Studio Ghibli Hangs an Anti-Nuclear Power Banner on Their Studio

Yes it does.

Right, forward, and not backwards.

It always causes increased fossil usage. If they export it, they remove the need for the other countries to use as much fossil fuels to generate power. That's good, because global warming is a global thing. If it all just got wasted, then that means they could have stopped using (as much) fossil fuels. In either case, using less nuclear is never the right answer.

Ah nice you actually bothered asking. You have to admit, some guy on the internet posting random numers is supposed to raise scepticism.

In Germany the change was merley for populism so there was no choice for one or the other. So I take whatever I can and gladly get rid of nuclear now and fossil later and I think people should at least use the current debate to push things forward.

I still find the dangers of nucelar plants worse than coal. I guess it's not as obvious as I thought it was and more of a personal thing. In the end we can at least agree that something has to be done. This is realy just choosing the lesser evil, or as we like to say the choice between pestilence and cholera.

But I have to admit it's probably harder for countries that have most of their power coming from nucelar energy. And regarding global warming, as long as the big ones like the US and China have enormous emissions it realy doesn't matter what the rest of the world does. So preventing a meltdown happening in my neighbourhood has a higher priority for me.

Props to the Netherlands for the bicycle traffic. Pretty cool sight. :D

The issue is not this. The evil system isn't what's stopping this from happening, it's the ridiculous passiveness and lack of initiative the people have.



What I pointed out was not an error in your numbers (they're fine, though I insist that it the amount of years between each meltdown should heavily increase after every meltdown), it was that your overskepticism towards the Reiquan Index that makes no sense. Scientists have better things to do than to make up a random index with no mathematical base at all and I certainly have better things to do than to make it up just to prove a random point in a forum. I'm not even that creative, and the index makes a lot of sense no matter what impact you try on it, go ahead and compare impacts on anything you like using it. It's not something you can just make up in an hour or two, and even though it's nice to be thought as such a genius, that's also a petty insult to the ones who actually developed it.

Anyway, enough with the index. I happened to come across my teacher today on the way to one of my exams, and asked him about it; it's in a pretty specific book on enviroment and that it might've been "Reikan" instead. Still no luck on google, but I sent him an email and he'll get back at me with the book title at the least.
There's a little frustration in not finding sources on such an awesome Index that allows almost anybody with slight environmental cause-effect knowledge to give a rough estimate on impact, but I'm not mad. Your poking at it is reasonable (although, like I said, you wouldn't have in the first place if I hadn't been honest enough to confess that I can't find it on the internet) and that just makes me want to find out more about how it works. I'll get back at you regarding that as soon as my teacher does.



I don't think I have much to add to what thepsychoticone answered regarding that. I admire Germany for their decisions, and if nuclear energy isn't creating any electricity for the actual population and is either going to waste or being exported, then sure enough, get rid of the nuclear power plants.
However, if that removal results in the increase in activity or number of fossil plants, you're doing it wrong.

I still have trouble understanding how people think nuclear energy is more dangerous than global warming. Meltdowns are a localized, immediate danger, so they're obviously more noticeable, but the long term effects of global warming are far, far, worse, and I don't think there's any denying that. In a couple of decades you'd get enough meltdowns to make Australia uninhabitable, but compared to not being able to live anywhere in the world but scandinavia level and above (and not even that's guaranteed), the nuclear impacts are nothing.
Nuclear waste is indeed a shitty thing to deal with, and we'll have to deal with it for a very, very long time. Meltdowns are also obviously bad, but that's the price we pay for the mindless technological and economical boom that "exteriorized" costs (meaning they considered that impacts on the environment were always 0) and got us in this mess. Not making an oven out of the planet in a few decades is our priority right now, and people don't give a f*ck. It's just sad that genetic engineers are getting paid big money for finding genes that aid temperature resistance to insert in crops so that they won't die from the heat in the near future. It makes it obvious that nobody is willing to make a move to stop global warming beyond saying "oh hey we can just live off renewable energy". I would dare to bet that not even 1% of the housing in the world works with solar panels.
It's all talk. Except maybe Denmark and Netherlands. Their bikes rule.

Also, I like your avatar. It distracts me all the time as I type ._.

Woah

History only means something if we continue using 40+ year old plants, which is certainly not ideal.

Of course you also could have kept the nuclear plants, and shut down the fossil plants instead. Whether or not new fossil plants are being built to compensate for the loss of the nuclear plants, it still increases the total power generated with fossil fuels.

I wonder why there are already plenty of people running solar cells and feeding excessive power to the net if it's that complicated. The cost is realy the only problem and can be taken care of with the right funding. But of course that's not what the lobbyists want.

