Suppresed Video of Japanese Reactor Sodium Leak

James Hardine writes "Following an announcement this week that the infamous Japanese Monju fast-breeder nuclear reactor would be re-opened with a new plutonium core, Wikileaks has released suppressed video footage of the disaster that led to its closure in 1995. The video shows men in silver 'space suits' exploring the reactor in which sodium compounds hang from the air ducts like icicles. Unlike conventional reactors, fast-breeder reactors, which 'breed' plutonium, use sodium rather than water as a coolant. This type of coolant creates a potentially hazardous situation as sodium is highly corrosive and reacts violently with both water and air. Government officials at first played down the extent of damage at the reactor and denied the existence of a videotape showing the sodium spill. The deputy general manager, Shigeo Nishimura, 49, jumped to his death the day after a news conference at which he and other officials revealed the extent of the cover-up. His family is currently suing the government at Japan's High Court."

Comments

Hard to follow

[Anonymous Coward]

They shouldn't have let Shatner direct.

Re:Hard to follow

[kidcharles]

Yes, but since this is obviously the work of a salt vampire, who is more qualified to investigate?

Governments can suppress the videos

[Aurisor]

Governments can suppress the videos, but they will never stop the first posters.

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[Anonymous Coward]

As juvenile as that sounds, that is a fairly profound statement

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[DrTime]

That is why the CIA did the right thing by destroying those tapes of the interrogations. I am a liberal, but I agree with getting rid of those tapes to keep them off YouTube. Still, we have to make life as miserable as possible for the administration by investigating it. Just like they acted asses when Clinton was in office. It is just a game. A rotten game.

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty damn liberal, too, but I don't think we should treat things as a game. If some Republicans do, that just means the ones doing it assholes; it doesn't mean everyone else should stoop to their level. Someone needs to start acting like responsible adults, and perhaps the example they set could help change the tone in DC.

So, no, I don't think we should make the Bush administration miserable just for the sake of making them miserable.

HOWEVER, I =do= believe we should make them answer for the myriad of fuckups and irresponsible decisions they've made since January 2001. That alone should make them pretty miserable, and I wouldn't be sad to see it.

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, tree-hugger.

Nuclear power is perfectly safe and you have no right to criticise it.

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[psychicsword]

No thats what Mod points are for.

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[Anonymous Coward]

"Governments can suppress the videos, but they will never stop the first posters."

How do you know?

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[Fred_A]

I'm pretty damn liberal, too, but I don't think we should treat things as a game. Unless the administration fails its saving throw of course.

Re:Governments can suppress the videos

[Calinous]

I thought the parent's parent poster was funny too - yet, it is insightful also

radioactive sodium too

[wizardforce]

sodium cooled reactors also have a tendancy to produce radioactive isotopes of sodium like Na22 or Na24 from the high levels of neutron radiation exposure, the first produced by knocking a neutron out of Na23 and the second from neutron capture. sodium reacts with water to produce sodium hydroxide [caustic soda] and hydrogen gas, both of which are very dangerous in large quantities for obvious reasons.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Dun Malg]

sodium cooled reactors also have a tendancy to produce radioactive isotopes of sodium like Na22 or Na24 Eh. The chemical dangers are more significant. Na-22 isn't particularly radioactive, and the highly radioactive Na-24 has a half-life of only 15 hours.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[flyingsquid]

So they put liquid sodium on the fissile material as a coolant? Man, is there anything the Japanese *won't* put soy sauce on?

Re:radioactive sodium too

[X0563511]

Na-24 has a half-life of only 15 hours.

What does Na-24 decay into, and how dangerous is that? How long does that stick around?

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

Rice.

The Japanese won't put soy sauce on rice.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[schnikies79]

I'm a chemist, but not big into nuclear.

Na-24 beta decays into Mg-24, which is stable and not dangerous.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have had a single-word, witty retort to an obvious racist joke that would have been both correct, and without any single comeback even being possible.

Quite possibly, the hardest thing to do on the Internet. Nay. It is the hardest.

But then you had to go look like a total idiot by explaining what everybody already knew.

Dumbass.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[schnikies79]

I forgot to add the Mg-24 is the most common magnesium isotope with about 79% abundance.

So what you think of regular Mg metal is mostly Mg-24.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[BlueParrot]

sodium cooled reactors also have a tendancy to produce radioactive isotopes of sodium like Na22 or Na24 from the high levels of neutron radiation exposure

Except that the leak was in the secondary loop, which is never in contact with the core, and hence not radioactive. Had the leak been inside the primary loop you wouldn't have been able to walk up to it with a video camera because there would have been quite a bit of radiation shield and concrete in the way.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Tablizer]

You could have had a single-word, witty retort to an obvious racist joke that would have been both correct, and without any single comeback even being possible.

If we joked about French Crescants instead of soy sauce, would that be any different?

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Z00L00K]

So essentially - all is cool if you stay cool and not pour water on it. Oxidized sodium is of course a bigger problem, but not even that is a big issue.

The big issue here seems to be not the coolant itself - it seems to be a relatively good coolant to use - but the fact that the accident happened. The larger problem that could have occurred would have been a core meltdown instead, and that would have been serious.

This stresses the fact that nuclear power has it's dangers, and that it's necessary to watch the handling processes thoroughly to avoid major disasters.

Another question is if it's really worth the cost or not to run nuclear power, but that's a different issue.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[khallow]

The thing to keep in mind is that sodium is so popular as a reactor coolant precisely because it doesn't form a lot of long lived radioactive isotopes when irradiated in a nuclear reactor.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Fordiman]

If a coolant leak triggered a switch to manual operations and kept the reactor from actually melting down - well, that speaks to good engineering and shoddy workmanship on the coolant system.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell is a crescant? Do you mean Croissants?

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so cool.

While it's an excellent coolant, liquid sodium also reacts with a wide range of materials and acts as a solvent for some metals so it's pretty hard to contain. Liquid sodium is also pyrophoric (ignites spontaneously) in air. The white 'snow' the japanese workers are walking through is a mixture of sodium oxide and sodium carbonate resulting from a sodium fire. They're wearing respirators and masks because it'll destroy your lungs and eyes.

The halflife of Sodium-24 is around 15 hours. The primary decay route is beta emission to an excited Magnesium-24 which then emits two gamma rays at 2.75Mev and 1.37Mev. So the snow is probably pretty radioactive too.

YUK!!

Re:radioactive sodium too

[BlueParrot]

The halflife of Sodium-24 is around 15 hours. The primary decay route is beta emission to an excited Magnesium-24 which then emits two gamma rays at 2.75Mev and 1.37Mev. So the snow is probably pretty radioactive too.

Siiiigh, again.. The leak was in teh SECONDARY LOOP. It wasn't any radioactivity in it. Nada, zero, zip... Yes, it was a bad accident, but the only thing nuclear about it was that it occurred in a nuclear power plant. The same thing would be much less likely to occur in the radioactive primary loop, because that counts as part of the nuclear island and is hence under much stricter safety requirements.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Tablizer]

No wonder I couldn't find it in the spell-checker. Being crescent-shaped, I thought it was have that as a root.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[stormguard2099]

I think you forgot to say IANALBAAC
I am not a lawyer but actually a chemist

Re:radioactive sodium too

[thermopile]

Although I've never worked on one, I understand that sodium reactors are a real bear to manage. The US Navy tried it once on the USS Seawolf, but opted for plain-old-water. Some of the reasons were:

1.) The 15 hour half-life of Na-24 prevented immediate entry to the reactor in case of repair. Five half lives (the standard assumed for total decay away) means you're cooling your heels for about three days before you can really do any work. It makes quick response - like the kind Monju would have liked to have done - very difficult, if not impossible. 2.) Sodium freezes at 208F (almost 100C). Freezing in the pipes can be very bad for decay heat removal, as well as putting undue stresses on the pipes. I have seen previously rectangular "pipes" get their sides sucked in when the sodium freezes - which is impressive because they were 1/8-inch thick metal walls. Hence, you have to keep the sodium hot to work on it.

Neither of the above are necessarily deal-killers, particularly for land-based reactors. Yes, you can work around the 15 hour half life of the sodium, but it sure makes reactor entry challenging in times of distress.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Rei]

Siiiigh again... sodium reacts explosively with concrete. The concrete that the entire containment structure was made out of. The concrete that had a layer of steel over it to prevent sodium, in the event of a leak, from reaching the concrete (they thought the sodium couldn't corrode it). The steel that the sodium nearly ate its way through.

What, exactly, do you think the energy of a 2,000 pound bomb going off in the middle of a reactor will do in terms of letting more sodium leak? What do you think letting more sodium leak will do in terms of further explosions? What do you think all of this will do to the primary?

This was a Very Bad Thing (TM), but could have been far worse.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[mad flyer]

You do understand that as far as the Japanese are concerned "much stricter safety requirement" mean not trying to fix it with a hammer for more than an hour before asking someone higher in the hierarchy.
They can make simple things right. But operating a nuclear powerplant is still out of the reach of their rice-farmer level corporate mentality.

THEY have a long history of nuclear accident where the trigger was someone acting like a total redneck for no understandable reason. Tokaimura was one of the great example of how far this can go http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~meshkati/tefall99/toki.html

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

How's the publik edukashen working out?

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Goldberg's Pants]

A great example of the corporate mentality of Japan is the Toyota Formula One team. A budget of half a billion a year so they can get their cars on the back of the grid usually. Simply because the entire organisation is run by committee.

I couldn't help thinking while watching that video "I wonder if this is viral marketing for Cloverfield?"

Re:radioactive sodium too

[causality]

The big issue here seems to be not the coolant itself - it seems to be a relatively good coolant to use - but the fact that the accident happened.

The big issue here is not that an accident happened -- accidents have a way of doing that from time to time. Things go wrong, the best plans have flaws, people make mistakes. This is true of ... well, all non-trivial human endeavors. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, especially considering that no one in their right mind is going to deny that a nuclear reactor is a complex device with a non-zero risk of something going wrong.

The big issue here is that the government lied to its people and the fact that they lied was covered up. We need more stories like this of governments around the world because it might just put a dent in the (very dangerous) "government is your friend" mentality that is especially prevalant in the USA.

Personally I wish the definition of treason were expanded to include "issuing false statements to the people with the intent to deceive when done by any government official" or something to that effect. Meaning, you can make an honest mistake and it's no big deal; deliberately lie to the people and you get removed from office and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Does that sound harsh? Perhaps, but they don't seem to think so when they "make an example" of us, as we have seen with the War on (Some) Drugs and are now seeing with copyright law. Not to mention, almost any concept I have of "harsh" goes out the window when talking of wrongdoing on the part of people who consider themselves our masters.

This isn't Athens where people were chosen for public office by lottery. These are people who seek power and have worked very hard to get it. What's wrong with giving them a reason to be cautions with how they use it?

