• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Nuclear energy

Lord of Planar said:
Something we agree on. Still, nuclear has its own set of problems too.
Click to expand...

One worrying problem nobody has mentioned yet might be terrorism. In fact I'm surprised no nutjob terror group has attempted that sort of attack to date.

The potential consequences there don't even bear thinking about frankly
 
Mithrae said:
If what others have said earlier in the thread is true, that earlier nuclear plants were designed specifically to produce weaponisable waste (I didn't know that... sounds about right though :lol: ), that would be a pretty good reason for anyone to be leery of it.
Click to expand...

There are very few reactors built for that purpose. Nuclear plants built to produce efficient power are not the breeder plants that produce plutonium.
 
flogger said:
One worrying problem nobody has mentioned yet might be terrorism. In fact I'm surprised no nutjob terror group has attempted that sort of attack to date.

The potential consequences there don't even bear thinking about frankly
Click to expand...

Any public service, utility faces a serious threat of terrorism. And despite some beliefs, it would be extremely difficult to turn nuclear power or waste into a bomb without some extensive knowledge and equipment that is impractical for terrorists.
 
roguenuke said:
Any public service, utility faces a serious threat of terrorism. And despite some beliefs, it would be extremely difficult to turn nuclear power or waste into a bomb without some extensive knowledge and equipment that is impractical for terrorists.
Click to expand...

They don't need to do that they just need the knowledge to engineer another Chernobyl style incident. Sabotaging any other sort of utility would hardly have the same kind of impact
 
flogger said:
They don't need to do that they just need the knowledge to engineer another Chernobyl style incident. Sabotaging any other sort of utility would hardly have the same kind of impact
Click to expand...

No they need more than that because they would not be able to take over a nuclear plant for that long without a very large group of people which would be more of an act of war than terrorism with how many that would take to keep back the government long enough to create such an event. Chernobyl wasn't the result of simply pushing the wrong button.

Think about what would happen if someone was able to poison the water supply of DC in a way that did not set off any alerts or automated shutoffs. That could easily be more devastating.
 
roguenuke said:
No they need more than that because they would not be able to take over a nuclear plant for that long without a very large group of people which would be more of an act of war than terrorism with how many that would take to keep back the government long enough to create such an event. Chernobyl wasn't the result of simply pushing the wrong button.

Think about what would happen if someone was able to poison the water supply of DC in a way that did not set off any alerts or automated shutoffs. That could easily be more devastating.
Click to expand...

Lets for arguments sake say they flew their next airliner through the reactor containment wall destroying the cooling reservior . How long would the reactor take to go critical if the fuel rods were exposed ?
 
flogger said:
Lets for arguments sake say they flew their next airliner through the reactor containment wall destroying the cooling reservior . How long would the reactor take to go critical if the fuel rods were exposed ?
Click to expand...
Actually most reactor containment designed from the early 70's on, are designed to take a hit from a fully loaded airliner.
Aircraftcrashbreach - Nuclear Energy Institute
 
flogger said:
Lets for arguments sake say they flew their next airliner through the reactor containment wall destroying the cooling reservior . How long would the reactor take to go critical if the fuel rods were exposed ?
Click to expand...

Reactors go critical all the time if we want power. Critical is good when it comes to nuclear power, it means power is being generated. Supercritical is bad. But we have lots of safety measures in place that would prevent such things from happening before precautions could be taken to prevent supercritical from occurring. Several of the major multistate power shutdowns in the last 20 years were due to our safety precautions being extremely sensitive to any thing that could be dangerous to nuclear power. Three Mile Island was our mistake.
 
Anomalism said:
EDIT: I hit back to change the poll options and screwed everything up. Damn it, whatever. So I had a long disagreement with my dad about nuclear energy over Christmas break. He thinks it's a risk we shouldn't take because renewable energy looks promising and nuclear waste is a dangerous problem that we don't handle well enough. My argument was that the immediate need for other forms of energy outweighs the dangers of nuclear energy. I also argued that with more time and use we will get a lot better at it, which would very likely mean less waste and possibly a more reliable disposal method. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

1, The disposal method of throwing into a deep ocean trench after encasing it in a barrel full of concrete would be fine but the storage of dangerous nuklear crap industry is too powerful to let go of the golden goose that just keeps giving.

2, The danger from nuklear power is that if a war wanders across a nation with a few of these things then the poisionous stuff will be used as a weapon. That has easily the capacity to make the earth uninhabitable. Few other things can do that. Coal is never going to be so dangerous.

3, Soon, in the next couple of decades, the price of solar power or power from geothermal sources or something else will make all this debate redundant as it will become cheaper than coal. That's the point we stop using fossil fuels.
 
flogger said:
Lets for arguments sake say they flew their next airliner through the reactor containment wall destroying the cooling reservior . How long would the reactor take to go critical if the fuel rods were exposed ?
Click to expand...

Yep, war is the worry.

How long for heavy artillery to blast one open?

It would not take a huge war to smash a dozen reactors open.

I think with a couple of years and a couple of hundred thousand pounds I would be able to make a crude piston poered cruse missile and then make a dozen more. That would do for smashing at least one reactor. Properly loaded with explosives etc.

Good job that sciencey types are generally not the sort that want to kill lots of people.
 
Interesting comments and I agree with most of it. But I need to check on the GE aspects. As I recall, growing up on the Westinghouse side of the George Westinghouse/Tesla-Edison/GE divide it was Westinghouse that invested heavily in nuclear and basically went bankrupt doing so.
 
nuclear power
[h=1]Indian Energy Experts Baffled by Green Hostility to Nuclear Power[/h] Guest essay by Eric Worrall The Hindu reports on a fascinating top level debate occurring at a conference in India, between politicians and energy experts. The energy experts are struggling to understand why nuclear power is not the favoured Western option for reducing CO2 emissions. … Pointing out that countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland…
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom