http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

We don't need agricultural land or anything, no way, spent nuclear fuel will feed us!

is this supposed to make me want renewable energies? After they murdered those adorable chimneys and cooling towers???

NO!!

lol, the human mind is really weird. stick a face on something, and you instantly empathize with it.

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Thursday, February 9th, 2012 6:41am PST - promote requested by eric3579.

Disagree. No vote. Fossil fuels need to be abandoned before nuclear. Nothing generates more power than a nuclear plant.

>> ^Nebosuke:

Disagree. No vote. Fossil fuels need to be abandoned before nuclear. Nothing generates more power than a nuclear plant.


Nor does anything produce energy as cleanly as nuclear. It's shame the greens are so scared of the most promising clean energy alternative we currently have just waiting to be used.

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!

Nuclear is not perfect, but it's the best we have right now. Coal and Oil are much worse. Wind, Solar and Geothermal are better, but not nearly the same scale as Nuclear.

>> ^gwiz665:

Nuclear is not perfect, but it's the best we have right now. Coal and Oil are much worse. Wind, Solar and Geothermal are better, but not nearly the same scale as Nuclear.


There are several issues with nuclear and Chernobyl/Fukushima style disasters are frankly the least of them.

Leaving aside the obviously thorny issue of waste management, the other issue arises when you amortise the cost over the total lifetime of the nuclear plant. It's just not that cheap in terms of energy or money to build, run and then decommission.

As for renewable energy, it's nowhere close to providing the energy levels we need yet. Also there are other environmental issues with some renewable energy generation methods as well. Hydro requires large dams (concrete is an eco-nightmare) and can destroy habitats. Geothermal can affect the landscape (subsidence and sapping geysers are two common effects). Lots of people complain about wind turbines as visually unappealing (personally I find the aesthetically pleasing). I'm not saying renewable technologies are bad, merely that there are still issues with them.

In real terms, fusion is where it's at.

I want a dyson sphere. Get some people on that, could ya?
>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^gwiz665:
Nuclear is not perfect, but it's the best we have right now. Coal and Oil are much worse. Wind, Solar and Geothermal are better, but not nearly the same scale as Nuclear.

There are several issues with nuclear and Chernobyl/Fukushima style disasters are frankly the least of them.
Leaving aside the obviously thorny issue of waste management, the other issue arises when you amortise the cost over the total lifetime of the nuclear plant. It's just not that cheap in terms of energy or money to build, run and then decommission.
As for renewable energy, it's nowhere close to providing the energy levels we need yet. Also there are other environmental issues with some renewable energy generation methods as well. Hydro requires large dams (concrete is an eco-nightmare) and can destroy habitats. Geothermal can affect the landscape (subsidence and sapping geysers are two common effects). Lots of people complain about wind turbines as visually unappealing (personally I find the aesthetically pleasing). I'm not saying renewable technologies are bad, merely that there are still issues with them.
In real terms, fusion is where it's at.

>> ^gwiz665:

I want a dyson sphere. Get some people on that, could ya?

Been working on it in my shed. The design is pretty much done, I just need a tiny bit more materials.

and a spare star

They are a go cause I have a Space Star.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^gwiz665:
I want a dyson sphere. Get some people on that, could ya?
Been working on it in my shed. The design is pretty much done, I just need a tiny bit more materials.
and a spare star

*viral at its best, look at the anger

Adding video to channels (Viral) - requested by Krupo.

I like those pinwheels at the end, but together they couldn't power the monitor I watched this sift on.

Wow, QM. I didn't know you had that many monitors.

"One 1.8 MW wind turbine at a reasonable site would produce over 4,700,000 kWh of electricity each year, enough to meet the annual needs of over 1,000 households."

(the average household in the UK, with 2 parents and 2 children, uses approximately 5500 kWh of energy per year. -Strathclyde University statistic)
>> ^quantumushroom:

I like those pinwheels at the end, but together they could power the 3000 monitors I watched this sift on.

Nuclear could actually be MUCH safer and cleaner if Thorium reactors were built instead of the Uranium ones that are in use today.

Oh, so now this is funny? People have certainly changed their tunes from when i was putting cute faces and arms on footage of the Twin Towers coming down. Hypocrisy much?

>> ^PalmliX:

Nuclear could actually be MUCH safer and cleaner if Thorium reactors were built instead of the Uranium ones that are in use today.


