Porcupine_I said:
d21lewis said:
Porcupine_I said:
actually i believe that is part of the problem with nuclear power plants. there are too many old ones buildt in the 60's. There are so many new technologies and ways to make them safer then they used to be built now.
i do believe in using nuclear power, because it is a cheap source of energy. but safety should always be first. and Nuclear power plants that can not whitstand a airplane crash are not safe in this day and age, regardless how many fail safes are in place to eliminate human error.
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In defense of the old plants, we do have "outages" every few months. The plant (or part of it, anyway) is totally powered down and everything is inspected. Lots of components get replaced or improved. It's not perfect, by any means. It's like replacing parts of an old car instead of buying a brand new car. Still, I've only been there for a couple of years and the amount of changes and improvements that have happened in just that small amount of time (I think I've seen about five outages) is pretty impressive. And for the record, our plant is reportedly able to withstand earthquakes and a direct hit by a commercial airplane. The key word is, reportedly--not quit sure how that would hold up in practice. Most of the key components are in hardened structures far underground with automatic systems designed to kick in if something goes wrong. I'll quit now because certain things are considered protected information so I won't go into it. From what I've seen and the propaganda they push on us, we're fine. Again, I can only speak of our particular plant and not every nuclear plant in the world.
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of course, and i have no intention to imply that your plant is dangerous.
i believe though, what fukushima has shown, is that you can't just "power down" a nuclear power plant. some of the reactors haven't even been in use and still the used rods pose a great danger, and i bleive that is something that scared people a lot.
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IIRC though the Fukushima plant was over 30 years old, was due for a reactor upgrade (reactor one was actually less than a month away from being turned off and replaced) AND it was only built to survive a 7.4 Earthquake without a meltdown or a 5.7 metre tsunami, and it took a 9.0 Earthquake and 14 metre tsunami on the same day! After all the design was badly flawed (back-up generators were outside the main reactor buildings, and thus were destroyed) and what did we get? A few raditation leaks -- mostly stuff that had a half life of seconds or minutes over the course of days and an expensive/long recovery process.
In the end it is hard to argue that nuclear power isn't incredably safe when if a natural disater of that kind hit other energy sources the power plants would be wiped off the map and oil rigs would have a horrible effect on the enviroment (just look at the massive BP oil spill from 2010 -- it took them almost a month to control the spill and 4 months to offically seal the spill and it'll take decades for the wildlife to recover!
