"Poor Mr. Polar Bear. When he's not jumping from melting ice chunk to ice chunk trying desperately not to drown, he's avoiding the floating Russian nuclear power stations and their potential toxic waste."
I'll bet the Giz staffs masturbates while watching "An Inconvenient Truth".
The Arctic ice is not melting, polar bears are not drowning.
Wait, so they've been dumping nuclear reactors and other toxic waste into the ocean? Maybe all those hideous deep-sea creatures that scientists think are new, undiscovered species are actually irradiated mutants!
I stopped paying attention at this sentence: "The plants' potential impact on the fragile Arctic environment through emissions of radioactivity and heat remains a major concern."
Say you have a gigawatt power plant. If it is just 10% efficient, and most plants are at least 40%, then it emits 240 gigawatt hours per day of heat. That's only equal to the amount of heat from 10 square miles of daily sunlight at the earth's surface. The ocean currents and underwater vents are thousands of times more significant when looking at heat production.
@jetRink: It's more the fact that this is in addition to whatever natural amounts of heat the water receives than the actual amount of heat they give off that is important. Well, that, and the nuclear waste problem.
@jetRink: You're saying that in a nuclear meltdown they don't put out any more heat than when they are normally in action?? That statement was clearly talking about the case of a nuclear accident, not normal operations.
@Dreamwriter: Because nuclear meltdowns are so common, am I right? The fact is that nuclear power is more efficient and, yes, safer than the functional alternatives that would have to be put up north in the situation these plants would be used for. The detractors are simply being fearmongers.
@digitalzombie: Making such childish defenses to why these plants should not be made hinders the argument. I'm as opposed to this idea as any other person, but to suggest that Russia has learned nothing from Chernobyl is naive.
Oh Smithers, now that I've got my beloved floating Arctic plant, and my prized collection of extinct animals encased in carbonite, I'm on top of the world!
@GropedByChuckECheese_GitEmSteveDave: Actually chernobyl was caused by the Russians disabling the reactor safeties and trying to run their reactor at lower power settings when they knew that the reactor was extremely unstable at low power. Reactor began heat up and instead of being shut down by the safety precautions it continued to heat and build pressure until it exploded twice
Chernobyl was suffering from inadequate funding. Much basic maintenance had never been performed. It had only a skeleton crew, nearly all of whom were untrained workers from the local coal mine. The only manager with nuclear plant experience had been a worker installing small reactors on board Soviet submarines. Some genius decided to run a risky test of a type that no experienced nuclear engineer would ever gamble on. The test was to shut down the water pumps, which must run constantly in that type of reactor; and then find out whether the turbines, spinning on their momentum alone, had enough energy to restart and run the pumps during the forty-second delay before the backup diesel generators would kick in. The test was so risky that one faction within the plant deliberately disconnected some backup systems, trying to make the test too dangerous to attempt. The test was run anyway. It didn't work, the pumps couldn't keep up, the graphite core caught fire, the coal miners couldn't find any shovels so they didn't know what to do, and the reactor exploded.
05/03/09
I'll bet the Giz staffs masturbates while watching "An Inconvenient Truth".
The Arctic ice is not melting, polar bears are not drowning.
And Al Gore is not God.
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05/03/09
Say you have a gigawatt power plant. If it is just 10% efficient, and most plants are at least 40%, then it emits 240 gigawatt hours per day of heat. That's only equal to the amount of heat from 10 square miles of daily sunlight at the earth's surface. The ocean currents and underwater vents are thousands of times more significant when looking at heat production.
05/03/09
05/03/09
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05/04/09
Chernobyl was suffering from inadequate funding. Much basic maintenance had never been performed. It had only a skeleton crew, nearly all of whom were untrained workers from the local coal mine. The only manager with nuclear plant experience had been a worker installing small reactors on board Soviet submarines. Some genius decided to run a risky test of a type that no experienced nuclear engineer would ever gamble on. The test was to shut down the water pumps, which must run constantly in that type of reactor; and then find out whether the turbines, spinning on their momentum alone, had enough energy to restart and run the pumps during the forty-second delay before the backup diesel generators would kick in. The test was so risky that one faction within the plant deliberately disconnected some backup systems, trying to make the test too dangerous to attempt. The test was run anyway. It didn't work, the pumps couldn't keep up, the graphite core caught fire, the coal miners couldn't find any shovels so they didn't know what to do, and the reactor exploded.