Nuclear energy was politicized from day minus one. It was developed out of government driven military technology. In day zero nuclear energy was set up by politicians: goals, strategies, financing, deployment, risk handling, etc. Everything was coming from energy politics. Investments were directed and the market®ulations for nuclear were set up.
Government largely financed it and insures it.
The large scale, the monopolistic businesses and the government centric energy politics made it ideal for corruption. Remember, Fukushima was claimed to be fully save after inspections, just before the accident happened, which destroyed several reactors.
The investment into nuclear energy was a political decision. Every further investment into nuclear is a political decision. The 'small modern reactors' are mostly funded by government and the users are mostly military. The military is already mostly the only user of small reactors: nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Now we see other players which favor other energy politics (like the current US President who favors fossil fuels like coal, because his voters want jobs in the coal industry).
>It was developed out of government driven military technology
That's not a justification. The internet was also developed out of DARPA. Most of silicon valley exists because of cold war electronics warfare research, etc.
Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons. This resulted in huge subsides, but also a lot of export controls. You can't say that about the internet.
PS: A lot of past regulations seem dumb today, but power was not the primary goal which shaped a lot of policy.
"Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons."
Nope. They were, in fact, designed in a manner that made it very difficult/inefficient to use them to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Reactors designed to produce weapons-grade material operate in a completely different regime. In particular, you need to refuel them on a short continuous cycle, lest the desired plutonium be burned up in the normal operation of the reactor. Power reactors, by contrast, were designed to burn up much more of the fuel, and be refueled all at once.
In terms of manufacture, I agree. Further, Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years so we don't currently need anything in the way of production. So, yes direct production was mostly from dedicated reactors.
However, the lack of reprocessing beyond simple plutonium exaction increased the demand for uranium ore. This lowered prices and because waste was not reprocessed early stockpiles where created, even if they where not in fact used. So, the impact would have been minimal except the lack of innovative R&D calcified the industry around this approach.
The UK had 26 of these Magnox reactors for electricity production. These nuclear reactors were coming out of military technology and some of them were built and operated for dual use: Plutonium production and energy production.
The UK now sits on around 140 tons of plutonium from fuel reprocessing...
That was essentially a demonstration plant. Note that it only ran for six years, only produced 1,926 kg of plutonium over its entire lifespan, and was shut down because producing plutonium from spent fuel from commercial power reactors proved to be uneconomic.
2000 kg of plutonium is a rounding error, given that well over 1 million kg of plutonium have been produced since WWII.
It's another example of a reactor designed to produce electricity and plutionium. North Korea a;so operated a smaller 5 MWe reactor creating electricity for a town and plutonium for their weapons program.
It's a reactor designed to produce large amounts of plutonium. Any reactor produces some amount of energy, nuclear reactions are famous for their energy creation.
>But not electricity. For that a power plant has also turbines, generators, etc., ...
Yes,but if you don't do that, you're just wasting energy. The US realized that, which is why they added electricity generation to the N Reactor. Both were still designed to create plutonium, and would not be built without the aim of nuclear weapons.
It's like saying we grow the same corn for the edible part and for biomass. While technically true, the edible part is driving the production.
>Civilian nuclear plants where designed, built, and operated to reduce the costs of nuclear weapons.
ARPANET was designed, built, and operated to enable the exchange of information in the face of nuclear annihilation of cities.
The big famous radio dish on top of the hill behind Stanford and the signals research that went into it was placed there to look for anti-ICBM radar signals bouncing off of the moon from Russia.
We are standing on a mountain of tech based on research driven by the cold war. Nuclear energy is no different.
My favorite bit is, the first customer & funding grant of the transistor was for a particular application that needed something far more resilient to vibration, temperature, etc than vacuum tubes - ICBM's.
It's a bit different when you use it for terrorbombing not one, but two cities - to make sure the design works.
I guess you could argue that GPS has killed as many children now, by way of guided missiles and missiles fired by drones - but there's still a gulf between unleashing terror on a divine scale as a part of a publicity stunt and geopolitical maneuvering, to making warfare incrementally more efficient.
That is assuming Hiroshima and Nagasaki sped up the process of surrender (and probably assuming that most of that million of lives would have been lost to firebombing civilian targets). I don't think the point is unclear - but it could very well be wrong.
