Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Fukushima - The Elephant in the Room

Awesome... first the danger, then the fact that the MSM seems to have ignored the event.

Hard to believe that the first line of defense against meltdown, is sandbags.

if interested, watch 2 of 3

I am a big believer new the new nuclear technology. There are now plant designs that simply cannot meltdown using fuel with short half lives. There are also designs which can actually use spent fuel rods as fuel! We are running with very old plants and, I suspect, they should ALL be replaced. I also know that China has actually persuaded some of our modular nuclear manufacturers to move to that country as our own will not release material to even test with. I think the next 10 years will be very interesting and, if we don't deal with our old plants, very dangerous as well.

Actually the discussion/debate about sources of energy is, I believe, pretty tightly controlled and what is going to happen has actually already been decided - we just haven't been told. I also believe that the entire discussion is part and parcel of the larger question of our infrastructure which nobody has answers for so we will continue to clatter down a very bumpy road and hope it all works out?

As an aside does anybody know how the Obama plan is coming to fix our power grid? As far as I can tell that one died due to a multitude of questions to do with who was in charge of what as well as permitting. On the other hand the Bonneville authority, for instance, almost got completely destroyed by uneven supply from windmills.

One can only wonder?

Documentation, please?

What is a "short" half-life?

"Almost got completely destroyed"? How destroyed did it get and what saved it?

Thanks

[b]NRC: No flood danger at reactor[/b]Phew! They're on top of it. Now if they can just pass some legislation to make the rivers stop flooding.

So long as we're going to be an industrial society we're gonna need "base loads" to ameloriate surges from such NUGs as windmills, low-head hydro, solar, etc. I agree far better to have them nuclear. Coal is too valuable to waste putting potential in the air. I say "potential" intentionally as electricity represents "potential" not work and it goes away if not used to power something that performs work.

Our greatest vulnerability - to man-caused and natural events - is our grid system. Far better to utilize the technology you champion and place multiple plants near demand centers with minimal grid exposure. And why not design these plants to utilize the "spent fuel" in storage everywhere ? After all we've used less than 30% of its potential. Best of all these "cache" plants could be factory built modulars with all the QA/QC control that offers. >Mech

Grid system...if you could call it that.
More like a spaghetti rat's nest of inefficient, overheated, ancient wires that leak away more than half what we generate while sending another 1/4 of it to places where a local coop could do the job better.

Which leads me to my point:

Industrial areas and city centers need large centralized plants, I see that.

But suburban sprawl, exurbia and the great rural countryside?
Hell no, they do NOT need centralized power distributed from a great distance.

Yeah sure I am glad that the Rural Electrification program of the FDR era brought the network down there to the hollers, but let's let the holler generate its own power and use that grid to supply it locally.

Let's help the people in suburbia put solar and wind to work, and even some very small scale non-prolif nukes like pebble bed systems or thorium.

The so-called smart grid? Part of what would make it "smart" is the realization that METRO Dallas-Fort Worth, for example, needs centralized power production and distribution but Alvarado, Venus, Waco, Copperas Cove, and the other gazillion little bergs do NOT. They can do better on their own, with less waste, lower cost, less footprint and less dependence on some giant politically vulnerable utility.

Large scale centralized power production and distribution for everyone is a dead idea.
Limiting a nation's choices to gasoline only is soooo twentieth century.