Randall Munroe, writer of XKCD, is an ex-NASA researcher - it's trueOriginally Posted by ICBM
Regarding the rest of your post, the comic's about the safety of storing spent fuel in pools, similar (though not identical) to the discussion around Cumbria (in Cumbria, they're talking about dry-storing the waste after it's sat for long enough in a pool to be relatively safe). I don't think anyone's going to argue that building a Nuclear power station in an earthquake- and tsunami-prone area doesn't present additional challenges.
More modern fast-breeder reactors generate waste with much less initial radioactivity, and in the event of a failure, the reactor shuts down by design, in the same way that, if your car runs out of petrol, it stops, rather than accelerates to 200mph (a meltdown).
"Brilliant things instead of weeping will be for the person who comes to the truthful one. But a long period of darkness, foul food, and the word 'woe' - to such an existence your religious view will lead you, O deceitful ones, of your own actions." - 1000 years BCE, Zoroaster predicts the coming of Keanu.
They said that about Fukushima too - the reactors automatically shut down when the earthquake happened. But even a shut-down reactor needs cooling.
The meltdowns were caused by the failure of the cooling system when the backup generators were destroyed by the tsunami, which then put the reactors into an unrecoverable position because without the generators, they couldn't be restarted either.
Obviously this particular bit of design stupidity won't be repeated - but it doesn't give a lot of confidence in the nuclear industry engineers to properly think through worst-case scenarios. What's the next oversight of a combination of events that hasn't been planned for?
And not only is nuclear fail-unsafe, the consequences of a failure last decades to thousands of years.
To me, nuclear is a 1950s dream of futuristic cheap power that was developed before the downsides had really been worked out. It will never be completely safe, or cheap, and it's time to find other ways of doing the job. Finding somewhere to store the waste is the least of the problems really, but hopefully it may help to concentrate minds on the alternatives.
I used to be a rare thing - a 'green' who supported nuclear because it's much cleaner than fossil. But then I read the reports into Sellafield, Dounreay and Fukushima, and now I don't.
Last edited by ICBM; 31st January 2013 at 12:29 AM.
"Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand" - Homer Simpson
http://www.theangelconversations.com
There are trees, you just can't see them because it's so windy that they're growing horizontally.
Why should Hull get all the benefit? I'm bidding for it to go to Sheerness instead.
That's just greedy - they've already got a decaying ammunition ship.
"Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand" - Homer Simpson
http://www.theangelconversations.com
That's something I never thought I'd read..
My vote goes to London.
According to my colleague, they're DFL's (down from London) who live there for 5 minutes or have a holiday home there, and think they have a God-given right to dictate what the locals should be doing without knowing a damn thing about it.
Right, that's it! I'm starting a poll!
Well, you know - it's always the same - money to London, shit up north.. Cunts!
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