/sci/ - Science & Math

Sounds to me like you're making a No true Scotsman fallacy: Japan's nuclear reactors are safe and don't have meltdowns because meltdowns don't count when there's a tsunami involved.

Alarmists will alarm.
...Making other people alarmist and so on.

>>5007703
well, considering the reactor was totally fine before the tsunami game, and it was a once in 5000 tsunami, i'd say it didn't really count, yeah.

even if it was a melt down, what did it actually do?
no one actually died from radiation poisoning. and i think only two guys actually GOT radiation poisoning.
the ambient radiation levels only got into the worrying amounts for a few days maybe, then dropped right back down. there might be .5% higher cancer risk in the citizens from the nearby areas but they were (thankfully) evacuated very early.

hell, the fuel rod assembly ACTUALLY MELTED all the way, but then instantly solidified when it hit the bottom of the pot. and the plant was so old it was due to be decommissioned within the following week.

i'd say, considering the circumstances, it went extremely well.

Large crowds are stupid.

We need more, more effective pro-nuclear propaganda and honest information.

>>5007724
that's going to be difficult, the anti nuclear momentum is very strong, and lots of inaccuracies have wormed their way into "Common knowledge"

>>5007709
>tsunami came
>5000 year tsunami
meanwhile, on my keyboard..

>>5007709
> well, considering the reactor was totally fine before the tsunami game, and it was a once in 5000 tsunami, i'd say it didn't really count, yeah.

FACEPALM. If it didn't really count, then move right in, next door to the reactors. Moron.

REALITY COUNTS. IT HAPPENED. The reality is that there is yet another RADIOACTIVE WASTELAND on the planet where there wasn't one before, and it's due to yet another fuckup nuclear site.

At any rate, nukes in fault zones and tsunami zones: STOP FUCKING DOING THAT. Sadly for nuclear power, that means putting a stop to easy access to water supplies, which pretty much means putting a stop to most nuclear power in the first place. And I'm perfectly fine with that, since creating RADIOACTIVE WASTELANDS is about the intelligence speed of a Violent Simian.

>>5007739
>REALITY COUNTS. IT HAPPENED. RADIOACTIVE WASTELAND RADIOACTIVE WASTELANDS
Oh wow.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928050.200-risk-expert-why-radiation-fears-are-often-exagger
ated.html
>What is it about nuclear energy that makes people particularly fearful?
>There has been a lot of research on this. Nuclear radiation ticks all the boxes for increasing the fear factor. It is invisible, an unknowable quantity. People don't feel in control of it, and they don't understand it. They feel it is imposed upon them and that it is unnatural. It has the dread quality of causing cancer and birth defects.

>Nuclear power has been staggeringly safe, but that doesn't stop people being anxious about it, just as airplanes and trains are an amazingly safe way to travel but people still worry far more about plane crashes than car crashes.

>>5007739 yet another RADIOACTIVE WASTELAND

Your troll/devil's advocate is showing.

By "another" you imply the contamination is as bad as Chernobyl when it's not.


Problem:- Anti nuclear folk only need to hear your small batch of words. What approach should be taken to counter this argument effectively?

>>5007739
uh
the exclusion zone has been reduced to an area a mile around the plant since like...December.
the area is habitable now, very much so in fact.

>>5007739
>At any rate, nukes in fault zones and tsunami zones: STOP FUCKING DOING THAT.
'cept the rest of japan's reactors.....all of them in fact, including fukushima, took the earthquake just fine, and were in cold shutdown the minute the call came in that an earthquake was detected on the seismographs.

it's the damn tsunami that made all the problems.

and EVEN THEN if the generators were rated for flood usage, or put a few meters up off the ground, none of this would have happened at all

>>5007739
>the plant was so old it was due to be decommissioned ten years ago
fix'd

Part of the reason for its obsolescence was, ironically, the green lobby who didn't want:
a) for the plant to be dismantled as that would have raised the risk of radioactive contamination.
b) a new plant.

There have only been three serious nuclear accidents in the entire half a century nuclear power has been in use - only one of which actually lead to any loss of life.