Regarding science: You contradict yourself. I never made up any numbers nor do I want them, I criticised your for that. I explained the 10 year figure and it should be simple enough to understand. Do you disagree with that? I gladly take it back if it angers you so much, there's still history showing us an incident nearly every 10 years. That's better than any estimate of remaining risks.
Yet you still insist on your own numbers that are based on a system you can't even google. I don't want you to write an essay, but if you keep insisting that your equation is valid, than back it up! That should be expected of proper science, you defend so valiantly.

Furthermore, at least in Germany the energy needs can be fulfilled with most of the nuclear plants already shut off. Actually a good chunk was being exported, for example to France. Because they have quite a lot of reactors that can't work at full load on hot summer days.
So at least here, we don't need to build new coal-fired plants and can instead increase renewable energy which is still very low compared to other countries. That's the way to go and probably the only good thing our current administration did.

So do you make up the numbers to back up your opinion or do you see the numbers, analyze them along with the theory and say "hey, you're right"?
No matter how much you're used to people using the first approach, it's one that you'll never find science using. I honestly get tired of defending the scientific method because of people instantly assuming that science works like any other kind of flawed logic, and I also get tired of saying "science", "science", "science". It's no kids' game and they have better things to do than to toy around with you giving you false information, that'd be the equivalent of an electrician purposely building a flawed electric system so it will malfunction upon use, what is there to gain from it?
Environmental Impact is a very complex thing to calculate and that's why working teams can spend six months or longer to calculate the risks for any medium sized construction project outside the big cities. The most complex form of environmental impact study is a huge matrix by Luna Leopold if I remember correctly, it calculates 8800 possible cause-effect impacts, and every individual cause-effect may take long to analyze. This is probably the most accurate of all, but of course it's also the most inefficient time wise, and so came along things like the Environmental Quality Index that reduces it all to the effect on 7 subsystems and assigns a certain degree of impact importance (and mathematical percentage in the calculation) to each of them. The Reiquan Index I used there is an even more simplified version of that which, while subjective, can give you a pretty good overall idea of what you're dealing with through numbers. There's bound to be a mathematical base to it, nobody builds up a random equation with a scale without a purpose, but information on this index, or the earlier one, which is the one officially used worldwide, are nowhere to be found.



I'm no engineer, but from what I remember being taught in environmental science class, if it only involved the solar panels' cost, this would've already been done everywhere, but it seems to require a completely different local net system. Removing the old one and applying the new one would be as much worldwide work as changing the piping systems to meet the needs of hydrogen gas and that is difficult. Albeit hard and costly, it's a possibility and everybody brings that up in these discussions, but I don't see anybody asking their government for those enough for them to consider. In order to achieve something you have to pester your providers, and that takes effort, something that people will never take the initiative to make.
Perhaps once the mindless TV generation is gone and the internet generation takes over...

And also, yes. I bet nuclear plants are being extra careful these days and will keep being so for a couple of years, as long as people remember the incident in Japan. They might even start coming up with better safety control mechanisms that'd survive huge natural disasters like that one.
Half of Europe becoming uninhabitable > 12ºC of global warming making most of the planet uninhabitable. In our situation right now with a population that doesn't give a damn about global warming and doesn't make an effort to make the only good alternative possible, this "this is bad, get rid of it" will only lead to changing it for something worse, or at the least, equally bad.
But since deaths caused or influenced by pollution are not immediate and its consequences are long term instead of a big boom every decade or two, it's probably a better alternative, rite? It is obviously not.

If only people could afford to put 5-20k worth of solar panels on their roofs.

Pollution can do far worse. Oh, and as has been mentioned before, radiation does not travel well. Your outrageous exaggerations are not helping your cause.

My point wasn't to play down global warming but that you can't realy compare these complex things with a handful of numbers, especially when you want to convince people of your opinion.
Also please don't say lightly "every nuclear meltdown enhances security" if that could mean half of Europe turning uninhabitable. Is it worth to live with that risk? Apparantly many believe it only happens to others.

The recent events made it possible to start a debate about abandoning nuclear power, if we don't use it to our advantage now, than we probably have to wait for the next disaster before anything changes.

Furthermore I wasn't suggesting that everyone should build geoclymatic houses with all bells and whistles. Simply putting solar cells on the roof already covers a big chunk of the energy without any action by the user. It simply regulates itself and draws or feeds power from the local net as needed. That's the kind of supply we need, instead of crowding wind parks and solar cells in one place and than try to figure out how to transport the energy.

