My first bitching here

DONT CALL IN TWICE WITHIN ONE WEEK. TWO SATURDAYS IN A ROW DUDE. TWO. AND I HAD TO COVER BOTH.

And I was up at 5am to get ready for an opening shift here this morning too.....

I'm so tired :(

<Snipped quote by Rica>

nothing like being morning shift, being in that last hour before you leave, and then finding out evening shift called in so you have to stay the whole 13 hours.

god I'm glad I got out of the service industry

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels.

<Snipped quote by Dynamo Frokane>

Hey. Dats one my favorite channels. :D

I've out that most of the peoblems with atomic power are overblown or have been solved long ago, but everyone is so irrationally scared of radiation and so uneducated on it that we'll just keep poisoning the planet that fostered us. Because hey, one or two big booms at badly designed plants and a waste problem which has already been solved is so much worse than a power plant that pumps out toxins and is incredibly inefficient. Yes, I know, the romanticized solar and wind are the ways of the future... but a nuke plant will keep going through cloudy weather or a still day. A windmill or solar panel can't. We need better backups than fossil fuels or there's no point.

<Snipped quote by Inkdrop>

Now I'm saying this as someone who thinks there is still a future for Nuclear energy, but I feel it has to be addressed since it is the Elephant in the room. Chernobyl and Fukushima. It's difficult to write those off. I've give you that those are imperfect situations, but imperfect situations have to be expected when dealing with people. A badly designed coal plant or solar farm isn't going to irradiate any significant area.

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

Chernobyl and Fukushima were what he was referring to, or so I imagine. He didn't say "three" so I imagine Three Mile Island was ignored.

But the lessons from either are pretty easy to determine. One is to not be Soviet and the other isn't to build on fault-lines or in range of tsunamis. Both are pretty easy to not do all-in-all and we're unlikely to have a disaster as major as Chernobyl in the future, which was much more a result of faulty bureaucratic practices than the sloppy engineering of the reactor at the time.

Of particular fun note of Chernobyl is that every engineer in the room was strongly against running the test that melted the reactor down at that time, but the lead engineer in the room at the time wanted to cut corners to get it down. Then wanted to cut additional corners as the disaster progressed in a vein attempt to save his face so he can have the part promotion he was promised that year. It was in the Soviet case a severe lack of oversight that also exposed a severe fault in Soviet nuclear design that they would have otherwise denied until something else happened.

<Snipped quote by Dinh AaronMk>

But that's what I am saying though. If we were to fall back on nuclear power to a larger degree, wouldn't that sort of thing become more common? It just comes off to me a bit like being the guy in 1900 talking about the first car accident and saying "Hey, these guys wrecked their cars because they were being stupid and it was raining and its a new thing, people will wise up and this won't be common in the future."

You can't underestimate the ability of people to fuck up. It's just something that happens. And the main concern is that, if we were to quadruple the number of nuclear facilities, we'd see more of these fuck ups. We don't want to take what happened in Chernobyl and say "Well, for that to happen you have to have Soviet Bureaucracy", because that seems like false-empiricism, like saying "It has to be 1986, and Mikhail Gorbachev has to be in power, and you have to be somewhere in the Ukraine." Then we move to Fukushima and the situation is different, so we add a new list of requirements. That doesn't tell me we know all the ways these things can be fucked up, it tells me were are discovering the ways we can fuck up by having them happen. And I think this is too broad a disaster to play with it too lightly.

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

I think the thing being over-looked here as far as US design goes is that American plants are over-designed with security in mind versus Russian or Japanese plants. A notable fault in Chernobyl besides the failure to maintain an optimal void coefficient (the balance of water that surround the active reactor without vaporizing into steam so fast that it leaves large pockets of air that do nothing to maintain the reactor's temperature, in the case of Chernobyl when they let the water turn to steam they could get more energy from their RBMK reactor) was that the power-plant did not contain any containment structure for a likely explosion in the reactor core itself.

While Three Mile Island was a disaster in the American front, it wasn't actually a disaster and contained itself very well on part of the largely over-engineered structure of the plant to contain and explosion.

When NPPs explode too, it's not to the size of nuclear bombs. It's worth noting that the fuel in these isn't refined to the needed 5% minimum to allow for a explosive chain-reaction. So a solid shell of concrete can hold about anything that can go wrong.

It's not that these things happen, it's how they're contained. And besides, out of the over 400 global NPPs only 3 have gone wrong. Statistically it's a >1% failure rate and we as a society were more aware of the potential risks of failure then than we were with coal or oil power which even today results in consistent environmental and health failures with as much long-term public risk as a nuclear disaster.

The thing about radiation is that honestly, you can ignore most of it. Chernobyl levels are even measured in the milliseiverts and not a full sievert it'd take to cause immediate harm. Not to mention besides the implications that life doesn't give a shit for radioactivity, it may actually be good for you at those levels.

Versus having to eat a mercury choked tomato because waste fillings from a coal plant were blown into a field and mingled down into the sediment.

Now make like Molyneux and Smile [+]

@Dynamo Frokane

Regarding above... you shat in your bed, now you gotta lie in it. I ain't gonna read thirty links of aristocratic apologetics to come up with some sort of rebuttal. Not when i can look at memes and pretend to be busy.

...To come up with some sort of rebuttal. Not when i can look at memes and pretend to be busy.