not to mention real life experiences. Just look at the fantastic success it's been for Seattle.
I agree. I am 55 and my son is 21. My son has no interest in automobiles, but is extremely enthusiastic about automation. He hopes that city transportation becomes more automated and will gladly relocate to such a place. My wife’s friends (in their 50’s) do not understand why I still drive a car with a manual transmission. Most of her friends are hoping to see self-driving vehicles in the near future. Remember the Wedway People Mover of the mid-70’s? With Wedway, the seemingly harmless amusement ride presented an experience with self-driven EV transportation technology while you outwardly observed potential urban planning for the cities of tomorrow. The first time I experienced the ride at the age of 11, I remember that I was taken in by the awe and wonder of the moment. A little later myself and the family had a seat for a bite to eat in the same area of the amusement park, and I remember a conversation concerning the ride. My father (muscle car enthusiast) said to my brother (5 years older than me and also a muscle car fan) something to the effect that Wedway is not your friend and that someday very large corporations will be making the rules and telling you how to live.
the problem is all the marketing glitz fails to mention that computers are fallible, that software is egregiously shoddy crap written by people who can't/won't follow mandated safety practices or just make mind-numbing mistakes by the legion.
What if? We'd all be sitting in the dark twiddling our thumbs just like in the 1700s. But hey, we'd have a fancy electric car sitting chargless in the driveway.
No. You need a significantly worse problem than the grid going out to risk a meltdown in the fuel pool. There's no need to have water circulating in the pool to prevent meltdown, that's more of a regulatory requirement than a physical need. All you need is to keep the fuel covered with water. As long as there's water above the top of the spent fuel it cannot meltdown. (And for boiling water reactor fuel this isn't strictly true either, since that fuel sits in the operating reactor partially uncovered, since it's boiling in there). It physically can't happen. The water in the pool can't exceed boiling, 212F, and so the fuel can't ever reach the temperature where it will melt.
you're assuming diesel fuel supply will be uninterrupted. Or we in USA are guarenteed less retarded than the Japanese. No power, no pumps. A simple EMP or solar flare, or a few guys with some C4 and wipe out key distribution points, and you'll have nuclear plants going critical all over the place and no way to stop it unless the cooling tanks are below the water table and can be gravity fed at sufficient rate.
There's no reason to assume diesel fuel supply would be interrupted in a grid blackout, but if you want to consider it, sure. The plant I worked at had somewhere around a quarter of a million gallons of diesel stored onsite, in underground tanks. We had enough to run every diesel generator on site for weeks at full loading. Our backup pumper truck could get water up to the fuel pool for weeks with the amount of fuel we had for it, especially considering you wouldn't need to run it constantly to keep water levels high enough.you're assuming diesel fuel supply will be uninterrupted. Or we in USA are guarenteed less retarded than the Japanese. No power, no pumps. A simple EMP or solar flare, or a few guys with some C4 and wipe out key distribution points, and you'll have nuclear plants going critical all over the place and no way to stop it unless the cooling tanks are below the water table and can be gravity fed at sufficient rate.
What is your daily Gallon Per Hour to keep up with spent fuel pools? Has anyone actually tested turning off the pumps in the pools so it doesn't circulate?
The point is our current nuclear infra is needlessly fragile and rife with 1000yr problems. Vastly safer solutions nuclear designs exist and yet we refuse to actually pursue them.
The problem with your assumption is pretty much the only thing that could cause the situation you describe is cold war style WW3, and then no one will care that all the nuclear plants are popping off because the country will already be a radioactive wasteland. In order to encounter the situation you're describing there can't be even a small part of a power grid, or any diesel fuel. If that's the case then something absolutely apocalyptic is already occurring.
perhaps. But I have zero confidence in modern man's infallibility however, and we have plenty of enemies who would love to take us down. We've crippled our supply-chain and infrastructure such that we can't actually replace important pieces of it in a timely fashion not to have dire outcomes. And then there's the solar problem which we know happens periodically for which we have no recourse.
We absolutely haven't crippled our supply chain or infrastructure, where have you gotten this idea?
the comment was in regards to the entire electrical system and the precursors, not narrowly on the inputs on a nuclear power plant.