The Robots Sent Into Fukushima Have 'Died'

[MongGrel]

There is quite a bit of face palm to begin with in this thread.

I won't go on a rant.

There are a lot of valid reasons why Nuclear Plants have not popped up like mushrooms over the years, obviously.

 

[Sonikku]

I'm not sure I would even want Nuclear reactors popping up like a mushroom. :hmm:

 

[Schmide]

They are not dead, they're evolving into our new robot overloards. Let me be the first to welcome our new robot overloards.

 

[John Connor]

Wind mill ftw

Wind mill or wind turbine? We don't need a country making nothing but cookies.

 

[ControlD]

Wind mill ftw

Maintenance nightmares. I'm not sure what the solution is, but wind turbines isn't it.

 

[MongGrel]

I'm not sure I would even want Nuclear reactors popping up like a mushroom. :hmm:

Of course not.

:biggrin:

 

[John Connor]

I'm not sure I see a bright future for nuclear here in the U.S. For one, and this is primarily the biggest reason. They are very expensive to build. The other being not in my backyard. Then we have an abundance of coal, oil and natural gas so nuclear is pretty silly unless you're trying to reduce pollution.

Personally, I would like to see natural gas turbines take over. The plant north of here uses a single coal fired powered generator and has five NG generators. One puts out as much electricity as the damn coal fired generator.

I just like commonsense. We in the U.S have an abundance of NG. It's cheap and clean. Now it's not solar or wind, but unlike solar or wind it won't kill birds like the damn bald eagle. And the green energy idea that Obama tried to jump start is a joke. Look how many of those manufactures went bankrupt. Common sense energy is what is needed to power this country.

 

[sdifox]

I like Jimmy Carter, but he really screwed the pooch wheb he forbade nuclear reprocessing.

 

[IronWing]

Don't worry, everyone. Another Japanese nuke plant sits on top of a fault line. Thank goodness there earthquakes are few and far between in Japan.

Good thing America is smarter than that and we wouldn't do something stupid like build a nuke plant on a sand spit on the hurricane coast.

 

[Jeff7]

this is the problem with nuke. Even if we only have 1 accident every 70 years its a 20,000 year accident. Thats insane.

I wonder if we'll ever see Gen IV fission reactors. :\
Those designs are intended to be inherently safe, and they'd be able to use existing "spent" fuel as fuel. Current reactors can extract only a few percent of the available energy in a given quantity of uranium, leaving a lot of unused uranium behind. GenIVs should be able to get well over 90% of it out.


Or skip that and dump all efforts into fusion. It sounds like the private sector is making progress on it. Reading on it, I get the impression that it goes like this:
Academia: "Damn, this didn't work. Let's spend a few years figuring out why and documenting it all."
Private sector: "Damn, this didn't work. Let's spend the next two days finding a workaround, and then try again."
A thorough scientific approach certainly is necessary some places, but a guided brute-force approach can work too.

I like Jimmy Carter, but he really screwed the pooch wheb he forbade nuclear reprocessing.

I figure that if the military wants material for nuclear weapons, they are going to get it.

 

[IronWing]

I like Jimmy Carter, but he really screwed the pooch wheb he forbade nuclear reprocessing.

He didn't. Bush I did.

 

[sdifox]

I'm not sure I see a bright future for nuclear here in the U.S. For one, and this is primarily the biggest reason. They are very expensive to build. The other being not in my backyard. Then we have an abundance of coal, oil and natural gas so nuclear is pretty silly unless you're trying to reduce pollution.

Personally, I would like to see natural gas turbines take over. The plant north of here uses a single coal fired powered generator and has five NG generators. One puts out as much electricity as the damn coal fired generator.

I just like commonsense. We in the U.S have an abundance of NG. It's cheap and clean. Now it's not solar or wind, but unlike solar or wind it won't kill birds like the damn bald eagle. And the green energy idea that Obama tried to jump start is a joke. Look how many of those manufactures went bankrupt. Common sense energy is what is needed to power this country.

Fracking chemical are not exactly peachy.

 

[sdifox]

He didn't. Bush I did.

Huh? Search for 1977 in wiki

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

 

[IronWing]

Huh? Search for 1977 in wiki

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf

1992. President G. H. W. Bush halted weapons reprocessing in a policy statement on nuclear nonproliferation declaring: “I have set forth today a set of principles to guide our nonproliferation efforts in the years ahead and directed a number of steps to supplement our existing efforts. These steps include a decision not to produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear explosive purposes....”15

1992. Energy Secretary Watkins announced the permanent closure of the Hanford, WA, PUREX reprocessing plant in December.

 

[John Connor]

Fracking chemical are not exactly peachy.

