One more reason I'm glad I can live off grid.

Re: One more reason I'm glad I can live off grid.

The "not in my back yard" people really bother me.

I had FPIRG (Florida Public Interest Research Group) come by my house, when I lived in Tallahassee. They were petitioning against offshore oil drilling, driving a car. I, a 300lb guy who road my bike 5 miles to work and didn't own a car, mentioned that I'd really like to have them in sight of the beachs so every one knew where the oil was coming from that helped support their life style. Then I asked them to kindly "drive on"

Re: One more reason I'm glad I can live off grid.

>The really dumb location of placing that set of reactors in an area that might be tsunami prone is unforgivable.

It's quite common. Reactors need cooling, and having a large lake, river or sea nearby makes the design a lot more straightforward.

Everything looks dumb in retrospect when there's a problem. "They put San Onofre near a fault? They put Three Mile Island near a major population center? They put Hanford near a major river? Idiots!" But you do have to put them somewhere; the best you can do is make reasonable tradeoffs between risk, costs, effectiveness, efficiency, pollution etc.

Re: One more reason I'm glad I can live off grid.

solar_dave wrote: »

True but you then are bound to design for the worst case scenario, like all known tsunamis and over build by 150%.

Agreed - which is what Japan did. They had never seen a tsunami even half the size of the one that hit them.

This then factors into cost and perhaps improves the chances for a better location. Build 100 ft high sea wall or build the reactor 100ft above sea level? Pretty easy to see the cost effective decision. That is what makes if unforgivable.

Remember that the waves that hit were, in places, 120 feet high. Does that 100 foot wall sound like a "cost effective decision" now?

But let's say they decide to build up a 150 foot embankment and move the reactor to the top of it. Then there's a mudslide due to an earthquake, the embankment shifts and a part of the transformer building is damaged. Now they can't move cooling water - and because it's 150 feet in the air they can't easily just pump water up to cool the reactor. Someone would then post "it's unforgivable that they put that reactor on a hill just because they were afraid of a tsunami!"

Every form of power - even solar and wind - carries risk. Managing that risk is critical. But even when well managed, that risk is never zero.

Re: One more reason I'm glad I can live off grid.

actually the tsunami does not have to originate near the affected power plant or whatever else has in the line of fire. it can come from alaska or south america and even antarctica. how about a large iceberg hitting the ocean? earthquakes are one thing one may need to address if they are in that area, but tsunamis can happen along any ocean coast line and their frequency of occurrence is much higher than many think.

Re: One more reason I'm glad I can live off grid.

SolaRevolution wrote: »

Neuclear power plants are built to be 100% safe.
Just like airplanes and space shuttles.

Nothing is 100% safe, of course. You can build something that is 90% safe, or you can build it 99% safe, but that's going to cost you. Or you can build it 99.9% safe... How many nines do you want to buy?

Obviously the risk tolerance in a space shuttle is dramatically higher for a space shuttle than it is for a commercial airline, else we would never have been able to afford to build it.

Re: One more reason I'm glad I can live off grid.

Yea, sorry. It was a touch of sarcasm. :-)

I think it was the Three Mile Island incident that got me interested in "green" energy technology in the first place. I was nine at the time and it was one of the first news stories that really hit me. That was about the same time the story came out in my 4th grade Weekly Reader about "Gasoline prices may soon hit $1.00/gallon". I wonder how all of this news about energy supply and nuclear disaster will affect the psyche of kids growing up today.

Form my blue collar perspective, it's a plain and simple issue of risk/benefit assesment. With airplanes and space shuttles it seems worth the risk. No one can make you ride in them, and the statistical hazard to people on the ground is fairly minimal.

What is the meantime between failures?
What is the likelihood and what would be the costs associated with failure compared to the benefit of use?

The statistical "MTBF" of nuclear energy based on history has now changed. The analysis of the risk has new conclusions.

"Probability of contamination from severe nuclear reactor accidents is higher than expected: study"
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-probability-contamination-severe-nuclear-reactor.html

"According to the results of the study, a nuclear meltdown in one of the reactors in operation worldwide is likely to occur once in 10 to 20 years. Currently, there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation, and 60 more are planned."

"A major nuclear accident there (southern Asia) would affect around 34 million people, while in the eastern USA and in East Asia this would be 14 to 21 million people."



This truely is one more reason "I'm glad I can live off grid." I really don't want to encourage the use of nuclear power. It just seems too dangerous to me.

I wonder what could be possible if we could make the most efficient use of our cleanest, safest power sources. What if the grid were used as an "off-grid power system" which has been tapped for maximum efficiency. The "generator" would only be fired up sparingly, when needed and for system maintenance. Any ability to store energy would be precious and well minded. We would run our "heavy loads" on "sunny days" after the batteries are charged. We would set up ways of making the best use of our diversion loads.

I know, it's a pipe dream. :roll:
A good one.

Alex Aragon