Should aging nuclear power plants be closed?

Yes, get a time machine and go back and re-design structures at power plants.

You still have to do something with the spent fuel and debris from them; when you close them.

Quite a fix we’ve gotten ourselves into, depending for energy on unrenewable resources like gas and oil and such a demonstrably hazardous one as nuclear. I keep thinking, if we could send men to the moon why can’t we figure out how to create affordable energy in better, safer ways.

@Austinlad A better question is why the gas, oil and nuclear corporations have been allowed to stop affordable renewable energy in this country and around the world. The technology was ‘figured out’ a long time ago but has been suppressed.

If I’ve got the news right, the problem with the Japanese reactors was that they weren’t made to withstand an earthquake and prolonged power failure.
@RubyB The problem with renewable energy is that there isn’t much of it. It’s not going to run out, but until we iron out the kinks, we won’t be able to power all of our stuff with it.

@Nullo What’s wrong with a species that would risk extinction for more electrical gadgets? Your argument is the same as Tepco’s.

@RubyB – I don’t believe TEPCO are making an argument. You are, though.

People don’t act as a “species”. To ask what’s “wrong with a species that would risk extinction for more electrical gadgets” is like asking “what’s wrong with a species that will suffer domestication for cheese and biscuits?”.

The reactors in Japan (Fukushima) aren’t exploding.

The fault-lines the reactors in the US are on are unlikely to produce a magnitude 9.0 megathrust earthquake.

“When accidents happen, governments take the stance of “protecting” citizens from the reality of the disaster by withholding information about the extent of the magnitude.”

This is a bold assertion and one that really needs supporting, particularly with reference to both nuclear energy in general and the actions of the Japanese government in the recent Fukushima Daiichi/ni/san/yon crisis. I’d love to hear your analysis.

@RubyB Look up the power requirements for the average home. Multiply that by 5 billion. Throw in hospitals, government and office buildings, retail locations, utilities, the works.
Now, compare that to modern renewable energy output, since you strike me as the type that wants the plants closed tomorrow.
Even if we were to blanket every spare surface in solar panels, fill every field with windmills, I would be surprised if renewable energy left us with enough power to keep the houses lit and the food cold.
And consider the environmental impact. What might happen if Earth’s albedo plummeted into the inky blackness of a photo-voltaic cell? Would wildlife much appreciate humming wind turbines? How will wave turbines impact the feeding and migration of all them aquatic beasties? Won’t the cry shift from dolphins in tuna nets to porpoises mutilated by the evil, evil generators?
Nuclear power is not a permanent solution, to be sure – like fossil fuels, there is a finite quantity of fissile material; the space program is going nowhere, so it’s not like well be able to mine uranium on Mars or anything. But it is a stepping stone. We don’t have a map for this road, so we need to look around a bit before moving to the next one.

Actually, @Nullo, solar could cover the energy needs of Europe now with a solar farm the size of Wales (~8,000 SqM). It’s not practical – or practicable – for a multitude of reasons, although I’ve seen cost figures around £35Bn for the project.

I’m not disagreeing with you, though – the choice is stark and quite possibly brutal.

Personally, I think the future is solar, but that it’s a good 30 years off at least. Fission seems, to me at least, to be a necessary evil as long as oil prices continue to rise.

@the100thmonkey – What do you mean unlikely? And what about 8.5? You must be kidding. Just take a look at the US East Coast on this map.

http://www.onearth.org/blog/us-nuclear-power-in-quake-hotspots

Tsunamis in the Atlantic are unlikely, but possible. For example in 1755.

Most of the damage created by earthquakes and tsunamis is not severe longterm. We can rebuild our cities. Nuclear contamination is entirely different. That’s the issue here.

It’s not practical to switch to renewable energies? I don’t accept this. Most people didn’t think that it’s practical for every citizen to own a computer. Bill Gates disagreed.

We should refrain from linear extrapolation. We should have taken renewable energy and energy efficiency seriously decades ago. Let’s not make this mistake again. Let’s get started now. Seriously.

People who talk about ‘not practical’ are part of the problem. Not part of the solution.

Japan’s reactors are actually the safest in the entire world. The problem is that even these reactors were not designed to handle a 8.9 magnitude earthquake and tsunami. If we want to protect against these sort of large quakes, we need to find a way to improve ALL nuclear power plants. We can’t just close all four hundred something nuclear plants on earth. There is currently a major energy crisis, and these plants generate some 15% of the world’s electricity.

What I am looking forward to is nuclear fusion. Imagine a source of almost limitless energy, with no chance of a meltdown and no radioactive byproducts. Currently, people can produce controlled fusion (people have even done it in their basements). The problem to be solved is that of net energy. Current designs require more energy to run than what they produce, so they are useless to generate power.

The reactors in Japan are not the same as in the U.S. Thirty five years ago when the design was being done,, an engineer at GE quit because the Japanese company refused to change the design and he said in time it had a good possibility of failure, which has happen now..

@PhiNotPi – We won’t be able to find a way to improve ALL nuclear power plants dealing with all contingencies in case of stronger earthquakes. No, we can’t close all four hundred something nuclear plants on earth, but we can close the most dangerous ones right away. And we need to speed up innovation and implement alternatives. All nuclear power plants should be gone by 2040.

@Nullo, you said, “The problem with renewable energy is that there isn’t much of it.”

Um, this is the problem with nonrenewable energy, not renewable energy. Unless you are narrowly defining renewable energy to only mean biofuels and not solar/wind. There is a basically limitless supply of solar/wind energy.

On the other hand, fossil fuels will probably run out sometime this century, with uranium running out a few decades later.

