Quicksand Fans

We must never forget

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A glaring reminder of why safety must never take a back seat to progress.

Remember the firefighters and helicopter pilots and the rest who fought the fires and later helped entomb the reactor. Hail the victorious dead!

Never learn, do we? My 9th grade class went to the Trojan Nuclear Plant in Oregon, got the grand tour & a comic book to convince us how safe nuclear power was. That was actually only a couple months before the meltdown at Three Mile Island.

In Washington state our leaders poured millions of dollars into the two reactors for the Washington Public Power Supply company--yes, the acronym is really WPPS! Those POS's never fired up, never even got completed. The whole outfit went bankrupt and left us with two cement towers worth diddly-squat. Nuclear Power has no chance as long as profit is going to be involved. Maybe that's how it should be.

papablues050164 wrote:My 9th grade class went to the Trojan Nuclear Plant in Oregon, got the grand tour & a comic book to convince us how safe nuclear power was. That was actually only a couple months before the meltdown at Three Mile Island.

In Soviet Union every schoolkid knew - a nuclear reactor can't explode in principle because it designed so that it can't explode in principle. Period. Unfortunately, it seems, the same basic principle was a guide to the operators of Chernobyl Power Plant. They were convinced that whatever they would do, it can never explode. In principle. Because it was designed that way.

One of the factors that the Soviet reactors didn't have that contributed to the widespread release of radiation was that they didn't have a containment vessel, while other Western nuclear reactors did have one. Chernobyl was one of those events where human stupidity/incompetence and lack of adequate safety came together in a perfect shitstorm that became the Zone of Alienation, 64 killed trying to contain the disaster, and tens or hundreds of thousands of cancer cases for the local population. The chances of another Chernobyl-like disaster are extremely slim thanks to advances in modern technologies, but will never be eliminated.

Look at the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis: the reactors involved are about 30 years old, older than the ones at Chernobyl, yet the radiation released, while obviously not good, are far, far less than that released in 1986. The difference there was that there was a containment vessel on the reactor vessels at Daiichi while the reactors at Chernobyl didn't, not to mention more competent operators at Japan.

commadore wrote:Look at the recent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis: the reactors involved are about 30 years old.....

THAT is the real problem. What we need to do is start scrapping the old outdated ones, and replacing them with newer, safer models. Of coarse, to do that, you have to deal with the NIMBY crowd....fucking hippies.
Personally I've always been an adovcate of nuclear power. It has it's drawbacks but for the most part it's a safe, fairly clean way to generate power (and before you argue with me over the waste issue think about how easy it is to safely store used core rods vs capturing and storing the emissions of a coal fired power plant).

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