I don't think alternate-history fables is much of a defense for war crimes, however.
You might hold that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done to speed up Japan's surrender, and/or that they did speed up Japan's surrender by a meaningful amount. Further, you might argue that somehow two bombs was meaningfully better than one for this purpose.
From historical record, I'd say it's more likely Japan would've surrendered quickly either way - and that the motivation was more on establishing the USA as a superpower for the post-war era.
Either way, I think it's hard to argue that dropping of nuclear bombs on cities was done "for the sake of their people". After all, no-one was forcing the US to continue the war in the Pacific - or to capture Japan. The US could have sought a cease-fire and withdrawn to Hawaii or similar earlier borders. If the goal was to "save lives".
Well most of the internet and internet companies continue to exist because of military tech, and military strategy. It turns out the internet is a wonderful tool for psy-ops, and social influence, a la Arab Springs. Even Tor, and decentralization technologies are/were military tools.
Come on, network communication and nuclear energy are different planets. I kinda agree that without national plants things might have been better, but these kinds of efforts and risks cannot exist outside of govt for a while.
It will take some guys to figure out MSR designs if possible, and then they'll be small and safe enough to access the private market.
On top of all of this we had a generation that was hammered about the dangers of a nuclear war, including the potential poisoning of the environment around a blast by fallout.
And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly.
"And at the core of all this we have the issue that radiation is a silent killer. We can't smell it, we can't see it, we can't feel it. This amps up the fear element greatly."
As well it should. Dangerous things that you cannot detect with any of your human senses are rightly to be feared.
This behavior is well-preserved in humans for a reason.
Humans can detect CO2. An elevated level of CO2 makes you feel out of breath. Reducing O2 has no impact other than you pass out.
If you use fire, the "invisible" risks are oxygen deprivation or monoxide poisoning. You will be quite aware that something is wrong when there is too much CO2.
That has nothing to do with the nonsense that we should avoid using something powerful or dangerous simply because our human senses are not equipped to detect it. You are literally surrounded by toxicity in modern materials, power transmission, and machinery. 110 volts is enough to arc and create ozone. Basements can accumulate radon. Cooking can release toxic gasses. These are not reasons alone to avoid modern conveniences.
Yet the Japanese use/used the crap out of nuclear. You'd think they of all people would want nothing to do with it. At the end of the day it's all about dollars.
The Japanese people do largely want nothing to do with nuclear energy. Opposition to it still triggers some of their largest scale protests in a country that does everything to shy away from this kind of unrest.
But the political reality is that Japan is a client state of the US empire and the base of its operations in SE Asia. It's not functionally a democracy. The people who made money off of it were the alliance of conservative politicians and organized crime, backed by the CIA, who brought it to the country in the first place.
Fukushima was safe, by all standards. This was not related to corruption. It was simply not designed for the rarity of a magnitude 9 earthquake and the scale of the tsunami that followed. Your house in a five hundred year floodplain is not unsafe for lacking stilts. Safety costs money, this wasn't corruption.
> In the last century there have been eight tsunamis in the region with maximum amplitudes at origin above 10 metres (some much more), these having arisen from earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 to 8.4, on average one every 12 years. Those in 1983 and in 1993 were the most recent affecting Japan, with maximum heights at origin of 14.5 metres and 31 metres respectively, both induced by magnitude 7.7 earthquakes. The June 1896 earthquake of estimated magnitude 8.3 produced a tsunami with run-up height of 38 metres in Tohoku region, killing more than 27,000 people.
This risk needs to be addressed. That many people were killed by a tsunami is a catastrophe. But one would also like to have a stable energy system that does not go down like that and creates a huge problem (financial, technological, human, ...) for several decades.
The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption. Reactors were claimed save, which in a single event were totally wrecked. We are not talking about a single problem, but multiple problems (failing electricity backups, failing outside electricity, exploding buildings, ...), design mistakes (fuel is difficult to reach) and problems generated by running these reactors (like the amount of spent fuel on-site which needs lots of electricity for cooling).
> The japanese nuclear industry is famous for their corruption.
