THE MASTER OBSERVES LESSONS FROM FUKUSHIMA
Guest Post: Learning From Japan’s Nuclear Disaster; An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors.
Amory Lovins, March 28, 2011 (Greentech Media)
"…An earthquake-and-tsunami zone crowded with 127 million people is an unwise place for 54 reactors. The 1960s design of five Fukushima-I reactors has the smallest safety margin and probably can't contain 90 percent of meltdowns. The U.S. has six identical and 17 very similar plants…Overheated fuel risks hydrogen or steam explosions that damage equipment and contaminate the whole site--so clustering many reactors together (to save money) can make failure at one reactor cascade to the rest…
"…Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving…Fallible people have created its half-century history of a few calamities, a steady stream of worrying incidents, and many near-misses. America has been lucky so far…[at] Three Mile Island…Ohio's Davis-Besse reactor [and elsewhere]…U.S. regulation is not clearly better than Japanese regulation…"
Amory Lovins is The Master when it comes to Energy. (click to enlarge)"Nuclear-promoting regulators inspire even less confidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency's 2005 estimate of about 4,000 Chernobyl deaths contrasts with a rigorous 2009 review of 5,000 mainly Slavic-language scientific papers the IAEA overlooked. It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America. The total toll now exceeds a million, plus a half-trillion dollars' economic damage. The fallout reached four continents, just as the jet stream could swiftly carry Fukushima fallout.
"Fukushima I-4's spent fuel alone, while in the reactor, had produced (over years, not in an instant) more than a hundred times more fission energy and hence radioactivity than both 1945 atomic bombs. If that already-damaged fuel keeps overheating, it may melt or burn, releasing into the air things like cesium-137 and strontium-90, which take several centuries to decay a millionfold. Unit 3's fuel is spiked with plutonium, which takes 482,000 years."
click to enlarge"Nuclear power is the only energy source where mishap or malice can kill so many people so far away…[and] the only climate solution that substitutes [nuclear weapons] proliferation, accident, and high-level radioactive waste dangers…[N]uclear plants are so slow and costly to build that they reduce and retard climate protection…Each dollar spent on a new reactor buys about two to ten times less carbon savings and is 20 to 40 times slower, than spending that dollar on the cheaper, faster, safer solutions that make nuclear power unnecessary and uneconomic: efficient use of electricity, making heat and power together in factories or buildings ("cogeneration"), and renewable energy…
"…The last two made 18 percent of the world's 2009 electricity (while nuclear made 13 percent, reversing their 2000 shares)—and made over 90 percent of the 2007 to 2008 increase in global electricity production…Half the world's new generating capacity in 2008 and 2009 was renewable. In 2010, renewables…won $151 billion of private investment…while nuclear got zero…and kept losing capacity…A durable myth claims Three Mile Island halted U.S. nuclear orders. Actually they stopped over a year before—dead of an incurable attack of market forces…While we pray for the best in Japan today, let us hope its people's sacrifice will help speed the world to a safer, more competitive energy future."
posted by Herman K. Trabish @ 5:54 AM
1 Comments:
I have to say, that while I believe that nuclear power had promise once, its placement in fallible hands has convinced me that there is a better way to achieve energy independence, and we need to move now. I've never been a nuclear power stalwart, although Fukushima has reinforced my belief that we are in a war with big government and big business for our very survival. We can all rationalize that nuclear power is safe, but the risks of maintaining it as a staple of American energy far outweigh the benefits. From a global perspective, it's hopelessly fraught with economic and natural disaster, and we should act as a Nation to kill it as a once hopeful, but failed, pursuit. Just like we've put an end to so many social evils around the globe at times when the world needed someone to lead, so should we carry the mantle of disarming nuclear power. Wind, solar, geothermal, bio fuel and others should be utilized to reinvigorate how we pursue energy production on smaller, more practical scale. That means shedding our reliance on the utilities and creating a new market that brings power to people directly, so that large, vacuuous utilities become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, our law makers on both sides of the aisle are bought and paid for by special interests that will never see eye to eye, so it's up to the private sector of small town geniuses to join forces and create a revolution in energy delivery. We've reached a tipping point. God help us if we make the wrong choice.
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