Japan nuclear crisis: Seven reasons why we should abandon nuclear power
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2012/03/japan-nuclear-crisis-seven-reasons-why.html
What Is Wrong With Nuclear Power Plants
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-is-wrong-with-nuclear-power-plants.html
100 Reasons Against Nuclear Power
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2012/08/100-reasons-against-nuclear-power.html
7 Arguments Against Nuclear Power (Why It Should Be a No-Go)
6/15/2012
http://q.gs/1uSmq
10 Reasons Not to Invest in Nuclear Energy
7/08/2008
http://q.gs/1uSp0
6 Reasons Against Nuclear Energy
http://q.gs/1uSqe
Sunday, September 16, 2012
What Is Wrong With Nuclear Power Plants
What Is Wrong With Nuclear Power Plants
Upon 2020
The Next Decade In Technology: Musings by Johannes Ernst
I lived through the Chernobyl disaster back in 1986, as a teenager, in Germany. I recall watching the radioactive cloud coming closer and closer on TV, wondering whether it was ever going to be safe to go outside again. That was before I became an engineer, but I remember pondering even then whether it was just shoddy Soviet work that was the cause of the disaster, or whether there was something inherently unsafe about nuclear power plants.
The question: If there’s enough money and time and brainpower, and no political obstacles, is it possible to engineer safe nuclear power plants? It should be, shouldn’t it: it’s just engineering after all, and there is no mystery at all how nuclear power plants are supposed to work.
25 years later, watching the Japenese disaster unfold in the past few days, I’ve made up my mind. The answer is: no, it is not possible to engineer safe nuclear power plants.
http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree
Here is why. It has to do with complex systems, learning from experience, and the limits of human imagination:
Any complex system, like a PC, or a car, or some enterprise software, or a nuclear power plant, has one fundamental property that makes it similar to all other complex systems: that’s that it cannot be fully understood by a single person.
There are other definitions of “complex system”, but this is mine: no one person can understand all aspects of it.
For non-engineers, that may sound alarming. It was for me when I first read as a kid about SDI in its day, but is a fact of life that we see all around us: iPhones are complex systems, the electricity grid is, when the UPS truck arrives, Amazon shipping, even more and more toys. Nobody understands all aspects of any of it.
As engineers, we use plenty of tricks to deal with systems that are larger and more complicated than we can comprehend, like teamwork (“I understand my part, you understand your’s, and we negotiate how they interact”) and abstraction.
For example: “when I turn the key in the ignition, the car will start”. Many people do not know this, but not even the engineers who designed your car can tell you in detail what happens when you turn the key. All of them — and I used to work for a car company — will use abstractions, which means they will not know about details they think are unimportant, such as how exactly the network controller for the injection system initializes itself when power comes on, or what would happen if there was a lightning bolt hitting the car at the same time. That’s because they might understand the logical connectivity of the car’s parts, but not what lightning would do to it. (Some other engineers will understand the latter, but they won’t know about the software, and so on.)
The only way we ever get anything to work, as engineers, is to design our systems as well as we can, and then try them out, over and over, and fix what needs fixing. Flippantly, we could call the philosophy: “who cares whether we understand what exactly it does, as long as it does the right thing”; and that is demonstrated by trying out as many things as we can think of. Engineers call that “testing”.
As a result, the highest-quality engineering approaches that I know of for complex systems all put an incredible amount of resources into some form of testing, because that’s the only thing we can think of to make progress.
The design engineer (or team) has come up with a design, and they, their peers, and the test engineers, now throw the kitchen sink at it trying it out in as many circumstances they can think of. If only one of those tests does not produce the desired result, the design engineers go back and change their design until all test cases work. (For the engineers: to keep it simple in this article, I also consider design reviews etc. forms of testing as they follow the same iterative pattern.)
Here’s an example. Let’s say somebody gives you a new pocket calculator prototype that supposedly knows how to simplify fractions, and you are supposed to test it. What will you do? You probably start with simple tests, like “4/6 makes 2/3, that’s right”. And “999/111 makes 9?. But it goes from there: what about we try negative numbers? What if the denominator is 0? What if the numerator is 1.3 and the denominator is 3/4 itself? Etc. etc. Many people would not think of even those simple examples to test. Test engineers will, and many more, like what if the fraction is 1.2E81 over PI? Or what if one of the numbers is an open parenthesis only as you can in some calculators?
The only reason why cars start when you turn the ignition, and why iPads play movies when you touch the right buttons, and why Google delivers the right answer to your search, is testing.
For many complex systems, testing and fixing bugs takes a lot more time and money than actually building the system in the first place.
