* Posts by alis

5 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Mar 2011

Microsoft wraps Windows 8 in Ribbon UI?

alis
FAIL

Absolutely hate "the ribbon"

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/fail_32.png

Please no. Even if you don't want to use WIndows you pretty much have to - so is there a petition we can sign? Anything to stop this.

Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

alis

Nope...

Buikding Nuclear power stations the way we are - on earthquake zones, on shingle beaches, built so that they have positive power gradients at high temperatures allowing them to melt down is driving like a maniac. Building nuclear power stations that are actually safe would cost to much or meanthey would have to be built where we would not like them to be. It would mean knowing how we are going to dispose of the waste.

And people who cannot safely own a car are banned, as are cars that are not safe enough.

Your metaphor of the cars is actually better. Thank you.

alis

Idiotic statement

"So far from Fukushima proving that nuclear power is dangerous compared to other technologies, it seems to be proving quite the reverse."

You must be thinking of those terrible wind turbine fires or the solar cell explosions threatening oh 10s of sea birds and some fish that would have resulted from being hit by a tsumani as a reuslt of being built in a earthquake zone.

Can I point out that the risk (if you understand the concept of risk) represented by what we are seeing is orders of magnitude different from "other technologies". What will happen if there is a significant aftershock right now? What happens if the hydrogen/oxygen explosions that are now considered to be inside the primary containment get worse, as the current trend seems to be.

Its WAY too early to be sitting smugly on the "nuclear power has proved its safety" side of the fence. We would still only have to be a bit unlucky to see what has been a contained disaster turn into a complete nightmare.

Saying nuclear power is proved safe by this is like drioving like a maniac and saying that its obviously ok to do so as the safety features of the car meant you didn't die when you crash.

Japanese earthquake sparks nuclear emergency

alis

Some comments on other's views:

The only nuclear reactors that cannot meltdown are ones that have a negative power gradient at high temperatures – i.e. they switch themselves off. The only design for that is one that has existed for 50 years but has never been developed, which uses a large bed of fuel with water flowing over it rather than a high density fuel core. Why has it not been developed? 70% of all nuclear power r&d has been from Defence budgets. The fuel bed reactor would never fit on a submarine, as the "core" and the supporting plant is big. So while the Canadian Candu reactor design is safer than the 1970’s generation of reactors its still a pressurised water reactor that can lose coolant. There is a reason the Chinese are building their reactors as fuel bed ones, but its a very new technology as the r&d has not been done and we don't know how they will fare or how expensive they will actually be. Aldo China has a LOT of land and a polictical stance to build them wherever they want, shall we say. Hands up who wants 20 or more acres of Nuclear Power station next to their village?

Nuclear power is not as cheap as fossil fuel. Far from it. If you include the lifetime costs of fuel and dealing with waste and you take away the government levy on energy bills and the massive costs of an accidents then you end up with a very expensive power generation method. This is the best argument against nuclear power in my opinion – it costs too much to do correctly. For instance we don’t know how expensive its going to be to store all the high level radioactive waste that will remain lethal for millennia – we don’t know how/where or even when we are going to be able to long term store it. The fuel waste at Torness is still there and its been running since the 1960s – why? There is nowhere to put it so it stays in the cooling ponds rusting.

An example of how nuclear power does not pay for itself can be seen in the story of Bradwell – it was found that the nuclear core was dangerously fragile as a result of neutron bombardment and was at risk of cracking open. Stop the power station? No – wrap the core in ductile copper wire to keep it running. Why? It had not yet saved enough money to pay for its own decommissioning after over 35 years of service. Its now no longer running after the nuclear watchdog closed it down, and I believe it had to be bailed out by public money.

Nuclear power is not a zero emissions technology. Ask the people who work and live near the mines (and its getting increasingly difficult to mine) on land poisoned by the mercury used to dissolve the heavy metals out of the ore, the dirty power stations used to power the factories and mining which are almost entirely in developing or economically challenged countries. Then there are the costs for the transport of fuel and waste from continent to continent. Even looking at CO2 emissions there is a significant cost to nuclear power production, though admittedly much less than fossil fuels.

There is a lot of rubbish spouted about Nuclear Power, unfortunately. There is blinkered view of the technophiles (of which I am one, just not blinkered I hope) who miss the fact that it is actually a glorified steam engine using a dangerous fuel and the real sexy technologies are in the renewables, efficiency and microgeneration, there is the blinkered/desperate view of the economists and politicians who miss or deliberately avoid the true lifecycle costs of a unit of nuclear generated energy and there is the unfortunately blinkered view of some greens who concentrate on mutated babies rather than economics, understandably from a human point of view, but it will not win the argument.

Then there is the increased threat of nuclear weaponised nations and terror attacks on nuclear installations or using “primitive” weapons. I have been reliably informed that a physics graduate with a second class degree, a well stocked workshop, 10 kilos of weapons grade nuclear material, some semtex and a half decent physics and engineering library could build a very dirty kiloton yield atom bomb. Looking at what I know I totally believe I could.

However Nuclear power is the wrong way to go because it costs too much. Its that simple from my point of view. The problem is we aren’t investing anywhere NEAR as much in alternatives, even now, as we are in Nuclear so we are left walking down a one way road.

As far as Japan is concerned building Nuclear power stations in an earthquake zone is stupid, and was opposed at the time for the very reasons being seen now – not rocket science. And just so we don’t think how clever we are in this country by comparison, for instance building a nuclear power station on a shingle beach is stupid particularly when in recorded history a storm has changed the coastline by over a mile and normal everyday longshore drift requires trucks to run 24 hours a day 365 days a year to return the tens of tons of shingle removed from in front of the station. Dungeoness, its called.

Also the danger from a loss of coolant and a meltdown is not the molten blob (its called the elephants foot in Chernobyl), it’s the steam explosion that results from a bare surface of the core being exposed as the water level drops. No containment building that would be feasible or economically possible can withstand that explosion, and it creates a LOT of radioactive dust from the building and core material ejected. It’s the reason that the helicopter pilot who repeatedly dropped sand on the Chernobyl core continued to fly. He knew that he had absolutely no hope of surviving the required repeated flights through the plume of smoke, but he was a trained nuclear hazmat person and knew if it was not done then 10000s could die. Not an exaggeration. He survived 3 weeks.

There is a perception that this is a problem with shoddy Russian technology, and there is some truth to that. But I refer you to Three Mile Island incident. A reactor of the same basic design as many many reactors and the proposed new reactors in this country was something like 4 hours way from a catastrophic failure generating a steam explosion etc. after its coolant systems failed. That was some time ago, and things are much better now, but it only takes one, or sabotage etc. and power stations are built by the lowest tender.

Hmmm.

alis

Molten blob "not dangerous"

The reason there would have been a hydrogen explosion is the build up of hydrogen produced asa result of the disassociation of hydrogen and oxygen from the coolant water in contact with a super hot core. This implies a significant loss of cooling capability in the core and the potential for a meltdown.

As a note the molten blob caused by a melt down is hotter still, so hot it can melt through the containment vessel. All things considered attempting to characterise this as "not dangerous" is not reasonable - something a seemingly pro-nuclear and damn the consequences proponent said earlier.

Nuclear power can be safe if we spend enough money on it. If we do that then it's WAY too expensive. If we don't spend the money then we do things like build nuclear power stations in earthquake zones, on unstable shingle beaches, in areas with inadequate communications links and don't plan for disposal of the waste. Ahh - we did all of that and more - this strongly implies that we do not actually know how expensive safe nuclear power is and until we do ploughing ahead is just not rational.