That can be debated.

The French reprocess their spent nuke fuel. I read about that at the Heritage Foundation website. Was entitled something like, 'The French Do It Why Can't Oui?'

 

[sportage]

OH GREAT! I suppose that means more flags flown at half masked. Geeze...

 

[sdifox]

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22542.pdf

I am talking about reprocessing spent fuel rods.

 

[Cheesemoo]

Do they know if the molten cores are still within the vessels? If those things melt through and make it into the water table..

 

[Red Squirrel]

They are not dead, they're evolving into our new robot overloards. Let me be the first to welcome our new robot overloards.

This would be an awesome premise for a movie actually. ROVs are sent to the core of a melted down nuclear plant, they are fully controlled by humans, but then they start to slowly loose control, then lose connectivity. They figure the robots chips must have died from the radiation or something. They abandon the idea and just make an exclusion zone and move on. Then it forwards to "10 years later" and they start to detect weird activity in the plant, and robots, now self aware, start coming out of it and start killing people.


On subject of nuclear what I'd love to see is thorium plants. Too bad there's so much political stupidity when it comes to energy. We could be so much further than we are now in terms of energy tech if it was not for political road blocks. Science is rarely a limitation, politics are.

Of course the true future is a combination of thermal solar, wind and hydro. While those do have some physical effects to the environment, they're not even close to the effects of oil or even nuclear. But again: Politics. If it's not people complaining about "ugly" turbines, it's oil companies lobbying to make sure it does not happen. I'd say the only scientific limitation at this point is energy storage. Renewable energy tends to not be constant so there would need to be LARGE storage batteries of sorts on the grid to go fully renewable. But it could be done.

 

[sdifox]

This would be an awesome premise for a movie actually. ROVs are sent to the core of a melted down nuclear plant, they are fully controlled by humans, but then they start to slowly loose control, then lose connectivity. They figure the robots chips must have died from the radiation or something. They abandon the idea and just make an exclusion zone and move on. Then it forwards to "10 years later" and they start to detect weird activity in the plant, and robots, now self aware, start coming out of it and start killing people.


On subject of nuclear what I'd love to see is thorium plants. Too bad there's so much political stupidity when it comes to energy. We could be so much further than we are now in terms of energy tech if it was not for political road blocks. Science is rarely a limitation, politics are.

Of course the true future is a combination of thermal solar, wind and hydro. While those do have some physical effects to the environment, they're not even close to the effects of oil or even nuclear. But again: Politics. If it's not people complaining about "ugly" turbines, it's oil companies lobbying to make sure it does not happen. I'd say the only scientific limitation at this point is energy storage. Renewable energy tends to not be constant so there would need to be LARGE storage batteries of sorts on the grid to go fully renewable. But it could be done.

OR actually spend the money on fusion research.

 

[Ruptga]

OR actually spend the money on fusion research.

Fusion may be practical within some of our lifetimes, but it's not going to happen any time soon regardless of how much money is thrown at it. Well, maybe if we throw Apollo-level funding at it, but that's not a political possibility.

All we really need to do is use the designs we already have or have been developing and not be shitlords about it. Fukushima would not have happened if its operators and its oversight people had done their jobs right. But between that and the attempted coverup after Fukishima, they've really paid for it. Nuclear went from 30-40% of Japan's power generation to zero, and now they're back up to three operating reactors. That's probably the best possible outcome though; the people responsible need have skin in the game or Fukushima will just happen again somewhere else. Nuclear is great, but it is absolutely not worth doing unless it's going to be done right.

 

[OutHouse]

People freak out at the dangers of nuclear, but let's not forget all the oil related disasters such as the gulf oil spills and countless pipe line and train spills too. Just because it's not in your back yard does not mean it's not causing havoc to the environment.

oil spills vs. a nuclear melt down. humm ill take a oil spill for 1000 Alex.

 

[Ns1]

OR actually spend the money on fusion research.

who needs fusion research when you got Rossi and Adlep holding it down.

 

[OutHouse]

Maintenance nightmares. I'm not sure what the solution is, but wind turbines isn't it.

i know a bit about wind turbines, why do you say they are a maint nightmare?

 

[Ruptga]

oil spills vs. a nuclear melt down. humm ill take a oil spill for 1000 Alex.

It's not really that clear-cut. One affects an area the size of a county, the other affects a couple hundred miles of coastline and thousands of square miles of ocean. Sure nuclear accidents are far more dramatic, but petro accidents are far more common and that adds up.