CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » General Edinburgh
"Torness nuclear survival manual updated"
(28 posts)-
Posted 12 years ago #
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Hmm.
Regardless of your thoughts on nuclear power, it does irritate me when politicians attempt to compare Chernobyl to reactors currently in use in the UK. Concluding that we have 'failed to learn lessons from Chernobyl' because there isn't an immediately available supply of tablets in the 15-30km area is just daft.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Don't try to bring science into this. We're talking about nuclear power here!
Posted 12 years ago # -
As an entertaining aside, in the same way as I replace "cyclists" and "drivers" with (insert classic minority here), it can also be amusing to replace the names of foreign state-owned firms with the corresponding entity.
"The French government, which runs Torness, said the decision..." etc. ;-)
Posted 12 years ago # -
I love how the pro-nuclear lot always say things like "a tsunami could never happen here..."
Well, there's a fair chance in a 100 years of a moderately sized asteroid striking the sea and generating a sizable tsunami anywhere in the world. Torness is not immune.
And the point about many nuclear accidents is that they are not predictable, otherwise steps would have been taken to avoid them.
Posted 12 years ago # -
To which the confrontation reaction is: after an unbelievably large series of earthquakes and tidal waves, the Fukushima reactors were still relatively well contained, caused no direct deaths, and are unliekly to cause any indirect deaths or serious illness either*.
Modern nuclear reactors are one of the most resilient things humans are capable of building [citation needed]. It'd be great if our energy consumption permitted the sole use of renewable energy, but with that not being an option at the moment I'd prefer us to be all-nuclear than burning up coal and gas as well.
*I may be slightly out of date - I haven't read a great deal about it in the past few months.
Posted 12 years ago # -
IIRC, we're exposed to more radiation from coal plants anyway, since the coal they burn (and therefore their exhausts) is relatively rich in uranium.
Via wiki: "A 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant could have an uncontrolled release of as much as 5.2 metric tons per year of uranium (containing 74 pounds (34 kg) of uranium-235) and 12.8 metric tons per year of thorium.[21] In comparison, a 1,000 MW nuclear plant will generate about 30 short tons of high-level radioactive solid packed waste per year.[22] It is estimated that during 1982, US coal burning released 155 times as much uncontrolled radioactivity into the atmosphere as the Three Mile Island incident"
seems that you can't have your cake and eat it too :(
Posted 12 years ago # -
Please don't tell me that cake is radioactive as well?!
Posted 12 years ago # -
Of course -
Posted 12 years ago # -
My favourite fun nuclear fact of the moment is that if you swim around vaguely near the surface of a spent nuclear fuel rod cooling pool, you're exposed to less radiation than, say, standing in the middle of MMW.
Posted 12 years ago # -
I didn't MMW was that bad.
Here's a local Sci-fi writer's account of a visit to Torness "I got to crawl on top of, over, under, and around, one of the wonders of the modern engineering world: an operational AGR reactor".
Posted 12 years ago # -
Personal perspective and all that, but having grown up 15 miles from Sellafield I am intensely relaxed about nuclear power stations.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Posted 12 years ago # -
Ditto PS, what with working next to two to three depending on how many boats are alongside
Posted 12 years ago # -
At Fukushima, the world was extremely lucky that the primary containment was not breached. From what I can gather, it was an extremely close call.
Had the primary containment failed, we'd be looking at a Chernobyl type disaster.
Time to shut down this messy 20th C tech and move on. And hiding the waste beside the plants is unforgivable. What a terrible legacy to leave our children, and their children, and their children and... well you get the picture.
Posted 12 years ago # -
We got a school trip to Torness back when Scottish Nuclear had been spun off of SSEB in the run up to privatisation.
They had a rather patronising and parochial advert featuring a make-believe Scotland based somewhat on Take the Highroad
Posted 12 years ago # -
For anyone who dislikes nuclear power I strongly advise you do not google 'Project Pluto' and especially not even consider googling 'Project Orion'. Oh I know you're curious now, I'll wait for your reaction.
I used to hate nuclear power too, but now I am of the opinion that, like capitalism and democracy, it is one of the worst inventions ever except for everything else we've tried. Doing 5 years of Engineering studies and really being able to comprehend just how far up a certain river without a propulsion instrument we are tipped me into accepting we do need it. I'm a huge fan of renewables but they're not enough on their own, at least not right now.
Posted 12 years ago # -
I've just been browsing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impact and it's pretty interesting that the single biggest impact in terms of lives lost was unnecessary abortions (!) - 2500 in Greece alone, which rather dwarfs the 32 who died of radiation poisoning.
Reminds me of that statistic re: excess deaths in the US when everyone stopped flying after 9/11 and drove instead.
Posted 12 years ago # -
allebong, is Orion the rocket propelled by atom bombs? There's a book about Freeman Dyson which I enjoyed.
I was anti-nuclear for a long time. I even took part in a demo which tried to disrupt its construction in 1980. However I've since changed my mind. Electricity generation will always be a mix and nuclear has to be part of that.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Paraphrasing from wikipedia, Pluto was the nuclear ramjet and Orion the nuclear 'pulsejet'.
So Pluto needed to be moving pretty quickly to get air flowing through it, then the reactor in the middle would heat up the air and cause it to accelerate out of the black, throwing the rocket even faster in the opposite direction.
Orion effectively lobbed bombs out of the back end at regular intervals, and accelerated on the shock wave.
Intriguingly the latter, whilst mind-bendingly terrifying, turns out to be one of the options that might work should we all have to abandon earth...
Posted 12 years ago # -
We have the potential in Scotland to build renewable electricity way in excess of what we need, what with wind, off-shore wind, tidal, wave & hydro.
