Great Post!
Posted on 09/02/2017 1:53:10 PM PDT by Pontiac
Hurricane Harvey made land fall in Texas this week and the flooding was historic. What is shaping up to be the most costly natural disaster in American history, the storm has left refineries shut down, interrupted wind and solar generation, caused a constant worry about gas explosions, and caused a chain of events that led to explosions and fires at the Arkema chemical plant that is only the beginning.
The two nuclear reactors at the South Texas Project plant near Houston were operating at full capacity despite wind gusts that peaked at 130 mph as the Hurricane made landfall.
The plant implemented its severe weather protocols as planned and completed hurricane preparations ahead of Category 4 Hurricane Harvey striking the Texas Gulf Coast on August 25th.
Anyone who knows anything about nuclear was not surprised. Nuclear is the only energy source immune to all extreme weather events – by design.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Nuclear Ping
Nuclear produces none of the green house gases which liberals complain about when they push global warming. Yet the liberals tend to strongly oppose nuclear. All because of a half assed Jane Fonda movie which was in theaters at the time of the Three Mile Island incident.
And the idiots here in CA are working as fast as they can to dismantle what’s left of our nuclear generating capacity. And it’s just stupid. We need more of it not less. Seawater desalinization takes massive amounts of electricity, so do electric cars. Both are needed here, but rooftop solar isn’t going to be near enough to provide for anything more than our household needs.
Fukushima ping for the downside and a big + for a technology that generates waste that is *lethal* for 100 human generations.
I’d rather sit in the dark than glow in the dark.
Can it be safe? Likely. On a coastal setting? Don’t think so.
A tsunami took out Fukushima, due to faulty design placement of the backup generators and fuel tanks, as I recall. Hardly “impervious”.
This should not surprise anyone, ..... the Nukes always carry to load. Be it a severe Ice Storm, (underground Utilities) , heat waves, frigid cold snaps, most Weather Disasters etc., ...it’s always the Nukes that carry the load.
All this Solar, Wind, renewable garbage, is mostly useless and extremely unreliable, when ever storms kick up.
The USA Nuke’s have an impeccable modern safety record, they are zero release for emissions, and for the amount of power they generate......they do it all very efficiently.
It’s the power for the 21st Century and beyond.
Navy nuclear reactors have a pretty good record. I know a few stories of how some were hooked up at the pier to provide power to places that had power knocked out .
I think that thorium based reactors do not produce the waste as other reactor types do, however, envirowackos who rule the swamp have made such a critter impossible to build.
open Yucca Mountain and name it after Harry Reid and Obama
And you would trust Democrat politicians and the idiot cronies they appoint to regulatory roles to do a better job with nuke reactors than they did with levies in N.O.? :-)
Actually, I am completely with you, it is a good solution and the actual problems with waste are trivial and easily dealt with compared to the byproducts of fossil fuels. My only concerns with nuclear are with the incompetence of human beings, not with the science. But if the Japanese could mess up Fukushima so badly, what could happen with the kind of ineptness and corruption that let Katrina be so damaging.....
That’s like saying “because one house burns down go live in a cave”. Instead, we learn from examples like Fukushima that violated every precept of failsafe engineering and build far better, safer, more reliable plants in the future. Like those around Houston.
I’d rather see the government spend our research dollars on finally figuring out Fusion.(if that is at all feasible ).
I like nuclear power but fear the consequences of things like Fukushima and Chernobyl. We must be vigilant with the nukes we have and work to make any new plants truly fail safe.
Fukushima was one of plants built from the first GE design. Lots of changes have happened since including retrofit modifications in this country.
Great Post!
Nuclear power plants are not immune from flooding and having hurricane-related accidents.
Dangerous propaganda.
There are so many disaster type scenarios- Both natural and man made that lead to these things blowing up and spreading radiation everywhere. Yellowstone would be one for example. Imagine nuclear power plants buried in Dozens of feet of ash. All roads and infrastructure inaccessible. Airplanes unable to fly. Generators buried and even if they were not they would not run long with all the ash in the air. And there would be no way to get more fuel to them anyways. There are a hundred ways in that scenario where it goes BOOM!. And a volcanic eruption at Yellowstone would be the least of mankind problems. All of the years of stored fuel gets spread everywhere besides. These ticking time dirty bombs are by far the most hopeless and insane thing that man has ever done. They have the potential to be far more devastating than actual Thermonuclear bombs.
Nothing else in existence has so much potential to make so much land mass incompatible with human life for such a long period of time. And if you lose the infrastructure or the manpower to keep it cool it goes boom. You can’t just shut it down and walk away. You can’t quickly put it in safe mode.
It is insanity.
I’m for “all the above”. It pays to have a good energy mix. Minimizes the risk of common mode failure.
Fukushima is exactly right - Do journalist figure history started this morning when they got up. For god sakes the tsunami was just several years ago.
I mean how much fish are you eating these days from the pacific?
Or for a future nuclear disaster coming to a state near you. Hanford is a slow moving catastrophe that is a natural disaster - strong thunderstorm??? from all those tanks of waste leaving their extremely rusty home in search of the - Columbia River - oh that is gonna be sweet.
I have a rectanguler cube of carbon from the first ever nuclear reactor the Chicago Pile-1, which achieved criticality on December 2, 1942 somewhere around here . I was told the scientists were very excited because they had numerous schemes they wanted to experiment with but the very first reactor method worked. I wonder what has happened to all those other schemes. So far nothing very safe or not toxic has seemed to been developed.
We are familiar with the names Fukushima and Chernobyl. They’re the most devastating nuclear meltdowns to date, and their effects are still being felt years later. This has made many hesitant to look any further into nuclear power…
But thorium could change all that. Its chemical makeup is far superior to uranium, the usual fuel for nuclear reactors. It’s cleaner, produces more energy, and best of all, it will reduce the risk of a nuclear meltdown to almost zero.
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