and despite the ongoing horribly detrimental effect of this disaster on the environment and humankind, governments like that headed by John Howard are still pushing for nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power is extremely safe form of power generation, it seems alot of people have lapse memory about the fact that this happened in the USSR which didn't have the nuclear oversight functions that exist in our world today, not even mentioning the cock up that was the operation to end the disaster. Nevertheless, what most people don;t realize is that fixing Chernobyl cost the USSR billions, so much so that it had a marked effect on it's downfall in the early 90s. If it's not nuclear power, it's either coal or oil then since REAL alternatives don't exist at the moment.

And civilization as a whole giving up useless forms of power consumption, that I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Because radioactive waste has a half-life of 10 to the 19th years and is the by-product of a system subject to human error and unpredictable natural disasters, I don't believe anyone can say it is truly safe.

disclaimer: coming from what's traditionally a very anti-nuclear country I've obviously grown up with a very anti-nuclear opinions (so my views on the matter are probably a little unbalanced).

it does seem to be a pretty shortsighted effort though; Uranium is a pretty limited resource... and it's a tad arrogant of us to knowingly make a mess that will be around for 20,000 years or so. I agree that in general the plants tend to have a fairly good safety record, though one does have accept that a single accident can be pretty devastating.

It's funny to think that had the Three Mile Island reactor suffered a complete meltdown (which it very nearly did) we wouldn't even be having this discussion at all.

yeah, I have to go with persephone and aidos on this one... it does seem arrogant to mess around with stuff this dangerous, especially since its byproducts will be with us forever (on a human scale anyway)... the mere fact that the USSR did not have the kind of oversight necessary to prevent this disaster should be enough to indicate that other governments would likely falter in these areas as well... especially those of developing nations or those which are continually experiencing upheaval. All we need for a really spectacular disaster is for one of these facilities to be caught up in a warzone... I would hope that no combatants would see the destruction of one of these as acceptable collateral damage, but in war, little is actually controllable.

I disagree with the notion that its arrogant to 'mess around with these things'. In fact, though I knew this post might arouse anti-nuclear sentiment, I'm very pro-nuclear. There is a reason three mile island would NOT have been a Chernobyl if it had totally melted the core and that is it had a containment structure. Chernobyl had no containment dome at all, the operator on duty that night broke no less than SIX critical safety rules to do his extremely dangerous stupid test. Nuclear power can be very very safe when done properly and with strict oversight. And persephone, I think you're missing the inverse relationship between half-life and radioactivity of a substance. A substance with a half life of 10^19 years is utterly harmless BECAUSE the half life is so long. In fact, I'll wager you've EATEN significantly large quantities of a radioactive substancec with exactly this length of half-life......its bismuth! As in, the pink tummy remedy, pepto-bismol! As Marie Curie said, nothing is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

how did these guys even get in there? who are they? i wish i knew russian...

i don't understand how they can walk around in there, even (especially) with current conditions of the now, (only recently defunct) power plant.

faces exposed, etc. and what the hell is a plastic biohazard suit going to block, except maybe the dust itself?

that sarcophagus is in such poor condition too, that if they don't do something about it soon, it's going to collapse and cause a disaster very comparable to the original, if not worse.

as far as safety concerns while operating the plant, do some reading and you'll see that they were performing a very dangerous test, on a very unstable reactor, bypassing all kinds of security protocol. while i believe nuclear power to be a safe form of power, it's far too easy to sabotage. intentional or otherwise.

I think the plastic suits are intended to do just that, only keep the radioactive dust out. There's no way you could walk around in there with enough lead on to block all the gammas. I think they just accept the dose and limit their time in there.

I'd rather have nuclear power then have wars of energy conquest. I am as Gluonium very pro-nuclear and believe that people have exaggerated fear of the things due to the media and simply misunderstanding.

ok, maybe Three Mile Island wouldn't have been as bad as Chernobyl, but you can bet it would have been bad enough to stop the US from carrying on with the development of nuclear power (hell they all but did anyway). It was just pure luck that it didn't work out that way.

I don't think it's arrogant to mess around with things you don't understand, in fact I believe it's essential. I do however think it's pretty arrogant to knowingly create such a massive mess that generations and generations of people will have to babysit.

