My heart goes out to Japan.



I think nuclear power plants are based on a rule of insanity. The potential destruction is beyond our wildest imaginations.

Except now..
we can imagine it.

poor Japan it is. Playing with Mother Nature. She usally wins.
Be greatful we live in USA, they reinforced that type of power plant here a few years back. But who is to say if that is enough. : (

I don't know much, but could a nuclear plant withstand a f-five twister?

It would cause some damage but not to the important parts.

Its the water levels that they need to control better. I don,t know about twisters. My guess is an f 5 is powerful. Takes brick homes amd makes them look like legos. Saw that first hand in TN. Since they ( power plant buildins) are reenforced many times ( the cores area ) my guess is they wil survive as long as water is being pumped in to keep it cool. It is like a heart , needs the fluids. No fluids, no pump, result is melt down.

It isn't. A test was conducted recently on the Diesel engines that are supposed to power the emergency pumps that feed coolant to the reactors in American power plants. The test involved three engines purchased new and broken in. Then they were started and ran at 100% under all the same conditions a real pump would face in a real world catastrophe. One failed out right. One failed in an hour and the last failed in three hours. All critical engine failures that were not repairable on the fly. The strongest earthquakes recorded were nothing like the 9.0 that hit Japan. Even Chile was never hit with one like this. Worst is that the east coast of Japan sank two feet! The backup systems were tossed off of their mountings. Now don't underestimate Japan. They built to withstand a 7.5 or greater earthquake and the intentionally built to withstand a 8.0. the fact Tokyo is still standing after this says volumes about their skills as builders.

Now for those of you who sarcastically say "oh poor Japan, Bo hoo," WE built their reactors! They had to retrofit them to meet THEIR building and safety codes which compare to and exceed California's which ARE the most stringent in AMERICA! WE Take more chances. If California gets hit with an earthquake that bad Sacramento will go underwater and San Francisco will get knocked completely down! Now for some happy news, California has three reactors I know of, two are on the coast line and one sits RIGHT on a fault line. now if California goes down 12% of global food production shuts down right then and there! So lets do some math folks.

Nothing of consequence has been retrofitted. To replace the emergency systems they know they need to replace would cost billions. They done the math and a catastrophe fits in with their equation. It sucks Japan had to have to be a sign of what we will all reap with Bad Math. Supposedly radiation detectors in California are starting to go off! Not much mind you but they are showing detectable amounts and when it comes to radiation we all have good reason to be scared.

Nuclear Power as we know it is wrong. There needs to be more research on controlling radiation and dealing with pollution before we go crazy implementing this technology. Right now we are sitting on a bomb and hitting it with a hammer!

Japan did nothing wrong. If anything this crisis is showing us how culturally backwards we have become as a people. Americans are nothing more than Romans of the modern day. Can we ever get back to our Golden Age?

Japan did not retro fit their reactors. We .... was Ge not the people of the USA per sey. And we keep making changes to make this seem safer. As I said and you quoted me. Mother nature will reclaim and that includes playing with nuclear energey.

Your remark came off as snide and crass. We know MN is not to be screwed with BUT likewise ignorance is no excuse either. I am a huge proponent on more research to tame the atom. For now we are messing with something we know is dangerous but where people see profit in it so will come the profiteers.

Japan also did do a lot of retrofit work like Seismic Isolation. That is what new buildings sit on so they don't come down. Had their reactors not gotten shaken by a force THOUSANDS of times more powerful than ANY Earthquake I ever experienced, likewise had they NOT have been hit with a tsunami right behind that I doubt they would be in the predicament they are in.

I seen that crap Doomsday movie 2012. Tectonic movements of that scope are possible on say Venus which may very well turn itself inside out every once in a a while but such Grand Upheavals? Physically impossible except under one and only one condition I could see happening, an asteroid impact like the one that took out all life 65 million years ago. Still what happened to Japan WAS a real honest to god Grand upheaval. No one ever seen a quake like this hitting japan and they have a history of Earthquakes like we do in California.

Yes GE built the reactors. GE likewise is a fairly Global business. But Japan also imposed their building standards on GE. 13 feet of ground movement is significant. So is a drop of 2 Feet in ground elevation. The Japanese side of the quake dropped, the ocean side rose, the sea rushed in! The tsunami was not very large but it is the ocean we are talking about!

If this disaster hit California what would you say then? I hope to GOD if there is one that someone is making us look at our nuclear program a lot more seriously and looking towards making what we have more disaster proof instead of listening to the tree huggers all whine about how evil atomic energy is! I also hope to god this lends to more research in cleaning up radioactive contamination! If we are going to use a means of power we need to learn to control and clean up after it! Not put our heads in the sand and live in the dark ages.

any ideas on a better way to give 100 million power to run there stuff like your computer

Methane digestion, geothermal, and improved hydroelectric. Solar still has yet to come of age as far as a technology goes.

Nuclear power is hardly insanity. You might as well say that driving
a car is insanity or that eating food is insanity since much more people
die every day from automobiles or food poisoning than have died from
nuclear power in total since the discovery of nuclear fission!


Living near the ocean is dangerous but so is living in Phoenix. How
about that smog and skin cancer due to sun?


How about those tornadoes in OK and in the midwest?


We live with risk all the time. Fact is that the odds of being hit
by lightning are far greater than being killed by nuclear power.
So stop the hysteria and panic and be realistic about the dangers
we face. If you don't want to live near the shore then that is
understandable.

