... nuclear companies has been ordered (by the governments) to keep secret anything that could help terrorists. ... Are nuclear power and terrorism incompatible, and if so which must go?
No.
It just means that governments are led by blockheads. That, I think, is not news to anyone.
Safety through secrecy doesn't work. But secrecy is always good at promoting fear, which is pretty much all the political classes in western countries have had left to run on for the past 30 years.
Are nuclear power and terrorism incompatible ...? No. It just means that governments are led by blockheads.
It just means that governments are led by blockheads.
Francois, what are your thoughts on What if a technology requires a perfect government? by MillMan on July 11th, 2007 Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
I think it always boils down to the assumptions made for nuclear risks. We come back to what was discussed in this "How can we talk rationally" thread you pointed to.
If you think that any anomaly related to anything nuclear is the end of the world, nothing will do but absolute perfection, which is not achievable.
The nuclear industry is like any other industrial operation. They spend their life dealing with breakdowns, mishaps, screw-ups, stuff that fails for no good reason and Murphy's Law. And none the less it works because the industry explicitly rejects the notion above. The key notions are design simplicity, defense in depth, redundancy, fast communication, return on experience and preventative action. And the factual record says it works very well.
Same at the government level. A lot of things can go wrong before the whole thing goes wrong. What you need to avoid is the situation in the US where a single fucker is able to crash the entire thing.
Interestingly, You'll note though that the GWB disaster is happening only because of the general acceptance for governmental secrecy. Take that away and GWB would have imploded 4 years ago. No Iraq, no New Orleans. Well, probably no Republican party for that matter.
Transparency is not a cure-all but it allows what's done in the nuclear industry, early action before things go really wrong.
A lot of things can go wrong before the whole thing goes wrong. What you need to avoid is the situation in the US where a single fucker is able to crash the entire thing.
I hasten to say what you sort of say in the next paragraph, that the system as it existed ten years ago has been carefully subverted ... ah, be honest, broken. -----sapere aude
So, how do you get around the problem of blockheads?
For that matter, how do you abolish the military? (I think nothing less would suffice to make nuclear plants NOT a national security issue with secrecy requirements.) *Traitor*, n. A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.
I don't know what the military has to do with nuclear power in countries without a nuclear weapons development programme. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
(True, the point is debatable in the case of coffee makers. But still.)
I don't think people necessarily want access to technical papers.
My guess is what they want is reassurance that the industry is being run by reliable professionals, that accidents will be minimal and that procedures are in place to handle them, and that dangerous waste is contained safely and is unlikely to leak or be stolen.
Corporate openness, technical openness and security transparency are all separate issues.
If the industry is going to be trusted it has to have a solid record on all three counts. So far that doesn't seem to have been the pattern the industry aspires to, never mind operates by.
Fertilizer. Cars. Knives (including your bread knife, but that won't matter as there won't be any bread anyway (no fertilizer)). And so on.
Ban this, ban that.
What is needed is proper cost benefit analysis. And with that both bread knives and nuclear reactors come off looking good. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
won't be any bread anyway (no fertilizer)
As usual I'm not going to make suggestions here, but I can think a few delivery methods which would do the job quite effectively.
It's a question of scale and accessibility, not just a theoretical binary 'might be.'
But I'll say again - there are different kinds of secrecy and security being discussed here as if they're identical.
They're not. There's no paradox between industry-wide openness and industry-wide security - or at least there shouldn't be. The information needed to reassure everyone that the industry is being run in a sane way is completely different to the information that terrorists might want to use.
One is about clarity of practice and professional emergency response. The other is very much about plant specifics.
So it's a useful data point that the two are being conflated by the industry itself, for its own benefit. There's no reason why they should be, and the fact that they are suggests that the industry is either not being run competently, or isn't used to be being completely truthful - or both.
The difference is that nuke waste could be used to kill a lot of people quite easily, with much more of an impact than a fertiliser bomb would.
Furthermore, the chemical explosives in your dirty bomb is bound to kill more people than the spent fuel itself.
Spread it into the water mains? Use ricin instead, or botulinium, dioxines, lead, or just the ordinary damn flu.
Bound to kill thousand of pensioners.
