Comments Thomas Palm has made

Insulting

It is especially insulting to use this false quote together with a link to the real statement. It shows that Roberts did have access to the original and that he though no one would bother to look it up.

This is the kind of sloppy reporting that can be used to downplay the entire story of FBI monitoring environmental groups. The right loves to find some detail that is wrong in a story, attack it and make the rest of the story be forgotten.On 'Eco-terrorism' is the feds' new all-purpose excuse to increase domestic surveillance. posted 4 years, 6 months ago 5 Responses

Communes

Anyone interested in how communist societies work, or don't work, should read about about the Iseali kibbutz system. It worked without political oppression, but certainly not witout some strain.
On Revisiting the 1970s eco-cult classic that gripped a nation posted 4 years, 6 months ago 10 Responses

Elena's story from Chernobyl

It is an interesting story with some good photos, but one should also consider that the text is as much about rumors as about facts. Lacking any trust in the government stories get told and retold, getting better every time. In many cases the areas people were forced to leave were less dangerous than the cities they were moved to. (the Soviet Union had lots of coal plants with no filters).

I wouldn't mind taking a trip to see the area surrounding the reactor. I have actually been on a visit inside Ignalina in a trip to Lithuania where we one day tried to find wolves and the next looked at their most polluting industries. I've also seen Famagusta, although only from a distance. (It's a city in Cyprus that was evacuated when the Turks invaded)On Some not-entirely-coherent thoughts on nuclear power. posted 4 years, 7 months ago 34 Responses

Chernobyl and cogeneration

The only detectable damage from Chernobyl was caused by radioactive iodine. This iodine has a halflife of 13 days. The damage would also have been strongly reduced if people around the reactor had taken iodine pills directly after the accident. (Here in Sweden all households around reactors already have received such pills just in case). The second component that have caused some worry is radioactive caesium with a halflife of 30 years.

It is no accidents that people worry about substances with short halflifes. Radioactivity means that nuclei decay. If they do so quickly you get high radiactivity for a short time, if they do it slowly the substance will be correspondingly less radioactive. You can't have a substance that is both highly radioactive and has a long lifetime. (The dangers of plutonium are highly overrated. It's nasty, but not that nasty).

You do not have to wait any 50,000 years for the area around Chernobyl to be harmless. In fact, people living around the evacuated zone complain that they are invaded by wolves since the area has become a wildlife refuge.

I don't know how long the toxins from Bhopal will persist, chemicals can be very stable and cause long time damage too. I am convinced, however, that Bhopal has already caused more deaths and suffering than Chernobyl will ever do no matter how far into the future you look.

Over to cogeneration. In Sweden we have discussed for a long time building a tunnel transporting hot water from the reactors in Forsmark to Stockholm, a distance of roughly 80 km. This hasn't happened (yet) because supposedly we are going to close down our nuclear reactors some time in the future. We have built a half as long tunnel elsewhere, so we are not talking about any need for having the reactor as a neighbor. Not that I would worry much about having one nearby, and neither do people who do live close to reactors in Sweden. The resistance to nuclear power is concentrated to areas that have none. But then I think the Swedish nuclear industry has been more open and managed to convince people that they know what they are doing.

In Sweden too reactor owners are excluded from paying more than a fairly insignificant amount in case of an accident, but if you speak to them they have concluded that in case of a large accident they would most likely be forced into bancrupcy anyway. Laws or not, they wouldn't be able to get away with not paying everything they own, someone would find a loophole.

I don't know enough about your US sites, but I wouldn't like to live near a miliatry facility. The military operate under different (no) rules, and can get away with a lot you can't in the civilian sector. You shouldn't compare facilities for production of nuclear weapons with civilian nuclear reactors.On Some not-entirely-coherent thoughts on nuclear power. posted 4 years, 7 months ago 34 Responses

Both cogeneration and heat pumps

You first use cogeneration supplying homes near the reactor with heat, then you use some of the electricity in heat pumps to warm homes further away, or in less dense areas where it doesn't make sense to supply central heating. This is more efficient than either method by itself.

Chernobyl isn't relevant for any Western reactor. It was a lousy design combined with incompetent staff. Three Mile Island is a better example on what might happen, and that wasn't exactly an environmental disaster. I find it interesting how people can drag up Chernobyl to claim that nuclear power is too dangerous, yet forget all about the much worse accident in Bhopal. Shouldn't Bhopal prove that we have to close down chemical industry?On Some not-entirely-coherent thoughts on nuclear power. posted 4 years, 7 months ago 34 Responses

Steam engines

Just making compaines liable won't work. Shady companies are very clever at creating subsidiaries with no financial assets, and a company like that can build a really cheap and shoddy reactor and just laugh if it blows.

The success story for these kind of market solutions is steam engines. Early on they had a tendency to explode as the boilers contained high pressure and sometimes were of low quality. Then one company started to offer insurance against explosions on one condition: they sent their own experts to qualify the engine first. As companies caught on the number of accident plummeted.

A market solution would have to include that each reactor owner guarantees that a fixed, very large, amount of money is available to cover any accident. This can either be managed through an insurance company, or by owners of nuclear plants joining to create a mutual fund. The latter option has the advantage that one reactor owner is likely to know a lot about what kind of flaws another reactor may have.On Some not-entirely-coherent thoughts on nuclear power. posted 4 years, 7 months ago 34 Responses