Nuclear Power
Dave Sweeney from the Australian Conservation Foundation says Australia has a direct moral responsibility for any nuclear fallout.
Fair enough as long as we accept that Japan has a direct moral responsibility for Aussies killed in accidents involving Japanese vehicles.
Same logic.
The Greens and Lefties will be crowing about the danger of Nuclear power but Australia is well know as being geographically stable so the current Japanese problems have no bearing whatsoever on our Nuclear power debate.
Two earthquakes and no tsunamis of note in my life time in the entire continent do not cut it as a factor in the debate.
The same type of characters that panic about climate change used to panic about nuclear energy and to try and force us to join their church come up with the term ‘China Syndrome‘, a scenario where a reactor accident would develop into a self sustaining heat source and burn all the way from the US to China.
In a small way the Three Mile Island accident proved the extent of truth in the proposition as the molten core material got exactly 15 mm of the way to China as it froze on the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel.
No one died but that’s not the point. The Left has an ideological abhorrence of anything nuclear, possibly emanating from the cold war days when they agitated for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Unilateral because they only wanted the US to disarm – the communists in the USSR were the good guys after all and anything that might bring the Great Satan to her knees was on their ‘to do’ list
It will be a long long time before Nuclear energy racks up more deaths that coal fired energy.
If ever.
Ziggy Switkowski, former chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation has this to say;
In Australia, opponents of nuclear power already point to the situation in Japan as evidence of the dangers of nuclear reactors. They conveniently sidestep the loss of life and damage caused by exploding oil tanks, burst gas mains, electrical fires: hazards that come with living in a tectonically active region.Possibly tens of thousands dead from the earthquake but about half of the media coverage is about the nuclear disaster which, so far, has killed exactly no one. Let’s just concentrate on helping Japan get back on her feet. UPDATE: There is an incredible amount of misinformation and hyperbole flying around the internet and media right now about the Fukushima nuclear reactor situation. To get a good layman’s description and maybe become better armed to enter into debate on nuclear energy you might like to read this piece at bravenewclimate
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Poor old Dave.
How will he react when he learns the nuclear powered USS Ronald Reagan is now in Japanese waters providing assistance? Surely, the ACF will order it to be gone.
No to nuclear power, the time is now to invest in renewables, nuclear power is not clean and in no way green. Accidents like these prove it. The waste takes hundreds of thousands of years to become stable, the places thought “geographically stable” now, may not be in the future, time to go green, Australia has so much sun, geothermal, wind and water resources to exploit. NO NO NO NO to nuclear.
Renewables are way too expensive and do not provide baseload capable power. the waste from a reactor is stable from the moment it is generated, it isn’t safe (more on that later), but it is stable and certainly could be easily stored somewhere central in Australia.
In the event thay an area in the centre of a tectonic plate like Australia becomes tectonically unstable, we have WAY bigger problems than a few hundred tons of radioactive waste.
Time to go green? no way, sun doesn’t provide baseload power and is both very ‘surface area intensive’ and 7 x as expensive to generate power as coal. wind – do a google search on ‘failed wind turbines’, generally when the subsidies stop, the maint stops and the turbines self destruct not long after – they also tend to slaughter birds, hardly green – they also don’t do baseload and create noise pollution. Water, hmmm – you remember that drought we just came out of? the one the global warming nuts told us will never end? yes, thats the one. it will be back in due course.
Dams also interfere with wildlife reliant on those waterflows for food and water and when they fail they tend to fail catastrophically.
Geothermal? hmmm you do know that the company pushing that has failed to make their test sites work don’t you?
But back to nuclear, a 50 year old reactor tech, run quite poorly by TEPCO, survived a Mag 9.0 earthquake, was then hit by a 14m (ish) tsunami and released only trivial amounts of radioactivity – that is a pretty major endorsement for nuclear power, particularly in a techtonically stable country like Aust, with plenty of room to site them inland where tsunamis are not a threat.
However, you can go one step further, and IMO we should, LFTR (also called MSR) reactors rather than the ‘conventional’ PWR reactors, the US built and ran one in the 50s, India and China are developing them (France too on a smaller scale), they run on Thorium and the waste products they create are ones that would decay to background radiation levels in 300 years, they do not require pressurisation, so you would not see explosions like the hydrogen explosions at Fukushima. They are also easy to build with passive safety systems that shut them down if external power is removed.