And yet people STILL freak the fuck out over it. Hell, Germany is now in the process of completely abandoning nuclear power because all the anti-nuke rhetoric from Fukushima scared the shit out of them. Ironic considering they're going to have to buy power from France (which almost exclusively uses nuclear power).

>>5007768
oh...yeah..that...
i know that over here in murrika, it's because there aren't any new plants being built so licenses are being extended to accommodate

>nuclear power plants are dangerous
>we need thousands of nuclear warheads
>mfw

>>5007770
Even more ironic is that their supposedly green government is busy busy busy building more coal powerplants.

German greenies literally make me sick.

>>5007770
to be fair, Chernobyl was fucking horrible. like, mind-blowingly fuckbadhorrible.
i think the problem is people don't understand how bad chernobyl was, WHY it was so bad, and how pitiful three-mile island and fukushima were

>>5007781
The wonders of Soviet engineering. And professionalism.

>>5007785
mostly it was the RBMK design being all around really unsafe
and the personnel being lied to about other smaller accidents..
....and the fact they they went through with a shut down test at far lower power than they should have, and lots of other things all mixing together into a big pot of terrible

>>5007781
An estimated ~5-6 thousand died as a result of the accident, most of these deaths were due to cancers which were largely untreatable at the time.

By comparison, the estimate of Chinese miners who have died in mining accidents in China in just the last ten years is about 50-60 thousand (according to official numbers) and 100-150 thousand according to unofficial reports.


That's an average of 10 deaths a year vs 10,000

>>5007803
>Who else but china?

>>5007791
Yes, I remember. Here in finland, the red cross and other establishments were put on alert when the amount of fallout was still unknown. Reindeer meat, mushrooms and milk produced in some places were on the restricted list for years.

I guess it's the "All X is guilty by relation to X(a)".

>>5007803
A better comparison IMHO(in my haughty opinion) is the amount of people dying because of other energy production methods, especially coal plants, in more developed countries.

>>5007829
Coal fired power plants have produced far more radioactive fallout then every atomic plant and accident.

If you don't like radiation in the air you are better off using 3rd generation light water reactors then coal power plants.

>>5007847
oh, and the mandatory exclusion zones around power plants double up as excellent wildlife conservatories

>>5007817
uh
did they bother to actually test for cesium levels?

>>5007850
Yes. There were some elevated levels in eastern parts for a while. The long restriction was more for caution's sake than real need.

Not that it really stopped anyone from eating mushrooms and reindeer meat.

>Implying Nuclear even has a long term future
>Inb4 piece of shit will never work fast breeder reactors.

yeah, lets hold out for Fusion as well!

Green energy is the future, everyone knows this, no one gives a shit about Nuclear any more.

>>5007865
>nuclear doesn't have a long-term future
Nuclear has a longer-term future than tidal, wind or solar. When the Earth-Moon system becomes tidally locked, Sol stops shining and the atmosphere is no more, there's still radionuclides to be used.

>>5007865
Too bad green energy requires tons of space like farming, is unreliable due to dependence on weather, and has no efficient storage technologies.

Nuclear is the best source of clean, reliable baseload power.

I would just like to point out, a thorium powered reactor can't be weaponized. And it's much cheaper and efficient. That would be great for developing or damaged countries, as well advanced ones. And thorium is much more abundant

>>5007895
Yes. Currently thorium LFTR is the great future hope.

IIRC, a thorium reactor could be made small and powerful enough to open up the outer solar system.

That's if we can prevent greenies from shooting nuclear space ships down, figuratively and literally.

>>5007877

The earth gets consumed by the red giant sun before the sun stops shining.

But yeah, we need fusion power for spaceship drives (unless we can safely use miniature black holes, create wormholes, or violate matter/antimatter symmetry). And if we want similarly big projects on earth and whatever other planets we colonize, fusion power is going to be very useful. You need to cover square kilometers of surface for the same amount of energy that you need a 0.03 square kilometer high tech fusion power station with a bucket of water as fuel source.