Not just the Japanese nuclear industry, Tihange 2/Doel 3 Nuclear Power Stations are sitting right in the middle of Western Europe and they are another catastrophe waiting to happen.
These reactors pressure vessels have serious issues with micro-cracks in their steel and at this point, it's not certain their structural integrity can actually be guaranteed [0].
The solution? Just "regulate" that in the case of emergency cooling the cooling water needs to be pre-heated, so the temperature shock doesn't break the pressure vessel.
Whatever could go wrong with that approach? I guess nobody can imagine a scenario in which the reactor would need massive cooling but the surrounding infrastructure is destroyed and the water can't be pre-heated, what happens then?
Nobody knows and I'd be really surprised if anybody, in a position of responsibility, has even thought that far about this whole mess. It rather feels like they are operating on the principle of "Let's just hope this never happens instead of planning for what we gonna do when it happens and set resources aside".
New inspection tools showed micro fissures. The power plant was stopped as a precaution.
Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted. Still extra security measures are set, just in case.
To me this just shows that the security is taken seriously. Why is the public opinion so scared about such an exemplary event?
> Then further investigations showed that these have always been there and are not evolving. It was safe all along, that was a false alarm. The power plant is then restarted.
Sorry but that's plain and simply wrong, you are vastly misrepresenting the situation and chain of events.
These micro-fractures are not part of the design and they are evolving [0], documentation of the manufacturing can't be found and it's assumed the manufacturer made them vanish on purpose to hide the fact that cheaper materials had been used to build, leading to the fractures.
These reactors have been controversial for years, they've been taken offline and online many times to look for new fractures and they keep finding new ones, fractures which shouldn't even be there in the first place.
It's amazing how you try to turn this into an "everything is safe, there's no reason to be worried, it was always broken!" even tho everything about this screams "you better be worried" and the neighboring German states (and the Dutch) are already hoarding Iodine tablets [1].
Even the Belgians themselves handed them out to their population, tho they used ISIS as a scapegoat at that time [2]
We are talking about the pressure vessel here, not some unimportant plumping part on some auxiliary system, and they just keep on watching as more fractures build up in there. Where do you think this is gonna lead? The warning signs can't get any worse than this considering these reactors are also running past their original life time.
Your own post confirms my assertion that the magnitude 9 earthquake was an exceedingly rare event and did not necessarily need to be designed for. It had been at least one hundred years since the last earthquake of that magnitude. Same for a >10 meter tsunami.
Large scale disasters almost always present as a conglomerate of smaller problems; multiple failures during 100-500 year disasters once again do not indicate poor safety standards and/or corruption.
Safety design is expensive, and there is always a balance between cost and risk, in literally everything that we as humans do, individually and collectively. Hindsight alone is not enough to bill this reactor as unsafe. There are thousands of BWRs operating globally without incident, and they have been for decades. It is ignorant to presume that they are all time bombs.
Edit: I'd like to kindly remind the community that down votes are not for communicating disagreement.
How can you say it was safe with a straight face when it clearly wasn't? That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
If some standards claimed it was safe, then those standards were simply wrong. By other standards (including, most importantly, reality), it definitely wasn't safe.
>That's like saying your car is fine when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
I'd argue it's more like saying your car is safe when it's smashed upside-down in a ditch on the side of the highway.
It is safe. The safest minivan is fantastically safe. Then it smashes into a semi truck at 80 mph and everyone dies. It was still a safe car, when compared to other cars.
That's a perfectly valid and logical conclusion, and indeed there are many big companies you've heard of (including Waymo, Tesla, Uber, and many conventional auto manufacturers) who are working on precisely that.
Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be.
"Nuclear can similarly be phased out like human-driven vehicles will be."
You have it exactly backwards. Manually operated nuclear plants will evolve into fully automated, completely safe designs. A very similar approach to self-driving cars.
Lets take your car that is smashed, upside-down in a ditch.
When you bought the car, did you think it was safe? Did it pass the government tests, even ones you think might be a bit ridiculous? Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens. Some vehicles have such safety precautions, but only when the situation seems to warrant it (a Jeep, for example).
The nuclear plant was the same. It was safe when it was built, only it wasn't designed to handle that magnitude of earthquake because that strength is rare, especially for that area. This is despite designing it to withstand stronger than ever recorded earthquakes. Sure, afterwards the plant was unsafe, but so are many cars after accidents.