If there wasn’t any testing, none — I repeat, NONE — of the complex systems I know would even come on, never mind do anything useful.
And even after gazillions of dollars in engineering salaries and testing equipment were spent, Windows still crashes. (and many other products; even my lowly computer keyboard seems to manage to crash occasionally.)
Which brings us back to nuclear power plants.
The problem with nuclear power plants is that they cannot be tested, at least not tested sufficiently.
All the things that have been going on in Japan since the tsunami wave hit — today’s headlines all talk about “heroic staff at the reactor” — have been totally outside of the range of anything that has ever been tested. (Yes, I wasn’t around when they tested, so I don’t know for sure. But trust me on this: engineering pride does not allow for several roofs being blown off by sudden explosions, or seawater corroding the machinery, or remaining staff having to be evacuated, as “normal events”. So it’s a safe bet it wasn’t tested.)
Which means that fundamentally, we have no idea what will happen next: nobody understands the whole system because it is complex, and nobody has ever tried it out (“tested”) in the state it is in now, so nobody has any clue.
My heart is with the engineers fighting to keep those plants under control; they are doing an incredibly hard job while in mortal danger themselves. But everything, ever since we left the realm of what has been tested before (I think that was probably just after the tsunami knocked out the generators), they had to make up on the fly.
Leaving the realm of what has been tested happens frequently with other kinds of complex systems, say, Windows. But there is one crucial difference: if Windows crashes, you reboot. If it keeps doing it, you re-install, or buy a Mac. The costs are rather limited. In case of a nuclear power plant, the costs are catastrophic because people might start dying and not just a few of them.
Why weren’t they tested better? There are two reasons:
First, your neighbors will not approve repeated testing that involves blowing up the roof of your nuclear power plant and releasing some radiation, which is of course what happened recently.
You can guess all day long, using simulations and what have you, but because they are simulations and not the real thing, they are not sufficient. (I’m sure these plants had lots of simulations run on them, but it wasn’t good enough for sure.)
And secondly, in my now 20+ years experience building complex systems, I have never, not once, seen a complex system, that didn’t behave rather badly from time to time. Because I usually build software, it would be the users (they are very good at finding very unlikely bugs!) who managed to do something to the system that left all engineers scratching their beards saying “that’s impossible”. I’ve learned that there are no bug-free complex systems, and the reason is always the same: the engineers did not have the imagination required to come up with all the circumstances that the system found itself in.
“What do you mean, the user managed to click the button twice before the popup went away?” (well, Ms Mary Smith of Hamstead managed) and “Yep, once the data was corrupted in this particular way, and there wasn’t enough memory, bad things might happen. We tested each, but not together.”
In Japan, they did not test (not even simulate) a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami, and certainly nothing that came after that. I’m sure those plants in Japan were tested well, much much better than your average software system.
But earthquake plus Tsunami plus generators-out plus out of fuel etc. etc. was something clearly not considered. And if it had been considered, something else would not have been.
There is always one more bug. In case of nuclear power plants, that one more bug is going to have catastrophic consequences.
We cannot avoid that one more bug because we don’t know how to, as I’ve tried to show.
So let’s stop assuming that nuclear power can be made safe; it can’t. There will be catastrophes from time to time, like the one in Japan this week.
The question is simply this: do we need nuclear power so badly that we need to be okay with an occasional nuclear catastrophe?
Upon 2020
The Next Decade In Technology: Musings by Johannes Ernst
I lived through the Chernobyl disaster back in 1986, as a teenager, in Germany. I recall watching the radioactive cloud coming closer and closer on TV, wondering whether it was ever going to be safe to go outside again. That was before I became an engineer, but I remember pondering even then whether it was just shoddy Soviet work that was the cause of the disaster, or whether there was something inherently unsafe about nuclear power plants.
The question: If there’s enough money and time and brainpower, and no political obstacles, is it possible to engineer safe nuclear power plants? It should be, shouldn’t it: it’s just engineering after all, and there is no mystery at all how nuclear power plants are supposed to work.
25 years later, watching the Japenese disaster unfold in the past few days, I’ve made up my mind. The answer is: no, it is not possible to engineer safe nuclear power plants.
http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree
Here is why. It has to do with complex systems, learning from experience, and the limits of human imagination:
Any complex system, like a PC, or a car, or some enterprise software, or a nuclear power plant, has one fundamental property that makes it similar to all other complex systems: that’s that it cannot be fully understood by a single person.
There are other definitions of “complex system”, but this is mine: no one person can understand all aspects of it.
