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Japanese Company Admits To Nuclear Cover Up

Posted by Zonk on from the we-haven't-used-buckets-for-that-since-the-50s dept.

a-charles writes "Just as power companies are considering the first expansion of nuclear power usage in the US since the 70s, Reuters reports on a disturbing anouncement from the nation of Japan. On Thursday the Japanese power company Hokuriku Electric Power admitted it had covered up a 1999 incident in which mishandling of nuclear fuel rods led to an unintended self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reaction. The mishap caused the plant, located in central Japan, to enter a 'critical state' for much of those 15 minutes. Apparently, this was in the same year that two workers were killed in a separate incident in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo. A pair of workers were killed after using buckets to mix nuclear fuel in a lab, a test that also created an uncontrolled chain reaction for a short time. The nuclear power industry already has a bad name for safety violations in Japan, and these revelations are unlikely to help with that public image."

12 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Let the flamewares begin! by sphealey · · Score: 4, Informative

    > ut I haven't yet seen a (proven) solution for
    > the latter*[nuclear waste]
    > Until we're there, nuclear just doesn't seem
    > as viable as coal (sad tho' that may be)

    Of course, coal burning generates radioactive waste as well. The concentration is small but the volumes are very large.

    sPh

  2. Nuclear cycle by iwein · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is always bugging me a bit. But I'll give it a shot again:

    1. Mining.
    This is the same as any other kind of mining, just that what you dig up is a bit more dangerous, so you'll have to be carefull. No fundamental problems here.

    2. Reaction
    No fundamental problems here, just handling dangerous materials, have to be careful. The good thing is that you'll actually reduce the amount of radioactive material in the reactor.

    3. Waste
    Well now you just put the material that remains back were it came from. End result: less radioactive stuff in the globe. No fundamental problem here. You could even put it in one of those trenches on the bottom of the ocean. Then it would naturally transported to the earts core, mixed through the magma and only resurface in a few milion years or so...

    The story is a little bit more complicated and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spent_nuclear_fuel/ is of course nasty, but in the end there is less plutonium and less uranium 238 and those are by far the most dangerous, right?

    --
    Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
    1. Re:Nuclear cycle by GooberToo · · Score: 3, Informative

      Rule #1 when discussing anything nuclear. The first person to mention Chernobyl as an example as to how dangerous nuclear power can be is the loser. The reason? That person just admitted that they have absolutely no clue what they are talking about and are unfit to contribute anything to a nuclear debate. The second rule of debating nuclear power, never mention Chernobyl.

      Here are the Chernobyl facts:
      o Chernobyl only has a single containment shell which is thinner what anyone considers safe for a single layer of a double layer containment design. In other words, any non-Russia design has two containment shells, both single layers are thicker than what Chernobly provided with its single shell. Why? Because its dangerously stupid to do it that way.

      o Chernobyl has fewer safety mechanisms that is considered safe by the world, even as far back at the 1950s. Basically, all non-Russia designers have deemed Chernobyl a worst case accident waiting to happen and unfit to be built. Only in technologically inferior Russia could such a design be approved. Even by Three Mile Island standards, where some monitoring equipment was not installed, Chernobol is third world sub standard. This is important because by the time Three Mile island went online, even its monitoring equipment was considered sub standard by its opponents.

      o What little was installed for Chernobyl's auxilary cooling systems were non-functional and in need of repair. They were offline. Ignoring all non-Russian operated reactors, the reactor would have been taken offline as a matter of safety protocol.

      o But small penis Russia had something to prove, so they DISABLED their remaining safeties! Followed by a mandate from the Russian government that they begin a series of very dangerous tests. These tests would be considered dangerous for any fully operational, non-Russian reactor. In otherwords, basic protocols say you NEVER do these types of tests on a full scale reactor unless the reactor is specifically designed for these types of tests.

      o And oh, let's make sure they do these tests while the reactor has a skeleton crew. Basically, they had so few people, they could never hope to react to any real emergency.