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing to keep in mind is that sodium is so popular as a reactor coolant precisely because it doesn't form a lot of long lived radioactive isotopes when irradiated in a nuclear reactor. Wrong. Sodium does form radioactive isotopes like Na-24 (that has a half-live of 15 hours). Water cooled reactors and CO2 cooled reactors produce shorter half-live isotopes like N-17 (that has a half-life of a couple seconds). Water in a PWR or BWR will become slightly radioactive over time due to stripping slight amounts of cobalt from valve seats (in a form like stellite which is used to make hard valve seats) and from the release of fission products that are not due to the fuel particles but from uranium impurities in the core materials that are very close to the coolant surface (so that in some cases the fission fragment can be ejected into the coolant through a very short distance of some part of the core material). This level of radioactivity is extremely low so that the coolant really isn't a threat even though the radioactivity is detectable. A simple filter will clean the water further. Sodium reactors have the same issues as well as having to worry for days after shutdown about the levels due to Na-24. If there was a core casualty and you needed to get in near the core, you could do it in a couple of hours with a properly shielded PWR or BWR. It would a week for a properly shielded liquid sodium reactor.

So you are right that sodium does not produce long-lived isotopes. But you are wrong that sodium cooled reactors are used in lieu of water or gas cooled reactors for that reason. Sodium cooled reactors are popular for fast breeder reactors. Water cooled reactors are popular for ease of use and maintenance which is why they are used widely in power generation.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Tablizer]

Fine, but they ain't teach no French.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[mad flyer]

Cool... the wapanese are moderating again...

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Dr. Spork]

Lead might be even better. It doesn't react with air/water, and it doesn't tend to capture neutrons. I know there are some designs for modern breeder reactors that have liquid lead as the coolant, and even if it capacity to move heat are much worse than sodium, the safety issue might be an acceptable tradeoff.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[ecavalli]

So how hard would it be to wait the thing out? 15 hours is not a lot of time for it to do much damage, particularly if an area has been evacuated/contained.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[rethin]

From the article

"Although the accident itself did not result in a radiation leak, many argue that the sodium spill itself came very close to detonating Monju, a catastrophe which would have spilled plutonium into the environment."

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Eunuchswear]

So how hard would it be to wait the thing out? 15 hours is not a lot of time for it to do much damage, particularly if an area has been evacuated/contained.

15 hours is the half life of sodium 24. That doesn't mean that it's safe after 15 hours, it means that half of it has changed into 24Mg. The other half is still there. Wait another 15 hours and only a quarter of it will be left, and so on.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[ecavalli]

This is what I get for posting without any sleep for 36 hours.

So how long would we have to wait until the remnants are of negligible danger?

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Eunuchswear]

No wonder I couldn't find it in the spell-checker. Being crescent-shaped, I thought it was have that as a root.

Duh, it does:
From French croissant 'crescent', from Middle French creissant.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Cyberax]

Current breeder designs use NaK alloy for cooling - it melts at about room temperature, though it's a bit more dangerous to work with.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Eunuchswear]

Most people seem to be saying around 4 days.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[mpe]

Na-24 beta decays into Mg-24, which is stable and not dangerous.

Unless it catches fire.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[mpe]

The big issue here is that the government lied to its people and the fact that they lied was covered up. We need more stories like this of governments around the world because it might just put a dent in the (very dangerous) "government is your friend" mentality that is especially prevalant in the USA.

It's possibly more "government is your friend and anyone who thinks otherwise is a nutjob conspiracy theorist(tm)".

Personally I wish the definition of treason were expanded to include "issuing false statements to the people with the intent to deceive when done by any government official" or something to that effect.

This would be "high treason". The idea is that crimes committed by members of government are automatically more serious than those committed by the "plebs". Since these people have more ability to both do harm and hinder any criminal investigation.

This isn't Athens where people were chosen for public office by lottery.

In Classical Athens lotteries would even be used on a day to day basis.

These are people who seek power and have worked very hard to get it. What's wrong with giving them a reason to be cautions with how they use it?

Especially given that people who seek power are often the least suitable to have it.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[khallow]

I keep forgetting how I get pwned, when I mouth off about nuclear fission on slashdot. :-) Thanks for the correction.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[mpe]

The leak was in teh SECONDARY LOOP. It wasn't any radioactivity in it.

The problem with sodium is chemical rather than nuclear. It reacts rapidly, sometimes explosivly, with all sorts of common materials.

but the only thing nuclear about it was that it occurred in a nuclear power plant. The same thing would be much less likely to occur in the radioactive primary loop, because that counts as part of the nuclear island and is hence under much stricter safety requirements.

How secure is that section of the plant against explosion, fire and corrosive materials? Also without the secondary loop what is keeping the core cool. You cannot just switch off a nuclear reactor...

Re:radioactive sodium too

[__aaqvdr516]

Just to add some further info on this one. The USS Seawolf(S2G) you're talking about is SSN-575 and not the USS Seawolf(S6W) in current use SSN-21.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[jollyreaper]

Personally I wish the definition of treason were expanded to include "issuing false statements to the people with the intent to deceive when done by any government official" or something to that effect. Meaning, you can make an honest mistake and it's no big deal; deliberately lie to the people and you get removed from office and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Does that sound harsh? Perhaps, but they don't seem to think so when they "make an example" of us, as we have seen with the War on (Some) Drugs and are now seeing with copyright law. Not to mention, almost any concept I have of "harsh" goes out the window when talking of wrongdoing on the part of people who consider themselves our masters. Mod up. I would personally like to see treason charges brought up against public officials who put party and personal interest ahead of the public but the test for that can be hard, how can you differentiate between malice and ignorant mistakes? But in a case like this, the legal test is plain as day, deliberate misstatement of facts to lull the public into a false sense of security.

I would also like to see ALL political campaigns funded by public tax dollars so that any money changing hands between politicians and companies, private citizens, etc, will be seen as bribery and bribery carries the same penalty as treason.

The problem, of course, is that the fox is guarding the hen house and we'd have to get the fox to agree to the curtailing of his own powers.

If my boss comes up to me and says "Hey, I've got this dead body to hide, give me a hand," the answer is "Fuck no, I would go to jail as an accessory." If a politician goes up to his press secretary and asks him to put out spin, his response should be the same.

We just don't have boundaries in this country anymore. I mean, there used to be acts so far beyond the pale that even giving voice to them would make you seem like a total asshole. There should be certain standards of which the violation should seem as anathema as incest and pedophilia. Thou shalt not lie to the public and conceal information they have a right to know. Thou shalt not engage in politicking past the national shoreline. And most verily, thou shalt not fuck with the democratic process and tamper with elections. If we can't trust our own elections, we're no better than the communists. (make special note of that, red-baiters.)

Re:radioactive sodium too

[abb3w]

Lead-206 and -207 each make up about a quarter of naturally occurring lead, and if I recall, have a non-trivial neutron capture rate leading to lower breeder efficiency than Sodium. While the immediate danger to the plant infrastructure from this kind of accident is reduced, lead is also a permanently poisonous heavy metal. The short term ease-of-operation would probably be a trade-off with long term damage from the rare accidental release. Frankly, I'd prefer sodium.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[abb3w]

Actually, it's sodium's low neutron absorption levels in the MeV range that fission neutrons come out at, which in turn allows for breeder reactor operation.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Thuktun]

This was a Very Bad Thing (TM), but could have been far worse. Curiously, the incidence of this comment seems to go up precipitously when nuclear reactor incidents are discussed.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[jafac]

Agreed;

And even worse - it *IS* against the law, to classify something as "Secret" or "Top Secret" (etc.) if the purpose is to prevent embarrassment - that is, if there is no functional security component to the classification. This was made law back in the 1960's after abuses were exposed. And yet, this law is routinely ignored.

National Security is often nothing more than a tool for fearmongering, to keep citizens from asking embarrassing questions about how their money is being misspent. The careers of whistleblowers are being ruined, they are even going to jail; possibly even being compromised to foreign governments (in the case of Brewster Jennings, Ltd.) - and we'll never know about it.

Lying is one thing.
Using National Security as cover for lying, is an abuse that has gotten people killed, has started wars, perpetuated immoral policy, and cost our nation trillions of dollars.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

The benefits of sodium are:

1. Low absorption and scattering cross section.
      In a fast reactor you don't want the coolant to thermalize the neutrons.
      You also need something with a smaller absorption cross section than water.
2. High heat capacity. You can remove a lot of heat with a smaller
        amount of coolant (compared to water)
3. Low corrosion *with metal*.

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Anonymous Coward]

Reaction yes. Explosive no.

"The safety related consequences of the interaction of sodium with concrete can be summarized as follows. Thus, there is a production of hydrogen, a release of energy, and an impairment of the load carrying capability of concrete structures." http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4642300.html

It's not like nobody ever considered the risks before. http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=7208928

In this study they poured molten sodium into regular old limestone based concrete crucibles. It took about an hour and a half for the reaction to culminate and it left behind black slag in the crucible and a sodium oxide aresol, probably the "sodium snow" described in the film. Where I come from, explosions take seconds or less and not over an hour.

To minimize the damage to structural integrity, the line at risk areas. Metal, or special sodium resistant concretes.

Bad yes. Near miss for Nuclear Meltdown? No. Since this isn't supposed to happen, you have to re-examine all of your other places that may have the same or similar means of failing, and the re-certify the design. Very expensive and time consuming

Re:radioactive sodium too

[Rei]

Thus, there is a production of hydrogen, a release of energy,

Where I come from, a fuel-air mixture of hydrogen inside a pressure-retaining enclosed structure is explosive, and "energy" (only a small amount) is needed to detonate it.

Also

[sakdoctor]

Wiki leaks server suffers a meltdown after 9.1 MB video gets slashdotted.

Japanese government doesn't even try to cover it up.

Re:Also

[ceejayoz]

9.1 MB video via https, mind you.

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

Elighten me: does https invovle a lot of overhead for the server? Your comment seems to imply that; and if true, it would explain why https isn't used all the time, especially for sites like slashdot which require a login...

Re:Also

[Jeffrey Baker]

Oh, hell yes. The initial key exchange to start an https connection is wonderfully expensive.

Note to web "masters" everywhere: you cannot distribute huge files to millions of people using MySQL and SSL. Full stop. Upload that shit to Amazon S3 or Akamai or YouTube or _anything_ other than mediawiki. Thanks!

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why we have hardware accelerators that make https and other crypto protocols run nicely on modern hardware.

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think the server meltdown is from a bottleneck in the CPU?
 
Apologies for the pun.

Re:Also

[owlstead]

Yes, then again, without hardware crypto, the symmetric encryption and MACing (for authenticity of the data) of a 9 MB stream will be much more CPU consuming than the initial setup. Asymmetric encryption is much slower than symmetric encryption in general but normally you only need it for initial authentication and session key changes.

If you use a lot of SSL/TLS (the S in HTTPS) you might need an SSL off-loader, a PCI based hardware accelerator or a CPU containing hardware crypto. The first one is most safe and can be very fast, a CPU with crypto (e.g. Sun T2) will beat it in performance per dollar. Then again, with most software/CPU aided cryptography the private keys will reside in main memory, which makes it possible to copy the key if the web server is compromised.

EC cryptography could dramatically reduce the CPU time needed for the (cryptographic) part of the SSL handshake, but unfortunately MS and the major certification authorities don't seem to be too happy to provide support for Elliptic Curve cryptography.

Re:Also

[Jeffrey Baker]

The real problem is that under a heavy traffic storm the server is buried in an avalanche of initial key exchanges. As the first few sockets are hogging all the CPU during setup, a huge backlog of connetions gathers in the queue. The server will die.

