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Pander posted:A lot of them are at where nuke plants are. I think they're also adding any type of processing plant, national lab, or repository. Could go there and check but I'm lazy and think I'm correct. Nah, I checked. They're "private and EPA sensors" so basically where there are cities and/or weirdos. However they have a forum.... Edit: Alas the forum is more "why is there a spike on station ____!!!" and "which Geiger tube should I buy" than anything fun. However, there was some confusion about neutrons/neutrinos. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 04:31
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So if I feel like it I can put a radioactive source next to a geiger counter that's hooked up to the internet and convince a bunch of wacko's on the internet that there's a huge radiation leak in my state? That's pretty cool!
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Dec 12, 2013 04:41
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ed: Mispost
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Dec 12, 2013 04:43
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Trabisnikof posted:Those are just random Geiger counters connected to the internet. That's kind of a neat idea. Assuming they're reliable and the data can't be manipulated of course. Hopefully it can be used to show everyone it's all cool. I mean, with this many nuclear plants: And all the readings on the map being 'normal', maybe it ain't so bad. Trabisnikof posted:Saying coal/gas is about as useful as saying solar/nuclear. It's really not.
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Dec 12, 2013 05:31
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Hobo Erotica posted:That's kind of a neat idea. Assuming they're reliable and the data can't be manipulated of course. Hopefully it can be used to show everyone it's all cool. If you try to use them to gauge background radiation where you live, for instance, you'll never really know what you're measuring. 20 counts per second might be the first signs of radon, or maybe just a nearby pile of bricks or slab of granite/marble. Yes, granite and marble are pretty radioactive, and someone working at Grand Central Station in NYC will get much high dose rates than staff working in contaminated areas in a nuke plant. What's with the "coal/gas" "solar/nuclear" thing? I'm strongly against coal for how insanely harmful it is to the environment and our health. I'm against natural gas because I think fracking is a tremendous waste of water, harmful to the environment to college, and natural gas still contributes to greenhouse emissions on a large scale. I'm for solar, but feel that it's logistical disadvantages are underestimated by many environmentalists. The primary disadvantages of nuclear are matters of policy on multiple fronts (public/political will, waste management, changing Jimmy Carter era reprocessing opposition, maintaining high standards of engineer vs low bidder mentality), not technical So I want nuclear up front to create clean baseload energy, I want solar to steadily grow in contribution (especially in more isolated/sun-friendly areas). I want storage system development spurred. I want natural gas used for heating. I want coal to be left in mountains. I'm on the fence with wind, preferring to wait for better designs that don't require massive gearboxes prone to failure and generators that don't require so much neodymium (I think Enercon had a neat no-blade design, but I've not paid attention to wind stuff since my wind power course about 2 years ago). Pander fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 05:41
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Hobo Erotica posted:It's really not. Its still incredibly silly to treat coal and gas as equivalent in any meaning way except they both emit carbon. Their production impacts are vastly different, their interface to the grid is different (including their emissions per kw/h), secondary markets effecting price are different, and most importantly their regional distribution is vastly different for the two fuels. Maybe its only as bad as saying renewables/hydro, but its still not a helpful simplification. Especially when energy is so geographically dependent, the differences between coal and gas for specific counties can be a huge deal. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 06:23
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Trabisnikof posted:Its still incredibly silly to treat coal and gas as equivalent in any meaning way except they both emit carbon. Their production impacts are vastly different, their interface to the grid is different (including their emissions per kw/h), secondary markets effecting price are different, and most importantly their regional distribution is vastly different for the two fuels. I think a lot of people in this thread place high emphasis on "does this energy source contribute to carbon emissions?" Hence grouping coal/gas and nuclear/solar. There are numerous sizable differences between coal and gas, but it's not illogical to lump them together when you're comparing "carbon burning" versus "zero carbon".
