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If we build a nuclear station, where should we put it?
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"I used to be in your camp too - with an irrational fear of nuclear energy - so I have an idea of your approach. I am sure you are quite genuine in this, but I can assure you that you are mistaken. "
Very good SeanW ! Where did your road to Damascus experience take place - in the spotlessly clean visitors canteen in the spotlessly clean Sellafield Interpretative Centre?
:D:D 0 -
Judgement Day wrote: »"I used to be in your camp too - with an irrational fear of nuclear energy - so I have an idea of your approach. I am sure you are quite genuine in this, but I can assure you that you are mistaken. "
Very good SeanW ! Where did your road to Damascus experience take place - in the spotlessly clean visitors canteen in the spotlessly clean Sellafield Interpretative Centre?:D:D
I don't understand, is this supposed to be a provocation, a joke or an insult?
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so you admit nuclear power generation is worse than coal....... thank you...
Thank you for putting words into my mouth. No I don't think nuclear power is worse than coal. I accept that nuclear accidents can be worse than coal accidents. However, coal at its safest, without an accident, causes more damage to the environment and population living in close proximity to it than nuclear power does. This, to my mind, makes nuclear better than coal.robtri wrote:so you dismiss the chernobly effect, because it doesn't fit into your nice squeaky clean image of nuclear power... like it or not Chernobyl happened and could happen again... the forsmark incident in Sweden shows how close it came again to happening....
the other two examples are out of date... ok how about reading this report on nuclear accidents that have happened since chernobyl..
http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/181/181995.pdf
I haven't had the chance to fully read this, I will try to get round to it, however, in the parts I did read, they claim nuclear power is unsafe based on reactors built in the last century. This is my point, that technology has grown to make nuclear power safer. People keep highlighting "near misses" but doesn't this just reinforce my point? The safety precautions are good enough to limit accidents to near misses instead of full-blown meltdowns. What is "the chernobyl effect"? If you are referring to the fact that an old nuclear reactor left to rot for years will meltdown eventually, I fully acknowledge that fact, my point is rather that such a thing shouldn't happen.robtri wrote:The worst very rarely happens, but accidents happen all the time....
Agreed, but for a nuclear meltdown to occur in a modern reactor, several accidents and system failures would have to occur all at once. I suppose this is possible, but so is the sun going supernova and destroying us all...robtri wrote:your analogy about the swords and guns is pointless and .....
ohh by the way, you could also fall over and impale yourself on swords, or fall and impale the guy in front of you... which is just as bad as shooting yourself or a friend...
I did use the word "reasonably" in there. There's no way you could reasonably fall on your sword and impale yourself by accident(although I could be wrong, I've never tried!:P)! You could trip and impale the guy in front of you, which would be tragic, but with a gun you could accidentally trip and mow down a whole squad of your allies. That is what I was going for with the comparison. Accidents with swords cause smaller scale injuries, accidents with guns cause larger scale injuries. Coal accidents cause smaller scale injuries, nuclear accidents cause larger scale injuries. My point is; we shouldn't hold back on advancement because there's a small chance something goes wrong, how else can we possibly improve our technology? 0 -
Don't forget I too am in favour of nuclear power, I think its a great thing and personally don't have any issues with it at all...gaynorvader wrote: »Thank you for putting words into my mouth. No I don't think nuclear power is worse than coal. I accept that nuclear accidents can be worse than coa <snip> ....because there's a small chance something goes wrong, how else can we possibly improve our technology?
Yes the chances of a large scale accident are diminishing all the time with new safety protocols and advances in technology... but people need to be aware they still happen....
and if we decided to build a new nuclear power plant in the morning and forgetting about planning issues, the technology that goes into it would be out of date by the time it opens.... it takes between 12 and 17 years tobuild and commision a nuclear powerstation.......0 -
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@Cliste:
"Well let's have our own conversation anyway!" Sure, why not. I'll bite
"Is it wise to pin your hopes on what is really an emerging technology?" Like I said, I doubt these will still be "emerging" by the time, if ever we are ready to think about it logically.
"Has anyone done the maths on the environmental impact of the micro reactors?" If you're looking for very fine details, I don't have them. My knowledge is much more general. But I do know that some of these, such as the Toshiba 4S, operate much as a "nuclear battery" being fully self-contained units and with specifications that call for them to be placed underground, it sounds pretty clean and straightforward. I don't know much about the manufacturing of them though.
Besides we don't have to use these emerging reactor types - the CANDU reactor generally comes no more than 600MW per reactor - and it has the added benefit of being a virtual "garbage can," being theoretically able to take not only normal nuclear fuel, Low Enriched Uranium or LEU, but natural uranium, plutonium, reused MOX fuels, Thorium and a few others.