My research on the topic has convinced me that it's not the great power source we're led to believe it is. People are quick to express how 'clean' it is, but they often don't think about the mining and refinement process involved before the Uranium is actually used. Not only that, but you end up shipping the bulk of the energy resource from just a couple of select locations... and we've all seen how well the world deals with the politics of that arrangement in the past.

My biggest concern with it is that it's simply not sustainable. I think the money spent on nuclear development would be much better spent developing/researching renewable energy sources.

more specifically related to Chernobyl have a flick through this this girl's travel shots.

She managed to obtain permission to do a motorbike trip through the whole region. really interesting stuff.

"In France, as of 2002, EDF - the country's main electricity generation and distribution company - produces about 78% of its electricity with 58 nuclear power plants (making it the leading world country in its usage of nuclear power)."

One area where France leads the world in BALLS.

Its worth noting that Elena Filatova
is something of a huckster. She took the same tour that everyone else who goes there does. I think you're correct that nuclear fission in the way that we currently use it is not a perfect and limitless power source. But that's because we don't reprocess, we only use 5% of the energy in the enriched U235/U238 mixture that is present. If we reprocessed fuel and used non-proliferative breeder reactors, we could get many many times the amount of energy out of each pound of uranium that we do now. The amount of energy gleaned from a pound of U238 would be really vast. In any case we should be thinking of fission as a stopgap measure to be used only until we master fusion power, a totally safe form of nuclear power. The energy reserves of that power source are utterly staggering, a bathtub full of heavy water and a pinch of lithium no larger than that found in a laptop battery could EASILY power your entire modern lifestyle for the next 30 years. Plus, you can use fusion reactors to "burn" radioactive waste from fission plants into harmless non-radioactive elements. This is called an actinide burner.

I've been here recently myself. Anyone else playing STALKER?

Yup, France is pretty gutsy on stuff like this, it's probably why their country is doing so well as a whole right now. We still love you France.

Pho3nix, I believe that is German, not Russian.

As everyone has stated, the Chernobyl disaster was caused by gross misconduct on the part of a Soviet nuclear engineer. While I can understand people's fears about this occurring somewhere in the U.S., we are much more rigorous with standards. We don't have the Simpson's nuke plants hanging around.

As someone pro-nuke, I second Gluonium's post - we need to use the material better in the reactors. As with any technology, the old should be updated/replaced with the new (with breeder reactors hopefully). France is a great example of a country successfully using nuclear power.

For those who are strongly anti-nuke, what alternatives do you propose? A coal burning plan produces quite nasty stuff (when left unfiltered). Natural gas is better, but not great either. Honestly, I wish we could have green energy but it does not produce the amounts necessary. We should not keep spending money on nukes if we are not adequately funding future research into fusion/improved green power.

Great find Gluonium.

If you want to see an extremely safe and efficient use of nuclear power, check out the U.S. Navy's Nuclear Powered Submarine Program. Zero tolerance for mistakes, never an incident.

pretty wild.

I'd seen a photojournalists images from a trip into chernobyl maybe a year back; remember him remarking that the ghost villages around chernobyl were pretty remarkable to visit, as the occupants were evacuated and not allowed to return for possession, so dishes still sit on tables, family portraits still hang on walls, but now small trees are growing in living rooms and on rooftops.

... and yes, all you fusion researchers need to get back to work, and stop screwing around on videosift!

"As Marie Curie said, nothing is to be feared, it is only to be understood."

Now I'm fairly pro-nuclear, but I'm not sure that's a very convincing statement given Mme. Curie's fate.

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

I think it's a question of pick your poison. We have irational fears of nuclear power thanks to movies like China Syndrome and Silkwood. Because radiation is inivisible - it has a real bogey-man quality.

But seriously, coal based reactors are very bad - belching out heavy metals that fall into our oceans, and get into our seafood, causing real poisonings.

I have been reading up on the new generation of light-water reactors- they produce an incredible amount of power with very minimal waste. For me, it's the best from a bouquet of evils.

I'm in favour of a two pronged approach of nuclear and conservation. Just replacing all bulbs in the uS with the compact flourescents would have a large effect.