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Dec 12, 2013 07:20
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Quantum Mechanic posted:
What of this cleanup operation in Japan? You mean the same one which was hit by a wrath of God Hat Trick, managed to stay in one piece and not blow up? Besides, blaming nuclear power and painting it as unsafe because of a poorly managed cleanup is a little silly. What of Uranium Mining, it CAN be managed with seawater extraction, and that doesnt even consider the Fast-Neutron reactors. As far as the rest of it goes, nice strawman, keep doling out the Gishgallop.
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Dec 12, 2013 07:37
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Pander posted:I think a lot of people in this thread place high emphasis on "does this energy source contribute to carbon emissions?" Hence grouping coal/gas and nuclear/solar. But one is twice as bad as another on carbon alone, and if you open it up to the full environmental impacts coal is incredibly worse as a fuel source than gas. And requires no new technology or mass changes in public perception.
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Dec 12, 2013 07:49
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Trabisnikof posted:But one is twice as bad as another on carbon alone, and if you open it up to the full environmental impacts coal is incredibly worse as a fuel source than gas. And requires no new technology or mass changes in public perception. It does require vast amounts of freshwater, which becomes contaminated. I have a problem with that. And I'm not even talking about potential contamination of aquifers, I'm just talking about the straight injection of water required to frack. Coal is worse to burn, I don't argue that one bit. I argue that the extraction of natural gas is every bit as bad as coal, just in a more subtle way.
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Dec 12, 2013 08:58
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You should be more pissed off about the flaring. The water issues largely come down to State Departments being bad at creating and enforcing painfully obvious regulations that no other industry can get away with. It's not something that can't be done right, the governments just get caught up in the middle between rogue drillers with wads of cash, sensible engineers and environmentalists who take forever to form their opinion, and hippies. Make the drillers use their industry's own cleaned up water and you'll get them cleaning it up right. Mining coal is still worse.
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Dec 12, 2013 09:18
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Neurotic Nurse posted:What of this cleanup operation in Japan? You mean the same one which was hit by a wrath of God Hat Trick, managed to stay in one piece and not blow up? Besides, blaming nuclear power and painting it as unsafe because of a poorly managed cleanup is a little silly. I'm interested in hearing your definition of "in one piece"  and "not blow up." 
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Dec 12, 2013 09:55
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Neurotic Nurse posted:What of this cleanup operation in Japan? You mean the same one which was hit by a wrath of God Hat Trick, managed to stay in one piece and not blow up? Well done, I didn't think even the most rabidly pro-nuclear could call Fukushima "in one piece" at this point. Neurotic Nurse posted:Besides, blaming nuclear power and painting it as unsafe because of a poorly managed cleanup is a little silly. If private operators falling off roofs can be counted in the "death toll" of solar energy, massive spills of contaminated water and acid can sure as poo poo be included as downfalls of nuclear. You can't just say "well, yes, that should have been done better." It wasn't, and more than that, it wasn't done properly in a country that's generally pretty goddamn terrified of nuclear power. One of the issues I have with nuclear is that I have little faith in our long-term ability to correctly plan for it and regulate it. Neurotic Nurse posted:What of Uranium Mining, it CAN be managed with seawater extraction, and that doesnt even consider the Fast-Neutron reactors. See, nuclear proponents do have an argument when they point to the scientific and commercial pedigree of current nuclear power. That's a reasonable argument upon which someone can base a plan, and one I'll admit has more stability than renewable plans. When you start bringing in non-commercial, expensive, and in some cases downright theoretical technologies, you start losing that. You can't point to the issues with nuclear power currently and go "well we'll just solve that with X uncosted technology" when the criticism you level at renewables is that the technology doesn't have the commercial pedigree of nuclear. Neurotic Nurse posted:As far as the rest of it goes, nice strawman, keep doling out the Gishgallop. You mean the strawman of "goddamn hippies" that you paint as being the universal source of opposition to nuclear power? Or rapid-fire citing scientific organisations whose only relationship to nuclear power is one or two working papers and no official word for better or worse? Calling CSIRO numbers that they admitted are optimistic estimates "endorsement?" Give me a loving break.
