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‘Japan battles nuclear meltdown’ – Headline from London’s Financial Times.
Based on what we are seeing in Japan right now, I’m guessing the person that said your article about nuclear power showed a “lack of critical thinking and the usual hysteria about nuclear power” are probably eating their words.
The article was called ‘Cost of Living In Costa Rica. Electricity prices.’ https://www.welovecostarica.com/public/Cost_of_Living_In_Costa_Rica_Electricity_prices.cfm
Nice work Scott.
Thanks Sally
Looks scary over there…
We haven’t heard from you in quite a while, welcome back!
Scott
PS. Some incredible before and after photos can be seen at:
[ http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm ]
The biggest advantage of nuclear power over hydroelectric production facilities is footprint. The amount of water storage required for a hydroelectric plant runs to many square kilometers eliminating huge tracts of the natural landscape while a nuclear plant requires one to four square kilometers.
The current situation in Japan is showing us that advances made in construction of nuclear facilities has improved greatly since the days of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
There is one huge drawback to nuclear facilities in the disposal of spent fuel rods. Until this issue can be resolved in a viable manner these facilities should not be constructed in Costa Rica. If a viable solution can be found to eliminate this problem Costa Rica could stop putting valuable natural land under water.
Unless the Americans or Chinese come into CR and manage to convince (bribe) a politician, I can’t imagine the Costa Ricans ever saying yes to nuclear power. But I never underestimate the power of greed to overcome good sense and social conscious.
[quote=”sprite”]Unless the Americans or Chinese come into CR and manage to convince (bribe) a politician, I can’t imagine the Costa Ricans ever saying yes to nuclear power. But I never underestimate the power of greed to overcome good sense and social conscious.[/quote]
My comment was more as a comparison of environmental impact rather than anything else. The situation in Japan is, so far, had been an indication of the safety advances made in nuclear power plants but the shutdown of the water cooling systems indicates that the fat lady hasn’t even arrived on stage yet.
It’s hard to tell what politicians will do. I wouldn’t have expected that Costa Rica would allow open pit mining but it’s happening.
One of the reasons we moved here ws Costa Rica’s commitment to the environment but the Arias administration’s idea that planting trees will reduce the national carbon footprint to zero is a non-starter. With the new import rules for alternative energy vehicles I hope the new administration is realizing that pollution needs to be reduced at the source.
I reconsidered what I wrote above. Everything has to be put into context. Costa Rica is not on another planet. The winds blowing radiation from Japan to north western Canada and United States may not reach far enough to the south to effect Costa Rica. But there are many other destructive “wind”s blowing around which will and which have reached Costa Rica to some degree. I don’t believe Costa Rica can insulate itself from the economic melt down, world wide environmental degradation and an exploding population. Sooner than later, I expect there will have to be some pretty discouraging changes happening to my favorite place on earth.
It’s interesting to note, however, that the Fukushima power plant was undamaged by the 9.0 quake to any substantial degree. The problems stemmed from siting the emergency generators at too low an elevation, so they were flooded and ruined by the surging water level of the tsunami. Ooops.:cry:
In case you missed it …
In 2003, Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto released a video showing all 2053 known nuclear detonations between 1945 and 1998:
Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing”the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.
The point about nuclear waste is very important. In the U.S. we are playing Ostrich with our heads in the sand. EVERY U.S. plant is storing its entire life time of waste fuel in “temporary” holding. This is outside the containment building in the fuel handling area (where they load it from trucks). The area is often called “the swimming pool” because it looks like one. You can walk along the rail and LOOK at the glowing waste fuel covered only by a few feet of water. This is the same area in Japan where they have had fires and explosions AND where the older Japanese plants also store waste fuel. In the U.S. they have repeatedly rearranged the fuel storage racks to hold more and more fuel because the political problems of moving the materials have not been solved. IF this were solved we only have storage available for about 20-30% of the existing waste fuel.
In Japan the situation is probably not nearly as bad as in the U.S. because they DO move fuel out to be reprocessed and may not be storing the entire plant’s lifetime of waste fuel as we do here. But I do not know this for a fact.
The ONLY logical way to handle waste fuel is to reprocess it and properly store the waste (for 40,000 years they say. . .). Reprocessing results in making plutonium and the issues of diversion to weapon making. . . There are also serious technological issues with reprocessing as well as the storage which most countries ARE NOT taking responsibility for.
In the end the problems with Nuclear are and have been largely political. In the U.S. the issues of moving waste fuel are political. But the politics run several ways. In Japan they take maintenance VERY seriously. When engineers recommended (Globally) that many components (such as primary coolant pumps) be completely dismantled, inspected and repaired the Japanese did it. In the U.S. they took a “sampling” and did a statistical study. In other words, they paper whipped the maintenance requirements. . . In the U.S. the O.E.M.’s did a lot of the inspecting. Protecting their reputations was more important than finding actual or potential problems. The system in Japan is not perfect either. There are always financial concerns to be considered when doing maintenance. The worst concern EVERYWHERE is how long the plant will be down. These things are looked at as huge money making machines and every hour they are not in operation is counted in millions of dollars lost. . . and thus there is a HUGE amount of pressure during refueling and maintenance outages to get them back on-line ASAP.
The problems with Nuclear are far too complex with terrible VERY long term implications for us mere humans to be responsible for. If the absolute BEST people were in charge it would still be too dangerous. But the best people are NOT in charge. The politicians, lawyers and bean counters have more power than the engineers and maintenance personell.
NO NEW NUKES!
Note: I am second generation nuclear maintenance. Glad to be out of the business.
my step daughter is chief counsel for a nuclear energy company. even in light of this crisis, she defends the use of nuclear power because there is simply no way to meet the demand for electricity. i don’t necessarily agree with that, and i think the Germans are now trying to generate massive amounts of solar energy in the Sahara. We can blame the proliferation of nuclear anything on our unfettered, and unbridled consumption without any thought to the ultimate consequences.
Forgetting natural disasters which as has been shown in Japan can always be greater than predicted. Besides the immediate problems they may lose the use of all 6 units at one site due to lingering problems and future reevaluations of the site safety.
This big problem is that nobody has addressed the Nuclear waste issue. France used to dump theirs in the Ocean. . . In the 80’s Japan started hauling away European waste to reprocess and use in their plants. After some research on the Yucca Mountain facility in the U.S. it turns out it is not ready for use and may not be ready for another 20 years if there are no delays. . . Meanwhile fuel is stored in refueling canals and in on-site dry casks making every nuclear site a waste holding site. If the U.S. with its large expanses of undeveloped areas cannot find a satisfactory solution to waste storage how can countries like Japan, South Korea and others? What would Costa Rica do with wastes that must be stored for tens of thousands of years?
Cheap energy in the form of oil is to blame for our turning to dangerous nuclear energy. Cheap oil permitted us to over consume and over populate and devastate our environment by depleting it of resources while polluting it. The over population seem to me to be the biggest problem brought on by oil because now how are we going to come up with enough fuel for all the new billions of people?
None of the green, renewable energy sources have the technology behind them to satisfy world demand. The obvious conclusion is that we either reduce demand OR continue and let the system collapse which will, in turn, reduce the population which will reduce the demand. Guess which one is most likely to happen?
I want to be on my Costa Rican mountain with some sort of renewable local energy supply in place before too long.
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