The Pacific Ocean is being trashed....

[Frank Lee]

If you are alive and you want to do things, you're gonna use something. My PC electrical consumption is like a spit in the ocean- are you sure you wanna go there? Because AS NOTED, it is not the existence of a few power stations that is causing the uproar, it is the addition of more and more and more power stations and the more and more and more grid and all the lovely things that go with that, that is causing the concern... a tipping point sort of thing.

I don't know why you and Varn and some others are so gung-ho about new power plants- are you invested in utilities or something? Do you suffer from excessive brownouts and blackouts? What's it to ya?

I nominate your back yards for new nuke plants AND nuke waste storage sites.

If there is a difference between the power plant Glee Club and the Drill, Baby, Drill Glee Club... I don't see it.

[Giovanni LiCalsi]

I'm with you!

[NeilBlanchard]

It is going to take at least 40 years to clean up the mess that is Fukushima. A lot of farm land is ruined, and a lot of people are displaced.

If the best they can come up with a freezing the ground all around the plant down below the ground water, then things are pretty bleeping desperate.

[Giovanni LiCalsi]

The inspector is now saying that it will not be successful to build a freeze wall and that we humans haven't the technology to fix it. There will be a lot of nuclear band aids used for many years. Too bad. Japan was a beautiful country.
I love seafood but now I'm considering my thyroid condition could be in trouble if I continue eating fish. A lot of my generation (64 years old) have had their cancerous thyroid tumors removed, due to radiation from all of the atomic bomb testing and the WWII bombing of Japan.

[P-hack]

start an open source geiger counter project...

edit, looks like plenty of them out there:
http://code.google.com/p/opengeiger/

take it shopping.

This looks like the heart of it, $20 part, and same chip as in an arduino:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/301019751801?lpid=82

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

Unplug a few hundred million phantom electricity using devices that are essentially doing nothing productive, or put up more filthy nukes- or power plants of ANY sort?

Two distinct points here. I completely agree on the first - cut out much of the waste, and we would not only not need to build more power plants, we could shut down some of the dirtiest.

But when you say that nukes are filthy... well, that brings us back to the old Mark Twain saying about the things we know for sure that just ain't so. What's sadly ironic here is the sight of people who rightly chide the AGW denialists for ignoring science, turning right around and ignoring science when it conflicts with their quasi-religious "nukes are sinful" beliefs.

I don't know why you and Varn and some others are so gung-ho about new power plants...

Because if you build a new, clean nuclear plant, you could conceiveably shut down an old, dirty coal plant. And if you combined that with increased energy efficiency, you could shut down TWO of them.

[Giovanni LiCalsi]

It is not cost effective to build a nuclear power plant, period!

[t vago]

All the true believers here are harping on the Fukushima Japanese nuclear plant accident that occurred as a result of the 2011 tsunami. Little wonder that none of these true believers have anything to say at all about a true nuclear atrocity, because it would cast some doubt on their favorite form of government.

NYT: Soviet Nuclear Dumps Disclosed

Of possibly greater concern [than the nuclear reactors disposed in the ocean] is the radioactive waste dumped at sea. Russian authorities told Dr. Charles Hollister [of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution] that 11,000 to 17,000 waste containers, holding 61,407 curies of radioactivity, were dumped off Novaya Zemlya from 1964 to 1990. In addition, 165,000 cubic meters of liquid waste were dumped in the Barents Sea west of Novaya Zemlaya from 1961 to 1990. For comparison, the Chernobyl accident released about 86,000,000 curies of radioactivity.

[In addition], Dr. Hollister reckons the amount of nuclear material within some of the [four Soviet submarines lost at sea] at seven times that in the ill-fated Chernobyl reactor.

Keep in mind that Fukushima is estimated to have released about 1/10th as much as Chernobyl did.

And here's another tidbit about how wonderfully the anti-capitalists performed:

CNN Fortune: THE NEW SOVIET THREAT: POLLUTION After 74 years of Communist mismanagement, the former Soviet Union is an environmental menace to the world. The cleanup will cost billions -- and guess who pays.

Last year [1991], a Russian scientist from Murmansk disclosed that contrary to official denials, the Soviet navy had been dumping nuclear waste in the Barents Sea for nearly 30 years. The dumping site, he claimed, was several hundred miles from the Norwegian coast in a known fishing area. Even worse, the barrels of nuclear waste at first floated. So what did the Russians do? They punctured the protective containers, apparently so the highly toxic barrels of radioactive waste would fill with sea water and sink.

Where is y'alls concern about this, true believers?

[t vago]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

Either you and Vago have done that, or you both have missed the thread about energy usage where I posted my 122 kwH/mo average electric consumption

I really don't give one whit about how much ocean spit you saved. You're the one who lumped us all in as trashy "tenants."

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

P.S. It's too bad that such well known names in this arena- like Gore and Nader- are also the biggest hypocrits and idiots. Fine- dismiss them completely. Don't let them destroy the facts and the message.

Nope. They're the face of the AGW/Gaia/Eco-crazy movement. They're the ones that get the most publicity. They're the ones who define the movement in many people's eyes. They're the ones who selectively ignore the true environmental atrocities that were committed by the USSR, and are committed by Red China. Can't just ignore that, now, can you?

[redneck]

.

Here's a good reason not to build anymore.

Courtesy of the U.S. government...



U.S. GAO - Spent Nuclear
Fuel: Accumulating Quantities at Commercial Reactors Present Storage and Other Challenges

140,000+ tons of (reported) spent fuel laying around in the US alone, and continually making aprox 2,000 tons every year. The last major storage proposal, Yucca mountain, was squashed in 2009. Currently over 75% of the spent fuel is stored in cooling ponds waiting to be dealt with. The government is estimating that once a suitable location is located that it would take 15-40 years of work to develop it. Once an off-site facility is available, it will take several more decades to ship spent fuel to that facility. This situation will be challenging because by about 2040 most currently operating reactors will have ceased operations, and options for managing spent fuel, if needed to meet transportation, storage, or disposal requirements, may be limited.

And just like Fukushima...

Studies show that the key risk posed by spent nuclear fuel involves a release of radiation that could harm human health or the environment. The highest consequence event posing such a risk would be a self-sustaining fire in a drained or partially drained spent fuel pool, resulting in a severe widespread release of radiation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which regulates the nation’s spent nuclear fuel, considers the probability of such an event to be low. According to studies GAO reviewed, the probability of such a fire is difficult to quantify because of the variables affecting whether a fire starts and spreads. [I]Studies show that this low-probability scenario could have high consequences, however, depending on the severity of the radiation release. These consequences include widespread contamination, a significant increase in the probability of fatal cancer in the affected population, and the possibility of early fatalities.[/I]

And then there's this.

Because a decision on a permanent means of disposing of spent fuel may not be made for years, NRC officials and others may need to make interim decisions, which could be informed by past studies on stored spent fuel. In response to GAO requests, however, NRC could not easily identify, locate, or access studies it had conducted or commissioned because it does not have an agencywide mechanism to ensure that it can identify and locate such classified studies. As a result, GAO had to take a number of steps to identify pertinent studies, including interviewing numerous officials.

So, nothing to worry about now is there...???

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