For non-engineers, that may sound alarming. It was for me when I first read as a kid about SDI in its day, but is a fact of life that we see all around us: iPhones are complex systems, the electricity grid is, when the UPS truck arrives, Amazon shipping, even more and more toys. Nobody understands all aspects of any of it.
As engineers, we use plenty of tricks to deal with systems that are larger and more complicated than we can comprehend, like teamwork (“I understand my part, you understand your’s, and we negotiate how they interact”) and abstraction.
For example: “when I turn the key in the ignition, the car will start”. Many people do not know this, but not even the engineers who designed your car can tell you in detail what happens when you turn the key. All of them — and I used to work for a car company — will use abstractions, which means they will not know about details they think are unimportant, such as how exactly the network controller for the injection system initializes itself when power comes on, or what would happen if there was a lightning bolt hitting the car at the same time. That’s because they might understand the logical connectivity of the car’s parts, but not what lightning would do to it. (Some other engineers will understand the latter, but they won’t know about the software, and so on.)
The only way we ever get anything to work, as engineers, is to design our systems as well as we can, and then try them out, over and over, and fix what needs fixing. Flippantly, we could call the philosophy: “who cares whether we understand what exactly it does, as long as it does the right thing”; and that is demonstrated by trying out as many things as we can think of. Engineers call that “testing”.
As a result, the highest-quality engineering approaches that I know of for complex systems all put an incredible amount of resources into some form of testing, because that’s the only thing we can think of to make progress.
The design engineer (or team) has come up with a design, and they, their peers, and the test engineers, now throw the kitchen sink at it trying it out in as many circumstances they can think of. If only one of those tests does not produce the desired result, the design engineers go back and change their design until all test cases work. (For the engineers: to keep it simple in this article, I also consider design reviews etc. forms of testing as they follow the same iterative pattern.)
Here’s an example. Let’s say somebody gives you a new pocket calculator prototype that supposedly knows how to simplify fractions, and you are supposed to test it. What will you do? You probably start with simple tests, like “4/6 makes 2/3, that’s right”. And “999/111 makes 9?. But it goes from there: what about we try negative numbers? What if the denominator is 0? What if the numerator is 1.3 and the denominator is 3/4 itself? Etc. etc. Many people would not think of even those simple examples to test. Test engineers will, and many more, like what if the fraction is 1.2E81 over PI? Or what if one of the numbers is an open parenthesis only as you can in some calculators?
The only reason why cars start when you turn the ignition, and why iPads play movies when you touch the right buttons, and why Google delivers the right answer to your search, is testing.
For many complex systems, testing and fixing bugs takes a lot more time and money than actually building the system in the first place.
If there wasn’t any testing, none — I repeat, NONE — of the complex systems I know would even come on, never mind do anything useful.
And even after gazillions of dollars in engineering salaries and testing equipment were spent, Windows still crashes. (and many other products; even my lowly computer keyboard seems to manage to crash occasionally.)
Which brings us back to nuclear power plants.
The problem with nuclear power plants is that they cannot be tested, at least not tested sufficiently.
All the things that have been going on in Japan since the tsunami wave hit — today’s headlines all talk about “heroic staff at the reactor” — have been totally outside of the range of anything that has ever been tested. (Yes, I wasn’t around when they tested, so I don’t know for sure. But trust me on this: engineering pride does not allow for several roofs being blown off by sudden explosions, or seawater corroding the machinery, or remaining staff having to be evacuated, as “normal events”. So it’s a safe bet it wasn’t tested.)
Which means that fundamentally, we have no idea what will happen next: nobody understands the whole system because it is complex, and nobody has ever tried it out (“tested”) in the state it is in now, so nobody has any clue.
My heart is with the engineers fighting to keep those plants under control; they are doing an incredibly hard job while in mortal danger themselves. But everything, ever since we left the realm of what has been tested before (I think that was probably just after the tsunami knocked out the generators), they had to make up on the fly.
Leaving the realm of what has been tested happens frequently with other kinds of complex systems, say, Windows. But there is one crucial difference: if Windows crashes, you reboot. If it keeps doing it, you re-install, or buy a Mac. The costs are rather limited. In case of a nuclear power plant, the costs are catastrophic because people might start dying and not just a few of them.
Why weren’t they tested better? There are two reasons:
First, your neighbors will not approve repeated testing that involves blowing up the roof of your nuclear power plant and releasing some radiation, which is of course what happened recently.
You can guess all day long, using simulations and what have you, but because they are simulations and not the real thing, they are not sufficient. (I’m sure these plants had lots of simulations run on them, but it wasn’t good enough for sure.)