It's a scale of environmental impact estimation that goes from 1 to 225, just because you don't want to make any sense of the numbers doesn't mean that it isn't there.
"Meh, slight rise in global warming, big deal"
Like I said, you'd probably start wearing an anti-pollution mask if we counted the amount of deaths caused directly or indirectly by fossil fuel burning. Just from the warming alone and off the top of my head, there's rising rates of skin cancer and the sinking of land all over the world. There's an isostatic process going on in Greenland that might become a huge ass problem if accelerated through futher warming, etc.
To those impacts along with the tens or hundreds of other possible unpredicted impacts, you add the pollution impact, which I remind you was so serious back in the carbon-burning age a few years ago that the goddamn buildings had acid corrotion problems, just try to imagine the impact on your lungs, we have merely managed to lessen those impacts to a level where there isn't much immediate impact, but it is still there. Then there's the impact on biodiveristy derived from the pollution impact, there have already been experiments proving that the slight rising of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere are enough to switch the balance of a population in favor of a different species other than the one that had been dominant up until that moment, and natural balance is something you don't want to screw with, specially the one on the small scale with the insects that eat the same food that we do and can ruin our crops and the bacteria that may kill the crops or ourselves directly or indirectly.

Besides, every nuclear meltdown enhances security on the rest, so the meltdown rate is bound to decrease exponentially with time. I, too, want to get rid of nuclear energy ASAP, but we're not at a point where we can do so without screwing up something else in exchange, and when that something else is something global and a lot more ominous...
Ever heard of a 6ºC increase in global temperature being capable of reducing the ocean pressure enough to release massive amounts of underwater methane to the atmosphere, increasing the global temperature by another 6º?
Chances are if that doesn't manage to kill most of us, its indirect consequences will. I hate to be a catastrophe preacher, but this all has data backing it up, so it's a likely theory, and we're near hitting the 1ºC increase in temperature which is 1/6th of the way. I'd rather have three more localized meltdowns until we can just rely on water as an energy source than to risk hitting a critical temperature increase that might screw us all over if a volcano suddenly decides to burst away just enough dust around the world to increase the remaining temperature for the methane disaster to happen. That might as well happen without the help of our global warming but better be safe than sorry.



Nuclear or fossil does unfortunately seem to be the question. Switching to geoclymatic houses is pretty much the only alternative we have, but people are too busy burying their ass into the ass-mould on their sofa to demand it to happen.
I've experienced geoclymatic housing firsthand, albeit a "fanmade" one, if you'll allow me to make the comparison. It unfortunately has downsides associated with management that require a certain degree of education and understanding of how the house works, such as estimating how many hours of sun will charge the batteries depending on the intensity of incident sunlight in a way that won't affect the batteries' further performance, which the general population simply do not have. That, coupled along with the fact that you pretty much become a "slave" of your household; this person I met didn't mind at all because he liked all of this stuff and he actually felt really happy with it, but he admitted that the calculated and timed turning of knobs every few hours to keep the house running would discourage many, if not most of the population.
Also let me remind you that this is Spain I'm talking about and we have no lack of sunlight issues, other countries will have it a lot, lot rougher. As of today's society, based on economic gains and comfort, geoclymatic housing isn't really an alternative. As long as global warming is viewed as something that doesn't matter people will continue not to give a damn, and even if they do, they'll probably refuse to leave their current comfortable form of housing to change it for a complicated and more inconvenient one.
Well, who knows? maybe an educated population such as Iceland or Denmark might develop it further to ease its cons and fund the damn thing once and for all, but that's all the hope we have really.

Regarding waiting for the cool technology, a passive stance is not one I'd generally take at all, but if you checked the news last year, a scientist finally managed small-scale hydrolisis with a cobalt catalyst. Considering its incredible possibilities this was not given any importance except by a few magazines with scientific interest. Managing large-scale hydrolisis is only a few steps away if not hindered by the big companies, hopefully, and such a thing would completely erase most of energy-generating problems as soon as we also exchanged pretty much all of the world's piping to suit hydrogen gas. I'm not even sure if piping so awesome that it doesn't leak a ridiculously small molecule such as H2 exists yet. Nothing's easy.


Yup, as a teacher in his fifties who mostly teaches veterinarians how to handle their animals and as an 18 year-old genetic-engineer-in-training who would normally seem to be absolutely unrelated to the issue at hand, we both have enough interests in this to let ourselves be brainwashed for the sake of monetary gain.

Unfortunately for conspiranoics, science works otherwise.