Most of the hardware crypto devices are utterly useless for anything other than IPSec VPN, where the number of keys required is measured in single digits. This includes the Niagara T2. Hardware crypto sounds good on paper until you realize that the keyspace on the chip is limited and the programming model for loading keys and connection state was designed by a hardware guy who never did any programming in his whole life. Beyond a certain number of key pairs, programming the crypto engine becomes more expensive than simply using OpenSSL on the main CPU.

Re:Also

[laddiebuck]

What reason could you possibly have for trying to prevent in-flight modification of a video file you are distributing and making available constantly to millions of users? I mean, other than pure bureaucratic or incompetent waste?

Re:Also

[Solra Bizna]

At a guess, Wikileaks is SSL-protected to make it harder for evil governments and corporations to know that you're visiting it.

-:sigma.SB

Re:Also

[ichigo 2.0]

Well SSL doesn't help against that, as the traffic still goes between the user and the wikileaks site.

Re:Also

[Cramer]

Even with hardware crypto devices, the key can often be found in memory or on disk. The card has to get the key from somewhere. Only the super expensive FIPS compliant cards have on-board key storage (key your private key safely offline on a floppy in a safe) and generation (so noone ever knows the private key.)

A top of the line opteron is good for ~1000 RSA key exchanges per second. With "cheap" hardware cards (where cheap is in the 500$ range), that number goes from 10k to 28k per second. FIPS certified hardware is a lot slower, but still much faster than a CPU -- ~4k with a $4k card. (And yes, these are all fully supported (openssl) linux hardware solutions.)

Re:Also

[MasterOfCeremonies]

I am one of these web "masters" of which you speak and am genuinely interested in (but unfortunately ignorant of) what you say. Would you have the good grace to explain to someone who knows a lot about programming (web and otherwise), but is still yet to grasp the intricacies of encryption, why MySQL / SSL is inappropriate for distributing large popular files?

Thanks.

Re:Also

[Fred_A]

At a guess, Wikileaks is SSL-protected to make it harder for evil governments and corporations to know that you're visiting it. Maybe to know *why* you're visiting it. Won't stop anyone looking seeing that you've been visiting it though.

Re:Also

[Johnno74]

What did you think the point of SSL was if anyone sniffing the traffic between the user and the server could decrypt it?

Someone intercepting the connection can't even see the URL... All they can see is the wikileaks IP address. The only way around this is to have your own root cert on the end-users computer. (I believe this is done in china... all PCs there have a chinese govt root cert installed, so they CAN read SSL traffic.)

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

China and the company I work at! They're about to implement SSL screening of online content at the internet gateway. They don't seem to mind that they're breaking the entire reason for SSL's existence in doing so.

Re:Also

[ichigo 2.0]

Thank you for this short explanation of encrypted HTTP communication. Why you decided to post it in response to my post is one of life's little mysteries.

Seeing as you repeated the relevant part of my post within your own... ;)

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, hell yes. The initial key exchange to start an https connection is wonderfully expensive.

Pfft, that might be important when serving up hundreds of little webpages, but when it comes to serving up 9MB files, that's nothing compared to the difference between a zero-copy sendfile() and having to read the data into userspace, encrypting it, then shipping it back out through kernelspace to the network. On my C2Duo, lighttpd using sendfile() operates nearly 10 times as fast as lighttpd+ssl.

Video down?

[winphreak]

Looks like Wikileaks is having trouble with bandwidth of the full video.

Re:Video down?

[hyperherod]

An English subtitled version can be found here until that also runs out of bandwidth. Also a link to a version on YouTube but this is with Japanese subtitles only.

Re:Video down?

[ceejayoz]

I can't imagine it helps that they linked to it on a secure server. That's going to be one melty server.

Re:Video down?

[tomhudson]

"nuclear reactor would be re-opened with a new plutonium core,"

"Someone set up us the bomb!"

Re:Video down?

[AndGodSed]

Darnit, I WANT THIS VIDEO!!!

darn you slashdot...

Re:Video down?

[el_gordo101]

Not to worry, the server is cooled with liquid sodium. Uh, wait...

kdawson != editor

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppressed should not be misspelled by anyone who is employed. Kdawson, please submit your resignation to OSTG on Monday. Then go back to adult education.

Sincerely,
The Genius

Youtube link

[pirodude]

Uploaded to youtube http://youtube.com/watch?v=pwWQLMmn0tM

Re:Youtube link

[pirodude]

Also, english subtitled video here: http://www.dotsub.com/films/videotape/index.php?autostart=true&language_setting=en_2524

Re:Youtube link

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a chunk of my ear shot off in a college organic chemistry lab when someone dropped a small piece of sodium in the sink. Those guys were walking through a mist of it,leaving footprints though a powder of it. They have way way more balls then me. If there was water in any of those multitudes of pipes overhead that started leaking, the whole place would have been one large crater.

Re:Youtube link

[Jesus_666]

Dotsub is currently mirroring the incident in more ways than one - their server is on the verge of meltdown. Expect long loading times.

Re:Youtube link

[TubeSteak]

Here's the subtitle text:

NPJ Video News No. 3
Video taken just after the sodium leak accident at Monju, hidden by the PNC - the so-called 2 o'clock video
Just after the accident, the PNC sent employees to the site to film the leak.
However, due to the graphic nature of the footage, the PNC hid it
The PNC explained that they hid it because "it has no value"
With your own eyes, we want you to judge why the PNC hid the video
This video was not only hidden at Monju (Fukui Prefecture),
it was also discovered later that there was another copy hidden at the head office
An employee who had to lie at the press conference committed suicide right afterwards
What was it that drove him to commit suicide... Think about this
Nishimura-san's death is also being reported on at "Joho Tsushin Sokushin Keikaku" (tokyodo-2005) blog
Search in the blog for "Nishimura" (è¥æ? in Japanese)
Employees heading for the site of the leak
Sodium mist fills the air
Footsteps on white sodium
Repeatedly checking something
Camera also moving toward the scene
Visibility is very poor
The sodium "snow" is so deep that footsteps do not leave a trace
The mist gets deeper
Seems like they found something
A small mountain of sodium
Camera angle graphically tells the story
Going back quickly
Emergency telephone
The video continues a bit longer, but the important part is up to here
To make the most of Nishimura-san's death, all we who live in Japan
must think of what needs to be done
NPJ Video News No. 3

Re:Youtube link

[budgenator]

Most of the Na was shot into the air while molten so it's all oxidized or carbonated; yet I did notice that they didn't have the seams on the over-garments taped up, the thought of NaO dust working it's way to the skin is scary in itself.

Re:Youtube link

[BlueParrot]

If there was water in any of those multitudes of pipes overhead that started leaking, the whole place would have been one large crater.

I give you one chance to guess why the reactor was built to carry the hot sodium far away from the reactor before using the heat from it to boil water for the turbines. Also, the white powder was probably not sodium ( sodium is silver-like in colour ) but rather sodium-oxides produces when the sodium is oxidized in the air.

Now for the record, had those pipes actually been carrying high-pressure water for a power turbine you would certainly be dead had they leaked. To achieve high turbine efficiency power plant engineers try to maximize the pressure and temperature on the hot side of the turbine, which means that if one of those pipes bursts when you are standing next to it, you are in deep shit. In fact Japanese workers have indeed died from steam pipes bursting at a nuclear power plant. Was no sodium involved in that one thou.

In general there is only one point in a sodium cooled power plant where water and sodium are even remotely close to one another, namely the secondary sodium-water heat exchanger. Mixing of sodium and water has occurred in Russian plants in the past, but it didn't cause any damage that was beyond repair, and no release of radioactive material.

Re:Youtube link

[cheater512]

I highly doubt that they didnt have a sealed suit on underneath the shiny stuff.

Re:Youtube link

[emilper]

the subtitles are misleading:

"Sodium mist fills the air" and "The mist gets deeper" -- the camera was out of focus and it was quite dark in there; no "sodium" mist; a second after they filmed the "sodium mist", the "mist" dissapeared. There was not enough light, and the operator had to use a large aperture, so the range at which the objects were in focus was short: move the camera from the back of the shining suit in front to the wall that's 3m away and you get "mist".

"Footsteps on white sodium" -- not sodium but sodium carbonate, which was used some 40 years ago for washing clothes by hand (prolonged use caused sores on skin, but by prolonged use I mean keeping your hands in warm water with 4-5 hours a day), and still is used in detergents, and sodium hydroxide, which you can buy in some shops, and is used for some household tasks, such as unclogging pipes. Ever bought those small bags with colored granules which are supposed to be miracle pipe uncloggers ? There is sodium hydroxide in that. Yes, it will damage your skin.

and a comment to "To make the most of Nishimura-san's death, all we who live in Japan must think of what needs to be done": how about toning down the obsession with saving face, this is what killed Nishimura-san, and it also prevented his bosses from being completely open about the accident.

The video is useless. It says nothing about the gravity of the accident, but instead can be misconstrued in many creative ways: in it you see people in shiny protective suits (which, btw, were not hermetically sealed) going through some rooms in a nuclear (oh, nuclear ... that must be dangerous) power plant in a bad light and everything is shot with a low quality black and white camera. With the help of the subtitles it has become "Blair reactor project".

Re:Youtube link

[Mike Morgan]

The subtitle text I saw was:

        Narrator: In A.D. 2101, war was beginning.
        Captain: What happen ?
        Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
        Operator: We get signal.
        Captain: What!
        Operator: Main screen turn on.
        Captain: It's you!!
        CATS: How are you gentlemen!!
        CATS: All your base are belong to us.
        CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
        Captain: What you say!!
        CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
        CATS: Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
        Operator: Captain!! *
        Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
        Captain: You know what you doing.
        Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
        Captain: For great justice.

Re:Youtube link

[__aaqvdr516]

Exactly! Those silver suits are in fact steam suits and are not sealed. I haven't been able to view the vid yet though, just saw a pic of them. I've worn that type of suit before though, it's not very comfortable!

Re:Youtube link

[jollyreaper]

Here's the subtitle text:

NPJ Video News No. 3
Video taken just after the sodium leak accident at Monju, hidden by the PNC - the so-called 2 o'clock video
Just after the accident, the PNC sent employees to the site to film the leak.
However, due to the graphic nature of the footage, the PNC hid it
The PNC explained that they hid it because "it has no value"
With your own eyes, we want you to judge why the PNC hid the video
This video was not only hidden at Monju (Fukui Prefecture),
it was also discovered later that there was another copy hidden at the head office
An employee who had to lie at the press conference committed suicide right afterwards
What was it that drove him to commit suicide... Think about this
Nishimura-san's death is also being reported on at "Joho Tsushin Sokushin Keikaku" (tokyodo-2005) blog
Search in the blog for "Nishimura" (è¥æ? in Japanese)
Employees heading for the site of the leak
Sodium mist fills the air
Footsteps on white sodium
Repeatedly checking something
Camera also moving toward the scene
Visibility is very poor
The sodium "snow" is so deep that footsteps do not leave a trace
The mist gets deeper
Seems like they found something
A small mountain of sodium
Camera angle graphically tells the story
Going back quickly
-- Tentacle snakes out from mist and grabs man, pulls him out of view
Frantic screaming cut off with a wet squelch
Camera view becomes jostled, yelling in Japanese
Party gets turned around in the tunnels
Another horrible scream, another man is killed off-camera
Mist seems to be thickening, visibility decreases
Shape looms ahead, wider than a man, filling tunnel. Cameraman screams
Camera drops, focus is on the wall, a pool of blood spreads across the floor, the floor being on the left side of the image
Camera runs for another 60 minutes, tape ends
Camera recovered after reactor is properly vented, no bodies were recovered, no sign of what killed the men

Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I sure am glad that breeder reactors are as safe as proponents of nuclear power tell us. I'd hate to think of switching to nuclear power on the promises of better safety with new, high technology reactors only to have another nuclear accident which irreversibly contaminates the groundwater, or kills people. That won't happen with breeder reactors, right? They're intrinsically safe.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[$RANDOMLUSER]

How many people die yearly in coal mining accidents? How about accidents on oil drilling rigs?