      So in a nut shell, we have a design that is so flawed, it could NEVER contain any type of serious accident and by worldly comparison, is considered ufit and should never have been built. Most of its backup systems were never installed and what few were installed, were not operative and in need of repair. Both common sense and basic safety protocols were already violated yet they contained to run. What few safetys remain were purposely disabled by the skeleton crew to allow for a series of very dangerous tests. The tests caused a run away which any other non-Russian design would have safely handled. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume a non-Russian reactor would of failed...but all non-Russian containment shells would have properly contained the situation causing only a minimum of radioactive venting. And that's still assuming a 1960 - 1970s reactor design. Modern designs would simply melt into a slag, shutting down the runaway, preventing any and all containment loss.

      Long story short, anyone that thinks Chernobyl is in any way, shape, or form an example of how dangerous nuclear power is is ignorant of the subject, and unworthy to debate it. Pointing to Chernobyl as a posterboy makes as much sense as pointing at a standard bomb and declaring nuclear is dangerous. Chernobly is a posterboy of how small Russia's penis is and nothing more. In otherwords, if one wanted to spread radioactive contamination over a huge area, you do it, by design, EXACTLY how Russia did it. Chernobyl is a posterboy of how to build a bomb while calling it a power plant.

      If anything, it proves that we don't want Russia building nuclear power plants. If anything, it proves that Russia is technologically incompetent. If anything, it proves that the Russian government is unethical and immorale. If

  3. Critical State? by markass530 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's been a few years (and a lot of beer) since I went through the navy's nuclear power program, so I can no long speak about it like an expert, but this i know a "Critical State" is just what happens when a nuclear reactor is producing power. It's fucking annoying to hear it announced like it's a bad thing. If it inadvertently entered this state, it could be bad a suppose, but as long as the hafnium rods where avaialable to be shoved back down in there to stem the reaction this wouldn't be a problem?

    1. Re:Critical State? by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's fucking annoying to hear it announced like it's a bad thing. If it inadvertently entered this state, it could be bad a suppose, but as long as the hafnium rods where avaialable to be shoved back down in there to stem the reaction this wouldn't be a problem?

      I know what you mean about the misuse of the term "critical," but I think in this case it is the proper term to describe a bad thing. In the first situation a reactor (presumably shut down for maintenance, probably with no systems to come to the rescue with lots of negative reactivity) becomes critical without anybody knowing about it for 15 minutes. Remember that there's not a lot of margin between critical and prompt critical (which I'm sure you probably remember as very bad), and sometimes it might not be hard to go from one to the other. Ask the guy that got pinned to the ceiling at SL-1 if having a reactor enter a critical state while you're not looking can be bad.

      In the second situation some poor schlub is pouring a solution containing some fissile material into a bucket and it goes critical on him. Personally, I'd find an up-close-and-personal dose of neutrons from a bucket at arm's length to be a bad start to the day.

      IMHO a critical assembly is nothing to worry about as long as (1) it's got instruments (and alert people) watching it that can trigger some rapid negative reactivity and (2) there's lots of shielding between me and and the assembly.

      --
      [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
  4. Re:Let the flamewares begin! by mblase · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's a myth that we waste energy.

    Actually, it's a law.

  5. Re:Let the flamewares begin! by KonoWatakushi · · Score: 3, Informative

    The real problem with nuclear energy is not the reactors (the middle bit)), but the mining (the first bit) of the uranium and the disposal (the end bit) of the waste.

    Actually, it is not a problem in the slightest, if we use modern designs like the Integral Fast Reactor. Current reactors only extract a few percent of the energy from the Uranium, and throw out the rest. Merely by recycling this "waste", any new Uranium mining can be delayed for certuries.

    I can imagine a solution to clean up the former (although this would make nuclear fuel even more expensive), but I haven't yet seen a (proven) solution for the latter*

    Using the aforementioned technology renders the waste problem inconsequential. More than that, it is likely to actually improve the waste situation; these reactors burn away all of the really nasty elements, and the little remaining waste is much safer and (relatively) very short lived.

    Furthermore, the design is passively safe, and meltdowns are impossible.

    The search for a better solution to our energy need continues. (be it sequestration for coal, waste disposal for nuke, higher efficiency for wind, cleaner materials & higher efficiency for solar, better storage techniques for all the above). There is no silver bullet.

    The search is over. Of course we should continue to investigate other technologies, but we have a perfectly workable and very nearly ideal one staring us in the face. For the foreseeable future, this is the silver bullet.