On a side note, I heard that a power plant was shut down in Japan in these last months which was in the convergence point of two or three geological faults. Now this is why environmetal impact studies are necessary, nuclear energy is dangerous, but it's a danger we can mostly control if we aren't careless as f*ck.
I agree with you regarding security measures, they can't seem to be trusted much, but that won't improve much if the only talk about nuclear energy is "remove it" or "keep it", instead of "improve your security measures, for f*ck's sake" and investing further in surveillance until we can finally get rid of it with no worse or equivalent downsides.

Ah yes I knew I wouldn't get around looking that up. It was something like the chance for a single reactor is every 5000 years and we have 442 on the whole world, thus every 10 years one goes boom. If you look at history than the intervalls of meldowns already happend come quite close to that figure. But you have to admit calculating statistical chances makes more sense than just saying nuclear to fossil is like 137.5 to 63.75. Can you realy compare a nuclear disaster in the middle of a higly populated continent with poluted air and maybe a slight raise in global warming?
Maybe you ask your professor again about this in particular, I'd be interested for sure.

Still the question is not nuclear or fossil. We have to pursue alternatives and we don't have the time to say "let's just wait till the cool new super tech gets developed". As you said in your own example, energy independent houses are quite possible and with the right funding most people would at least consider putting solar cells on their roof.
There's no need for higher efficiency because we already know that the amount of cells is enough to supply a household with energy and warm water. If the general public becomes independed, one of the biggest energy consumers is gone. Then you can find out how to improve energy management for industry facilities with off-shore parks and who knows what.

Burning coal is not the answer to the nuclear phaseout. This is just an argument brought up by the pro-nuclear supporters and energy providers to scare people and get their hold of the ressources still slumbering in the ground.

lol ...hahahaha

At this point renewable energy just can't provide the energy we need. If we could have all renewable, i would be happy, but that won't happen anytime soon. Also some renewable energy does have enviromental impacts. Hydroelectricity destroys enviroments. Solar and wind are good, but not all areas get alot of wind and sun. Also wind turbines kill birds, and their population would go down. Also it will take up huge areas. I guess we could just cut down the forest though. That is the area, or we destroy homes. Governments aren't going to destroy homes, so forest, and other enviroments will be cut down and destroyed. Even if you do this, you still wood be lacking in needed energy of todays society. In other words, a lose-lose. Also renewable cost alot of money in short term. Money that countries don't have. But I can see why people don't understand this. I don't understand it that much either. But if you want to figure out how to completly go renewable, then become some sort of engineer, and do that. I will bet that you wouldn't be able to do it. Right now, nucleur is a safe and reliable energy source. I am not saying nucleur is 100% safe, but neither is wind and hydroelectricity. And solar will just take up to much room.

I obviously made it up in the past few hours because I had nothing else to do.

I've looked everywhere and it really is nowhere to be found, very weird. Still that doesn't really say much when I can't seem to find the equation for the Environmental Quality Index used by the National Wildlife Federation which it is based on. Hey, since the equation for that isn't even on the internet that must mean all of the people in the world working on environmental impact are doing nothing, kick them out!
Even so, this is something in the notes given to us university students by the teacher who also happens to be Spain's chief in biology education assessment and evaluation, whom I also believe has better things to do than to make up random equations. Be as skeptic as you like, but this seems like a pretty legit simplification for estimations before doing the actual studies that take months to carry out accurately.

And what's below you may skip since it's just my need to point out the hypocrisy in that last post as a scientist-in-training.

Now that's a convenient equation. Could you also calculate Coke vs. Pepsi?

Okay, so let me give you some actual environmental impact numbers.
There is a form of measurement I've been taught in evolutionary biology called "The Reiquan Index"... which must have some sort of typo in it because google won't find it anywhere, but anyway.

Evaluation of environmental impact through:
Persistence (from 1 to 5) * geographic scale (from 1 to 5) * nº of subsystems affected (from 1 to 9)
Persistence is pretty clear: 1=days, 2=weeks, 3=months, 4=years, 5=decades
Geographic scale is pretty clear too: 1=local, 2=regional, 3=continental, 4=intercontinental and 5=global.
Number of subsystems affected requires a bit more consequential logic, but these are the nine subsystems:
-Biological
-Social
-Political
-Soil
-Water
-Air
-Energy resources
-Nutrition resources
-Material resources

Let's do the numbers now.
For nuclear energy:
Persistence = 5
Geographic Scale = 1-2 depending on how bad the disaster is.
Nº of subsystems affected:
Biological. Yes.
Social. Yes
Political. Definitely.
Soil. Barely.
Water. Yes
Air. Yes
Energy resources. Yes
Nutritional resources. Yes
Material resources. Yes

So that's:
5*1*8.5= 42.5 at least
5*2*8.5 = 85 at most
So let's just take the mean, 63.75

Then, for fossil fuel burning:
Persistence: 5
Geographic scale: 5
Nº of subsystems affected:
Biological: Yes. (those who dissent can ask and I'll name a few examples).
Social: Yes.
Political: Yes.
Soil: somewhat.
Water: Yes.
Air: Definitely.
Energy resources: tough one.
Nutritional resources: Not really.
Material resources: Not really.

