Why don't we have more nuclear power?

[gfretwell]

Bill Weld WAS on the ballot in 2016. You were too busy deciding between Trump and Hillary to notice.

[gfretwell]

Nobody ever accused Californians of being smart.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Yes, but he was in the #2 spot and not noticed. I did vote for him though.

[hubops]

All the nuc-plants < Russia / Chernobyl notwithstanding >

can withstand sudden and complete loss of grid power - that was established in the 1960's. In Japan - their emergency <back-up> station service power generators were flooded & disabled prior to the proper reactor shut-down. Not necessarily bad design - bad procedures ? YES .. bad communications ? YES

All our west-world "safe" nuclear power plants will be moth-balled very soon ... got a better idea ?

John T.

[trader_4]

Thanks for reminding me. He was on the Libertarian ticket, that's all I needed to know, I heard enough of their loony toons. Bye, bye Bill.

[trader_4]

Say what? Losing power, both grid and the standby generators flooding most certainly was the problem. With no cooling pumps working, the core overheated and melted.

Same thing can be said for TMI. They know people screw up and they didn't plan for it? Or when an earthquake hits the US, they will be saying how stupid it was to build nukes in CA, near fault lines, etc. But that's your forte, 20-20 hindsight.

It's all part of the same process, building a high quality, well designed product. But you think the Japanese are inferior at that. Go figure.

They were not dragging the UAW around like a

Sure, and no US manufacturer has ever done anything like that. Racism at play here, maybe?

[trader_4]

What bad procedures? There is nothing I've seen that anything was wrong with the procedures. When you lose all power, cooling is lost and even after you scramble the reactor it takes many hours, days before the residual heat declines to a point where you no longer need to cool it. Just because new fission has ceased doesn't mean that all the radioactive isotopes decaying producing heat and all the heat already there are not a critical problem.

[Ralph Mowery]

My cousin worked for the local power company. He had some contacts with the TMI people. From him what really caused the failuer was incompnet management. The reactors, just like most mechanical/chemical operations have their own 'personalities' that do not go by the book. The operators saw the problem comming and would probalby have had it under control but some managers got involved and started barking out orders. As usual, they were wrong.

I worked at a factory that made polyester out of raw chemicals. A powder and liquid were heated and boiled off. This went on through several continious vessels. There was a probelm, the operator was taking the correct steps. Then a manager got involved and gave the wrong orders and made a big mess out of things .

[gfretwell]

Read your sentence again. "both grid and the standby generators FLOODING"

Maybe we should just let the Navy design and run them. They seem to have a 100% track record.

You can have the best design possible but if it was built like shit, it is still shit

I haven't seen it and I have owned a lot of cars. There were a few "Muscle cars" in the 60s where things were hard to get to but you didn't need to remove the engine for any but the most ridiculous examples of very limited production models. The Prelude was a pretty mundane car, pretty much just a Civic in a sport jacket and they made a bunch of them.

[gfretwell]

Maybe these operators are just not capable of thinking outside the rigid box they were educated in. If the only issue is pumping water, why not call the fire department and use the pump on the fire engine to move the water around? During the design phase, putting in these standpipes would be trivial. I am not sure what would be involved in an emergency but the pump is a FRU, disconnect it and trick up a way to connect a fire hose. It don't have to be pretty and it can even leak some. The reality is why not just use auxiliary pumps of some sort anyway that are not electric? The problem you are describing was easy to deal with if someone had just thought about it a little.

[micky]

Forgetting about Japan for now, I've read that nuclear power plants in California were built on earthquake fault lines. I presume that would be because no one wants to buy a house on a fault line so the land was/is available. Doesn't sound safe to me.

[micky]

I didn't waste my vote. Hillary carried Maryland. IIRC you're in Florida, which was carried by the lying orange man who is causing all the trouble. Voting for Weld instead of Hillary was a big mistake.

[micky]

This part was a joke. Everyone got that, right?

The world has a 1000 things to be interested in. I'm curious about plenty, and I have enough reading scheduled for the rest of my life, even if nothing new comes up (and something new comes up every day). I can't spend time on all of them.

[gfretwell]

I would never point to California as people who do smart things. They were ground zero for the Enron debacle and they recently sued their power company into bankruptcy and then seemed shocked that the lights went out.

[micky]

BTW, the 3rd or 4th objection was to the amount of water heated by these plants and expelled into rivers where it messes up the water for fish etc. But I think only commie pinko fishermen raise this objection.

But the need for cooling water is why they are built on the ocean or sufficiently large rivers.

[gfretwell]

You most certainly wasted your vote in more than one way, For one your candidate lost, just like mine. In a wider sense she lost because she won races by a very wide margin in the states that she carried but she just didn't carry enough states. Your vote was meaningless in a landslide

There was no way I would have voted for Hillary, no matter who the GOP ran but I didn't vote for Trump either.

[Ed Pawlowski]

With a good conscience I could not vote for Trump or Hillary. I too voted for Weld and hope to again next year. Or at least someone sane. None of the Dems are any good.

[gfretwell]

"Oh oh. Ten minutes to Wapner".

[rbowman]

If you worry about minor things like earthquakes, mud slides, fire, and drought you shouldn't be in Californicate.

[rbowman]

Good. Hillary can be Queen of Baltimore.