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Dec 12, 2013 09:58
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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Pander posted:It does require vast amounts of freshwater, which becomes contaminated. Fracing still requires less water than coal does if you look at the whole fuel cycle, coal power plants consume a lot of water (and some coal mines are way worse than fracing for polluting ground water). Really the issue with fracing is one of regulation not a technological one.
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Dec 12, 2013 10:11
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Ganguro King posted:I'm interested in hearing your definition of "in one piece" Wooh i got to debunk this with a crazy customer who pretends to be a professor at the college close to my work! If the rods were somehow blown to smithereens you'd easily be able to find them because they'd be emitting crazy amounts of radiation compared to everything else. You gotta remember that only the empty roof of the building blew up from the hydrogen accumulating in the enclosed building, it only contained the spent fuel rods not the actual reactor itself. Seeing as the fuel rods are in fact not blown all over the site or rendered into a molten pool then spread via smoke and debris ala Chernobyl this is a sound success for nuclear technology. Imagine what would have happened if a coal plant had been there instead, poisoned ground for who knows how long with the sea life most likely facing a mass die off. I'd love to see what those waste water ponds do to life and farm land--didn't one of them already break back in the 70s? *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill woop "it does have some heavy metals within it, but it's not toxic or anything." haha. Arghy fucked around with this message at 10:52 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 10:47
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I don't think anyone made the claim that the rods themselves exploded? (Maybe the crazy guy at your work?) And I wouldn't call the forcible evacuation of 300,000 people with no timeline on when they can return to their homes a "success story." That's a shitload of people who have been harmed as a result of TEPCO's incompetence, and all too often it's gets waved off because they are suffering from stress-related illnesses instead of radiation poisoning. I sure as hell am not advocating coal so I dont know why you brought that up either.
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Dec 12, 2013 11:16
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Quantum Mechanic posted:Well done, I didn't think even the most rabidly pro-nuclear could call Fukushima "in one piece" at this point. Well, there you go. I just did, although I'm only referring to the containment vessel proper. That is a fair point you made at me though. Quantum Mechanic posted:If private operators falling off roofs can be counted in the "death toll" of solar energy, massive spills of contaminated water and acid can sure as poo poo be included as downfalls of nuclear. And I agree, and unlike renewable energy, I'm not aware of a single instance of any species going locally extinct, or birds being chopped up because of it. Quantum Mechanic posted:You can't just say "well, yes, that should have been done better." It wasn't, and more than that, it wasn't done properly in a country that's generally pretty goddamn terrified of nuclear power. One of the issues I have with nuclear is that I have little faith in our long-term ability to correctly plan for it and regulate it. Well, if it makes you feel better, you could for instance look at the French example, or the Swedish, or the West German examples, or even at Japans. Nobody died, and a death toll even at the highest end estimate, of around 5,000 people, is tragic admittedly, but still by far the safest of any form of electricity. Quantum Mechanic posted:See, nuclear proponents do have an argument when they point to the scientific and commercial pedigree of current nuclear power. That's a reasonable argument upon which someone can base a plan, and one I'll admit has more stability than renewable plans. When you start bringing in non-commercial, expensive, and in some cases downright theoretical technologies, you start losing that. You can't point to the issues with nuclear power currently and go "well we'll just solve that with X uncosted technology" when the criticism you level at renewables is that the technology doesn't have the commercial pedigree of nuclear. And yet here we have the renewable energy lobby, which for the last 10 years has been blabbing for a CST plant to replace Playford B, promising this marvelous new technology just around the corner, yet 10 years later on, here we are, not even slightly closer. You did get me on a fair point though. I shouldn't have delved into the whatifs. I should have just ignored what you had to say on it, and pointed to you the real working examples which we have, as well as the largest deposit of Uranium in our very own backyard.