We're praising the French nuclear policies now? If they're so convinced of the safety of their nuclear activities they should run the tests in their own backyards, not on the other side of the world in mine.

Sigh... I never understood people's irrational fear of nuclear power. It usually centers around "big" events like Chernobyl and "long term" events having to do with the waste.

There's a lot of miss-information about both fears on the anti-nuclear side, though. Chernobyl was their, own fault - they shut down many hours of warnings and interlocks to try and run a test they were late on. The plant kept trying to shut itself down, and they overrode it. This is bad, but it's easily fixed with new designs. And as was also mentioned, even in the case of a huge failure, all modern reactors have containment shells.

The waste fear is particularly laughable, though. Most of this stuff was around in one from or another already - we just mined it out. More to the point, though, if it's dangerous, it's usable fuel! We can just keep burning it, until it finally decays to something that's fairly safe. We are barely touching the possible reactor types we could be using... I wonder if these types know that current coal plants put out more uranium waste than is used in all our nuclear reactors. That is the tragedy that should be shut down.

The kicker, though, is what to do without nuclear power. Shutdown the world and go without? (I know some neo-nippies that want that...) Use our current fossil-fuel power? Energy needs only go up in huge ways, and we need something. Solar/etc is nowhere near efficient enough yet. Nuclear power really is the green choice for the foreseeable future.

/sorry for the long post... @.@

Farhad raised a good point that people aren't going to change their energy consumption habits any time soon. I think that so long as their energy needs are being met, there is no motivation to change, but for the future of the planet, I believe we must change.

The problem I have with nuclear power aside from the risks it poses to the environment, is that it won't revolutionize how we consume resources. Individuals and industries will continue to consume at a heady rate and as aidos mentioned, nuclear power is not a renewable resource, either.

We've got brilliant people on this planet capable of developing all kinds of technology- I'm not buying the argument that renewable energy systems can't meet our needs. It's always the well-funded technology that gets off the ground first. I bet solar R&D budgets are just a drop in the bucket compared with the nuclear establishment's.

Anyway, renewables can certainly meet the needs of the average household. People who have put the effort into going off the grid will tell you that it's a great exercise in changing lifestyle and habits. It's like being made to use a rainwater tank. You quickly work out how to reduce your usage.

Things like this give totally the wrong idea about nuclear power stations, people seem to thing it's like a nuclear weapon. The truth is nuclear power is the cleanest, safest power source we have that can create enough power to be anything more than a political tool (e.g. wind power. The radioactivity is a danger but it is easily contained and it took spectacular incompetence and underfunding to create this. I have every confidence that in any nuclear plant now or in the foreseeable future, if someone tried the same things as were tried in Ukraine, the system would block them and come morning, they'd face a 10 minute interview with the bosses before being fired and possibly arrested for some negligence crime. Unfortunately, people look at Chernobyl, Nagasaki and Hiroshima and think "God, how can we allow this in our country?!". Give me a nuclear power plant in my back yard before a coal, gas or oil plant any day!

IIRC, coal power plants actually create more radioactivity than nuclear plants!

Good post codenazi. I totally agree with the pro nuclear people here.

I'd like to dispel the anti-nuclear argument that there is not that much uranium in the earth to sustain nuclear power for a long time. This is bullcrap. The cost of electricity from a nuclear plant is almost completely unrelated to the price of uranium. That it, the process is much more expensive than the raw uranium. The uranium prices can increase 10 fold and we would barely notice it in the energy price. When the price of uranium increases new reserves can be tapped. Also there hasn't been nearly as much uranium exploration as oil exploration so there's tons of the stuff still to be found. Also there are scientist working on extracting uranium from the ocean which would give us all the uranium we could ever need in the foreseeable future.

Then there's Chernobyl which as been stated was just a complete cock-up and bad design. However the effects of the event were nowhere near the magnitude reported by scaremongers like greenpeace.

http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/nuclearsafety/colloquiumNovember2006website.pdf
"Professor Wade Allison of Oxford University (a lecturer in medical physics and particle physics) gave a talk on ionising radiation 24 Nov 2006 in which he gave an approximate figure of 81 cancer deaths from Chernobyl (excluding 28 cases from acute radiation exposure and the thyroid cancer deaths which he regards as "avoidable"). In a closely reasoned argument using statistics from therapeutic radiation, exposure to elevated natural radiation (the presence of radon gas in homes) and the diseases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors he demonstrated that the linear no-threshold model should not be applied to low-level exposure in humans, as it ignores the well-known natural repair mechanisms of the body."

