Cyril R wrote:
Oh, and Axil: here's an exercise in honesty and humility for you. Try to calculate the decay heat per spent fuel rod for 14 month old fuel. Then try to see if you can make the fuel rod melt using this decay heat, remembering that the heatup is non-adiabatic.
Cyril R,
Don’t you believe that honesty and humility is the best policy in all cases?
In the end, the following small incident of deception caused the German nation to lose faith in the nuclear power industry and nuclear experts in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactorQuote:
In spite of the limited amount of radioactivity released (0.1 GBq 60Co, 137Cs, 233Pa), the THTR management tried to hide the accident, possibly because this accident pointed to some specific problems with pebble bed reactors, mostly pebble flow and radioactive dust. The management might have thought that the emission would not be detectable due to the Chernobyl fallout happening at the same time. They continued to blame the Chernobyl fallout for all of the contamination found in the surroundings, until the presence of Pa-233 in the vicinity was detected. 233Pa is not formed in uranium reactors, such as Chernobyl, but only in thorium reactors (and also by natural spontaneous fissions with thorium nearby). Thus, step by step, the THTR management report lost all credibility. The radioactivity in the vicinity of the THTR-300 was finally found to result 25% from Chernobyl and 75% from THTR-300. The handling of this minor accident severely damaged the credibility of the German pebble bed community, and pebble bed reactors lost a lot of support in Germany.
Summed up in a nut shell, nuclear power has lost credibility in a few but growing number of countries where the opinions of people are important.
If I am wrong about this, please explain why the German and Japanese people are so down on nuclear power.
The proper means and strategies to increasing the prospects of nuclear power including honesty, integrity and humility are more important than the rapid implementation of nuclear power.
As in japan, a strong nuclear power base is no guaranty of longevity. The process of energy choice is essentially political in nature and the rules of politics apply. The arrogance, dishonest, and corrupted will eventually be tossed out and replaced with an alternative.
Those who are intent on advancing nuclear power must look to weed out and denounce the arrogant, dishonest, and corrupt if they want to see nuclear power advance.
Quote:
None of that stops any of those folk.
BAU is doomed, and according to them civilization is likely to collapse.
Just the same, the few billion who are likely to die as a result of that is presumably a lesser risk than running nuclear reactors.
Their death-wish is incredible.
It is not the job of those misinformed billions of common folks to know the truth, all they know is that they are being lied to.
It is the job of the nuclear community to police their own in competency, honesty, integrity, and humility knowing that any violation of the public trust either real or perceived can have deadly consequences.