(September 12, 2021 at 1:32 pm)Spongebob Wrote:(September 12, 2021 at 1:07 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: There's exactly one form of alternative energy that we know is capable of providing the level of energy we've been consuming:
The pitfalls would be storing the waste (that said, given that petroleum and coal's waste tends to go straight into our atmosphere, literally anything else would be better) and making sure that the plant builders don't cut corners, since it looks like all the major incidents at nuclear plants have been due to corners being cut.
I support the use of nuclear fission. The Fukushima and Chernobyl incidents weren't really about cost cutting, though. Fukushima was due to a bad design, one which other plants also use, and Chernobyl was just plain human foolishness. Blame it on the Ruskies being the Ruskies.
The 3-mile island incident was a combination of poor design and poor operating procedures. Their backup systems were not sufficient and they didn't have adequate device status indications. There are much, much higher standards for those things now than 30 years ago, even in places where there's no nuclear material. Nuclear plant design and safety systems have come a very long way since these accidents and notably, we learn a great deal every time one occurs.
But nuclear fusion has far more potential to provide clean energy if we can ever get it past the vapor ware stage.
All three disasters had profit and cost-cutting as major contributors:
- Three Mile Island had a poor design and poor training because the alternatives would have cost money.
- Fukushima was built in where they knew tsunami was a serious risk because it offered cheap access to coolant water. Various design flaws were flagged decades before the incident but never fixed because it would have cost money. Both TEPCO and the Japanese government has admitted their failings in this respect.
- Chernobyl is the epitome of cost-cutting leading to disaster. Corners were cut so ridiculously that the reactor lacked primary containment and had graphite moderators wed to the control rods. It was designed to fail.
Fission would work much better as a power source if we built some sensible 4th generation reactors and some nuclear incinerators to take care of the waste. Our current methods are dismally bad, largely because they were dreamt up in the 1950s and 1960s. Sadly, there is far too much opposition to make new reactors feasible, at least not in much of the developed world.
