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In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.
I mention this not because I think the engineers lied to the public. I don't. Nor do I think nuclear power is so dangerous it should be rejected as an energy source. I mention it because it shows how hard it can be to make sense of information from experts.
Trust in institutions and expertise has taken a lot of knocks in the last decade. Can society recover it? Are we all called to a higher effort to vet the information we are given, or is there another, better remedy?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 29 2017, @06:54PM (3 children)
One wonders if the money spent lining GE's pocket for faulty designs such as Fukushima had been spent on solar/wind/geothermal research, how much farther along those other technologies would be. It seems there is a bit of elitism here where interesting technologies are discounted merely because hippies embraced them. All of these other technologies are just as cool tech-wise and have great potential without the risks associated with nuclear (like what _do_ you do with a 1000 year poison?), but hippy-punching is fun I guess.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 29 2017, @11:07PM (2 children)
Was Fukishima known to be faulty at the time it was built? (Yes, given the placement of the backup power supply it *should* have been, but was it?)
I'm rather strongly in favor of continued development of nuclear power. Especially of reactors that can run on the wast produced by the current plants. But I question that they deserve more subsidy than do solar or wind plants, and tide generators of various kinds should receive continued low level development support.
The ones I *don't* think should be subsidized are coal, gas, and oil. And the subsidies for hydro should be directed to ensuring that the stuff already built continues to work...dredging out reservoirs, ecological remediation, etc. Ideally maintenance Including dredging) should be paid out of returns on investment. If it can't be, perhaps it's time for the managing company to shut it down. But ecological remediation is something that companies have proven that they won't do on a voluntary basis, so the money to do it should be taxed out of them. And if bankruptcy happens, the remediation should be in line to be paid before the CEO.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 30 2017, @04:10AM (1 child)
The reactor design itself has been known dangerous since the mid 70s.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fukushima-mark-nuclear-reactor-design-caused-ge-scientist/story?id=13141287 [go.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 30 2017, @04:35PM
But by the mid-1970's the reactor was already in operation. It may well not have been known to be dangerous at the time it was built.
That said, there were clear design mistakes such that they *should* have known that this particular reactor was unsafe including, as I mentioned, the siting of the backup power supply. And this is the kind of mistake that causes *me* to be hesitant about ALL nuclear reactors. They had good reason to know that the particular implementation of the design that they were building was unsafe, but they either didn't notice (i.e., those who had the authority to stop construction didn't notice) or they went ahead and built it anyway.
One can thing of lots of large projects with fatal flaws that aren't canceled because the people who had the authority to cancel them either didn't understand the problems, or stood to gain too much to allow ethics to override economic benefit.
I rather trust the technology, if not those who push it, but I don't trust the human administration of the projects.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.