Mr. Fusion says:

#26 & 30,

My point is that everything has some trade off. Yes, I could have covered every point. Perhaps I’ll make that the major theme of my next book. (cue laugh track)

The Japanese nuclear generator survived a serious earthquake without any significant damage. It survived the external power failure by using its own diesel generation. Where it failed is the tsunami knocked the diesel generators out by contaminating the fuel supply. The batteries worked as intended until they too died. Also, the batteries didn’t have the power to keep the water out of the diesel generators so they were flooded before fresh fuel could be sourced.

The expected catastrophic failure safeguards worked except for the tsunami being larger than expected. Yes, the fuel could have been kept higher than it was to avoid the water. That raises the question; how high should they have anticipated the water? Eight meters? Fifteen meters? 35 meters? At what point would have been high enough?

It is because of all the redundancies and fail-safes that nuclear is so expensive to build. That is the tradeoff. Every other power source also has some tradeoff. None of them are free. While we can consider and plan for the problems of solar and wind, we can also build safeguards into nuclear to gain a steady supply or coal to be a clean(er) source.

So while I won’t volunteer to stand naked in front of a melting core, I won’t say nuclear power is all bad. Just expensive to build and maintain. And I’ll sleep tonight knowing there are several nuclear power stations within 100 miles of here.

spookie says:

Because it’s a NON-STORY! Nuclear scientists don’t use the word meltdown for a reason–it has no meaning! I live the width of the Mississippi from a reactor of the exact GE design of those in Japan. It worries me not, because if a crisis occurred that caused a dangerous situation, I’d have other things to worry about. Nuclear is safe and clean and produces far less radiation than coal plants.