Do you mean Nuclear Power Stations?

The answer is: yes.

my opinion is pretty divided and i'm not very up-to-date as well i think...
i'll start with benefits:
endless "fuel"
much energy from few stations
cleaner air (?)

and disadvantages (right word?):
much deaths if it goes wrong
no good solution for the dumb (right word?)
not sure or this is much spoken about too but if they become normal the protection might get lower, things might get illegal and they would be great targets in war and for example for al-qaeda...

any thoughts/opinions??

No you did not wrote it right. I am going to assume that nuclear stations are nuclear missile stations in which case, yes, those are one of the main reasons we are still alive.

sorry, english is my second language and i'm 13 (almost 14) so i didn't know how you call it exactly...
but as long as it's clear...
oh, and please correct me when i say something wrong, still learning...

Some clarification:

-The fuel is *not* endless. There's just a lot of it.

-All Nuclear accidents have been user error and were avoidable. Not a single disaster happened because of poor design or lack of understanding of nuclear energy.

-dump, not dumb. Yes, this is a problem, but not an unsolvable one.

jmo: really, i don't get that one, using them is like being binded to someone with a rope and the throw him in the depth...
you go with him...
also willing to discuss nuclear weapons in this thread :)

"All Nuclear accidents have been user error and were avoidable. Not a single disaster happened because of poor design or lack of understanding of nuclear energy"

Abg, I'm an avid supported of nuclear power but I really don't think statement is accurate.

Just looking at the major ones:
TMI - Certainly had some user errors but it did stem from a poor design and could have been avoided with better planning

Chernobyl - Yes, the commies were idiots.

Fukushima - Certainly a large majority of the issue was design flaws. The diesel generators were prone to common mode disasters and the cooling pools lacked containment.

@Yonni

I stand by my statement. In the three examples you listed, user error was the critical difference between a minor problem and the disaster that occurred.

From wikipedia:

"Once the secondary feedwater pumps stopped, three auxiliary pumps activated automatically. However, because the valves had been closed for routine maintenance, the system was unable to pump any water. The closure of these valves was a violation of a key NRC rule, according to which the reactor must be shut down if all auxiliary feed pumps are closed for maintenance. This failure was later singled out by NRC officials as a key one, without which the course of events would have been very different"

Fukushima is a particularly embarrassing example. That plant had *decades* of scandal and misuse. Yes, in this case I will agree that there were some design issues, but they were *known* issues that the company did to cut corners, which I think is different than accidentally designing a faulty system.

If you extend "user error" to poor design then, yeah, Fukushima was a product of user error. However, you did say that no nuclear accident has been a product of poor design and that's simply not true. Heck, even the idiots at Chernobyl would have been able to handle the disaster if they had designed some sort of containment.

I'll concede the point that it is possible to build a reactor that is almost impervious to catastrophic releases of radioactivity if they're operated appropriately.

But I won't agree that NPPs have always been built that way.

By "poor design" I meant accidental poor design. I didn't mean blatant corner-cutting, which the designers knew would result in unsafe plants.

I would say NPPs built today *would* be built that way. At least here in the US with government funding and backing and watchdog groups all over their ass keeping an eye on things. Nuclear power can be safe. The past is gone and the technology and construction of modern plants today are much safer and pose less environmental risk than the pollutants put out by coal and oil-fired plants.

@Draug,
I would like to think so. However, I think it is prudent to recognize the limitations of practical design considerations. If the design basis for a reactor is a 1 in 10,000 year earthquake, then that earthquake might still happen. Just look at what happened in Virginia last month.

Don't get me wrong, I fully support the notion that we should keep building NPPs and that they are part of the solution to fossil fuel dependencies. However, it's never 100% fool proof and we (the nuclear community, as well as the public) need to continue to be critical of the methods to insure that nothing catastrophic happens.

Agreed, Yonni. We must weight the risks, but NPPs are safer based on the measurable data and probability than the health hazards proposed by the continuing use of fossil fules to provide our electricity.

As far as the engineering goes, I worked on a superfund project back in the early 90s wher I analyzed the worst case wind event for the life of the nuclear materials being stored at Fernald so the engineers could design the storage silos to withstand that scenario. Could an even worse wind event occur like a direct tornado strike? Sure, but the probability is so low that the risk of trying to transport the material made it safer to stor it there until it was safe to handle.

Sorry, sent a little soon...

The point of that example is that the engineers who did the cleanup of the superfund sites are no more conscientious than the ones who design the plants. And the builders of the containment units are no more competent than the ones who build the reactors.

steephie22 - "jmo: really, i don't get that one, using them is like being binded to someone with a rope and the throw him in the depth...
you go with him..."

