Any time something goes wrong is an opportunity to make improvements. Fukushima is no different. For the most part, people have not come to any conclusions about Fukushima. Some have come to wrong conclusions. Nobody has implemented any right conclusions yet. Three Mile Island brought about a massive change in operator training and nothing like TMI has even come close in the intervening 34 years. Wrong conclusion: The Germans and Japanese have panicked about nuclear power. Both are closing nukes as fast as they can. The Germans delude themselves they can make good the loss through wind and solar power, and now electricity has become exorbitantly expensive there. The Japanese are going to import LNG to run gas turbines to replace their nukes. Germany is having to reopen dirty old lignite-fired power plants and try to clean them up some by importing high-quality coal from the US. Wrong conclusion: Nuclear is bad. Dont build any more. Shut down exiting plants. If nuclear is bad, how have all those nukes run so long without incident? No conclusion. The US has come to no conclusions about Fukushima. Nuclear power is so bound up in permitting that action is nearly impossible. Right conclusions: Some adjustments to existing sites are justified. First and foremost, emergency generators have to be hardened to withstand record natural phenomena. The true cause of the Fukushima problem was that the emergency generators were sited a meter below the tsunami level. They got flooded and shorted out and the meltdown occurred. If the generators had been 10 meters higher, Fukushima would be a non-incident. Any thermal plant has to be sited near a big body of water as emergency cooling is always a necessity. This means all thermal plants (both fossil fuel and nukes). If you are near a body of water, a flood is always a possibility. The reasonable adjustment is to site emergency generators and pumps on a higher elevation. The Fukushima tsunami was a mere meter higher than historical tsunami experience. Now hills are not hard to come by in Japan. You simply locate the emergency generators maybe fifteen meters above the historical max. Provide a submarine-quality cable run to pumps in the palnt. Another reasonable adjustment is to cease and desist keeping spent fuel rods at the plants. For the US, this means opening the spent fuel rod depository at Yucca Mountain. This is not just a hole in the ground. It is equipped with a triple-redundant heat transfer system to get rid of the low-grade heat of nuclear decay. Yucca Mountain is very secure. It is a part of the Nevada Test Site and the security there rivals that of Fort Knox. If terrorists want to grab some fuel rods (how would they lift them?) theyd better bring at least a mechanized brigade with some serious air defense assets. Yucca Mountain is located in one of the driest parts of the country, and the geology indicates it has been a long, long time since there was any water there. By putting all the nations spent fuel rods into Yucca Mountain they can cool off and be handy when the economics favors reprocessing the fissile material out of the rods. Another right conclusion is that it is time to start replacing aging equipment with reactors that have had the benefit of a half-century of engineering development. No equipment lasts forever. You have to replace it eventually. The US has lots of usable material that can be used as nuclear fuel be it recycled U-235 and Pu-239 from spent fuel rods, uranium, thorium (for a thorium-232/U-233 cycle) or even borax to drive an aneutronic boron fusion process (if one can be developed). Otherwise, America has to become even more dependent on shale gas or go back to coal. While it is unlikely America will ever get the high percentage of its energy from nuclear the way the French do (using US nuclear technology) it is not unrealistic to think the US could get 25-50% of its electricity from nuclear power.
Could you show me a study that shows how high something needs to be to be able to be above a tsunami in Japan. Can you then show me how such an installation can be hard wired so that once impacted by a tsunami the generators will be able to supply the critically needed power.
Tell me - instead of using HINH plans (Hope It Never Happens) what are the plans for rectifying the problem of a busted nuclear power station. I mean they still have not been able to do anything with Chernobyl have they? I gather, since you do not feel that a leaking plant is a problem you would have no issues if asked to assist in cleaning up a plant, or living next to one............. I hear there is cheap land going around Chernobyl
What can be done about CHernobyl? There is no nuclear radiation lysol, it takes decades for radiation to disperse. Can't just send people in to mop it up.. He didn't say it wasn't a problem. He was talking about the steps taken or conclusions made after the fact.
Depends on the land form. Some topography focuses waves so they get much bigger. In some places, 10 meters asl would be perfectly safe from any ordinary tectonic tsunami. In other places, 50 meters would not be enough. That's a fairly trivial exercise. The technology for hardening military generator sites has been known for decades.
Good post, and I generally agree. Shutting down all the nuclear power plants was an asinine sop to popular hysteria. We have learned a lot from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and now Fukushima. Building nuclear power plants in locations at high tectonic risk, like Fukushima, has to be one of the dumbest ideas ever.
Thats exactly my point. They made these calculations and unfortunately got them wrong. It is the one downside to nuclear power, you virtually can never afford to screw up. You have to get it right first time, every time
Agreed - yes we have had very few "accidents" (that we know of) but the worst have left us with a legacy we have been unable to deal with. Even the very best industry in the world will not ensure 0 adverse events
Which is why we cannot expect an industry to achieve zero accidents, which, by definition are unforeseen events
Do not build a nuclear power plant near the coast of a highly populated area. The radioactivity will be carried by the water.
