Title of an article in this week's Economist magazine. Now why would I bother to read such an article? They don't know what's going to happen, and I know they don't know. Nobody knows.
We still don't know how bad Fukushima is. So far there is horrendous property damage. Five out of six reactors on the site are damaged and/or wrecked permanently. A few workers have been exposed to maybe twice the safe yearly dosage (17 REM)for nuclear workers. Radio activity outside the plant fence is worrisome but not bad enough to warrant abandoning the land long term. But the accident is still not under control. If a reactor pressure vessel ruptures the radio activity release will poison a big swath of Japan for decades. That hasn't happened yet, but nobody will rule that out as long as the reactor cooling systems are down. The ultimate outcome, either merely horrendous property damage or a second Chernobyl, will make a big difference in what happens next.
We will have a contest between the anti nuke greenies and the consumers who want a lower electric bill. The greenies will talk about accidents that will cause all your children to be born with two heads. And glow in the dark.
The consumer side is less organized. It isn't clear right now that nuclear power is all that cheap, although rising fuel prices may turn that around. In the US, nuclear plants need US government guarantees on their mortgages, the private capital market considers them risky investments, and won't lend without Uncle Sam's guarantee. That suggests that a $6 billion-and-change nuclear plant may never earn enough money to pay off its mortgage.
The utilities got cold feet about nuclear power 30 years ago after Seabrook and Three Mile Island. So they are standing on the sidelines, they don't have a dog in the fight.
The global warming greenies ought to back nuclear power, 'cause it doesn't emit any CO2. But they probably won't.
With the battle ground and the contestants so murky, any kind of prediction is untrustworthy.
2 comments:
The greenies are against any kind of power, including alternative sources. Just listen how they scream when a new wind farm or solar farm is proposed: It (they) will disturb the existing ecology; it will kill birds; it will destryt the only known habitat of (place the name of the endangered species du jour here); construction of the power lines needed to carry that alternative energy will destroy/desecrate the prairie/forest/desert/etc.
You name it, they'll find something to be against.
In regards to nuclear power, the one thing that only a few reports mentioned about the Fukushima Daiichi plants: they're 50-year old designs built 40-some years ago. The newer Gen III and proposed Gen IV plants are far safer and won't suffer from the weaknesses of the Gen I and Gen II plants. But none of that matters because all the greenies know is that someone told them nuclear power is bad/evil/will cause you to gain weight and suffer from male-pattern baldness. Therefore it must be banned.
Does seem like the greenies can get all righteous about nearly anything. Yet few of them will admit to being willing to go live in the woods like Hiawatha. Especially in a New Hampshire winter.
The Fukushima plants were well built and well designed. They rode out a Richter scale 9 earthquake. Unfortunately the following tsunami knocked out their backup electric power, putting down the electric coolant pumps and causing the reactors to overheat.
When fingerpointing time comes, we oughta ask why the backup generators didn't have better protection, and why the coolant pumps didn't have steam powered backup. I mean this is a steam driven nuclear power station, they ought to have plenty of steam to run small steam turbines attached to the critical coolant pumps. Or, a Briggs and Stratton gasoline engine hooked directly to the pumpshaft.
The worst case plant accident we used to worry about, was a "guillotine break" of the main coolant plumbing. Such a break would let all the coolant out of the reactor and prevent the pumps from circulating anything. This was the "loss of coolant accident" (LOCA) much discussed in the reactor safety literature. This did not happen at Fukushima. Instead the electric grid went down from the earthquake and their backup generators were knocked out by the tsunami.
I've heard a lot of talk about better modern reactor designs that can cool themselves by natural convection. This was called "thermosyphon cooling" back in the day before all cars had water pumps. Henry Ford hated pumps and Fords ran on thermosyphon cooling long after his competitors put in water pumps. Me, I believe in pumps.
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