Not counting the impact on energy resources:
5*5*5.5=137.5

137.5 >>>>>> 63.75

Note that the impacts on the subsystems have to be studied a lot more and that I've just done this off the top of my head, but since nuclear energy already has a 9 on that, it has nothing to lose, while the 5-5.5 on fossil fuel burning could become a 6 or a 7.

My opinion on this issue is that you cannot outright deny the use of nuclear energy without a valid alternative. Banning nuclear energy just to have all of the energy it produced be produced by fossil fuel burning instead is just trading a slightly risky dangerous thing that we'd have to manage for a very long time for another seemingly not so bad thing, which couldn't be more far from the truth, since it'll f*ck us up earlier than the time it'd take for chance to make all nuclear power plant in the Earth have an accident at this rate.
If deaths caused directly and indirectly by pollution were to be measured, I tell you nobody would want fossil fuels anymore. Like my teacher said back in the day: "George bush will once be considered a mass killer worse than Hitler just because he refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol".
So yeah, switching nuclear for fossil fuels is no good. Time to find an alternative source of electricity before you start whining about the impacts. Regarding that, a friend of my dad owns a geoclimatical house which is absolutely independent just by being made round, with the right materials and using solar panels. No construction company ever tried to help him when he started his project. If these things were funded and spread around the world, we'd stop relying on fossil fuels for electricity and could discard nuclear energy and happily keep using them fossil fuels for other stuff without much worry that we'd be doomed in the near future; and just wait for mass hydrolisis to be achieved and for the hydrogen gas energy revolution to happen.

Also this:


I forgot that people know nothing about the very small efficiency in all solar, eolic and hydraulic energy. If there were an easy, clean alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear energy we wouldn't be having a worldwide environmental crisis.

"But nuclear power is cheap" Yes for the industry, not the customer. Also radioactive waste disposal is not something the providers take care of but the goverment, funded by tax money. So you actually double dip without noticing.

"But nuclear power is clean" Yes unless a disaster happens, with the amount of reactor cores around the world the statistically likelihood is something around every 10 years.
The waste produced is radiating forever and today nobody realy has a clue what to do with it. They burry it in some holes and forget about it, hopping there won't be any leaks in the next centuries.

"But the amount we need can't be produced otherwise" First there's also a way if you want to. Of course big corporations rather milk the last drop of oil before they start to look for alternatives. That's why we need goverment regulations.
And you don't realy need large wind or solar power plants. Just make them affordable for the public and people will start to put solar cells on their roofs. Private househoolds would become nearly independent from the big energy providers (something they obviously don't want) and also feed small amounts of excess energy back into the net.


And please stop talking down meltdowns with BS like "there's enough time to evacuate". Japan got lucky the wind blew the radiactive dust onto the ocean and not right into Tokyo and other highly populated areas. Evacuating them was nothing but impossible, which is also the reason why they offered reports so slowly. If there's one thing we learned from Fukishima, it's that corporations can't be trusted when it comes to maintaining safety or informing the general public about the actual state of a affairs.

Doing a little more research, i found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multijunction_solar_cell

Lab tests have shown 42% efficiency, with a theoretical max of 86%. Of course that just means your 190 x3 estimate is probably more accurate than you thought it was. But yeah, this is why solar is not viable for large scale energy generation.

Some interesting facts:

Nominally, sunlight strikes the earth with an intensity of roughly 1 kW per square meter. This translates to 1 GW per square kilometer.

The theoretical maximum efficiency of a silicon photovoltaic cell is about 25%, depending on your reference. This means you'll get 0.25 GW of electricity per square kilometer of the best solar panels, in optimum conditions.

Earlier this year (before the panic) nuclear power plants generated 47.5 GW of electricity in Japan.

This means you'd need about 190 square kilometers of solar panels to make up for the power generated by nuclear power plants under optimum conditions. Of course, optimum conditions require it to be daytime and for there to be clear skies. The 190 sq km should probably be tripled, to be safe.

Just some food for thought.