"Judging by the traditional reactors they aren't really that carbon efficient... "
Well, France gets more than 90% of its electricity from non-fossil sources, of which 75% of the total is nuclear, I am assuming thusly that this would have been very difficult, if not impossible if the maths didn't work out.
Keep in mind that when I say I'm pro nuclear, it's not because I love nuclear power so much, it's just that everything else is far worse in at least one respect. In a world where, quite literally "nothing is perfect" nuclear is closest power generation form we have.
@Driseog
"With the small size of this country and proper political commitment, there is no reason for us not to be able to get all our energy from renewable sources."
I can give you one very good reason - renewables don't work. Despite every Green party and Greenpeace propoganda piece being festooned with pictures of windmills, grid control requires controllable power sources. Renewables are - quite literally - as reliable as the weather, and so we cannot build a power system based on them. The only country that has ever been able to eschew both fossil and nuclear electricity is Iceland - but that's only because they have a whole bunch of wide river valleys and geothermal activity.
A lot of talk is given to the idea of energy storage - i.e. taking power from the wind turbines and solar panels in highly productive time, dumping it some kind of power bank, and drawing down on that when the clouds roll in or the wind tapers off. The problem is that for Ireland that would mean storing up about 1000 GW/h of power or more, if we wanted to use weather based renewables exclusively. The only proven technology for this is hydroelectric or pumped hydro plants. An emerging technology, the Vanadium Redox Battery, is too small in scale - you might have heard about this having been proposed for the Sorne Hill windfarm in Donegal. That idea is on ice for 3 main reasons:- The company that markets the technology is bankrupt.
- To be viable, it would have required a large increase in electricity charges to consumers. We already have among (if not the) highest electricity charges in all of Europe, so that's out.
- Despite being by a wide margin the largest VRB in the world, the Sorne Hill VRB would only store 12 MegaWatt Hours. Ireland's peak demand is in the region of 4000MW.
"And with the way things have gone in the past few years would ye trust anyone to manage a nuclear power station safely in Ireland?" If we tried to build and run our own reactor, the worst that could happen is that it would be 10 years late, 3 times over budget, and the nuclear regulator would be shutting it down all the time - which would be very much in line with the way our government does things :mad:
This is NOT the Soviet Union, however, and the chain of events that caused the Chernobyl accident could not happen - not even in Ireland!!! The closest modern evquivalent necessary would be Zimbabwe.
Of course we could always just buy Toshiba nuclear batteries, we would avoid a lot of that.0 -
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I haven't read all this thread, too long winded for my taste.
If someone can come up with an alternative power source that will power the country as clean and cost effective as nuclear power then lets do it.
Unfortunately we dont have any sensible alternatives. Personally I think we should build a Nuke Station in between Tallaght and Lucan. Both areas would benefit from Jobs created by its construction and provide a couple thousand jobs once its open. Plus it would definately improve the esthetics of the area.
Nuff said, if i was El Presidento thats what i'd do
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NOGMaxpower wrote: »I haven't read all this thread, too long winded for my taste.
If someone can come up with an alternative power source that will power the country as clean and cost effective as nuclear power then lets do it.
Unfortunately we dont have any sensible alternatives. Personally I think we should build a Nuke Station in between Tallaght and Lucan. Both areas would benefit from Jobs created by its construction and provide a couple thousand jobs once its open. Plus it would definately improve the esthetics of the area.
Nuff said, if i was El Presidento thats what i'd do
sensible alternative..... GAS
cheap to build, cheap to run and lower risks than nuclear...0 -
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In the firstplace, I doubt it was "just luck" that prevented a meltdown, there may be some hyperbole there (wouldn't be the first time). In any case, the reactor has (or should have) full double containment vessels that would have taken anything a reactor in meltdown could throw at it and the worst that could have happened was a Three Mile Island, which as you're aware didn't make any territory uninhabitable, or AFAIK kill anyone, due to the fact that it had full double containment vessels whereas Soviet plants did not. It should also be pointed out that the plant dates back to the 1980s.nothing happened, but the potential for catasphropy is shown by failures in the plant..
It's not a question of "brushing it under the carpet" - it's a question of relevance. Most of the people who play the Chernobyl care either A) have an agenda orI am only talking about recent times... since chernobyl, as seemingly some people who support nuclear power want to brush that one under the carpet...
don't know what they're talking about. The only comparison between Chernobyl-4 and modern Western nuclear reactors, is that they're both nuclear power plants.
In every other possible detail, the Chernobyl/RBMK plant is not at all like anything ever done outside the former Soviet Union.