We need to couple that with:
- energy efficiency
- energy storage (e.g. pumped hydro, hydrogen gas generation)
- demand/load management* to avoid building excess capacity to deal with peaks
- and interconnectors between other countries e.g Norway to import/export when we need to.
An excellent load management system exists in New Zealand where there is 'normal' electricity i.e always on, and cheap rate electricity for non-essential loads e.g. hot water heaters. The 'cheap rate' electricity can be switched off during certain (limited) hours of the day to reduce peaks in demand. It works really well, everyone is happy.
With the political will we can do it!
Posted 12 years ago # -
The problem is, Scotland is a reasonably sized country practically designed for renewable generation, with a tiny population. For the UK as a whole, you just can't get the numbers to add up unless you're important I ng vast amounts of energy all the time.
This could be something nice like concentrated solar, but I suspect it's more likely that a variety of poorer countries would set up incinerators and dirty power stations to meet the demand. We just shift the problem elsewhere and make it worse through lack of regulation.
Nuclear power is green apart from the waste (and it's a big but manageable 'apart'), and continued investment brings us closer to the holy grail of nuclear fusion, as well as throwing off all sorts of bonus byproducts like medical imaging, cancer treatment, space exploration, cleaner ships, etc.
Posted 12 years ago # -
I've no doubt that in Scotland we can happily live off renewables, we're already at about 1/3rd, but it's the rest of the UK that's the problem. Regardless of your stance on independence from England/Europe I think it's fair to say nobody is suggesting throwing up a barricade and cutting all the grid connections. So we need to consider renewables on at least the UK level and ideally also the European level.
Wind is by far the most mature 'modern' renewable (not counting hydro) which is why everywhere in the world a wind turbine is a pillar with an 3 bladed horizontal axis turbine on it. Problem with wave power is that there are dozens and dozens of designs out there all being tested at various states of development and there's not a standard off-the-shelf wave power device yet. So, while we can easily enough build enormous amounts of wind turbines if the money is there, we can't do the same for wave or tidal until we have a working design.
I used to be infatuated with energy efficiency but I now think it's at best of marginal importance. Why? because if you look at the total amount of energy you personally use you'll find there's an awful lot you really can't do anything about and this is vastly larger than any savings from switching out lightbulbs. The best illustration is this excellent site: http://www.withouthotair.com/ which goes into how much energy a person uses in a year. Point is, since we're conducting this conversation online, we're all part of modern technological society and the amount of emissions created just to make products for us is pretty substantial. The real stinger is air travel: let's imagine you lead a lifestyle that, while not stone age, would be enough to get you labelled as a hippy in some circles. So: no car, minimal heating and lighting, organic homegrown local food etc, minimal use of electricity and no continuous buying of consumer goods. You would rightly think that you are having much less of an impact than an typical person with car and fancy house etc. So, you decide as a holiday to take a short haul flight for a week away in the sun. Well done, every single energy and emission saving you made in the past year has been utterly nullified by spending 2 hours on a plane. You are now back at the average level and now have no right to consider yourself superior to somebody who lives a more energy intense lifestyle but doesn't fly. I know several people who consider themselves 'green' because they buy organic food and have a compost bin but they don't see the problem with flying a dozen times a year.
Energy storage is something I believe we need to get building pronto but again it's easier said than done. Pumped hydro is well proven but good luck finding anywhere in the country to build it - this goes for conventional hydro too. Hydrogen has been built up as the messiah but it's really an appalling thing when you get down to it. If you have electricity you want to store, doing electrolise>hydrogen>compression>storage>expansion>fuel cell absolutely murders the efficiency and you will get much less back than you put it. Personally I'd go for flywheel energy storage.
Any talk of demand load management in this country gets you a front page tabloid headline along the lines of 'big brother EU superstate wants to control when you can use your TV!!!' and there's sod all point in explaining to your average person what it is and how it actually works. The fact that it may work perfectly well in another country without the sky falling in is of no importance here, as we all to often find out with other issues.
We already have several interconnectors and IIRC there's one being built right now to Norway from Aberdeen so that we can use their pumped storage systems to load balance our wind.
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Bonus fun points: Search for 'Project Orion battleship' and contemplate the fact it could actually be built and even 50 years later many of the details are still classified.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Just because one flight negates all the energy efficiency savings for electricity you may have made in a year, doesn't mean you should not make those savings.
I think what allebong is alluding to is the hypocrisy of some 'greenies'. For example, building a brand new eco-home in the middle of nowhere, thereby committing yourself to drive everywhere to shop/work etc. Being completely green is something to aspire to, it doesn't mean you have to be perfect at it.
EU regulation on energy efficient lightbulbs and consumer goods' standby power consumption has already saved the output of several large power stations across Europe - it does work as a whole.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Nuclear power is green apart from the waste
Coal fired plants are green apart from the waste
Cars are green apart from the fumes
Posted 12 years ago # -
Sorry - you're right to pull up a tautologically nonsense statement!
I intended to say that nuclear produces as its sole waste product a very well-defined, containable waste product that we can completely remove from the system. True, it's a pretty grim product if you happen to be near it, but hopefully we won't be producing it for a particularly long time.
In my mind nuclear fission is a stopgap solution until we either get fusion nailed or sort out solar power in the deserts. If you've got to have a stopgap, let's go with one where we can control the damage.
Posted 12 years ago # -
When I was in school we were 25 years from fusion.
Seems like we still are.
20th century nuclear power plants look like they will still be getting dismantled in the 22nd. I guess the design is better now.
I was on a plane in '86 I'm in no hurry to do it again and that one was a uni field trip.
Memsahib doesn't like low energy bulbs but I get them anywho.
And then there is eating meat to consider too.
Time for the matter/antimatter and dilithium crystals.
Posted 12 years ago # -
Posted 12 years ago #
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