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Frosty Piss]

Well I sure am glad that breeder reactors are as safe as proponents of nuclear power tell us.

Are breeder reactors the type people are advocating for a return to nuclear power? I don't think so...

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[doshell]

How many people die yearly in coal mining accidents? How about accidents on oil drilling rigs?

Those do not incur the risk of radioactive contamination, which has long-term consequences that are more worrying than those resulting directly from the incident (I'm not saying every nuclear incident goes the way of Chernobyl -- just pointing out there is a risk). So it's not just a matter of comparing casualties resulting from the particular explosion/meltdown/whatever.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[aztektum]

I have long been saying life would be more interesting if we had more six-eyed fish and flipper kids walking around.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[X0563511]

You realize breeder reactors are used for producing plutonium, and NOT for power generation?

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Artifakt]

Nothing that involves a high concentration of energy and a low concentration can ever be completely safe. Energy is the ability to do work, and it may end up doing work you don't want it to do. Now here's the real problem: You feel you have been lied to, that somebody promised you breeder reactors are completely safe, or that other kinds of reactors are completely safe or something. Well, somebody lied to you all right, when they told you that any power generation could ever be completely safe.
        Read up on 'loss of blade' accidents for windmills, dam failures for hydro, and how coal releases radiation (lots of it) and other toxins (lots of them). Read up on what chemical compounds are used in solar cells, or just how hot a commercial sterling solar engine is at the mirror's focal point. Look at the political consequences of breeders, but also at the political consequences of the existing fuel oil demand. Look at the environmental consequences of nuclear, but also at the environmental consequences of big oil. Find out how even wave and tide, if scaled up to produce tens or hundreds of gigawatts, means thousands of small boat accidents a year, plus Manatees and probably many other species will inevitably become extinct and whole ecologies such as the everglades will likely follow. For any power source, read up on where it is to be located, and the human costs of sending the power to where it is to be used. THERE IS NO SAFE!

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Martz]

Instead the burning of coal slowly kills thousands of people a year through air pollution.

And as we all know, that's not news because it isn't sensational enough.

One study I found when searching indicates that 25 reactor meltdowns per year would be required to being it inline with coal pollution deaths.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[TobiasTheCommie]

I would be very interested in reading said study

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[NevermindPhreak]

So interesting, that i took the liberty of finding the source.

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Kingrames]

Technically "meltdown" is when the plant shuts down and the carbon rods retract.

It's an explosion, specifically coolant pipes bursting, that's the real threat.

You see the plant has to balance the generation of power with the cooling down of the pipes transferring water (or some other material) around everything, so that the pipes don't burst. if the pipes burst, radioactive water vapor is released. that's a worst case scenario. The carbon rods are the implement used to generate power. the more of them there are exposed, the more power generated, and the more you have to worry about coolant. The retraction of the carbon rods is called meltdown.

Don't go thinking that it's the meltdown that's the bad thing. When the plant experiences a meltdown, the city or whatever loses power, but the real catastrophe is averted. Naturally you don't want a meltdown, but if anyone advertises a meltdown-free nuclear power plant, run screaming in the other direction. The alternative is far worse.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Shining Celebi]

Those do not incur the risk of radioactive contamination, which has long-term consequences that are more worrying than those resulting directly from the incident (I'm not saying every nuclear incident goes the way of Chernobyl -- just pointing out there is a risk). So it's not just a matter of comparing casualties resulting from the particular explosion/meltdown/whatever.

Coal mining accidents might not incur the risk of significant radioactive contamination, but the combustion of coal does release massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere, and people living near coal-fired power plants are exposed to more radiation than those living near nuclear power plants.

I've always found these statistics to be interesting:

For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants.

Of course, in the case of an extreme nuclear accident, as in Chernobyl, we have a very big problem to deal with right away that wouldn't be possible with coal. But I think it's worth remembering that a great deal of radioactive material is accumulating from coal-fired power plants, and that could someday be a major problem too. Nuclear power is not the only source of radiation released because of human activity.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[c.r.o.c.o]

Have you done any reading on the status of Chernobyl lately?

Since the accident, the natural wild life has returned in full force, and the region's ecosystem is healthier than it has been for centuries. Obviously without an in depth study we cannot be certain of mutation and cancer rates in those animals. But I'll venture a guess that natural selection took its course, and the overall population is healthy, allowing it to adapt and thrive in a mildly radioactive environment.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/33784558.html

So there goes your whole argument. Now read up on blue fin tuna that has such large quantities of mercury that even 6 pieces of sushi per week exceeds the safe limit. Read about the Exxon Valdez spill and countless others that directly destroyed entire ecosystems.

At this point nuclear energy is safer than any conventional other energy source. It is also the only economically viable energy source, at least for the time being. People who believe that solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources are the way to go obviously have NO idea how much electricity is consumed in industrial processes. Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes that much in a half hour.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[tkinnun0]

Nothing that involves a high concentration of energy and a low concentration can ever be completely safe. Energy is the ability to do work, and it may end up doing work you don't want it to do. We must ban steel, because E=mc^2 and steel is denser than air!

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[CrazedWalrus]

I don't know about that study, but the statement itself seems to agree with this:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Over the past few decades, however, a series of studies has called these stereotypes into question. Among the surprising conclusions: the waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, fly ash--a by-product from burning coal for power--contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste.

At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Smidge204]

That's funny, I thought a "meltdown" was when the core overheats and actually begins to... you know, melt. I can't think of any reactors that actually use carbon as a mediator anyway...

=Smidge=

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[TobiasTheCommie]

Thanks, heard it a few times from sources i trust, just really wanted to have a source for it(the coal power plants are more radioactive)..

Still would like one with the specific 25 disasters a year (or what it was). But lets hope the original poster can give me/us that.

Again, thanks, bookmarked. :)

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[sjames]

Actually, breeders can do both. Early examples were primarily for weapons grade Pu production but many designs exist geared more for commercial power production. The Pu they produce is well suited for further use in a reactor, but is much more difficult to process into weapons material. That, of course, is a big plus these days when the world has quite enough bombs.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Ironsides]

Of course, in the case of an extreme nuclear accident, as in Chernobyl, we have a very big problem to deal with right away that wouldn't be possible with coal. But I think it's worth remembering that a great deal of radioactive material is accumulating from coal-fired power plants, and that could someday be a major problem too. Nuclear power is not the only source of radiation released because of human activity.

There is another factor to consider in this. Chernobyl used a design whereby a lack of water caused a positive feedback loop in the reactor to cause it to get even hotter. U.S. and most other designs use a negative feedback loop so the less water/coolant there is in the reactor, the less energy is put out. A Chernobyl type accident is physically impossible in any reactor used in the U.S. 3 Mile Island is about the worst nuclear accident that can occur in a U.S. nuclear power plant and about three dozen things went wrong (including stupidity on the part of the plant operators) in order to cause it.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Zymergy]

Not to mention the un-filtered combustibles from coal-fired power stations release vast amounts of Mercury Vapors that contaminate our environment and food chains.
Scrubbing the gaseous elemental Mercury from the combustion gases is very expensive and not that efficient and many countries don't even bother. Look it up in your own country.
I'd rather have the *fear* of an unlikely contamination of my environment from non-global-warming nuclear power than the *certainty* of air pollution and Mercury in my food.

I live in the Central US and already pregnant women are strongly cautioned to NOT to eat freshwater fish more than once per 2 weeks (last I read) because of Mercury pollution from rain containing coal-combustion mercury vapor condensates. And this mean ALL lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, etc... I used to love to catch and eat my caught fish. Now I can only catch and release...

For some reason, I don't see the any tree-hugging Nuclear nay-sayers addressing this point. Because it clearly points toward MORE coal burning to power the exhaust scrubbers (and thus more CO2 released) versus Using Nuclear power and having Zero CO2 release.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[kabocox]

Find out how even wave and tide, if scaled up to produce tens or hundreds of gigawatts, means thousands of small boat accidents a year, plus Manatees and probably many other species will inevitably become extinct and whole ecologies such as the everglades will likely follow. For any power source, read up on where it is to be located, and the human costs of sending the power to where it is to be used. THERE IS NO SAFE!

Be honest though. As long as it is safe for humans, we don't care if it kills off every life form that we aren't actively breeding/farming on this planet. That's really how much we care about nature and wild life. PETA may think animals ought to be saved, but, truthfully, every other party would kill animals in hordes as long as we got anything positive from it like meals most of us think taste good.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[TooMuchToDo]

Technically "meltdown" is when the plant shuts down and the carbon rods retract.

A meltdown is when for some reason the nuclear reaction isn't mediated, and the reaction "runs away" or takes off out of control. This would happen in older reactors if there is a loss of coolant and the control rods weren't dropped into the reactor (also known as a SCRAM) to stop the nuclear reaction from occurring. With breeder reactors, I'm unaware of what their procedure is for handling any sort of failure with the sodium coolant.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[CrazedWalrus]

Any time.

I was just in my home state of Pennsylvania yesterday and saw a bumper sticker asking "Why not coal?" (Coal Miner's Union) The major industry around my area used to be anthracite mining, and when that collapsed, the town kinda went to shit, although it's coming back slowly. Given that, I understand why they'd want coal, just like I'm sure people in Detroit want the auto industry back, and the midwest wants ethanol.

Unfortunately, even though it would probably be a boon to my home town, I can't agree with bringing back coal. All of the evidence just seems to point to critical public safety issues due to the inevitable pollution. I'm a believer that, when the world changes, you change with it. Re-educate, find something else to do, and go do it. This resistance to change is what keeps communities poor in the global economy, and creates lobbies to bring back technologies and industries that are probably better off dead or significantly re-structured.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Jesus_666]

Actually, they partially are. Breeders can be reduced to dramatically reduce the amount of waste generated, thus eliminating one of the major issues with nuclear power. I've seen predictions from 95% to 98% less waste.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Artifakt]

I agree that the human race is unlikely to make the decision to save the Manatees at the cost of less jobs, fewer lifestyle options, and such, but it is becoming apparent that impoverishing the rest of the capital E Ecology or even local ecologies hurts us as well. Maybe Manatees aren't that significant, maybe Alligators can all go, just maybe we could pave the whole everglades without losing carrying capacity for humans, but take out enough species, whole biomes, and so on, and it will hit us too.
        Even before that, safe for which humans? Plenty of us wouldn't care about something that only kills people on the coasts, if we live inland, but those people on the coasts get to vote too, most places. If wave rockers on the Texas coast affect erosion of the few remaining sandbars protecting New Orleans, Texas may think they're great, but Louisiana won't.
        Even before extinctions, something that commits large parts of the world's coastlines to power generation will probably have impacts we don't like on good old us, for example, tankers hit coastlines sometimes - what happens when an oil tanker mishap also takes down part of the wind and wave grid for a double whammy? (Hint, the oil company says it was all the wave rocker floats fault and the tanker wouldn't have run aground at all if not for them - after all, if you had just loss a valuable asset in an accident involving your competitors, and they were about to sue you, wouldn't you try to prove they were at fault? Oil companies don't sue mother nature for putting rocks there, but when someone owns the coast and covered it with big moving objects that 'affect currents', that's different.)