And secondly, in my now 20+ years experience building complex systems, I have never, not once, seen a complex system, that didn’t behave rather badly from time to time. Because I usually build software, it would be the users (they are very good at finding very unlikely bugs!) who managed to do something to the system that left all engineers scratching their beards saying “that’s impossible”. I’ve learned that there are no bug-free complex systems, and the reason is always the same: the engineers did not have the imagination required to come up with all the circumstances that the system found itself in.
“What do you mean, the user managed to click the button twice before the popup went away?” (well, Ms Mary Smith of Hamstead managed) and “Yep, once the data was corrupted in this particular way, and there wasn’t enough memory, bad things might happen. We tested each, but not together.”
In Japan, they did not test (not even simulate) a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami, and certainly nothing that came after that. I’m sure those plants in Japan were tested well, much much better than your average software system.
But earthquake plus Tsunami plus generators-out plus out of fuel etc. etc. was something clearly not considered. And if it had been considered, something else would not have been.
There is always one more bug. In case of nuclear power plants, that one more bug is going to have catastrophic consequences.
We cannot avoid that one more bug because we don’t know how to, as I’ve tried to show.
So let’s stop assuming that nuclear power can be made safe; it can’t. There will be catastrophes from time to time, like the one in Japan this week.
The question is simply this: do we need nuclear power so badly that we need to be okay with an occasional nuclear catastrophe?
Japan nuclear crisis: Seven reasons why we should abandon nuclear power
Japan nuclear crisis: Seven reasons why we should abandon nuclear power
By Noraini Connie Fattah II in A Nuke Free World
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2011/10/support-no-nuclear-energy-nuclear-free.html
1. Accidents and population centers
Worldwide standard operating procedures at nuclear power plants offer little margin for safety errors, and the industry is scrambling to check safety at each station. But can it reliably prevent another accident? Accidents are difficult to predict and have immediate far-reaching consequences, compounded by the fact that most nuclear reactors are located near major population centers – Moscow, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Budapest, Kiev. It is nearly impossible to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people in a timely fashion, even with advance warning of several days – as hurricane Katrina demonstrated in New Orleans.
Officials at the Japanese nuclear plant did not think to have closed-circuit cameras inside the buildings to chart an accident for which they never fully planned. But we can be certain of the following. Officials belatedly warned surrounding residents of the danger to their lives, belatedly began to issue potassium iodide tablets to protect them, and belatedly expanded the evacuation zone around the station. Now at least 100,000 people have had to leave the area, and at least 100,000 more have been forced to live inside of sealed houses. At Chernobyl, as well, the authorities only ordered evacuation after a shocking delay.
2. Old reactors are dangerous
It is now standard practice to extend the life of reactors from their design parameters of 25 years to 40 years and longer. It seems foolish at best to take such a gamble on complex technology that operates under high temperature and pressure. Any “unlikely” loss of coolant-capacities may result in explosions, meltdown, and significant release of radioactivity into the environment.
3. No secure repository for spent fuel
Utilities and reactor operators still store spent fuel and other nuclear waste in and around reactors, since no truly secure, permanent repository has been built. In the US, 70,000 tons of spent fuel sits at 103 reactors around the country within 75 miles of 125 million people. In Russia, 50,000 tons of spent fuel remains at power stations.
4. Vulnerable to terrorism
Reactors around the world – 55 in Japan, 103 in the US, 40 in Russia, and so on – are also vulnerable to terrorism. For example, a National Academy of Sciences report in 2005 indicated that pools holding spent fuel stored at these reactors might not withstand a determined attack. The industry is now touting – and building – “floating” nuclear power stations that would operate on barges; clearly protection of these stations would be difficult.
5. Mother Nature's threat
As the nuclear crisis in Japan has shown, even the best-prepared facilities can neither predict nor withstand the most severe natural disasters. Exacerbating the inherent dangers of nuclear power, several plants have been built on active seismic faults: Diablo Canyon in California, Metsamor in Armenia, and Fukushima in Japan.
Diablo Canyon in California is designed to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake, but experts have raised serious concerns – even before Japan’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami – that the plant’s safety would be threatened by a tsunami or high-magnitude earthquake.
The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant in Armenia had to close abruptly in 1988 because of a devastating earthquake. It was restarted seven years later to cope with the country’s energy shortage, but has since been condemned by the European Union as deeply unsafe and vulnerable to accident.
6. Costs outweigh benefits
For fifty years, engineers have promised “too cheap to meter” energy, the construction of inherently safe reactors, and solution to waste disposal. Instead, a typical reactor, based on the experience of the advanced French industry, now costs a minimum of $6 billion. The Obama administration approved $54 billion in subsidies to the nuclear industry to jumpstart construction in the US.