The amount of panic about nuclear power is laughable, avoiding nuclear power because of Chernobyl is like avoiding air travel because of Aeroflot.
“But back to nuclear, a 50 year old reactor tech, run quite poorly by TEPCO, survived a Mag 9.0 earthquake, was then hit by a 14m (ish) tsunami and released only trivial amounts of radioactivity – that is a pretty major endorsement for nuclear power, particularly in a techtonically stable country like Aust, with plenty of room to site them inland where tsunamis are not a threat.”
No it didn’t
http://www.news.com.au/world/japan-nuclear-reactor-core-maybe-breached/story-e6frfl00-1226028269142
the core is breached.
No, according to your reference, it MAY be breached (actually, that is just the headline, the official quoted in the story says it isn’t breached – see below) and so what if it has? it has not released any serious amount of radioactivity, if this is as bad as a core breach gets, bring it on – from a public safety perspective it doesn’t matter if the reactor has been doing the foxtrot on ice skates, it has leaked SFA radioactive materials.
To quote your reference – “It is possible there may be damage somewhere in the reactor,” he said, adding later that there was no data suggesting there were any cracks and that a leak in the plumbing or the vents could be to blame.”
Again, big endorsement for nuclear.
Harry, it has released very high amounts of radiation.
http://www.news.com.au/world/fukushima-workers-evacuated-over-radiation-levels-in-water/story-e6frfkyi-1226029011701
It may help to read the full story rather than just a partial headline, Eddy.
Here’s a roundup of the latest facts, accompanied by highlights of the most egregious misreporting.
First up, three technicians working to restore electrical power in the plant’s No 3 reactor building stood in some water while doing so. Their personal dosimetry equipment later showed that they had sustained radiation doses up to 170 millisievert. Under normal rules when dealing with nuclear powerplant incidents, workers at the site are permitted to sustain up to 250 millisievert before being withdrawn. If necessary, this can be extended to 500 millisievert according to World Health Organisation guidance.
None of this involves significant health hazards: actual radiation sickness is not normally seen until a dose of 1,000 millisievert and is not common until 2,000. Additional cancer risk is tiny: huge numbers of people must be subjected to such doses in order to see any measurable health consequences. In decades to come, future investigators will almost certainly be unable to attribute any cases of cancer to service at Fukushima.
Nonetheless, in the hyper-cautious nuclear industry, any dose over 100 millisievert is likely to cause bosses to pull people out at least temporarily. Furthermore, the three workers had sustained slight burns to their legs as a result of standing in the radioactive water – much as one will burn one’s skin by exposing it to the rays of the sun (a tremendously powerful nuclear furnace). They didn’t even notice these burns until after completing their work. Just to be sure, however, the three were sent for medical checks.
So – basically nothing happened. Three people sustained injuries equivalent to a mild case of sunburn. But this was reported around the globe as front-page news under headlines such as “Japanese Workers Hospitalized for Excessive Radiation Exposure”. Just to reiterate: it was not excessive.
Wow, lets all panic about that.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/25/fukushima_scaremongering_debunk/
Feel free to keep wetting the bed about this, but you are not helping your case.
Now rated as bad as chernobly Harry, you still think it is trivial?
Yep, trivial, as noted by the sane, that rating is precautionary, it is more of an accounting matter, not in response to anything that has actually happened.
Find me someone outside the reactor complex who has scored more radiation exposure than you’d get from a chest CT scan.
Please, stop the bed wetting and read some science, MIT has an excellent rolling update, now take a bex and go to bed, it will be fine.
http://mitnse.com/
20,000 plus killed by the tsunami….zero killed by the reactor damage but the Left still insist on spreading alarm and despondency about nuclear power.
FFS…Its an ideology thing Eddie.
Dude the thing with the Half life if you had 1Kg of Caesium-137 in 30 years you would have 500g then 60 years after release you would have 250g then 90 years a/r you would have 125g so to reach your saeetmtnt of Not much left .. will take quite a while ,after 230 years about 3.5g will be left which is emitting gamma rays at 1.176 Mev still enough to give plenty of people genetic damage ,or add in Bio amplification and that makes most meats tainted for the next 500-1000 years .<3 <3 <3
Periya, do you mean 240 yrs for 3.5g. Just wondering…..typo I guess.