We have a bunch of those video, I posted a new one

http://videosift.com/video/Liquid-Fluoride-Thorium-Reactors

I am not a technical person, supposedly there are some corrosion problems, but that is just something I heard from a person studing to be a nuclear tech (he isn't an authority yet)

too soon?

>> ^sepatown:

Oh, so now this is funny? People have certainly changed their tunes from when i was putting cute faces and arms on footage of the Twin Towers coming down. Hypocrisy much?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Wow - fantastic.

*cute

Videos are limited to being in a maximum of 7 channels - ignoring all requests by JiggaJonson.

>> ^sepatown:

Oh, so now this is funny? People have certainly changed their tunes from when i was putting cute faces and arms on footage of the Twin Towers coming down. Hypocrisy much?


Only towers were harmed in the making of this video though

>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^Nebosuke:
Disagree. No vote. Fossil fuels need to be abandoned before nuclear. Nothing generates more power than a nuclear plant.

Nor does anything produce energy as cleanly as nuclear. It's shame the greens are so scared of the most promising clean energy alternative we currently have just waiting to be used.


So it's not just me...

I'd like to like environmental politics, but their approach to nuclear power is just so ignorant. Nuclear power is by far the best source we have for being clean, safe and effective. Yes, it has problems, but much fewer than any other source. It's cleaner than fossil fuel. Never mind the more obvious pollutants, nuclear plants release less radiation than coal plants.

Meanwhile, renewable sources like the wind farms that this video is pushing produce sod all. All the solar panels in Germany (one of the most solar-powered countries around) produce the same amount of power as Fukushima did, and that's only in the sort of ideal weather conditions that exist for a matter of hours a year.

As horrible as the Fukushima disaster was, this was about the worse case scenario. One of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded, striking near an old power plant and what happened? Zero deaths from radiation, with long term effects yet to be seen of course. Do we need land for agriculture? Yes, although it's debatable just how much as total food production isn't the problem. We also need electricity. We also need to cut pollution. If we invested in nuclear power, thorium in particular, we could achieve all these even before fusion is perfected. Also, we wouldn't need to have 40 year old power plants in earthquake regions if counter-productive environmentalists didn't try so hard to wreak the environment.

Care about the environment? Then support nuclear power!

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!


Yes, because wind and solar are ever so profitable aren't they. If you had a solar farm in Fukushima's place producing the same amount of power you'd have heavy metals seeping into the water supply across half of Japan. That doesn't even mention the fact that half of Japan, would have been permanently covered by those solar panels just to match the output of the Fukushima plant.

How many deaths are attributable to Fukushima by the way? Zero.

If you want to talk about long term health effects, please don't forget to add up the damage from burning thousands of tonnes of coal and dumping the smoke straight out into the air 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I know which poison I'd pick every single time.

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!


I know what you're trying to say, but when your opening gambit is calling people nuclear industry shills, you sound like a lunatic. I mean, i think it's fair to say that only a lunatic would think there are not just one but multiple nuclear shills dedicated to promoting nuclear power on the sift.

Renewable so far isn't enough, and the cost of nuclear power mostly comes from handling the fuel and waste it seems. So with nuclear we have to spend a lot of money (and some fossil fuels) to handle the materials. On the other hand with fossil fuels, we spend less but hurt the environment more. But then we need to consider how long we can go on burying or sinking radioactive material and/or rendering huge areas of our limited planet uninhabitable, we need another solution which is almost certainly fusion.

Fusion is an engineering problem right now. Perhaps a technology/cost problem especially during a recession. Anyone with any money left to put into hopeful energy tech has it in the form of oil (because that's going nowhere and we damn well need it) and why would they promote that?

I'm just going to assume you're either passionate about wind power or just didn't like my unique brand of humor, powered by coal.



>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

Wow, QM. I didn't know you had that many monitors.
"One 1.8 MW wind turbine at a reasonable site would produce over 4,700,000 kWh of electricity each year, enough to meet the annual needs of over 1,000 households."
(the average household in the UK, with 2 parents and 2 children, uses approximately 5500 kWh of energy per year. -Strathclyde University statistic)
>> ^quantumushroom:
I like those pinwheels at the end, but together they could power the 3000 monitors I watched this sift on.

@quantumushroom

Neither, I just can't stand the fact that you talk out your ass all the time.

Always pointing out problems and hidden agendas. Never any solutions or objective observations.

I'll grant that your puns can be pretty humorous tho.
[when not filled with blind prejudice and hate]

The thing with looking at the danger of nuclear power is you have to make a more complicated comparison. It's not just nuclear power or "safe."