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Dec 12, 2013 11:19
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Neurotic Nurse posted:And I agree, and unlike renewable energy, I'm not aware of a single instance of any species going locally extinct, or birds being chopped up because of it. "Birds being chopped up" by wind turbines is a complete furphy. Do you also think they should be taxed on grounds of "visual pollution?" Neurotic Nurse posted:Well, if it makes you feel better, you could for instance look at the French example, or the Swedish, or the West German examples, or even at Japans. Nobody died, and a death toll even at the highest end estimate, of around 5,000 people, is tragic admittedly, but still by far the safest of any form of electricity. Yeah, the best examples there went massively over time and over budget, and the worst fell the gently caress apart because someone was apparently asleep at the wheel when siting it. Also, uranium is great when you can externalise the environmental effect onto mostly poor/third-world nations and externalise the costs of actually running the plants onto the government, like EDF do. Neurotic Nurse posted:And yet here we have the renewable energy lobby, which for the last 10 years has been blabbing for a CST plant to replace Playford B, promising this marvelous new technology just around the corner, yet 10 years later on, here we are, not even slightly closer. I'm confused. Would this be the Repower Port Augusta campaign who worked with BZE to develop a CST/wind proposal to replace the Playford B plant as an alternative to the gas plants SA want to use? That didn't involve any future or non-commercial technology? That's been stonewalled at every turn by fossil fuel corporation lobbying? We're not even slightly closer to CST in Port Augusta because the SA government refuse to go through the plan, not because the technology doesn't exist. You, again, seem to credit the environmental movement and the Greens with considerably more power and influence than they have. You honestly seem to think RPA have just been holding the government's hand back on demolishing the plants and replacing them with glorious nuclear reactors because they think viable solar is only a few years off. Neurotic Nurse posted:You did get me on a fair point though. I shouldn't have delved into the whatifs. I should have just ignored what you had to say on it, and pointed to you the real working examples which we have, as well as the largest deposit of Uranium in our very own backyard. Pointing out that we have nuclear deposits isn't a particularly great rebuttal to concerns over uranium mining. It's funny, though, how it's always perfectly okay to make Aboriginal people rip up more tribal land whenever we need it.
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Dec 12, 2013 12:17
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Quantum Mechanic posted:"Birds being chopped up" by wind turbines is a complete furphy. Do you also think they should be taxed on grounds of "visual pollution?" Tell that to these guys: http://news.yahoo.com/guilty-plea-bird-deaths-wind-farms-first-081651963--finance.html 
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Dec 12, 2013 12:24
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14 eagles I'll admit could absolutely happen, but the way some people act you'd think wind turbines rained dodo guts. It's also worth noting that there's recent evidence that birds are capable of avoiding wind turbines, and that the simple installation of the plants doesn't inherently cause bird collisions - that it's a far more complex issue than just "turbines kill a bird."
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Dec 12, 2013 12:32
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The companies only 'admitted' to those counts. There also are not many eagles out there dude. They are just playing politics. The claims are much higher, across wildlife agencies, across continents. I suppose you'd call Nature a furphy blog too though? http://www.nature.com/news/the-trouble-with-turbines-an-ill-wind-1.10849
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Dec 12, 2013 13:24
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That article said basically what I just said, which is that turbines can be sited, designed and operated in ways that minimise bird fatalities, of which wind turbines are an utterly miniscule amount compared to cats, power lines and farms. So yes, I'd pretty much call it a furphy that in my experience 90% of the time is trotted out by conservative politicians as a way to attempt to turn the messaging of the environmental movement back on itself while continuing to push for expansions of coal and gas power.