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[timmarhy]

the 1950's called and they want their nuclear tech back. no one has built a new plant based on water cooling in 50 years.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Artifakt]

Iron doesn't fission or fuse, so steel is only risky if it's got mechanical potential energy. Ergo, we must ban weightlifting and tall buildings. All other elements besides iron are potentially capable of liberating energy by either fusing to make iron or fissioning to make iron, so it's all other elements we must ban. If we just make the whole universe iron, and pack it all into one ball so nothing can fall any farther, then everybody will ,at last, be safe. Uhm, wait...

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[timmarhy]

coal plants release far more radiation into the environment then nuclear plants ever have. it's just effective fear mongering that's preventing them being used.

i'd like to see a link to that warnign though, i wasn't aware inland USA was that polluted.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[jacksonj04]

No, you're thinking of either a controlled shutdown or a SCRAM (Emergency, probably uncontrolled, but still designed to be safe). A meltdown is what happens when the emergency control systems fail and the core physically melts due to the high temperature, possibly melting its way through the containment (Or worse - see China Syndrome).

Furthermore, you're not understanding the role of the control rods (No plant I can think of uses carbon btw). They are fully lowered into the reactor to slow the reaction rate by absorbing neutrons, hence the retraction of the rods would cause a meltdown.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[philicorda]

"or just how hot a commercial sterling solar engine is at the mirror's focal point. "

You had to really stretch to think of something dangerous about solar/sterling engines. :)
I would not count the heat as a danger anyway, it's necessary to generate power, not a byproduct like radioactive waste or chemical/particulate pollution.

As far as safe, clean power goes, they are pretty good.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[khallow]

The retraction of the carbon rods is called meltdown.

No, a meltdown is when the fuel rods and surrounding material starts to melt. Worst case, the fuel completely melts and pools at the bottom of the reactor container, melts through the floor of the reactor container, and keeps going for a while till enough other material, particularly neutron-absorbing material (graphite, bismuth) (which in the worst case for old, poorly designed reactors may be ample portions of bedrock underneath the reactor) has mixed in to bring the fuel density below criticality. There may be additional chemical energy sources (like molten graphite and Earth's atmosphere) to keep the fuel molten. Chernobyl is probably fairly close to the worst case scenario in a situation where a well-organized response to the meltdown occurs. Worst case would probably be a meltdown as part of a larger event that kills off the local authority (eg, large asteroid impact, large suprise nuclear strike) In that case, there are bigger problems, but the meltdown isn't going to help.

Naturally you don't want a meltdown, but if anyone advertises a meltdown-free nuclear power plant, run screaming in the other direction. The alternative is far worse.

There are modern nuclear reactor designs where meltdowns are impossible. For example, pebble bed reactors. The fuel never reaches the density that would generate enough fissions and heat to melt the pebbles. And even if all reactor cooling fails, the pile can be air-cooled.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[BlueParrot]

There is another factor to consider in this. Chernobyl used a design whereby a lack of water caused a positive feedback loop in the reactor to cause it to get even hotter.

Oh if that was the ONLY thing that was wrong with it...

1)The end of the control rods were made of graphite, which accelerated the reaction rather than slowing it when the operators pushed the panic button.

2)The channels that contained the control rods were far too narrow, causing the control rods to get jammed when they deformed due to the intense heat.

3)The reactor did not have a containment building, allowing the radioactive gases to escape into the atmosphere after the accident blew the roof of the reactor itself.

4)The reactor core was unusually large, containing much more nuclear fuel than other reactor designs, thus making the radioactive release worse.

5)The reactor was staffed with uneducated workers that didn't have significant experience with nuclear reactors.

6)The operators were not told about the design problems with the reactors even thou they were well known at the time.

7)The operators ran the reactor outside of safety regulations, withdrawing many more control rods than the reactor was designed to operate with ( that this was even possible is another design flaw ).

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[m0rph3us0]

Technically you're right, there is no "risk" of contamination from coal, it just plain contaminates everyday. There is enough uranium and thorium in most coal that if you could extract it economically would produce more power than the coal itself. Coal is somewhat radioactive, how do you think they do carbon dating?

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[superskippy]

There's a lot of fluff in reply to this comment, but basically everybody knows that nuclear power is very clean and nice, unless a big disaster happens, whereupon it becomes extremely unpleasant. Coal on the other hand is slightly unpleasant all of the time. Which you think is best largely depends on how much you trust the people running them to avoid the big disaster.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[BlueParrot]

Are breeder reactors the type people are advocating for a return to nuclear power? I don't think so...

There are other coolants you can use for breeder reactors. My personal favorite is the lead cooled system. It can safely shut itself down even without any computer or operator intervention (thanks to thermal expansion of the core ), there is no pressure in the reactor, so it can't explode, lead doesn't boil at the temperatures involved, so a loss of coolant accident as happened at TMI is unlikely, and it can reach temperatures high enough to allow high-efficiency thermochemical production of hydrogen from seawater. The latter will be important as natural gas gets more expensive ( virtually all fertilizer used in agriculture is made using hydrogen from natural gas ). Main issue is corrosion in molten lead, but already proven materials can handle it for electricity generation. The more advanced high-temperature system that produces hydrogen thermochemically at 850 C will require more advanced materials to be developed however.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Anthracite coal is pretty different than more typical bituminous coal.

It is almost pure carbon with trapped natural gas. And while it's very hard to ignite, when it burns, it burns with a blue flame and produces almost no particulates. The ash is chemically inert and not dangerous to the environment.

The *main* reason we couldn't use too much anthracite is there simply isn't that much of it. What is available is not amenable to anything but wide, but narrow open pit strips which tend to rip up the landscape over many square miles.

The reason you're seeing a boom in the use of anthracite is back in the "old days", most uses (heating, trains, etc) required large sizes (referred to as egg, chestnut, pea, rice, barley) and the fine anthracite powder was cast on piles that reached 1000-2000 feet in height.

Back in the late 80's, due to some changes in regulation and technology, so called "co-generation" electric plants because feasible because they required the fine antrhacite coal and so did not require anything more than a lot of dump trucks and front end loaders.

For a guy who is a coal-cracker, you are not very knowledgeable about this fascinating form of coal. I left the coal regions 25 years ago, and the area is beautiful where it wasn't torn up by "strip" mines. A lot of that was due to ineffective regulations on the strip mines. But the environment has recovered pretty quickly now that it was filled in. in another 50 years, you won't be able to tell there were strip mines.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Zymergy]

Looked it up again: http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=Oklahoma+Mercury+Fish+Warning&btnG=Search

I was wrong, It is not more than one serving per week... (but that was 1995)... http://www.epa.gov/waterscience/fish/advisories/news/newsmar05.htm
"The Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) plans to lower the acceptable level of mercury in fish from one part per million (ppm) to 0.3 ppm so that the state's standard matches federal guidelines. In advance of the change, the department issued an advisory that women who are pregnant and young children should not eat more than one serving of predatory fish per week (including bass, flathead catfish, walleye, gar and crappie) from Oklahoma waterways.
Source: Oklahoma DEQ issues statewide advisory for mercury levels in fish, Associated Press, Feb 16, 2005."

As 'large' as some of my fishing friends and neighbors are, I feel confident in saying that they often surpass the vague "one serving" quantity in a single dining session. There are very few 'Natural Sources' of Mercury in Oklahoma. NOTE: Oklahoma only has one or two 'natural' lakes/reservoirs out of the 3 dozen or so lakes/reservoirs in the state. I'd expect similar results in adjoining states.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[timmarhy]

coal is slightly unpleasant? have you ever been to a coal fired power station?

"Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 10,000 deaths per year, there would have to be 25 melt-downs each year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning"

http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm

please read and take note, nuclear power is MUCH safer and just as useful as any form of power generation we have.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Zymergy]

Correction... Study quoted was in 2005 (not 1995). Dough!

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[ArbitraryConstant]

Erm... it was safe. The reactor suffered a significant failure of its cooling system without escalating beyond that. No design that relies on zero accidents is safe, that requires a design where even accidents aren't catastrophic.

If the sodium leak had involved sodium exposed directly to the reactor (it didn't), environmental contamination would primarily be from Sodium-24, which has a half-life of 15 hours. That's not irreversible contamination, at worst that's a temporary evacuation order. It's not like non-nuclear industrial accidents can't get that bad (eg, the Bhopal disaster). This is something we already have to live with as an industrialized civilization, nuclear power simply has the virtue of releasing far less CO2.

The only part of this that causes me concern is the cover up.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[turgid]

There is another factor to consider in this. Chernobyl used a design whereby a lack of water caused a positive feedback loop in the reactor to cause it to get even hotter. U.S. and most other designs use a negative feedback loop

Much worse than that (which comes from a very US-centric view of nuclear reactor design) is that the control rods had neutron reflectors on both ends (i.e. graphite moderator which provides more thermal neutrons for the chain reaction) and that they had to be "driven" mechanically (against water/steam pressure) into the reactor to subdue the reaction vs. sane designs where gravity would have done the job.

Water schmater. Gas-cooled reactors can be very safe. Chernobyl was an horrendous design combining the worst of both worlds (light water coolant and a graphite moderator!!!?!). Incompetent, uneducated operators, an arrogant, superstitious manager, safety systems that could be (and were) vetoed, basically a criminally bad design being operated by nicompoops.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

is there as much a tendency to cover up accidents on those? are the cover ups bad enough for the staff to commit suicide in shame after the event? Dress it up all you like, this is disastrous PR for the nuclear industry. People aren't sure about its safety as it is, deliberate cover ups are just totally insane.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[budgenator]

I think there are still a few around;

Chernobyl's RBMK reactor, however, used solid graphite as a neutron moderator to slow down the neutrons, and neutron-absorbing light water to cool the core. Thus neutrons are slowed down even if steam bubbles form in the water. Furthermore, because steam absorbs neutrons much less readily than water, increasing an RBMK reactor's temperature means that more neutrons are able to split uranium atoms, increasing the reactor's power output. This makes the RBMK design very unstable at low power levels, and prone to suddenly increasing energy production to dangerous level if the temperature rises. This was counter-intuitive and unknown to the crew.
more significant flaw was in the design of the control rods that are inserted into the reactor to slow down the reaction. In the RBMK reactor design, the control rod end tips were made of graphite and the extenders (the end areas of the control rods above the end tips, measuring 1-metre (3 ft) in length) were hollow and filled with water, while the rest of the rod - the truly functional part which absorbs the neutrons and thereby halts the reaction - was made of boron carbide. With this design, when the rods are initially inserted into the reactor, the graphite ends displace some coolant. This greatly increases the rate of the fission reaction, since graphite is more potent neutron moderator (a material that enables a nuclear reaction) and also absorbs far fewer neutrons than the boiling light water. Thus for the first few seconds of control rod activation, reactor power output is increased, rather than reduced as desired. This behavior is counter-intuitive and was not known to the reactor operators. Chernobyl disaster

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[marcansoft]

Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes that much in a half hour.