Actually it is more like being binded to someone with a rope and saying "If you throw me over the edge then you are going over the edge too." Of course there is the risk that someone will say "Fuck it" and off the edge you go.

Yes, I completely support nuclear power stations. Also re Fukushima, it took a massive earthquake and a tsunami to cause the meltdown. Also, the plant had been built in the 70s (IIRC), since then safety standards and engineering have come a long way forward (I hope).

I liked that post, largeham. If anything, Fukushima has show how safe nuclear power is, since even with a ridiculous amount of things going wrong in an out-of-date plant there has been limited damage. It's still incredibly serious and shows how much precaution is needed to make this wolf by the ear safe, but I'll bet anything that the world has more problems from the hundreds of nuclear weapons tests that have been carried out than ever could happen from accidents at nuclear plants.

HAvign said all that, once fusion is perfected we need to get rid of all these thing ASAP.

Excuse me, but Nuclear power...whether electrical power or strength...provides many benefits and anyone who says the risks are too high is obviously a cold-hearted liberal who is to be hated and shunned.

"once fusion is perfected we need to get rid of all these thing ASAP"

Said the nuclear engineer 50 years ago, and 25 years ago... and now

ok, first the weapons: ever thought of Al Qaeda with their suicide-people??
once they get it done to build them they keep firing on America and all other countries they hate and away goes the world...
and probably it would even work when they want to kill more then lose people since America can't fire nukes anywhere without killing friends wich they can't...
if no one would've started building them it would be much harder for terrorists to get them... besides, i said use them, not have them... :)

ok, now the power-stations...
everybody says it's very safe IF they are built right and all those things but you shouldn't expect that, things will get illegal and also, like i mentioned before, they would be great targets for terrorists...
easier then building nukes and firing them...

@steephie

Turning Pu-239 into a nuclear bomb is not a trivial process. Making a dirty bomb out of Pu-239, or even U-235 is certainly possible, but the reality is that there is already tons of this stuff all over the ex-Soviet bloc, if the terrorists wanted it. Further more, it's possible to use Th-232, which is OK for NPP, but not good for bombs.

Yes, they would be great target for terrorists, but, honestly, so would any power plant. Have any NPP in the world been the victim of a successful terrorist attack?

And, honestly, we shouldn't build NPP because we're worried about terrorists? That's letting them win, man!

The real terrorism concerns with NPPs is the depleted fuel rods being used in dirty bombs. After all, they don't need to go critical to be vaporized into a deadly radioactive gas that wipes out an entire downtown populace.

Yes, I understand, but there are NPP all over the world, not to mention the countless stores from the Cold War.

How many dirty bombs have there been?

Agreed, abgemacht. I was just making the point that the plants themselves wouldn't really be the targets anyhow.

"wipes out an entire downtown populace"
I'd be hesitant to believe that

"Th-232, which is OK for NPP, but not good for bombs"
The fissile material in a thorium plant is U-233 which is OK for bombs. Granted, it's more difficult to use because of higher gammas, but it's still doable. Furthermore, to drive a thorium plant you're probably going to use some Pu or enriched uranium so it's not the anti-proliferation haven that it's hailed to be.

NPPs are very difficult to attack as a terrorist. Withstanding is an airplane crash is now part of the design criteria (yeah, I know that's not the only form of terrorist attack but it's pretty solid benchmark).

Talking to my prof, he maintains that medical isotopes are the easiest source for dirty bombs. So much of it flows internationally and with insufficient tracking.

@Yonni - I was more making a point that it isn't going to wipe out a whole city, just a few blocks. To me downtown is a 4x5 block (20 square blocks) which is more or less the size of downtown Cincinnati. Downtown Chicago or NewYork? Obviously not. LA maybe as it is a small downtown seeing as it is all urban sprawl between downtown and Hollywood and Bevferly Hills.

And it depends on how much depleted uranium and how much explosives they use to scatter it.

As far as urnakium in a thorium reactor... Urnaium is only the startup material. The thorium is the fuel used in the sustained reaction. The amount of Urnaium required is very very small.

Thorium is not fissile. It must absorb a neutron to be Th-233, which decays to Pa-233, which decays to U-233.Eq'm amounts of U-233 depends on various things but will be between 1% and 2%. As well as U-233, you'll have whatever fissile source you had present to start up the reactor.

Also, if we're looking at closed thorium fuel cycles, you'll need a fair amount of alternative fissile fuel as well to reduce the amount of reprocessing.

so, long story short:
my state of power stations being easy targets for terrorists is just wrong...
i have to say i didn't got the rest...

Interesting Yonni. This backs you up, to a degree. But it points out that the spent material is far less dangerous and has a much shorter half life.

http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/12/01/how-a-liquid-fluoride-thorium-reactor-lftr-works/