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Dec 12, 2013 14:00
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Quantum Mechanic posted:That article said basically what I just said, which is that turbines can be sited, designed and operated in ways that minimise bird fatalities, of which wind turbines are an utterly miniscule amount compared to cats, power lines and farms. So yes, I'd pretty much call it a furphy that in my experience 90% of the time is trotted out by conservative politicians as a way to attempt to turn the messaging of the environmental movement back on itself while continuing to push for expansions of coal and gas power. Cats don't kill Condors. Reread the article my friend. Read the actual papers if you're feeling jiffy. Don't create straw man arguments because you don't like the people or their viewpoints. You ever see one of those blades fall off? They aren't exactly tiny. They don't last nearly their rated 20 years. Wind is not an end all.
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Dec 12, 2013 14:29
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Quantum Mechanic posted:"Birds being chopped up" by wind turbines is a complete furphy. Do you also think they should be taxed on grounds of "visual pollution?" Most bird species can avoid them just fine. A few of the rarer species may have some difficulties, but I'm not up to date on that. A good solution there is probably to not build wind mills in locations where endangered birds who fly into wind mills live. Most bird species don't fly into them with any regularity because they register as things not to fly into. Like a barn. Khorne fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 14:42
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Off the topic of nuclear and renewables, is there a more up to date history of the oil industry than "The Seven Sisters" or is that still required reading?
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Dec 12, 2013 18:43
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JollyPubJerk posted:Cats don't kill Condors. Reread the article my friend. Read the actual papers if you're feeling jiffy. Don't create straw man arguments because you don't like the people or their viewpoints. You ever see one of those blades fall off? They aren't exactly tiny. They don't last nearly their rated 20 years. Wind is not an end all. I like how you simultaneously call someone out for making straw man arguments then proceed to make straw man arguments, no one is arguing wind is an end all energy source. If we want to start talking about incidental animal deaths due to power generation lets talk about thermal fish kills.
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Dec 12, 2013 19:55
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Trabisnikof posted:If we want to start talking about incidental animal deaths due to power generation lets talk about thermal fish kills. So....fish, which repopulate in much larger numbers are obviously more adaptable than eagles, which lay two to three eggs a clutch.
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Dec 12, 2013 20:41
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Listen, unless your power plant effects no person or creature physically, emotionally, or financially it's out, I'm not even going to consider it. Unless it's coal or gas, which are awful, but until someone comes up with a perfect alternative we're stuck with it, sorry guys.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:07
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Baronjutter posted:Listen, unless your power plant effects no person or creature physically, emotionally, or financially it's out, I'm not even going to consider it. Unless it's coal or gas, which are awful, but until someone comes up with a perfect alternative we're stuck with it, sorry guys. Listen, your plan might be the most pragmatic, but there are some details I don't like so I'm going to wait until several trillion dollars fall from the sky so I can build fifty thousand CST plants.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:09
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Hobo Erotica posted:Is this scenario contained in any nuclear engineering books? Or are they in uncharted territory, making it up as they go along? This is from a few pages back, and you had other good questions that are worth answering (though some answers will be hard to come by as I'm not sure the information has been released), but to address this in particular, the answer is basically yes. The immediate cause of the accident is a generally described incident called a Loss of Offsite Power (LOOP), where you lose the power you're using to run your pumps and must resort to a local alternative (generators). This is covered in any standard nuclear engineering textbook about power engineering and reactors. Given the nature of the accident (usually something catastrophic happens to lose offsite power) and the consequences (no pumps = no cooling = meltdown) it's stressed as one of the biggest problems you can run into while operating a nuclear reactor that absolutely must be handled properly, along with a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA), for hopefully obvious reasons. The clean-up, however, is a completely different thing. No one has ever had to do a radioactive cleanup on this scale before; so in that sense, this isn't a textbook scenario, though you can bet it will be in the future. We don't have a strong understanding of how Cesium migrates in the environment because we've never had a release like this before, which is important to the cleanup effort. Some of the things they're attempting, for example the fuel rod removal, has never been done before because we've never had a reason to do it. In that sense they're "making it up as they go along", using what we know about radiation and nuclear reactors to do everything as carefully as possible. Edit: To answer your other questions about the fuel removal and storage tanks, the IAEA has status reports here, and the TEPCO page has some information as well. Phayray fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 21:33
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JollyPubJerk posted:Cats don't kill Condors. Reread the article my friend. Read the actual papers if you're feeling jiffy. Don't create straw man arguments because you don't like the people or their viewpoints. You ever see one of those blades fall off? They aren't exactly tiny. They don't last nearly their rated 20 years. Wind is not an end all. Haha, are you loving serious? I read the article. If you think it was a flat condemnation of wind power you're just reading what you want to read.