@PhiNotPi, these particular reactors were certainly not the safest in the world, as they did not have a passive cooling system. A passive cooling system would not require electric power to run the pumps. Safer power plants use stacked pools and the water circulates via gravity. (That said, who knows if even passive cooling would survive an earthquake/tsunami).

Fusion is still a long way off. And at this point, I am starting to wonder if the safety risks from fusion would be worth the limitless energy it could produce. Solar and wind also provide limitless energy, but you don’t need to worry about creating and contain a plasma torus with fission that could potentially skeeze out of control and release radioactivity in a 100-mile radius with with solar panels or wind turbines. (Also, I wasn’t aware that people produced controlled fusion in their basements—do you perhaps have a cite?)

@Qingu No, I was talking about current production – power in the lines, not resources. If my reckoning is right, we cannot shut off the more traditional plants tomorrow, because there wouldn’t be enough output from the present renewable-energy infrastructure to pick up the slack.
You might want to go back and read my post. It’s been known to help.

Touche, touche. The transition is the trouble.

Though it would certainly help if conservative Americans stopped believing that oil and nuclear are magical and will last forever because God put them on Earth for us, and that alternative fuels are communist plots to install Al Gore as emperor.

@Qingu I’ve not heard that one.
My biggest gripe is with what may just be a semifanatical subsection that kinda sorta worships the planet, in a secular sort of way. The sort of people who think that fossil fuels and nuclear power are bad. Who like to blame earthquakes on global warming, or oil drilling. And who are more likely to buy Product A than Product B because A has “green” in the marketing.

@Nullo, well, considering that our planet’s health is what enables us to, you know, live on it, I don’t really understand what your concern is here.

Fossil fuels are “bad,” because they cause a lot pollution. Nuclear power inevitably creates radioactive waste, which we still have to figure out how to contain, and is also prone to terrifying accidents.

I’ve not heard of anyone blaming earthquakes on global warming (though it will of course cause massive flooding if left unchecked, and possibly alter established weather patterns in disastrous ways), but it is an empirical fact that oil drilling can trigger earthquakes. So can exploding nuclear weapons underground.

This doesn’t mean I think we should instantly stop all FF-burning and nuke plants and revert to stone-age technology to stop killing Mother Earth. I do think we should immediately start replacing these harmful technologies with sustainable ones that don’t damage the planet, and invest in developing such technologies further.

I believe that the Tropers call it hype aversion. More generally, I dislike the cult-like atmosphere; I’m not lacking in the God department.
I am generally unworried about the future; I am assured that The End is going to happen when it’s going to happen, and not a moment sooner. That promise comes with secondary guarantees, like not dying off en mass in the meantime.

“Bad” in the way that murder is generally considered to be “bad.”

Danny Glover blamed Haiti on global warming. Floating around the Internet is a rumor that an unnamed European official has said the same thing, either about the 8.9er or its subsequent tsunami.

Does hanging on the internet mean that we are Americans who believe that electricity is magical and will last forever.

Any aging anything that poses a danger to society should be replaced. If those who believe that nuclear energy is evil would stop fighting the construction of new and more modern plants, this could probably happen.

@Nullo, you’ve just demonstrated why people like me think your religion is a liability for human society.

You’ve just admitted that you don’t care about preserving the world you live on because it will be destroyed by a Mesopotamian sky deity anyway.

This is not only insane, it’s dangerous.

Also, here is what Danny Glover said:

“What happened in Haiti could happen to anywhere in the Caribbean because all these island nations are in peril because of global warming,”

“What happened” in Haiti could mean the earthquake, but it seems obvious he is simply talking about destruction in general. Rising sea levels from global warming will indeed cause great destruction to coastal communities, especially on poorer islands like Haiti.

But don’t worry about them, Nullo. “Kill them all and let God sort them out,” right?

@Qingu That’s okay, I feel the same way about your non-religion. We have fundamentally different perspectives. Ridiculing each other about them isn’t going to do anything but make us crabby at one another.
I care about keeping things spinning because we’ve been granted stewardship of the Earth, not out of fear for my own future.
* Sigh * And here I thought we were getting along, for a change.
* spits @Qingu‘s words out of his mouth, chugs mouthwash *

Well, how unworried are you about the future, exactly? I know there are evangelicals who take the stewardship idea seriously enough to support environmentalism. It would make me less cranky if you agreed with them.

To be fair, I am also generally unworried about the future, in the long term… not because I think the world is going to be destroyed by a deity, but because human society generally seems to improve on long time scales. But we still got shit to do to make sure we don’t ruin it.

@Qingu I am almost entirely unpreoccupied with the grand-scale future. The immediate future can sometimes perturb me – for instance, I’m a little worried about the cloud of radioactive steam breezing towards California, and I do fret about my job now and again.
My approach to stewardship might be boiled down to the rather crude “don’t crap where you sleep.” Or you could say that it works out, more or less, to “all things in moderation.” The Earth is a friend’s house that we’re staying in – we may use the appliances and fixtures, and the fridge is open, but don’t knock holes in the plaster, please.

@mattbrowne – the issue is not the fact that there is a fault; it’s the kind of fault that matters. The Tohoku earthquake and the attendant tsunami were caused by a megathrust earthquake. Such a quake is far more unlikely on the San Andreas fault, as it’s not a subduction fault, and therefore far less likely t5 produce a megathrust quake, in my understanding,

No thrust = very unlikely to produce a tsunami.

While a m9.0 quake in California will obviously cause massive amounts of damage, the reactors aren’t vulnerable to the same kind of problems that caused the Fukushima crisis. Hence, it’s counterproductive to compare them.

@the100thmonkey – What about the East Coast and intraplate earthquakes?