But if you decide to lock yourself in a home-made 1950's era
fallout shelter and stop going outside to avoid sun exposure or
the risk of lightning or automobiles then you will have finally
discovered the joy of the paranoia of Howard Hughes. I'd expect that
you wear rubber gloves, wash compulsively and have kleenex boxes
on your feet to protect against contamination with e. coli & MRSA...

Nuclear power is a reasonable way for countries to generate power if they're at all concerned about either their carbon footprint or the fact that the earth's oil supply is both finite and rapidly dwindling. Risk? Sure, there's risk, but it's both reasonable and manageable. Expense? Nothing like what lies ahead for oil. The time is here and now for renewable fuels for anyone who wants or needs to live outside of equatorial reqions. Stop pushing for more of the same, stop being irresponsible, and adopt fuels for the future. Atomic energy is a good alternative until something better comes along.

Oil IS a renewable fuel...

It 'renews' every 65 million years or so.

Requires a complete and rapid extinction of most life on earth...

Oil doesn't require extinction. New oil is being formed everyday!

The predominant understanding is that oil comes from microscopic
organisms lipids which sediment in the oceans over millions of
years. Since this process is always underway it is continuous...

With nuclear power, the uranium was already in the earth
irradiating us along with cosmic rays and all the other radionuclides.
They are just more concentrated in one place in a reactor where
a large amount of their energy is captured and turned into
electricity instead of being simply wasted. Of course there are
risks in doing this just as there are risks associated with
burning oil and gas.

My heart goes out to Japan too. They are dealing with a horrible
natural disaster and also the related horrible reactor accident.

Rather easily. The power rods that are currently melting into the earths core at the chernobyle site are nearly indestructable due to their mass/heat ratio. Like setting the wind on fire. The one thing that is most destructive to the power rods is water. This is why the shelf life while cooled with water is a maximum of 70 years. When innundated with water (like a tsunami) you risk litterally ignighting the water. Imagine setting the Pacific ocean on instant boil. The earthquake caused by that explosion would shift the techtonic plates with enough force (depending on the direction) to either force the Earth's core to stop spinning (eventually eliminating gravity) or cause it to spin with such force the magnetic field would become powerful enough to suck the moon into the Earth.

And they're afraid of solar panels because mass use would reflect enough light to cool the earth by 3°

Silly Humans lol

Never heard that one before. Who is "they"?

There is a lot of hysteria about nuclear power plant danger mostly fed by the media. The reality is that nuclear power is one of the safest forms of energy production. Find out how many people in the US have died from nuclear power. Compare that to coal mining deaths, exposure to coal exhaust pollution, or oil field (both onshore, offshore, and refinery deaths.

The anti nuke crowd uses the call of "Remember Chernobyl". To compare that poor Russian technology with few safeguards and incompetent operators to modern plants is ridiculous. "Remember Three Mile Island" is even worse. How many deaths were there at Three Mile Island? Zero.

I don't think nuclear power plants should be built near fault lines or near the ocean where fault lines are located. The risks rise along with the unknowns. However, most of the US has plenty of safe places to build plants without fault risks.

The future of transportation in America will be something like the Chevy Volt that mostly uses electricity. Electric heating and cooling will rise with diminished use of fossil fuel. Solar and wind are good but limited sources of energy.

There are no engineering problems that need to be solved to build safe nuclear power plants. The risk factors are weighed, the costs analyzed, and a compromise is selected between absolute safety and certain death. The nuclear industry does a safer job than the competition. Here is some information from http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm

Radiation

The principal risks associated with nuclear power arise from health effects of radiation. This radiation consists of subatomic particles traveling at or near the velocity of light---186,000 miles per second. They can penetrate deep inside the human body where they can damage biological cells and thereby initiate a cancer. If they strike sex cells, they can cause genetic diseases in progeny.

Radiation occurs naturally in our environment; a typical person is, and always has been struck by 15,000 particles of radiation every second from natural sources, and an average medical X-ray involves being struck by 100 billion. While this may seem to be very dangerous, it is not, because the probability for a particle of radiation entering a human body to cause a cancer or a genetic disease is only one chance in 30 million billion (30 quintillion).

Nuclear power technology produces materials that are active in emitting radiation and are therefore called "radioactive". These materials can come into contact with people principally through small releases during routine plant operation, accidents in nuclear power plants, accidents in transporting radioactive materials, and escape of radioactive wastes from confinement systems. We will discuss these separately, but all of them taken together, with accidents treated probabilistically, will eventually expose the average American to about 0.2% of his exposure from natural radiation. Since natural radiation is estimated to cause about 1% of all cancers, radiation due to nuclear technology should eventually increase our cancer risk by 0.002% (one part in 50,000), reducing our life expectancy by less than one hour. By comparison, our loss of life expectancy from competitive electricity generation technologies, burning coal, oil, or gas, is estimated to range from 3 to 40 days.

well, no matter what, we can all learn from what happened in japan... i'm not going to say anything about those poor people, they are doing everything they can in a situation that is worse than bad. Israel has already going to reinforce theirs, which was built in the 50's. criticizing nuclear power isn't going to help anything, it still has a great track record. here in texas, the coal power plants are killing the pecan trees and they want to build more. states like texas, without the worries of natural disaters is one of the best spots for nuclear power.

Some humans are quite silly...

'lifetime' of decaying urainium rods is 250 years... They will stop 'burning' then. Earths 'gravity' does not come from the 'spin' of the core... It comes from the 'mass' of the earth. The moon is moving away from the earth at a measured ammount every year (it used to be a lot closer). Earths 'magnetic field' will never be strong enought to 'drag' the moon into the Earth. (that would require an increase in gravitational forces).