> In all reality, the car was safe when it was new. It simply wasn't designed to withstand such an accident because such a thing is pretty rare in everyday vehicles, although it happens.
Except that cars now days do undergo rollover tests and are required to support 3x their weight when upside down.
> Were you under the impression it was designed to withstand being upside-down in a ditch?
I just read that some experts believe the standard should be increased to 4x. My previous assumption about my safety was a bit off, I am safe, but I could be safer.
Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds.
The region got so small radiation dose it is already basically harmless ... Decontamination efforts will make it pass even irrational radiation safety levels within 10-20 years. "hundreds" of years is therefore stupid hyperbole.
Public has not accepted nuclear risks because it is ridiculously misinformed. Don't spread pointless fearmongering, please.
> Fukushima didn't kill even ten people, let alone hundreds.
By official counts, 34 killed directly in the evacuation, 573 total, including indirectly, due to the disaster,and estimates are even with the evacuation, additional long-term cancer deaths due to the release could be in the 100+ range as well.
Well, I guess it's because I would consider my car extremely safe, with something stupid like 12 airbags, active brake assist, active collision prevention, it will even call for help automatically after an accident, without any input from me. Yet obviously it's not safe if it gets hit by a truck going 80mph, and it's not an impossible scenario. If they made fukishima stronger to withstand larger tsunamis, it could still be destroyed by an even larger one. It was "safe" within certain parameters.
We can argue that those parameters were wrong, but that's a different discussion.
Well, would be sufficiently safe. Just not in Fukushima.
It was hit by an earthquake. Reactor performed SCRAM correctly. Plant was ok.
Tsunami hit. Fuel tanks were washed away. This should never have been an issue. If you are in a zone that's prone to tsunamis, you don't locate essential infrastructure where it can be hit by tsunamis.
Everything went downhill from there. Including their inability to hook up generators brought by trucks due to some electrical incompatibility.
Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
> Now, if only this nuclear scaremongers would go away, then we would be able to upgrade those shambling power plants with modern technology.
That's really where you want to put the blame? Don't you think that's a bit dishonest?
Nobody is stopping the operators of plants from modernizing plants, nobody except the realities of economics.
Don't kid yourself: If they can keep on running reactors with the least possible effort they will do so because everything related to nuclear involves massive investment costs.
If you had the choice between spending several billion of dollars on modernizing a plant, which you've already amortized, or NOT spending several billion dollars while still making massive profits from the plant, which of these two is the more likely thing to happen? Greed always wins out.
It's not like plant operators want to modernize their plants and are being stopped by protests, nobody is stopping them from modernizing except for their own economic bottom line.
And how do you argue about the Diablo "safety" then? It's 6m above sea level, near a major fault line, in fact the only fault in the ring of fire which didn't go off yet in the last decade, and it's critical near to a major technical hub which will be destroyed for hundreds of years if the fault goes off, on land or at sea.
Your standard of safety does not sound appropriate for nuclear reactors. And, the decision not to spend the money to make Fukushima safer may well have been a craven, if not corrupt, one. TEPCO has been pretty sleazy ever since the accident.
So is it really economically at that point? Is developing, prototyping and building a next gen reactor worth the money? Do we even know how much it would take to account for other 1-in-100 year risks? Is it worth it over better solar/wind? Even this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-31/alphabet-...
I think the answers are clearly, no, no, no, and fuck no. We should be spending money on better solar, wind, having a distributed energy grid, and fusion. Not on a technology that is equivalent to diesel at this point, and something that will kill us.
The large scale, the monopolistic businesses and the government centric energy politics made it ideal for corruption. Remember, Fukushima was claimed to be fully save after inspections, just before the accident happened, which destroyed several reactors.
The investment into nuclear energy was a political decision. Every further investment into nuclear is a political decision. The 'small modern reactors' are mostly funded by government and the users are mostly military. The military is already mostly the only user of small reactors: nuclear powered ships and submarines.
Now we see other players which favor other energy politics (like the current US President who favors fossil fuels like coal, because his voters want jobs in the coal industry).
The point is: energy is always politics.