Yeah, there isn't just 1 type of nuke reactor. Canada has the CanDu reactor and it has a history of 0 incidents, as well as being a type of reactor that cannot be coverted to create weapons grade material, so its safe to export.

I guess I'm just somewhat blessed, coming from a country where 80% of the power generation is hydro.

But thats the thing Aidos, not all countries in the world posses rivers and lakes that can be used for hydro electrical power. Not to mention there is a cost associated with that as well, ask the millions of displaced people in China because of the Three Gorges dam. Even with that on going, China is building more and more coal power plants.

All I know is that if a wind-turbine malfunctions, it doesn't have the potential to over-heat and irradiate a few million people.

Omega molecules anyone?

"If you want to see an extremely safe and efficient use of nuclear power, check out the U.S. Navy's Nuclear Powered Submarine Program. Zero tolerance for mistakes, never an incident."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_%28SSN-589%29

I could probably throw the Thresher in there too, but I won't because, officially, it wasn't a nuclear-related accident. Also, most don't know about the SL-1 accident that happened in 1960 in Idaho. It was part of our studies, as well as TMI and the Scorpion, when I was training at NPTU there. Accidents happen all the time in the Navy, most of the contaminated spill variety. I remember a spill at NPTU Idaho that crapped up the whole starboard side of plant just because someone forgot to close a valve at the charging station while injecting chemicals to the primary loop. We had to stand our watches in full anti-c's (anti-contamination clothing) during the cleanup.

That said, 100% proponent of nuclear power. There are new types of reactors that are so inherently safe, you couldn't cause a meltdown if you tried. None have built as yet (afaik) because it takes forever in this country to get approval, not to mention the general fear from the public.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1

http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/logos20-1/passive01.htm

There recently was a show on Discovery called "Battle of Chernobyl" that you may want to check out. Outstanding look at the accident, the efforts to contain it, and the human toll it caused. Scary stuff, but that was then and there.

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

Fascinating article on the Scorpion there Fletch - thanks for that.

YW

I guess I'm the only PC gamer on the sift?

The main reason this was such a disaster is that the Russians never used containment structures in their reactors.

3 Mile Island had a partial melt-down...yet it was enclosed in a containment structure so the radiation didn't escape into the world like this total disaster.

My father was in Nuclear power all his life and was project manager at one in Virginia in the 80's. He started his career in the Navy out on the USS Nautilus. He was aboard when it first went under the North Pole....btw.

Ironically he died of mesothelioma from exposure to asbestos.

No budzos, you're not. Still haven't gotten around to playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. yet though.

Stalker is the awesome! And if i read it right somewhere STALKER is the name they give to the people that monitor the ruins of the plant. Dont quote me though.

Nuclear power is one of the largest and safest sources of power we have. How many nuke plants have you heard of blowing up compared to the hundreds that are in use? 1... id say thats pretty good odds.

There have been a number of nuclear power plant incidents actually (about 30 listed here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents), although only Chernobyl and Long Island are widely known and with good reason - the accident list is short in both number and fatalities for the amount of power generated. It saddens me that there is even notable debate on the subject, nuclear power is so clearly the best option. If a name had caught on that didn't make people think of big scary atomic weapons, I think it would be commonly used world wide by now.

I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. too but I didn't really enjoy it. Too much walking from A to B and random bandit appearances.

Fletch, sorry for being upset, but the article you pointed to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_%28SSN-589%29

clearly shows that the Scorpion's loss had nothing to do with its reactor.
The men in the submarine service pride themselves on being fanatic about safety.
In fact, in most cases spending 3 months on a U.S. Nuclear Submarine gives you LESS radiation exposure than a layperson (since you're shielded from the sun).

*history *science *worldaffairs

Adding video to channels (History, Science, Worldaffairs) - requested by calvados.