Bzzt. That statement makes no sense. Go read up on kWh vs kW and try again.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[budgenator]

Mercury Poisoning is a little vague, as is Illinois Fish and Your Health, but that is understandable because fishing and hunting is a significant source of income, I know in Michigan, during the late seventies early eighties, Mother's milk was generally unfit for human consumption!

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Dun Malg]

With breeder reactors, I'm unaware of what their procedure is for handling any sort of failure with the sodium coolant. They have a negative temperature coefficient due to the fuel and fuel cladding design. Thermal expansion causes more neutrons to escape, thus creating an upper limit on reactivity, even in the absence of sodium coolant. When this upper limit is reached, the core loses too many neutrons to sustain the reaction and it pretty much stops completely.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

"Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes that much in a half hour."

Yup. the plant I work at pulls 50 MW, 24/7.

Ironically, we make silicon for PV applications.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[ArbitraryConstant]

With pebble bed reactors (and other newer designs), they are "passively safe". This basically means that when the thermal energy in the core gets high enough, it is no longer a neutron-friendly environment and fission can't be sustained. The reactor is designed such that heat is naturally lost to the environment fast enough to keep the equilibrium temperature below that which would melt anything in the core. A meltdown in that case would be impossible, because heat by itself acts like emergency control rods, no operators or computers have to get anything right to halt the reaction.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Dun Malg]

You realize breeder reactors are used for producing plutonium, and NOT for power generation? No.

You realize that you are ignorant on the subject of breeder reactors?

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[TooMuchToDo]

A negative coefficient is usually the best way to go (vs. a positive coefficient design Chernobyl employed). Runaway nuclear chain reaction = bad day.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[urcreepyneighbor]

basically a criminally bad design being operated by nicompoops. Communism in a nutshell.

zing!

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[turgid]

And G W Bushes regime too.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[zrq]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/33784558.html

Does anyone else have problems reading pages on the National Geographic website ? I can see bits of the page, but most of it is obscured by a huge JavaScript driven advert that refuses to go away.
(using FireFox 2.0.0.10 on Linux)

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[KnightStalker]

What does "contains radiation" mean? If something is radioactive, it doesn't contain the radiation, by definition. It releases it.

Besides, the article really only suggests that the areas surrounding coal plants receive more radioactivity than the areas surrounding nuclear plants, which is not surprising since nuclear plants contain their waste instead of spewing it into the environment. I think nuclear power needs a lot more investment and is superior to coal burning but let's not be sensationalistic.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[dangitman]

5)The reactor was staffed with uneducated workers that didn't have significant experience with nuclear reactors.

I think you mean "... uneducated workers who didn't have significant experience..."

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[MECC]

That won't happen with breeder reactors, right? They're intrinsically safe.

They're only as safe as they're built. There's nothing 'intrinsically safe' about breeder reactors.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[emilper]

Coal on the other hand is slightly unpleasant

I lived once for three month near a thermo- power plant ... the firemen had every few days (like two or three times a week) dill sessions ... I can tell you, the sirens were more than slightly unpleasant. Also, having the fear of them boilers blowing up drilled into my bones regularly did not help much with my enthusiasm for the place.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[dbIII]

This is unfortunately bullshit. The original paper is on the ornl web site if you wish to read it. Considering pollution controls as a black box that throws a given percentage of all the inputs up into the air may be acceptable in a high school project but once you are beyond that it is just junk science. The cherry picking of the input to find the most radioactive coal possible and imply that it is all like that is extremely dubious at best. As far as I know the paper has never been cited since in a scientific publication (prove me wrong if you can) but PR agencies for nuclear power interests love it.

Coal has enough problems without making stupid stuff up.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[tjstork]

Unfortunately, even though it would probably be a boon to my home town, I can't agree with bringing back coal. All of the evidence just seems to point to critical public safety issues due to the inevitable pollution. I'm a believer that, when the world changes, you change with it

This is a pretty simplistic answer to change, unfortunately, and it fails to speak to how terrorism can spread like wildfire. Sure, you can say that we should all switch to some other way of life because we are screwing the planet, but, at the end of the day, you are but a man with a can of tuna saying that the dozen people in the lifeboat have to share. No, they do not. they could throw you overboard and take your tuna. Or, they could just eat you.

Coal mining isn't inherently bad. No resource extraction really is. It's just that 6 billion people can't live the way a billion people used to, and that ultimately begs the question, what if the world only had a population of 400 million Americans, and there was nobody else?

I guarantee you that your coal miner would be tempted to nuke the rest of the planet and keep his job, rather than uproot his entire family because some other uppity pricks from DC want him to "change."

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[mstahl]

Ever been to Centralia?

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[mstahl]

There's an excellent analysis on wikipedia, including a pretty good breakdown of the chronology leading up to and after the meltdown.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[torkus]

There's nothing intrinsically safe about anything with a power output in the 1GWe range :)

Then again crossing the street isn't particularly safe. It's funny. People look to mitigate risk from the .0000000000000001% scenario before the double-digit scenario.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[wxjones]

In Soviet Russia reactors meltdown you!

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[ChangelingJane]

That news story is obviously a fabrication.

The last time I visited Chernobyl, it was a radioactive wasteland full of mutant dogs, crazed boars, and weird headless things running amok. What a nightmare.

Thank god I had my AK47, a case worth of Vodka, and an endless supply of metal bolts.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[quanticle]

Reactors don't use carbon as a mediator. They use carbon (graphite) for the control rods that control the output of the reactor. The mediator that carries away the heat is usually water or some kind of liquid metal, like sodium.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[quanticle]

Don't lots of older reactors use graphite control rods? I know that Chernobyl did, since those very rods caught fire from the heat of the runaway reaction.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[X0563511]

I do, now.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[c.r.o.c.o]

Bzzt. That statement makes no sense. Go read up on kWh vs kW and try again.

I apologize, I shouldn't have confused kW with kWh. As a psych major, physics and especially electricity was never my forte. I will correct my original post to "Statements like "this windmill can power thousands of homes" are meaningless, when a single steel foundry consumes an order of magnitude more energy during the same unit of time."

Now please read up on Cherry picking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Although this is line of argument does not address another fact: Yes, coal causes more deaths (or, if you'd like we can just say "damage"), but the damage is spread out over the entire population, roughly evenly. However, a nuclear power plant meltdown causes damage in a very specific location. So, even if the amount of damage caused by coal plants is greater, the higher concentration of possible nuclear-related damage keeps people more cautious, especially when the plant is IYBY.

Say the damage to NYC from coal is worth $X per year on average with a standard deviation of 0. Now, put several nuke plants beside NYC that have an annual expected damage cost of $Y where Y is much less than X, but the standard deviation is much higher. One of them blows and you just wasted the whole city. It's not very likely, yes, but a real bummer if it happens.

So if you're going to compare the average cost, please also compare the risk to that estimate.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[sholden]

Because the people left. And people, it would seem, have a bigger negative impact on wildlife than the radioactivity from the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history...

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[timmarhy]

The level of risk? there's been a single dramatic failure of a nuclear plant ever. just one. and even that happening again is impossible due to reactor designs changing.

yes i hear you yelling 3 mile island, but keep in mind NO ONE was injured at 3 mile and wildlife still lives in the swamp around the plant.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[sethstorm]

Given that, I understand why they'd want coal, just like I'm sure people in Detroit want the auto industry back, and the midwest wants ethanol. Perhaps if there wasn't that blow delivered to them in the 70's-80's (from environmentalists and people with a hate for Detroit/"Big Labor" that exceeds the hate for Bush), that mistake wouldn't have been realized.

You underestimate the amount of people who will buy Detroit/UAW(and not at exhorbitant prices) despite the push to kill it. They are not of the type that will just settle for an import just because some non-voting person wants us to go in a direction contrary to the citizens' wishes.

I was just in my home state of Pennsylvania yesterday and saw a bumper sticker asking "Why not coal?" (Coal Miner's Union) The major industry around my area used to be anthracite mining, and when that collapsed, the town kinda went to shit, although it's coming back slowly. Maybe there are some that are just turned off by environmentalists, completely.

Re-educate, find something else to do, and go do it. Fine, then get rid of all of the "Right to Work" related laws, and then encourage the extraction of Oil Shale out of the West.

This resistance to change is what keeps communities poor in the global economy, and creates lobbies to bring back technologies and industries that are probably better off dead or significantly re-structured. No, that's what unionbusting has done.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

PONIES!

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[jacksonj04]

RMBK reactors (Like Chernobyl) tended to use graphite tipped control rods, but this has since been altered in light of the fact that they do catch fire. The other carbon-based moderator tends to be boron carbide, which is a ceramic with boron as the primary moderator.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Dolly_Llama]

Look at the political consequences of breeders

They move to the suburbs and start voting republican?

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Raenex]

there's been a single dramatic failure of a nuclear plant ever Three Mile Island was a dramatic failure. The plant was designed to never reach that point, but it did. There was also a hydrogen bubble that they were worried might explode, and they were debating taking risky action to prevent it.

even that happening again is impossible due to reactor designs changing Of course, before Three Mile Island and Cherynobl both would have been described as "impossible", just like Titanic was "unsinkable".

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[MrKaos]

Nuclear power is not the only source of radiation released because of human activity.

Accumulation of radioactive isotopes concentrates in the food chain. They mimic elements the body require and are deposited in the body by the food eaten. Depending on the radioactivity it emits and where it's absorbed the medical effects occur. i.e, strontium 90, calcium analogue, bone cancers.

Radioactive isotopes should collected and stored no matter what industry they come from.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[kabocox]

Even before that, safe for which humans? Plenty of us wouldn't care about something that only kills people on the coasts, if we live inland, but those people on the coasts get to vote too, most places. If wave rockers on the Texas coast affect erosion of the few remaining sandbars protecting New Orleans, Texas may think they're great, but Louisiana won't.

Obviously safe for my/our group of humans. You are thinking regionally at the state level where some states can fight against each other. But what's really going to be it is when the US as a whole finds a magic energy source that just means messing up one spot on the globe that we never see. Damn, sounds like I've almost described oil, but oil only messes up far more than the domestic politics of the oil producing nations.

If we had some solar farm over Nevada, or tidal energy generating sources along most of our entire sea coast, if a foreign ship dared beach itself on them, they'll be paying out for the down time and the replacement costs and the clean up costs. You don't think that we'd really let some foreign interests trump domestic concerns do you? The whole mess with oil can be summed up by saying it gives some domestic folk interests in foreign resources and such. Heck, we care about the price per a gallon of gas or a barrel of oil.