Lets see ... Russia was bankrupt then ... had been a Communist country only a few years earlier ... infrastructure probably built under the Iron Curtin ... nothing to see here.or 1993 Tomsk accident - over 2000 people exposed to large radiation doses, but that one was in russia so let me guess it doesn't count...
http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/115650-n9MQVZ/webviewable/115650.pdf
Glorified industrial accidents.lets try Japan 1999 - 2 dead and 119 people exposed to high levels of radiation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accident
and Tokaimura 1997, 37 people exposed to nuclear radiation
and 1993 Fukushima power plant 1 dead
And what if we decide to burn coal instead?there are plenty more accidents happening in nuclear plants, the problem with nuclear power is
the WHAT IF scenario....
Coal kills 25,000 people annually in the U.S.
and mining kills about 6000 more each year.
Norway spends an exponentially increasing amount of money each year treating its lakes and rivers with lime to counteract Acid Rain damage from Southern European coal burning.
If the entire area of Southern Norway where the critical load has been exceeded should receive sufficient lime, the costs would be approximately NOK 340 million according to the Norwegian Institute for Water Research.
Source.
Gas is not as filthy but still causes CO2 emissions as well as radon, and is totally insecure, being transported over long pipelines (from countries that don't like us very much) and being impossible to store or build a "strategic reserve" of.
With fossil fuels, it's not a question of "what if" but rather "How much destruction are we prepared to put up with?"0 -
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In the firstplace, I doubt it was "just luck" that prevented a meltdown, there may be some hyperbole there (wouldn't be the first time). In any case, the reactor has (or should have) full double containment vessels that would have taken anything a reactor in meltdown could throw at it and the worst that could have happened was a Three Mile Island, which as you're aware didn't make any territory uninhabitable, or AFAIK kill anyone, due to the fact that it had full double containment vessels whereas Soviet plants did not. It should also be pointed out that the plant dates back to the 1980s.
It's not a question of "brushing it under the carpet" - it's a question of relevance. Most of the people who play the Chernobyl care either A) have an agenda or don't know what they're talking about. The only comparison between Chernobyl-4 and modern Western nuclear reactors, is that they're both nuclear power plants.
In every other possible detail, the Chernobyl/RBMK plant is not at all like anything ever done outside the former Soviet Union.
Lets see ... Russia was bankrupt then ... had been a Communist country only a few years earlier ... infrastructure probably built under the Iron Curtin ... nothing to see here.
Glorified industrial accidents.
And what if we decide to burn coal instead?
Coal kills 25,000 people annually in the U.S.
and mining kills about 6000 more each year.
Norway spends an exponentially increasing amount of money each year treating its lakes and rivers with lime to counteract Acid Rain damage from Southern European coal burning.
If the entire area of Southern Norway where the critical load has been exceeded should receive sufficient lime, the costs would be approximately NOK 340 million according to the Norwegian Institute for Water Research.
Source.
Gas is not as filthy but still causes CO2 emissions as well as radon, and is totally insecure, being transported over long pipelines (from countries that don't like us very much) and being impossible to store or build a "strategic reserve" of.
With fossil fuels, it's not a question of "what if" but rather "How much destruction are we prepared to put up with?"
so every accident that has happened in a nuclear power plant you dismiss, cause it doesn't fit your clean nice image of Nuclear power..
well bury your head in the sand then.... NUclear power is a good thing but it isn't as wonderful and as squeaky clean as you say... I have no hidden agenda and am comfortable playing the chernobyl card...
core meltdown happened and happened before chernobly in Three mile island and the quite possibly will happen again....
I have never supported coal as a source of power...
I have only recommend Gas... which I believe is a better option for ireland...0 -
so every accident that has happened in a nuclear power plant you dismiss, cause it doesn't fit your clean nice image of Nuclear power..
well bury your head in the sand then.... NUclear power is a good thing but it isn't as wonderful and as squeaky clean as you say... I have no hidden agenda and am comfortable playing the chernobyl card...
core meltdown happened and happened before chernobly in Three mile island and the quite possibly will happen again....
I have never supported coal as a source of power...
I have only recommend Gas... which I believe is a better option for ireland...
And what happens when gas goes the way of oil? Why invest in old fossil fuels which will run out? Why not invest in something which, once running, will be easy to maintain running? I don't understand this over-reliance on gas, coal and petrol powered plants Ireland has. If any alternate to nuclear power were to be proposed, I'd recommend tidal power as it's as reliable as the tides!
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gaynorvader wrote: »And what happens when gas goes the way of oil? Why invest in old fossil fuels which will run out? Why not invest in something which, once running, will be easy to maintain running? I don't understand this over-reliance on gas, coal and petrol powered plants Ireland has. If any alternate to nuclear power were to be proposed, I'd recommend tidal power as it's as reliable as the tides!
what happens when uranium runs out or becomes too expensive.... Nuclear power relies on fuel we digg out of the earth and there is a hell of a lot less of it than gas....0
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