57 scares in 10 years

People say air travel is safe and yet hunderds of people die each year around the world in airliner crashes. I don’t see what the difference is with nuclear power stations. Sure, there’s been Chernobyl and Three Mile Island but think of the number of deaths in plane crashes since the beginning of nuclear power generation. Since the World’s first nuclear power station, Calder Hall in Cumbria, opened in 1956, over 62,000 people have died in air crashes. An interesting aside here is that, according to the air accident statistics I was looking at, in 1974 precisely 1974 people died in plane crashes.

However I’m not convinced we should build more nuclear power stations. Wind turbines (onshore and offshore), wave, tidal flow, tidal barages etc could produce a major proportion of our electricity if we were prepared to put the money where the mouth is. Increased energy efficiency too should be used to reduce consumption and narrow the gap.

Anti-environmentalists have taken to pointing out how much energy it takes to manufacture a wind turbine. That is an irrelevant in the energy comparison debate since it would almost certainly take much more energy to build, run and decommission a nuclear or coal-fired power station than it would to erect the dozens of wind turbines to provide a similar power output.

Large wind turbine = 2 Megawatts
Sizewell B nuclear power station = 0.85 Gigawatts = 850 Megawatts. 850 / 2 = 425.

So 425 large wind turbines would produce an equivalent output to Sizewell B. Like I say, dozens of turbines – 37.1 dozen to be precise!!!

However the wind does not always blow and nuclear power stations are not always operating at maximum output.

It is accepted that wind turbines on average are 16/27 efficient = 59%

But is a wind turbine producing 2MW already taking the 59% efficiency figure into account? All power generation systems lose efficiency – nuclear loses energy through heat. Is the 59% efficiency relating to frictional losses etc in the wind turbine or the fact that it only works for 59% of the time owing to variable wind conditions?

Perhaps Sizewell B does produce 1188MW – I got the 850MW figure from the net.

Where would all the turbines go? Mostly offshore, as is planned – the second round of offshore windfarms will be located further out to sea.

And if we stop needing wind turbines they can be taken down and scrapped whereas if nuclear power stations become redundant they will remain in situ for decades, bits of them for centuries even.

@Mr Bigstuff wrote:

Tony Blair’s been saying we need more nuclear power stations and he kept saying that they were safe. Somehow he forgot to mention the 57 safety scares that have happened in the last decade. These included staff being contaminated, radiation spillages and cracks in the safety casing of a reactor. 11 of the cases were classed as serious. I wonder if the people living near the power plants were ever informed?

By way of contrast, I wonder how many ”scares” have taken place in conventional power stations over the same period???

@Mr Bigstuff wrote:

Tony Blair’s been saying we need more nuclear power stations and he kept saying that they were safe. Somehow he forgot to mention the 57 safety scares that have happened in the last decade. These included staff being contaminated, radiation spillages and cracks in the safety casing of a reactor. 11 of the cases were classed as serious. I wonder if the people living near the power plants were ever informed?

57 ‘incidents’ in 10 years is a damn good safety record!

I believe nuclear energy is the way forward, sadly in the nuclear age, we’re still running on steam. A nuclear power station is merely a vast and very expensive kettle.

We need to be using the technology in order to understand it better, and unfortunately accidents will happen.