Thread: Climate change
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Old 19-12-2009, 01:21 PM
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renormalised (Carl)
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As I have said, what singles out nuclear power is the extent of the potential disaster with just one nuclear accident. As it happens with Chernobyl some things went right. There wasnt a nuclear explosion (most of the damage was due to fall out) But probability says that one of these days we wont be so lucky. Even so the fallout from Chernobyl was 400 times more than that released from Hiroshima. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Northern Europe, with some nuclear rain falling as far away as Ireland. Large areas in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people (not fish). What area were you saying was effected by Exxon Valdez. Thats right, Princess Charlotte Sound. The Ukrainian Health Minister claimed in 2006 that more than 2.4 million Ukrainians, including 428,000 children, suffer from health problems related to the catastrophe
You obviously don't understand the mechanics and physics of a nuclear explosion. There's no way that a nuclear power plant can go critical because the uranium in the plant hasn't been brought together under sufficient pressure to force the runaway reaction. If it was that easy to make uranium go critical, you'd never be able to build a powerplant!!!. In any case, you need to have an initiator source of fast neutrons to set off an explosion. They normally use polonium in nukes to achieve this. If you use plutonium in the powerplant, the only way to initiate the explosion is to implode enough of the plutonium to get it to initiate fission. The implosion has to be very precise, otherwise you just get an unholy mess scattered all over the place.

The only thing that will cause a nuke powerplant to explode is what happened at Chernobyl...enough of the uranium overheated and formed a pool of ultra hot metal in the reactor vessel. This, then, generated superheated steam when they shutdown the cooling pumps and that blew off the roof of the reactor building.

As for the Exxon Valdez....you've taken my comment there completely out of context with the rest of what I wrote. I never compared that disaster with Chernobyl. I was stating just how dangerous the oil industry can be if things go wrong, whether that be by misadventure or deliberate sabotage. 2.4 million Ukrainians is a lot of people, but what about the millions of people over the 50-60 years they've stuffed around with the Aral Sea...I've seen some pretty ghastly mutations of unborn babies caused by the environmental train wreck they've unleashed there. All in bottles of formaldehyde, sitting on shelves in the local hospitals and at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. People can't live there either, but they still do and the numbers of cancers and other diseases there have been alarmingly higher than elsewhere, for decades. The place is a poisoned cesspool.
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