Reactor costs do not include transmission, waste disposal, fuel costs, or the great costs of remediating such accidents as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima Daiichi. These billions of dollars will buy only more risk to the general population.
7. Renewable energies are safer, cheaper
With each accident – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi – the nuclear industry has followed the same pattern: hesitation to inform the public about the dangers as matters go from bad to worse followed by assertions that none of the world’s other reactors can face the same fate.
Yet none of these risks and dangers exist with other, renewable forms of energy – wind energy, solar energy – and conservation. If they are costly now in terms of power generation, they end up being less expensive and safer, while Fukushima Daiichi has already entered the lexicon of terrifying nuclear accidents.
http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree
By Noraini Connie Fattah II in A Nuke Free World
http://nuke6.blogspot.com/2011/10/support-no-nuclear-energy-nuclear-free.html
1. Accidents and population centers
Worldwide standard operating procedures at nuclear power plants offer little margin for safety errors, and the industry is scrambling to check safety at each station. But can it reliably prevent another accident? Accidents are difficult to predict and have immediate far-reaching consequences, compounded by the fact that most nuclear reactors are located near major population centers – Moscow, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Budapest, Kiev. It is nearly impossible to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people in a timely fashion, even with advance warning of several days – as hurricane Katrina demonstrated in New Orleans.
Officials at the Japanese nuclear plant did not think to have closed-circuit cameras inside the buildings to chart an accident for which they never fully planned. But we can be certain of the following. Officials belatedly warned surrounding residents of the danger to their lives, belatedly began to issue potassium iodide tablets to protect them, and belatedly expanded the evacuation zone around the station. Now at least 100,000 people have had to leave the area, and at least 100,000 more have been forced to live inside of sealed houses. At Chernobyl, as well, the authorities only ordered evacuation after a shocking delay.
2. Old reactors are dangerous
It is now standard practice to extend the life of reactors from their design parameters of 25 years to 40 years and longer. It seems foolish at best to take such a gamble on complex technology that operates under high temperature and pressure. Any “unlikely” loss of coolant-capacities may result in explosions, meltdown, and significant release of radioactivity into the environment.
3. No secure repository for spent fuel
Utilities and reactor operators still store spent fuel and other nuclear waste in and around reactors, since no truly secure, permanent repository has been built. In the US, 70,000 tons of spent fuel sits at 103 reactors around the country within 75 miles of 125 million people. In Russia, 50,000 tons of spent fuel remains at power stations.
4. Vulnerable to terrorism
Reactors around the world – 55 in Japan, 103 in the US, 40 in Russia, and so on – are also vulnerable to terrorism. For example, a National Academy of Sciences report in 2005 indicated that pools holding spent fuel stored at these reactors might not withstand a determined attack. The industry is now touting – and building – “floating” nuclear power stations that would operate on barges; clearly protection of these stations would be difficult.
5. Mother Nature's threat
As the nuclear crisis in Japan has shown, even the best-prepared facilities can neither predict nor withstand the most severe natural disasters. Exacerbating the inherent dangers of nuclear power, several plants have been built on active seismic faults: Diablo Canyon in California, Metsamor in Armenia, and Fukushima in Japan.
Diablo Canyon in California is designed to withstand a 7.5 magnitude quake, but experts have raised serious concerns – even before Japan’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami – that the plant’s safety would be threatened by a tsunami or high-magnitude earthquake.
The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant in Armenia had to close abruptly in 1988 because of a devastating earthquake. It was restarted seven years later to cope with the country’s energy shortage, but has since been condemned by the European Union as deeply unsafe and vulnerable to accident.
6. Costs outweigh benefits
For fifty years, engineers have promised “too cheap to meter” energy, the construction of inherently safe reactors, and solution to waste disposal. Instead, a typical reactor, based on the experience of the advanced French industry, now costs a minimum of $6 billion. The Obama administration approved $54 billion in subsidies to the nuclear industry to jumpstart construction in the US.
Reactor costs do not include transmission, waste disposal, fuel costs, or the great costs of remediating such accidents as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima Daiichi. These billions of dollars will buy only more risk to the general population.
7. Renewable energies are safer, cheaper
With each accident – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi – the nuclear industry has followed the same pattern: hesitation to inform the public about the dangers as matters go from bad to worse followed by assertions that none of the world’s other reactors can face the same fate.
Yet none of these risks and dangers exist with other, renewable forms of energy – wind energy, solar energy – and conservation. If they are costly now in terms of power generation, they end up being less expensive and safer, while Fukushima Daiichi has already entered the lexicon of terrifying nuclear accidents.
http://www.facebook.com/nuclearfree
http://www.facebook.com/nukefree
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