If we want to terraform, we have to use fusion. If we want to use industial projects to cure global warming, rather than allow concern for nature to rule our every action, we need fusion power. (industrial carbon fixation projects. In goes global warming and a bucket of water, out comes a trillion tonnes of diamond, graphene, carbon nanotubes, etc., oh and expectation value two nuclear disasters where 10 people die and 1000 people get cancer (if we can't cure it by then) and 300 square kilometers are uninhabitable, as opposed to global warming where 100 million people have to move, 10 million starve, and a million square kilometers become uninhabitable, and opposed to a life where everyone has to worry about our carbon footprints and limit our consumption.

Fusion is better if we don't want to live like hippies.

>>5007920

Global warming is good for plants

>>5007770
> Hell, Germany is now in the process of completely abandoning nuclear power because all the anti-nuke rhetoric from Fukushima scared the shit out of them.

And that's the rational response. Nuclear reactors in the hands of Humans just leads to serious accidents. Having sites contaminated for centuries is a true sign that YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

If you can't run a nuclear plant safely in the heart of a highly civilized nation, with all its advantages, then that's a BIG FUCKING HINT that you shouldn't be running them at all. Germany is a truly advanced society, in that they have finally ADMITTED that basic flaw. Since Japs and Ameritards are throwback cultures, they can't make such an admission.

COUNT ON further accidents in the West and in Japan, including the one from Reactor #4 that's still unraveling.

>>5007770
That's because Germany is a bunch of green dumbasses with ridiculous subsidies on their faggotry that ends up hurting them because they have shit understanding.

Countries like America have the best nuclear scientists in the entire world. We need more, if only just in cause we need to build more weapons in the future for space colonization. It's America's destiny to enslave and kill all inferior nations in the world.

>>5007950
Not in the amounts predicted.
Also, due partly to the interdependence of species of plants and animals, the climate change is going to cause a lot of local and global extinctions.

>>5007980
Someone who froths at the mouth(CAPS! MORE CAPS!! AN IMMENSE AMOUNT OF CAPS!!!!!!) calling the current german energy policy rational? If they weren't causing so much damage, I'd be laughing.

>>5007980
The scariest part is that you believe what you're saying.

>>5007982

It's not a matter of good science, but of effective quality control. You've seen the incompetence of government, the inability of regulators to do their jobs, and the disastrous corner-cutting of corporations. These are the people that run nuclear reactors, not scientists but underpaid Simpsons. If you honestly think nuclear disasters will not happen as long as there are nuclear power plants, you are naive.

But that is not to say nuclear power is bad. As long as we rely on solar power it's physically impossible to get over 400 W/m^2 average at the equator, and that's not counting seasons, clouds, or any kind of inefficiency in the collection or distribution. So really you're going to be lucky to get 50 W/m^2. And then you want to use that for everything in the human economy, replacing every non-renewable energy source. Using the result google gave me for 1800 kg of oil-equivalent energy consumption per capita, we get 300,000 square kilometers to cover. And that's with half the world poor as fuck.

>>5008033

cont.

Now let me tell you, covering all the cities is not going to be enough. If we use things like rapeseed, we'll be using up farmland. If we use deserts, we'll have to construct massive facilities to keep the power plants functional, and most nations don't have the surface area. As a result, we've already seen rapeseed subsidies cause famines because there isn't enough farmland for food. Thousands die and hundreds of thousands of square kilometers become unusable.

Does any of this begin to sound familiar? What was it again, oh yes,

> Having sites [be uninhabitable] for centuries is a sign you're doing things wrong.

Think centuries is bad? How about forever?

The fact of the matter is, fusion power beats solar at its own game. It costs less human lives, does less environmental damage, makes smaller areas uninhabitable, gives us more electricity at less cost, requires less maintenance, and don't require a massive overhaul of human cultural and economic systems to facilitate it, *including* whatever damage nuclear disasters are likely to cause.

>>5008035
>The fact of the matter is, fusion power beats solar at its own game.
It's also yet to be determined if we can even produce a sustainable fusion reaction on Earth.

I hope we eventually get fusion working, I really do. But we can't base global energy policy on what MIGHT be developed 10, 20, 30 years from now.

