasn’t a melting of the entire mass of fissile material. When I asked if it’d been tested, I meant has anyone actually tried setting up a runaway, uncontrolled reaction that results in complete core meltdown in order to validate this supposed design strength?
That would be rather ridiculous. Are building designs tested for earthquake strength by subjecting them to earthquakes?
Over half the fuel in the TMI core melted and 90% of the fuel cladding failed. It was not a complete meltdown but it was a very significant test of the containment system.
if that’s the degree of strengthening that’s needed to be certain can we actually honestly say that it’s feasible to contain a reactor such that it cannot catastrophically release?
Given that a commercial reactor went into production with that degree of containment (if it did in fact have extra containment), yes I think we can say it's feasible. It's also feasible to design reactors that simply can't meltdown. Whether there is a will do so is the real question. After all, we're quite happy to live with cars killing half a million people per year.
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Field Theory: Japan moves, in reply to Maurine,
Ironic when you think France has the second largest number of nuclear plants in the world after the US (19 vs 17 in Japan).
Not only that, but they weren't too bothered about fallout from the atmospheric tests they continued to do for 11 years after the US and USSR had stopped.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Rich Lock,
1) they are still unable to produce that food 25 flippin' years after being dosed
Sheep had to be tested before being moved or slaughtered. I'm not aware of any locations in the UK being unable to produce food. The vast majority of restrictions were lifted by the end of 1986.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
And this has been tested? No, didn’t think so.
3 Mile Island was a meltdown, so yes, it's been tested. We don't really know what's going on at Fukushima I yet, but it's very likely that meltdowns have occurred in all three of the reactors where the cooling systems failed. So far it does not appear that significant radiation has escaped.
@Steve Barnes:Which to my mind raises the greater part of my own concerns. 40 years is an awfully long time to be employing and using same design; I’m sure this wasn’t at the insistence of the safety authorities.
The other way to look at it is to consider that we have 40 years experience building and operating these designs. That experience increases safety a great deal. As noted on Wikipedia, it is actually new technology that has been the most prone to accidents, and that is due to unforeseen circumstances and lack of operator experience.
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Hard News: The Wall and the Paper, in reply to steve black,
I would think it was a civil matter not criminal.
Why civil? If I go and graffiti my neighbour's house it is a criminal matter, is it not? How is the council painting a wall they do not have permission to paint any different?
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Hard News: The Thread, It Is Open, in reply to nzlemming,
I love that comic. So over the top.
Speaking of over the top, the Herald has this to say about the Fukushima reactor incident:
Workers have been desperately dousing a nuclear reactor with seawater to prevent it overheating, and causing an explosion that could wipe Japan off the map.
Someone needs to sit down and take a few deep breaths.