What if almost the entire US didn't care about the price of gas or barrels of oil from foreign markets because we were using sustainable domestic energy sources? From a military point of view, we'd be much better off. If that time ever came, the US would never take part in any more middle east peace talks and would really start not caring about the entire region. Part of their problem with us is that our government has to take an interest in those countries for our oil resources. If we didn't need oil resources, we'd let them rot.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[kevin.fowler]

As someone who lived in a small town which had 300,000 tons of fly ash dumped on it per year (for a while), I am pretty horrified by what fly ash is. I am especially horrified that the same person who engineered this fly ash dumping is having a MALL BUILT ON THE 5-YEAR-OLD FLY ASH DUMP.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Chernobyl was pretty obviously designed primarily to produce plutonium, electrical power production was a secondary benefit. Hence #4, and the graphite moderator.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Kingrames]

Oh well, sorry for that.

I was basing that information on what I was taught in science class back in high school. I suppose it's very likely out of date.
Of course I was rather suspicious at the time of why they were teaching us about how a nuclear power plant worked...

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

However, even if a third of the individual animals are killed by the radioactivity, the species would be able to thrive in the shadow of the reactor. This is true for the human animal as well, though human society would almost certainly find that level unacceptable. Obviously, I pulled the 1/3 out of my ass, maybe it's 1/5000 or maybe it's 0 - but until someone does a study, it's worth remembering.

Re:Nuclear Power and Global Warming

[gr8scot]

Hyperbole aside, many of the "worst accidents" at nuclear plants are in fact merely instances of property damage with no injuries or fatalities. Wariness of nuclear reactors is smart, but so is wariness of speeding through thin air at high altitudes in a tube of metal, using a combination of basically flat, slightly curved protuberances and extreme velocity to keep hundreds of passengers aloft. Statistically, both are safer than the alternative means of achieving the same goals.

This video will drive one procedural change

[xC0000005]

They'll be certain to address the cause of the leak - videotapes. Whether or not the sodium leak problems will be addressed I can't say, but they'll ban video evidence of problems for sure.

Re:This video will drive one procedural change

[TubeSteak]

They'll be certain to address the cause of the leak - videotapes. Whether or not the sodium leak problems will be addressed I can't say, but they'll ban video evidence of problems for sure. Then how exactly will [government agencies/regulators] document incidents like that?
Are they going to ban photographs & written descriptions too?

Their mistake wasn't that video was taken, it was that they lied to the public.

Re:This video will drive one procedural change

[ChronosWS]

Unlikely. These video tapes serve very useful purposes internally to the organization, for instance to diagnose and correct problems. While it's fun to believe that government agencies like this operate as if they had no responsibility whatsoever, they have to avoid having repeat accidents or they will get shut down, people will lose their jobs, etc. So if for no other reason that to help them cover their own asses in the future they will continue to produce this kind of evidence for us to receive as leaks.

Regarding Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are my Zoku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei subs? Episode 4 aired and afk hasn't released episode 3 yet.

All Fucking Kunts

Re:Regarding Japan

[nomessages]

AFK being...AFK then?

Re:Regarding Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

So a guy uses most of his available spare time to produce some of the best translations available for you, for free, and all you do is insult him? Die in a fire, you worthless piece of shit.

Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

See, nuke power is safe, and we always know how bad even these contained breakdowns are.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems there is still work to do. But once that's done, nuke power for everyone!

Re:Safe Nukes

[X0563511]

This is not a power station! That's not what breeder reactors do!

The fast breeder or fast breeder reactor (FBR) is a fast neutron reactor designed to breed fuel by producing more fissile material than it consumes. The FBR is one possible type of breeder reactor.

Re:Safe Nukes

[toppavak]

Especially the new micro-reactor types like this one discussed on slashdot earlier. While I dont think that the most effective application of these is in power generation for neighborhoods or small towns, I can see where a self-contained reactor that will generate 200kW for 4 decades might be useful in ships and spacecraft.

It makes me sad how much baseless fear there is of nuclear power out there. A coolant leak is a pretty major breakdown as Nuclear disasters go, and AFAIK nothing truly bad happened in this situation. I'm not saying that nothing could happen- but properly maintained and operated nuclear power is far safer than the majority of fossil-fuel based technologies out there and significantly more cost-effective as well.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Kohath]

Gee, how many people died? How does that compare to other power generation mechanisms or the number of deaths attributable to the lack of power?

Nothing is perfectly safe. Nuclear power is relatively safer than all other forms of power generation per Kilowatt Hour and it's safer than not having power available.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Man On Pink Corner]

See, nuke power is safe, and we always know how bad even these contained breakdowns are.

Yeah, this video was way cooler than a video that shows the effects of coal-fired plants in normal operation.

Interior shot, emphysema ward. Nobody is wearing hazmat suits, and the place doesn't exactly look like a Doom level, but people are still dying here. The patients look like Auschwitz refugees... three-dimensional shadows of human beings who lack the strength to fight for their last breaths, suffocating like fish on 100% O2.

But yeah, I see your point about how, um, scary and dangerous nuclear power is.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

How unfortunate we are that we can choose between only nukes and coal.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, we must not count the other parts of the system that are unsafe when considering how safe nuke plants are.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

As far as we know. How many other suppressed videos, or events without videos, are there?

And the people who die from nuke mining don't think it's so safe, even if they don't appear in a video.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

Rockets never explode during launch, and satellites never fall to Earth in big chunks.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

For everyone left alive after all the kinks are worked out through trial and error.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear power is a civil engineering matter.
The safety of nuclear power is not.

All the major accidents have had the same story line of confusion, the accident, and then an attempt to cover up.
Windscale, TMI, chernobyl. Accidents which should not have happened but for bad management and lack of experienced engineers on site. The Windscale fire was caused by the pile being run way outside it's original design limits to create more plutonium and tritium for the British bomb projects.

Chernobyl is being used as a bargaining chip by Russia. They will not strengthen the sarcophagus without outside investment. Europe feels pressured to pay because they also can imagine the consequences. This creates tension.

While nuclear power plants have become more reliable, there are other issues to consider before they can be considered safe.

Re:Safe Nukes

[X0563511]

Never mind, I'm an idiot. I was confused, these ARE for power, but can be used for weapons.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

As the AC said:

Nuclear power is a civil engineering matter.
The safety of nuclear power is not.

All the major accidents have had the same story line of confusion, the accident, and then an attempt to cover up.
Windscale, TMI, chernobyl. Accidents which should not have happened but for bad management and lack of experienced engineers on site. The Windscale fire was caused by the pile being run way outside it's original design limits to create more plutonium and tritium for the British bomb projects.

Chernobyl is being used as a bargaining chip by Russia. They will not strengthen the sarcophagus without outside investment. Europe feels pressured to pay because they also can imagine the consequences. This creates tension.

While nuclear power plants have become more reliable, there are other issues to consider before they can be considered safe.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Chandon Seldon]

As far as we know. How many other suppressed videos, or events without videos, are there?

Do you realize how many deaths would need to have been suppressed to even bring nuclear up to the death count of hydroelectric (much less coal)?

And the people who die from nuke mining don't think it's so safe, even if they don't appear in a video.

If we built more fast breeding plants like Monju, we could run off the already-mined nuclear material for hundreds of years.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Chandon Seldon]

How unfortunate we are that we can choose between only nukes and coal.

What other option do we have the industrial capacity to build out to keep up with the expected increase in demand over the next couple decades?

It's nice to imagine that we could solve the problem with photovoltaics, but the entire industry couldn't build enough solar panels to handle the increase in power consumption for *next month* in *10 years*. It comes down to silicon fabrication, which we really don't have the technology to do in volumes relevant to large scale electricity generation. The other "alternative" power generation schemes either have similar problems or they only work in very specific places (geothermal, solar-thermal, tidal, etc).

Even if the US government started tomorrow to massively subsidize every alternative power generation scheme that had any chance of helping, we'd still be building new coal and nuclear plants for two decades. You just can't magic into existance orders of magnitude of industrial capacity overnight - so the choice really is coal or nuclear (or natural gas, which is slightly cleaner and quite a bit stupider than coal).

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

Do you realize how many people have died from mining the nuke fuel? And how many have died from the other bad manufacturing processes? And how many will die when there's an accident (or sabotage) at the waste storage dumps, sometime in the next several hundred/thousand years?

There are already terrorist attacks on oilfields. What happens when they hit a nuke plant? What happens when they just rob one?

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

Iceland started out with little science, less engineering, and one of the world's poorest economies in the 1980s. After a couple decades, they're generating 70% their energy from geothermal. The US energy demand is larger, but we've got even more geothermal resources, more money, all of Iceland's experience, and greater urgency.

Wind, tidal and solar also can be built out fast. Nuke plants take a long time, in addition to their risks.

Each of those can be built where they work best. And conservation can reduce big chunks, like eliminating practically all the appliance standby power, requiring practically all cars to get over 30MPG, revamping airline logistics to minimize circling/taxiing for delays (and slow down flights to arrivals when they do occur), and converting commuter highways to rail conveyors (and just using mass transit instead of individual transit).

We're not trapped in a choice between nukes and coal. Though I'm sure Dick Cheney will never believe it.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Chandon Seldon]

Do you realize how many people have died from mining the nuke fuel?

Ok. Let's find some numbers then. What ground rules do you want to set? All time mining deaths? Coal will be way higher. Deaths after basic safety precautions were understood? Coal will still be higher simply due to volume.

And how many will die when there's an accident (or sabotage) at the waste storage dumps, sometime in the next several hundred/thousand years?

Radiation accidents tend to expose like two people who then have an increased cancer risk when they get old. As industrial risks go, that's pretty boring. And we can make almost your whole issue go away just by using modern fuel recycling techniques.

What happens when they hit a nuke plant?

My bet: The power company will lose millions of dollars to damages on expensive equipment and to the massive PR hit. There will be no deaths, significant radiation exposures, or significant release of radioactive material.

What happens when they just rob one?

The DOW will fall 150 pts as the media go into a frenzy over the "nuclear terrorist" threat. Four hours later the FBI will catch the perpetrators and realize that they just stole two cement blocks. They'll still get 5 years in jail for "making terrorist threats".

Seriously, nuclear power plants aren't dangerous as industrial plants go and they aren't interesting as terror targets aside from the media hysteria that surrounds them. Nuclear power plants aren't bombs, and the radioactive material that they use isn't any more interesting than your average highly poisonous industrial material.

If terrorists ever do execute a plot involving a nuclear power plant, just be thankful that they got distracted by the overhyped target and didn't hit something legitimately dangerous like an urban chemical plant.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Chandon Seldon]

Iceland started out with little science, less engineering, and one of the world's poorest economies in the 1980s.

Iceland is the *perfect case* for geothermal. Perhaps there are specific places in the US that are equally lucky, but Iceland's story is basically irrelevant to the US as a whole in the same way that tidal power is irrelevant to people who live in Kansas.

... Solar also can be built out fast.

My entire post was explaining why solar (at least in the form of photo-voltaic panels) *cannot* be built out fast. You just can't fab silicon that quickly.

And conservation can reduce big chunks ... converting commuter highways to rail conveyors (and just using mass transit instead of individual transit).

You might as well be talking about ponies and rainbows. If conservation was going to save the world, it would have happened in the 70's, and rail conveyors (hell, mass transit in general) is about as realistic in the near-future USA as Gravity trains.