Nuclear fission is the most efficient and effective means of power generation available right now, and it IS generally safe. Three serious accidents in fifty years out of hundreds of plants around the world, only one of which resulted in a serious loss of human life - that's better than a lot of power sources we use right now.

>>5007901


I absolutely do not want this to derail into a thorium thread because that isn't what we're talking about but I want to make a quick point. Developing and deploying thorium reactors will realistically take 20+ years once funding has been sourced.

If you're considering climate change that is a long time to wait for a non-negligible reduction in emissions. Right now we have more important things to target and deal with before convincing the public to invest in thorium.

Some of the main hurdles I can see that need addressed.

Nonsensical knee-jerk reactions. Germany as an example; Shut down nuclear power plants indefinitely - Make up power shortage by burning coal and purchasing nuclear produced power from France.
Result = No nuclear accident can be attributed to the Germans. Significantly more "greenhouse gas" emissions, any goals to combat climate change have gone out the window. Is this the German politicians just giving the public what they want even though the public is wrong and badly informed? Gotta love democracy

Old plants having their lifetime extended with new plants being refused building permission. This is just fucking retarded and a direct result from anti-nuclear groups with big mouths playing on the fears of public ignorance.

>>5008588 con't


Public cares about man-made climate change. Public also doesn't believe in man-made climate change.
Believing in climate change means that you have agree and put up with counter-measures. Higher energy costs such as car fuel to discourage unnecessary traveling. Higher product costs because of measures required during manufacturing to reduce emissions and environmental damage, environmentally friendly companies can be more expensive to run. It's easier for people to say climate change is nonsense and they should just ignore it if they are immediately feeling the pain of change.

Public is anti-nuclear. Public doesn't know what nuclear means.
The only experience many people have with anything nuclear are Chernobyl, Stalker, Fallout, Hiroshima (Nagasaki doesn't exist), Fukushima and anti-nuclear protest groups. This is disappointing and troubling. They don't know what a nuclear reactor really is nevermind understanding the differences between old and new models. Fukushima could not have happened in a newer reactor.

It's a clusterfuck of bad information being chewed up and spat out into worse information to be swallowed by people who don't know how to process this information in the first place.

>>5008590
>>5008588

I suggest we take on the anti-nuclear groups, stalk their information outlets and flood them with correct information they conveniently left out. We can gradually sway their (huge) audience onto the side of common sense, managing to do this will be a huge milestone for nuclear power.

Good luck nuclear fags, you have some tough competition

>http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/nuclear/

>http://grist.org/list/20-foot-radioactive-ant-will-make-you-pretty-concerned-about-nuclear-power
/

Are they in some way implying radiation is related to giant insects? Are they confusing sci-fi with reality?

The anti-nuclear movement began a long time ago primarily to do with nuclear weapons and gradually more focused on nuclear power.

This was a time before the Internet. Does anyone remember how little fact checking was possible for trivial information? Bullshit spread easily and no one checks up on it even when they have no excuse because the Internet now exists.

They are a curse with 30+ years of experience of being entrenched in their ideology.

Okay, but I hope you enjoy Rolling blackouts and relying on foreign fossil fuels (Who's diplomatic status may chance, prices may change, and will dry up).

We (The UK) are going to be buying lots of energy off France and Russia if we shut down all our reactors tommorrow. Why? France has an abundance of cheap energy due to all their new reactors, Russia has lots of fossil fuels.

>>5008303
> But we can't base global energy policy on what MIGHT be developed 10, 20, 30 years from now.

Precisely my point. People who bring up fusion are like children, mentally. There's no evidence whatsoever that fusion will work for a commercial power source. In fact, there are decades of evidence that say it can't. Fusion is the unicorn of public energy policy. Nobody can sanely make a plan for it in that arena.

That old box on the chalkboard: "Then magic happens." It was supposed to be a JOKE, but the fusionerds aren't smart enough to know that.

>>5008744

Please pass that message on to the krauts and the little yellows.

>>5008748

How does this mental state compare to that of greenpeace? Who appear to protest everything even if it means contradicting themselves.

I blame mwdia sensationalism.reminds me of a different converation i saw on facebook.

Parents were discussing how old their child should be before they could walk to school bus stop by themselves.

