I’m not sure it’s shorelines themselves, but it does seem clear to me that you shouldn’t put a plant where the required backup generators can be disabled by a tsunami.
Just as one of the lessons of Katrina is that you shouldn’t put your emergency backup generators in the basement below sea level, and you shouldn’t build your city’s required pump rooms such that they can be disabled by flooding if the city fills up with water.
Thats hard to do in Japan. Over there its common for mountain ranges to rise up within 10-15 miles of the shore line. I guess it comes down to a dliemma betweeen locating the nuclear reactors in the mountains (where they could be affected by earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes) or near the shore (where earthquakes, tsunamis and pacific hurricanes can affect them). Considering that Japan has very little coal, oil or natural gas they are sorta' locked into muclear power.
Yeah, but if you didn't put them right next to the shoreline, you'd need pipes to bring the coolant to them. The environmentalists would have a cow over the pipelines.
Of course you can have cooling towers, but those are "grim symbols of nuclear horror."
Just as one of the lessons of Katrina is that you shouldn’t put your emergency backup generators in the basement below sea level, and you shouldn’t build your city’s required pump rooms such that they can be disabled by flooding if the city fills up with water.
Yeah, but if you put the generators anywhere but the basement, you've got vibration problems in the building's structure, as well as flammable fuel above the people, which raises troubling questions.
And if you put the fuel in the basement, with pipes to the upper floors, then water can get in the fuel during a flood.
It's really all just ignorance. People want the benefits of technology, of a technologically advanced society, but they don't want any risk, don't want to know about the risks or think about the risks. This makes puts the risks outside the realm of what the private sector can handle, because no one will want to bet on something that can ruin them if it goes wrong.
Reason being these were built years ago and there was no transportation system on the west coast to handle the equipment to built or maintain this size plant.