I just read that China has agreed to stop funding / financing the building of coal-fired power plants around the world. They've been the largest financier of such projects. China made it's announcement at the U.N. General Assembly meeting of world leaders. This is GOOD NEWS. IF the world would shutter the older coal-fired power plants that have no pollution mitigation systems on them - in all countries - and switch to solar, wind, and nuclear energy production, we'd have a much cleaner planet. Coal is the filthiest fuel we have - from the way it's dug from the ground and the associated BAD environmental impacts from the extraction - to the way it's burned and the filthy, dangerous, after-effects of the burning process. I've worked for over 40 years in numerous power plant facilities of coal-fired, natural gas-fired, and nuclear powered varieties. Coal is BY FAR the biggest source of pollution - of soil, air, and water. Every step of the coal process is filthy. Burning coal - beside all the other pollutants it generates - puts large amounts of mercury into the atmosphere. That mercury gets inhaled as we breathe, and it also gets deposited downstream on the soil and other surfaces by wind currents. It's too small to see, but it gets into plants we eat, and into animals we consume for meat. Ever wonder what's in that gray or black dust film that's on your window sills and trim??? Then you open those windows for some "fresh air." Switching to wind, solar, and nuclear power would be MUCH CLEANER ways to produce electricity. Switching doesn't have to mean loads of lost jobs either - millions of new jobs will be created by the cleaner methods of producing power. Life on planet Earth depends on a clean environment.
China has been building their infrastructure for the last half century, recently completing their national highway system. Their plan all along was to pollute the fuck out of their own country and the world, build fast, and then become more ecological and self-sufficient. They were too big to do it any other way, and all the math said if they didn't do it, a billion Chinese would eventually starve to death. They had no choice but to modernize or die, and their own people are impatient for them to actually keep their promise. They're still cooking on charcoal even in Beijing, while the whole world ecology is about to collapse.
China will no doubt offer to build nuclear power stations all over the world, then sell electricity to the people who have the power stations in their own country. How world leaders can be so gullible defies belief.
The US is the leading exporter of cheap nuclear power stations, and provided the designs for Fukushima, fully aware that white collar crime is practically legal in Japan. World leaders, do whatever the international cartels and the US tell them to do, or threaten nuclear war like Putin.
Fukushima had the fundamental design flaw shared by almost all nuclear power stations of not being able to use it's own power to cool the reactors. I remember discussing this issue with my late father back in the 1950s. At the time, using external generators was advisable in the smaller plants that only had a few alternators and reactors, but with todays larger installations it makes no sense at all. It simply needs a delta star coupling transformer on each alternator to allow the plant to run in total safety in event of grid shutdown. The cost only runs into thousands for the entire site, so failure to provide this safety measure makes no sense at all.
Fukushima was based on experimental submarine designs, and was built twenty years later, when they had alternatives. The US was pushing nuclear power on Japan, who originally wanted to go with natural gas. However, when your biggest customer, and reigning world power that kicked your ass in WWII, says go nuclear, you start glowing in the dark. The power plant was busted for violating every safety rule in the book, five years before it melted down, including stacking spent rods on top of the reactors, and all the executives were found guilty. They erected at least one other plant like it that they redesigned themselves, to save money. The berm wall around the plant was only erected to be as high as the last tsunami to hit that spot. Today, their solution is to install an underwater pipe, so the crap flows out to sea.
Well, the ugly dirty way of the capitalist developed world has been to do whatever it takes to amass money and development…..the environment be dammed. Then when others like China and India try to develop their countries, suddenly the capitalists find religion. Course, not so much as to relax patent restrictions on new clean technology or make grants to the developing world to catch up. I think climate change is horrifying, horrifying enough for the developed world to do change their greedy, greedy ways.
Some 90% of Americans are so stupid they've convinced themselves they are smarter than the average bear, believing they are better than average at detecting misinformation. At least 70% tend to ignore anything they believe contradicts conventional wisdom and common sense, even though nobody has ever proven they exist, anywhere on the planet, in over a century of efforts. Over half make up their own definitions for words, never suspecting or caring in the slightest, even when informed, that the dictionary merely contains popular definitions. If you believe Americans will "wise up" I have some Florida swamp land you can buy, near Donald Duck. If the banks get their way, they will attempt to turn saving our asses into a thousand year venture business, with the same result if we do nothing. The simple fact is, the "American People" ain't nothing but a collection of lynch mobs whose teachers could not teach a child how to share their words and play nice, if their lives depended on it. The only reason conservatives attack their own government, is they are stupid enough to believe nobody will kill them.
The wall protected the plant and the emergency generators, However, the generator fuel tanks were outside the wall for ease of filling. This is how they ended up contaminated. Unfortunately, rather than drain the water that had settled to the bottom of the tanks by using the drain valves below the fuel feed to the generators, the engineers continued attempting o start the generators until the starter batteries were flat. They then had no possible way of starting them, It is the coolant water outlets that have been run further out, in order to prevent a man made tropical area near the coastline. In the past, these areas had flourished, with both plant and animal life not native to the area. The problem was that when plants were decommissioned, this all died and putrefied, causing massive contamination. Preventing formation of these artificial tropical areas is now a feature in all new designs.
I can't speak to foreign laws & rules, but here in the U.S., after TMI, all U.S. nuclear power plants were retro-fitted with multiple safety systems so another TMI couldn't happen. TMI had only one control system, and when it failed, a meltdown was inevitable. I've worked on several nukes, and they all now have electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, and manual control systems to stop the reaction. If the first 3 systems would all fail, the control rods can be manually placed to stop the reaction. The retro-fit systems were tagged "TMI Upgrades." Underwater hot water discharge pipes are no longer allowed in the U.S. Cooling towers are now - and have been for some 40 years - the standard way to cool the reactor. The "smoke" people see coming out of cooling towers is actually steam - and it's NOT radioactive, as some people think. It's NOT hazardous to the environment!!! The reactor cooling system is actually much like your car's radiator cooling system. It's also a closed loop system - your car's engine doesn't get coolant fluid inside it's combustion chambers - and neither does the water get into the reactor "guts" to become radioactive. So the steam you see coming out of cooling towers is .... just steam from a closed loop system.
The problem is that the boron steel rods take up to 21 days to fully absorb stray electrons and fully shut the reactor down. The problem at Fukushima was that they had no usable electricity to cool the reactor during this period. They manually added water, but were forced to use the latent heat to boil the water off. Happening at around 100 degrees Celsius, fission continued. Have you read my replies to wooleeheron.? Do you also know whether the latest changes include delta star transformers that would allow the stations to use electricity from their own alternators in an emergency. Up until now, reliance on diesel generators has always been the weakest link. Needless to say, if transformers were installed, COMPLETE manual switchover would be required, since alternators not connected to grid are running 'wild' with no phase synchronisation. The star points of the transformers would also need to be earthed and bonded. Transformers could be added to all alternators, but needless to say, they could only be used one at a time for the same synchronisation reasons.