One young mom said "i used to walk to school by myself in the 2nd grade. But there is no way i will let my daughter do the,same. It isnt safe like it used to be"

This struck me as odd because crime is down across the board here.then i realized the news talks more about dangers, so people,become,scared. The jaws effect.

>>5007699
>>5007709
The reactor meltdown was fucking bad. It made half of Regan's helicotper fleet radioactive, and most likely made at least 3 pilots off the list of flying for a year because their exposures are too damn high for the tables.
>>5007728
>not living in the Southeast
>glorious new reactor construction

The southeast has the perfect 1 2 hit of old coal plants and expanding populations demanding cheap energy, and the coal lobby is weak because of how cheap coal is, making them low now. Nuclear is back, even with this, just because with gas having fracking issues in the Northeast, solar being a clusterfuck, and wind producing ultrasonic waves/BLOCKING MAH VIEWS, its the best not gas way of providing base load

>>5007980
Uh, you do realize that they actually do run in the heart of some of the largest cities, every day, San Diego, one of the largest cities in the United States has several gigawatts of nuclear energy, being run in horribly exotic drill conditions nearly daily, and it moves. It is not impossible to run a 100% safe flaweless program, but you need to demand more of your operators and procedures, also, why do you hate Freedom, anon-kun?

>>5007980
>Japan fails to adhere to safety protocols
>Germany abandons domestic nuclear power and buys electricity from France which only generates 80% of its electricity from nuclear
>rational

I still think this is the best picture of Angela Merkel ever.

>>5008590
>Nagasaki doesn't exist
oh man, i noticed that
it's all about hiroshima for some reason

>Hell, Germany is now in the process of completely abandoning nuclear power because all the anti-nuke rhetoric from Fukushima scared the shit out of them. Ironic considering they're going to have to buy power from France (which almost exclusively uses nuclear power).
>tfw Germany actually EXPORTS power to France

You guys got your heads so far up your own asses that Klein bottles get jealous.

>>5008941
>implying Germany has shut down all of its power generation

>>http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-sets-world-record-pv-solar-cell-power-conversion-efficiency
>>Tests of our Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (made of readily available copper, zinc, and tin, and referred to as CZTS) thin-film devices have achieved a world-record PV solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency of 11.1 percent (10 percent better than any previous reports) for this class of semiconductors, say IBM Research photovoltaic scientists Teodor Todorov and David Mitzi
>>http://courses.washington.edu/me341/oct22v2.htm
>>Typical automobile fuel efficientcy: 20%.
>>https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Nuclear_power#Use
>>As of 2005, nuclear power provided 6.3% of the world's energy and 15% of the world's electricity

We could drop nuclear energy tomorrow and most countries would never notice it's absence. The countries that have a nuclear program don't have it for energy, they have it for weapons. No one would be stupid enough to spend preposterous amounts of money building and maintaining non-thorium reactors. No one would use a form of energy that produced poison, unless they needed that poison for something else. That something else is nuclear weapons.

Solar is going to get cheaper and cheaper. It's not going to use rare or dangerous materials. Nuclear will be abandoned because it is objectively the inferior option. Oil will be abandoned because countries don't want to be enslaved to OPEC.

>>5008748
fusion will probably work, and work pretty well, but on a half-century timescale at best, and even then they'll have to "break in" the technology for a few decades to get used to its eccentricities.

>>5008851
southeast is in a nuclear expansion phase? neat
they certainly have enough small rivers to use for secondary coolant

>>5008851
also
>Regan's helicotper fleet radioactive
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-14/world/japan.us.navy.radiation_1_crew-members-radioactive-steam-ra
diation-exposure?_s=PM:WORLD
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-03-15/us/navy.radiation.challenges_1_crew-members-iodide-pills-radiatio
n-exposure?_s=PM:US
makes sense, but it must not have been too bad if it all came off with soap and water. the only issue is that i'm having trouble finding what their actual dose was.

it's funny watching the articles slowly escalate in severity (ones posted after the above two), yet they all link back to the same sources

>>5008982
>fusion will probably work

>>5009003
hey mang, i have pretty high hopes for MTF