    In any case, holding out for something like the Tokamak is a waste of time. While a Fusion machine, in the end, it is hardly radiation free; the neutronic fusion reactions will slowly irradiate the hundreds of tons of reactor, which will eventually need to be disposed of and replaced.

    Much more interesting and promising in my opinion is the Polywell, conceived of by Dr. Robert Bussard. The device seems like it may be perfectly feasible in the short term, and would have so many advantages, that it is madness not to make the minimal investment. I'm not going to discount Tokamak research, but we should really be investigating the alternatives as well. Anyway, here is Dr. Bussard's Google talk as well, for those who missed it: Should Google Go Nuclear?
  6. Re:Let the flamewares begin! by ShakaUVM · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, environmental groups are suing wind generator operators.

    http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-04-win dmills-usat_x.htm

    There's a similar story down in Arkansas.

  7. Re:Let the flamewares begin! by Abcd1234 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I doubt that many run into skyscrapers.

    You might wanna do a little research before making claims like this. For example, ignoring the clear sensationalism (it's MSNBC, after all), I have here an article where a researcher claims to have studied skyscrapes which kill 200 birds per day .

  8. The small-uranium-reserves fallacy by QuoteMstr · · Score: 2, Informative

    I keep seeing this point labored again and again, yet it's simply not true. The assumption of having only 80 years of uranium only applies if 1) you consider only the reserves available at current market prices, a minuscule fraction of the world's total known reserves, and 2) don't consider the use of breeder reactors, which process fuel ~100 times more efficiently than conventional light water reactors do.

    Plus, there's thorium, which is three times as common as uranium and also fissile.

    Sources:
    http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm#uranium_ supply
    http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen. html
    http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

  9. Re:That makes two accidents in 1999 by mdsolar · · Score: 2, Informative

    Conservatively 4000 to 9000 deaths. Most likely the 5000 deaths of newborns is a solid number and you may scale this report as you like http://www.ippnw-students.org/chernobyl/research.h tml but clearly the large number of birth defects is not and illusion. The UN figures are given here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_accident#Th e_Chernobyl_Forum_report.

  10. Re:That makes two accidents in 1999 by Aglassis · · Score: 2, Informative

    The one in 2006 in Sweden suggests that modern plants can't be operated safely but that the risk of a very large accident is one in forty years at the present level of reliance on nuclear power. If the list is very incomplete, as this cover up might urge us to consider, then the risk of large accidents could be much higher than one in forty years at the present level of reliance on nuclear power. In that case, increasing our reliance on nuclear power seems foolhardy and decommisioning existing plants on an accelerated schedule would be a good policy to adopt. You do not have a clue about nuclear safety. As someone who was personally responsible for the safety of a nuclear reactor I can tell you are just fear-mongering. You have cited some abstract fear (that accidents aren't reported) that you somehow use to rubberstamp fear about every design of nuclear reactor, including in a latter post the pebble bed reactor. Do you have justification that the US industry is not safe and not reporting its issues? You damn well better because you are claiming that the US nuclear industry, along with that of France, Canada, the UK, etc., are operating unsafely because of failures in Japan and Sweden. Oh and before you decide to cite your little list, you had better be damn sure that your 'accidents' affect reactor safety, not just vent a little radioactive gas into the atmosphere or spill a little radioactive water (which compromises >90%) of your list.

    But before we continue, the only question that I really need you to answer is what is your history of analyzing the safety of *any* industrial system? Or do you assume that any Joe off the street can analyze industrial systems (and in particular, nuclear systems) without detailed knowledge of their theory of operation, design requirements, QA system, formal procedures, operator training, monitoring systems (what you might call a meta-operator system), or regulatory requirements? Have you performed any operational risk analysis studies? Reactor protection analysis studies? Do you even know what 'QA' stands for? Can you tell me why switching off the cooling pumps during the TMI accident increased the severity of the casualty? Or what type of experiment were the operators at Chernobyl performing? What I'm asking is for a little credibility before you damn the entire world nuclear industry. You are asking the nuclear industry to prove a negative result so I am curious to how you have analyzed the problem that will affect things from jobs to global warming to the number of people who die due to pollution from coal plants.
    --
    Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.