For fossil fuels you have to consider every:

* Oil spill, Oil Rig Fire, other fossil fuel related disasters (tanker truck fires, gas station fires, CO poisoning in houses, etc.) Recall for instance, in New Orleans during the flood the contents of refinery storage tanks were spread all over the city, and the Deep Water Horizons disaster that killed more people than Fukishima and caused fantastic amounts of ecological damage.

* The broad diffuse pollution of fossil fuel power stations and refineries (including particulates, global warming from C02, other heavy metals and nastiness released). This is released not only from power stations, but every tailpipe of the millions of cars in the world.

* The damage caused by getting fossil fuels out of the ground. Drilling, fracking, strip mining for coal, and the nastiness released from this.

* Wars. (ie. fossil fuels are running out, but we got enough fissile material to last a long, long time--not that there couldn't be wars over this too (lots of it is in unstable parts of Africa)).

In short, fossil fuels do a huge amount of damage, it's just not as acute and widely reported as when something goes wrong with nuclear, and doesn't carry the same, often irrational, fear that the media loves so much. For instance, some area of land infused with heavy metals is just as unlivable as an area of land infused with radioactive substances, but one we accept as normal pollution, and the other is worldwide, front page news.

The overall comparison is very complicated. My inclination is to think nuclear is better, but that's difficult because it involves mostly *potential* problems, not actual quantifiable problems as with fossil fuels. There will probably never be a good study comparing the two given how much irrational fear and corporate interest is involved.

Wind, solar, and geothermal are very nice and should always be part of the equation, but it's pretty well accepted that it can't actually come near to replacing fossil fuels or nuclear in terms of energy output at any cost.

>> ^sepatown:

Oh, so now this is funny? People have certainly changed their tunes from when i was putting cute faces and arms on footage of the Twin Towers coming down. Hypocrisy much?


Yeah, that's edgy -- but not as edgy as backing it with the Benny Hill music!

Always pointing out problems and hidden agendas. Never any solutions or objective observations.

Like everyone else, I see the world a certain way. It seems like I'm always argumentative and sometimes it's true, but if you're standing on a cliff's edge wearing wings carved from a styrofoam beer cooler and I say, 'I see the wings, but gravity will not go easier on you if you leap' am I "trolling"? Methinks NOT.

Others here said what I said in a different way: wind power is great in the rare places it can be harnessed, but overall the cost is too high for the output.

I can't please everyone, but know that it's nothing personal. My shins get kicked all the time around here. Expand your love to include love-to-hate


>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

@quantumushroom
Neither, I just can't stand the fact that you talk out your ass all the time.
Always pointing out problems and hidden agendas. Never any solutions or objective observations.
I'll grant that your puns can be pretty humorous tho.
[when not filled with blind prejudice and hate]

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!


Because fossil fuel generation has always been relatively cheap up till now...

This clinging to the whole 'nuclear bad' schtick with little evidence to back it up is just getting old. Anyone who knows anything about solar cell production knows that it not only has many harmful chemicals at the manufacturing end but the panels themselves are dangerous at their end of lifetime if not properly disposed of.

Can nuclear power be dangerous? Of course. Is it a viable alternative for base grid load if we want to eliminate fossil fuels? Currently, it's the only alternative. Renewables are no where close to ready to take over base load and fusion just hasn't happened yet. Pick your poison, but think quick...

http://www.renewableenergygeek.ca/solar-power/solar-panels-health-warning-hazzard/

Old nuclear power plants produce deadly, cancer causing, bone deforming, face-melting radioactive sludge that will constantly be a threat to every human in a 50 mile radius for 10,000 lifetimes, so obviously nuclear power has one extremely large and worrisome drawback in its current iteration.

>> ^Kreegath:

Old nuclear power plants aren't impervious to tsunamis and powerful earth quakes simultaneously, so obviously nuclear power is bad.

"Dresden Generating Station is the first privately financed nuclear power plant built in the United States. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dresden_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Research. It works, bitches.

>> ^Ariane:

Did Fukushima not teach you shills for the nuclear industry anything? Nuclear energy is far from clean or cheap. The cost of a nuclear power plant exceeds the cost of electricity it will produce which is why there has never been a privately financed nuclear plant EVER!

Brayton Point Cooling Towers Implosion (Somerset, MA) has been added as a related post - related requested by Payback on that post.