Spent fuel is hard to get, hard to deal with and strictly supervised. You can du much more damage with toxic chemicals or just plain fertiliser. Much easier to get and make too. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
your intellectual position on this seems clear to my perception, you are quick to jump on projections.
terrorism is being used as a bogeyman by forces you recognise as malign, do you really believe de and dodo are modelling on them?
de is anti nukes, so jerome paints her as a pastoralist (his projection, rebutted as inaccurate), and you affect indecision and rational enquiry, while using the same kind of logic-twist as the right do to attack de and dodo more than you do those advocating nukes, like starvid.
thank pasta your sniping looks pretty ineffectual against facts, laid out so generously by de anander in this case, and many others.
do you like to be contrary for kicks, perhaps?
or do you really think the arguments raised by de and dodo don't deserve better than straw man talking points?
of course anti nuke activists will use the terrorism angle to help make their point, but it's not because they want to...it's to reflect that the same authoritarian structures are whipping the public's fear levels and then trying to push nukes.
it's the contradiction in the latter's logic that's startling, and should be a tip-off.
very similar to how iran shouldn't have nuke power plants, but others in the area can have them and n-weapons too..
either they're safe (enough) or they're going to cause more problems, and playing 'fair and balanced' trying to shoot holes in the arguments of those who have, imo, a deep commitment to doing better with respect to the earth, society, and its relationship to energy, seems a waste of such a keen intellect as yours.
another twisting strawman argument to bring in franco and hitler, btw. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
you don't need a military to protect windplants, but when you have mucho toxic waste that other countries' military or terrorists want to put their dirty paws on, then you have to invest in massive 'security' aka military, aka thugs in uniform.
you're so bright migeru, it seems like you're playing dumb in these discussions, or devil's avocado. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
So, yeah, you need the military to protect your nuclear waste from other militaries, but that's about it. And in that respect protecting nuclear infrastructure is like protecting any other infrastructure. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
couldn't that be hijacked and used as a weapon?
if this fear, oops, concern is scientifically impossible, maybe someone here will let me know.
i don't visualise some jewel thief ala david niven stuffing some into a bag!
as for the fine line between 'other militaries' and bog-standard 'terrorists', it's getting damn hard to discern.
regarding protecting it (them) from attack, like it was just another munitions warehouse, look what happened to pearl harbour in very short time.
from what i'm learning here, it's less likely that a terrorist would fly a plane into a nuke plant and achieve anything major, but if the plants are dependent on so much external power to keep them running cool, what happens if that's attacked, or the supply lines for the fuel to run that? The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
Or open. You can drop the canisters from planes or hit them with freight trains without them opening. The Americans managed to blow one open with an anti-tank missile, but the contamination was limited to a few square metres around the breach, and it was easily cleaned up.
What if external power is lost? Well, that is a bitch. First there is usually several off site power lines. But they might all be lost. Then you have the reserve diesels. They should not all be destroyed, as they are usually located at several places, usually two or four.
If they are all lost, you have about two hours to get power back online until you get fuel damage. That means that the water in the reactor tank is turned into steam and the fuel is uncovered and starts breaking apart and melting.
(The nuclear chain reaction stops after 1-2 seconds after the plane impact, but there is still heat left and this is the problem)
If no power is back within eight hours, the molten fuel breaches the bottom of the reactor tank and contaminates the inside of the containment. This is a nuclear meltdown.
The increased heat and pressure is a hazard to the structural integrity of the containment, so you need to remove heat. You do this by venting the (possibly) radioactive gases inside the containment to the atmosphere. This is sounds a lot worse than it really is.
It was done at Three Mile Island, and the radiation relase was positively tiny and did not hurt anyone whatsoever. After that incident, plants installed filters which catch 99,9 % of the radiation. So the result if a modern reactor melts down is zero divided by one thousand, hurt or killed.
Pretty much no one is aware that this most basic myth of nuclear power is false: that if everyhting is okay nuclear is very clean, while if something goes wrong ot becomes very dirty indeed. Well, it doesn't. But the plant is destroyed. $3-4 billion down the drain, which is a pretty strong motivation for private plant managers to maintain safety.
By the way, the new Westinghouse AP1000 reactor will have passive cooling systems, making a meltdown impossible in the first place. This seems to be the most popular reactor design in the American nuclear renaissance. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
I think I have told you before to get off your high horse, melo. You're pushing it again.
If you're right, you should be able to convince yourself. Then you should be able to convince a friend. Then you should be able to convince an enemy.
Convince me. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
as for convincing you, it's not about being right as much as being intellectually honest, and if de's posts can't convince you, certainly nothing i'd ever come up with would!
this issue is huge, and will continue to divide until it's put to bed by one more biggish accident, or by slow attrition from incidents, and the clockwork cover-ups, like the recent one in japan.
giving trust over multi-generational life-and-death issues to people who lie at first opportunity or press release, qualifies as giving away too much of what little sovereignty we left over our lives, imo, and is as breathtaking in its callousness towards future generations as continuing to pour more coke-smoke into the heavens.
i certainly don't want to mess with your optimism, i just wonder, mystified, at its placement.
climbs down off horse... The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. Chinese Proverb.
