Kornergas. Wake up and pull your head out of the sand. Talk of closing nucular reactor plants is cheap untill someone flips a light switch and there is no more electricity. Fossil fuel is not the answer nor is wind or solar, the only viable alternative is Nuclear. Stop posting nonsence. Salvadoral
https://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/electricity-nuclear-power-nuclear-plants-renewable/3/28/2011/id/33600
For 40 years I've written about nuclear power, defended it, andbelieved -- as I still do -- that it offers the best signpost to a greatfuture. To what Churchill called the "sunlit uplands"; in short,utopia.
I regard electricity as one of mankind's greatachievements, saving people from the menial, painful drudgery thatmarked daily existence without it. Growing up in Africa, I'd see men andwomen walking miles, many miles, barefoot across the savanna, lookingfor a few pieces of wood to burn for cooking and hot water.
Electricity,I've believed for these four decades, is assured for thousands of yearsthrough nuclear power. With advanced breeder reactors and with theenergy stored in weapons plutonium, it comes close to perpetual motion:So much energy from so little fuel.
The alternative choice is toburn up the earth, fossil fuel by fossil fuel, until we are searching,like the people of the African savanna, for something that is left toburn.
Wind and solar are defined by their geography and limitedby their scattered nature. Their place at the table is assured but notdominant. Industrial societies need large, centralized energy sources.
Yeta nuclear tragedy of almost immeasurable proportions is unfolding inJapan. The sum of all the fears about nuclear is being realized. Hadesand Poseidon have joined to cut nuclear down.
Do disasters, likethe Japanese nuclear one, really kill technologies? Mostly,obsolescence does that; but their demise can be accelerated by a lasthuge mishap.
While the Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, N.J.,in 1937 didn't end lighter-than-air aircraft for passenger travel, itdrew the curtains: fixed-wing airplanes were doing a better job. TheConcorde supersonic jet didn't leave the skies because of a fatalaccident at Paris-Charles De Gaulle Airport in 2000, but it did make theConcorde's planned retirement immediate.
Conversely, theTitanic's sinking in 1912 didn't put an end to ocean liners: they gotsafer. Throughout the 19th Century boilers were constantly blowing up,not the least on the stern-wheelers plying the Mississippi. Boats keptworking and the technology -- primarily safety valves -- got better. Badtechnologies are replaced by safer ones; good but flawed technologieswere improved.
That is the history of boats, cars, planes and, yes --resoundingly yes -- nuclear power.
Afterthe Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, a new word, "passive," began todominate reactor design and construction, but the idea arrived too latefor the
General Electric (GE) Mark1 plants, ordered so long ago."Passive" is a design in which cooling pumps are not as important. Theidea is to depend more on passive forces, such as gravity feeds andconvective cooling. These are featured in newer designs, and there hasbeen some back fitting. Things were moving in the right direction, butnot fast enough.
The story of the reactors at the FukushimaDaiichi site is a story of success and failure. They were designed 40years ago to meet what in advanced design is known as a "maximum"credible accident. That included, in the Tohoku location, an earthquakeof a magnitude which had never occurred there. Excluded from this"maximum" calculation of what was credible was the tsunami.
Thetsunami that struck on March 11 exceeded the imagination of catastropheto that point in time. Within the credible design envelope, the plantsperformed flawlessly. They shut down; the emergency cooling pumpsstarted up in fractions of a second; and when they failed, batteriestook over. The problem was that the tsunami destroyed the dieselgenerators, and the whole sequence of disaster began.
Theopponents of nuclear power -- and they have been pathological inopposition for more than 40 years -- have their footwear on and areready to dance on the grave of nuclear. They might want to unlace andtake a seat: Nuclear power is not about to be retired in favor of analternative source.
Big demand for new energy (ideallycarbon-free energy) around the globe, and especially in India and China,can't be satiated without nuclear. An abundance of natural gas in theUnited States already has reduced the demand for new nuclear to four orfive reactors. We'll be okay for a while.