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Dec 12, 2013 21:47
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Phayray posted:This is from a few pages back, and you had other good questions that are worth answering (though some answers will be hard to come by as I'm not sure the information has been released), but to address this in particular, the answer is basically yes. The immediate cause of the accident is a generally described incident called a Loss of Offsite Power (LOOP), where you lose the power you're using to run your pumps and must resort to a local alternative (generators). This is covered in any standard nuclear engineering textbook about power engineering and reactors. Given the nature of the accident (usually something catastrophic happens to lose offsite power) and the consequences (no pumps = no cooling = meltdown) it's stressed as one of the biggest problems you can run into while operating a nuclear reactor that absolutely must be handled properly, along with a Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA), for hopefully obvious reasons.
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Dec 13, 2013 00:23
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Quantum Mechanic posted:Haha, are you loving serious? I read the article. If you think it was a flat condemnation of wind power you're just reading what you want to read. I guess you hate eagles.
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Dec 13, 2013 00:48
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Doesn't wind theoretically max out at something near 1/17th of our current world power usage anyway?
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Dec 13, 2013 01:14
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 This showed up on my facebook, and just comparing it to my local nuclear plant (Sequoyah Nuclear Plant) I can't buy it, as the annual output of Sequoyah exceeds the combined output of Germany's solar, at least according to Wikipedia. They are saying 22 GW, in order to be that low a single reactor would only generate 1.1GW daily, but from what I can tell Sequoyah generates 48GW DAILY, for a total of 17k GW annually. Am I missing somthing? CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Dec 13, 2013 |
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Dec 13, 2013 01:23
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CommieGIR posted:
Did they include the words "good sunshine day" as a joke about Germany's weather?
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Dec 13, 2013 01:29
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CommieGIR posted:
Saying somethings generates "GW per day" doesn't really make sense. Saying something generates "GWh per day" does. Unless you mean GWdays, which I don't think you do. For example: Sequoyah has 2 1100MW reactors. That is, they can generate that many megawatts at any given time. Per year, the 2 reactors generate 17,754 GWh or ~24GWh per reactor per day. Which makes sense since if you run a 1.1GW reactor for 24 hours you get ~24GWh. What the facebook meme is saying is that on one day all of the solar generated 22GWs at peak which is the theoretical capacity of ~20 - 1GW nuclear reactors. I have no idea if the claim about that day of generation is true. Edit: Just looked it up. Yup, Germany has ~35GW of solar installed, setting the world record of 24GW peak generation. However, they only get 28,000GWh out of that 35GW of capacity. Which is still better than 2-3 coal plants I guess. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Dec 13, 2013 |
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Dec 13, 2013 01:34
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Trabisnikof posted:Saying somethings generates "GW per day" doesn't really make sense. Saying something generates "GWh per day" does. Unless you mean GWdays, which I don't think you do. Makes sense, but somparing it to a nuclear plant doesn't really make sense to me. The loss is from having to convert DC to AC I'm assuming? CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Dec 13, 2013 |
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Dec 13, 2013 01:39
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CommieGIR posted:Makes sense, but somparing it to a nuclear plant doesn't really make sense to me. Nuclear is the perceived policy alternative in Germany? Since they've had their big shutdown kurfuffle it makes sense for people to be thinking in nuclear plant equivalents.
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Dec 13, 2013 01:40
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Don't they have to buy power from France most of the time?
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Dec 13, 2013 01:45
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