You seem to be operating in a "If I were crowned dictator of the world" fantasy. In the real world, what happens is constrained by the existence of other people (the study of which is frequently called "economics"). Government policy can manipulate that to an extent, but even the most drastic of realistic government interventions still take time.

If massive government intervention started now, we could probably start installing some of the technologies you mention in bulk in a decade or two (sooner in lucky cases, but there are less of them than you seem to think). In three or four decades we could start replacing old power plants. By 2100 we could be off fossil fuels and nuclear entirely.

But for the new power plants that *will go in* in the next decade or two, the choice really is nuclear or coal - and modern nuclear is arguably better than most of the solutions that you suggest.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Doc Ruby]

The ex-president of Iceland who presided over their conversion says the US can do it. The US has lots of geothermal. And once it's electric, it can be pumped around the grid. Or it can power electrolysis to produce liquid fuels.

Also, I didn't say solar could do it alone. The point of what I said was that lots of alternatives to nukes and coal (and oil) exist. They can all be combined to scale up quickly.

If you think a radical conversion to more efficient energy is "ponies and rainbows", then you don't know what $200:bl oil means. Or even $100 oil for a year or more.

What's more massive government intervention than the $TRILLION (and thousands of lives, tens of thousands maimed) spent on Iraq because of its oil? That has done little but quintuple the profits we've paid out on multiplying oil demand. But we somehow should have pulled off conservation in the 1970s, when Gerald Ford (R-MI/GM) was running the show? Carter, who was a nuke engineer but instead amped up solar until Reagan/Bush shut it down? The US has never seen politics and economics so heavily against just burning more oil. That's the only reason nukes get considered (OK, also Cheney loves them like only the devil could). But what has also changed is that America's European competitors have demonstrated wind and geothermal on a scale that could replace petrofuels if applied in the US, with our own conditions.

You just lost me calling conservation efforts "ponies and rainbows". And that "mass transit in general is unrealistic in the near future". You're demanding that nukes, the energy that's been massively government subsidized from the very beginning (and before) and still isn't economical, replace all other alternatives to petrofuels. Which itself would take decades of building, growing pains that would see unsafe plants built and operated. But that's not "ponies and rainbows": it's macho, and it's clean because "it's physics". Meanwhile, Sweden too is going to be off petrofuels (despite neighboring #3 exporter Norway) before a single new US nuke plant is built.

I'll see you in the future. Then we'll see what's right. Until then, I'm not wasting any more energy on this conversation.

Re:Safe Nukes

[freedom_india]

Iceland does *not* have wall street.
US does have wall street.

Which is more profitable? Coal/oil burning plant requiring constant maintence and fuel, or some bad-a$$ geothermal plant located in a far corner requiring no further constant flow of money?

Re:Safe Nukes

[nunyadambinness]

"There are already terrorist attacks on oilfields. What happens when they hit a nuke plant? What happens when they just rob one?"

I finally get it. You're not incredibly stupid, you're just a coward.

I have to say, it's pitiful that you allow yourself to be dominated by irrational fear, but that's to be expected, you're an ignorant coward.

Deny it. You r post here proves it unequivocally, so watching you try will be a pleasure.

Re:Safe Nukes

[Kohath]

As far as we know. How many other suppressed videos, or events without videos, are there?

Maybe that's my problem. I only believe in real deaths, not imaginary ones. I'm sure all the imaginary wives and children miss their imaginary loved ones though. The pretend world can be sad.

And the people who die from nuke mining don't think it's so safe, even if they don't appear in a video.

And I'm sure all the mothers whose children accidentally drowned in bathtubs are wary too. But I bet they still have their other children wash once in a while.

Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear power

[religious freak]

(continued title)
... except stupid people.
This SHOULD show that even a "disaster" is minimal by nuclear standards and that safety is about a billion times better than any type of plant, but who knows how this will be interpreted by those who are inclined to panic at what they don't understand.

Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't stop the signal Mal

what?

[mofag]

I watched the whole video and I didn't see anything of note. I didn't see the "small mountain of sodium" and I didn't see anyone die. What is it? can anyone explain what I was meant to see please?

Re:what?

[megaditto]

You are not supposed to actually watch that video. You are supposed to just switch to the OMG WTF NUKULAR BAD groupthink.

Face it, nuclear power is Bad, so the fact that there is a video showing a bunch of kids in hazmat suits re-enacting Blair Witch in their school basement should we all the proof you need. Any grainy image of sewage pipes is a bonus.

Re:what?

[iminplaya]

Here's the correct link

Re:what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you terrified and screaming for the blood of purveyors of anything nuclear? My god man, "Camera angle graphically tells the story!" The cameraman is "Going back quickly" at a furious walking-pace! There's so much SODIUM you can't even see the footsteps in it! (Except when you can!)

I believe we've seen all we need to!

Re:what?

[Anonymous Coward]

At several points in the video you can see a white substance coating things, especially on the underside. This is probably the sodium, meaning that the stuff escaped, despite assurances that this hadn't happened, contradicting earlier statements by the agency. Consequently, it means that there may have been a corrosive effect to a (much) larger part of the facility, meaning that the plant probably was damaged to a much greater extent than has been made public, but also that the consequences of another incident could be far worse.

Re:what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that the disaster was so horrible, there's no piles of bodies or anything - it's just that the government lied about the situation, and this is proof of the lie.

Re:what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The true importance of the video isn't so much in being able to see sodium deposits on the floor and underside of pipes etc., but the fact that this video, which depicts things that supposedly didn't happen, and supposedly didn't exist, all of a sudden do. So, what ELSE would they or are they hiding? What else "never happened" just because no one found out about it?

I'm not taking sides on either side of the nuclear argument, but I will claim that the people in charge at least in Japan are very incompetent, and also have a culture of hiding stuff. Not very comforting.

Re:what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Late night PBS in Cincinnati used to run a 5 or 10 minute segment of translated Japanese news late at night. I remember seeing the mountain of sodium on a segment in '95. Pretty good footage with an explanation that it was a leak around a temperature sensor. So assuming it's the same leak, it sure wasn't a secret. But maybe some of the details are a bit scarier than originally stated.

Re:what?

[Scorillo47]

Sodium is not white - it is a silverly soft metal - similar in consistency with frozen butter. It can melt easily, and generates sodium vapors when heated. I didn't see sodium in the picture as it probably was alreayd covered with oxyde.

In fact when heated in air in quantities more than a few grams, sodium will simply burn (with violent flames) generating that white-yellow "smoke" which is a combination of sodium oxyde (Na2O) and sodium peroxyde (Na2O2).

Note that both sodium oxyde and sodium peroxyde are highly reactive, burning in contact with water, generating sodium hydroxide. Sodium peroxide also reacts violently with flammable organic materials that can easily "give" a hydrogen or hydroxil radical, such as alcohols. In this reaction, it generates more sodium hydroxide. Sodium vaports will slowly react with the oxygen in the air, again generating white sodium oxyde.

All these compounds will cause severe burns even if you expose the human skin to less than of gram of this stuff. Concentrated sodium hydroxyde simply melts the skin, nails and bones, and sodium oxyde/peroxyde is even more dangerous. In fact - this is how soap was made for centuries - just boil some fat in concentrated sodium hydroxyde and soon you will have some soap.

It's obvious why these workers have to wear special suits.

More fun stuff about sodium - check out the famous Sodium Party that Theodore Gray had a while back (or wikipedia)

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[Big Frank]

The next generation of nuclear power reactors is on the drawing boards today, and they aren't pressurized liquid sodium.

Related video...

[boisepunk]

I guess it would be a really bad time to mention Battling Seizure Robots!

Next

[93 Escort Wagon]

Tomorrow's top story on Slashdot: The Chernobyl meltdown! Followed on Tuesday by breaking Three Mile Island news...

Re:Next

[torkus]

Funny...and to comment on 3MI (which you may already know but others might not):

NO RADIATION WAS RELEASED. The safety devices functioned as expected and safed the plant. There was no radiation release outside of the containmnt vessel. The other reactor at the 3MI site is still in functional use today generating nearly 1GWe.

Was it a Bad Thing? Yes. Do we want to do that again? No. Have we learned from it? Yes. Was the public in danger? Yes - from paranoia and media but not from the reactor.

Re:Next

[Chandon Seldon]

NO RADIATION WAS RELEASED. The safety devices functioned as expected and safed the plant. There was no radiation release outside of the containmnt vessel. The other reactor at the 3MI site is still in functional use today generating nearly 1GWe.

Not quite. The best information is that there was a very small radiation exposure for anyone within a mile or so - less than being in a doctor's waiting room when someone gets an X-Ray.

The anti-nuke activists will claim that there was an unknown amount of radiation released because the detectors were tampered with, but given that there's no evidence that there was a dangerous radiation dose even for the personnel on site arguing any further than that seems silly - if it was a billion times less than a chest X-ray or a million times less really doesn't matter to anyone but the technicians involved.

Re:Next

[torkus]

Your source? The containment vessel was never breached.

Keep in mind that living near a nuclear plant does slightly elevate background radiation levels. They're negligable and way below any worries about safe exposure levels.

Also radiation intensity falls off with the cube of distance. If someone a mile away got exposed as you say then those close to the reactor vessel got substantially more. Perhaps my information is wrong, i'm curious to hear.

I agree though, even if they were exposed to direct 'chest x-ray' levels of radiation once (or twice or 5 times really) that's still not a danger. Coal plants emit more radiation in normal operation + soot + CO2 + NOx + +++

apple's at it again!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22868682/
 
face it fanbois. they make microsoft look like a charity.
 
but just keep denying it, keep buying into their lockin. keep getting fucked over again and again. it makes you easier to point out as a hypocrite and an asshat.

Maybe they were just trying to fight the monsters

[antifoidulus]

from "Horror at Party Beach" and thus needed....sodium! Someone should sing a song about it.

Sodium reactors and the Navy

[Scareduck]

I remember reading about some fracas with some congressman wanting to install sodium-cooled nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers. Hyman Rickover, who was running the Navy's nuclear-powered fleet at the time, got hauled in front of a congressional panel; he dropped a small chunk of metallic sodium into some water and asked, following the ensuing fire and explosion, whether there were any questions. The Navy commissioned one sub with a sodium-cooled reactor (the U.S.S. Seawolf), but it was the only one.

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[BlueParrot]

Would not have made much difference to be honest. If you get several atmosphere pressure of radioactive water suddenly blowing a hole in your sub and disabling its power system, you would be fairly stuffed as well. The US navy stopped using sodium cooled reactors mainly because they wanted to standardize on one design. Sodium would have a lot of merits, even at sea. In particular, because it doesn't boil at the temperatures used you don't have any pressure in the reactor, so an explosion or leaking of primary coolant is a lot less probable ( and sodium or not, leaking of primary coolant would certainly be a show-stopper for a naval mission ).

Oh, and btw, the summary is misleading. Sodium is very corrosive to concrete and a lot of other materials, but provided it remains pure ( i.e, doesn't mix with water / air ) it is in fact very non-corrosive to steel, which is one of the reasons why it is used. It is certainly a lot less corrosive than 300 C water with boric acid in it.

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[thygrrr]

I find this unlikely. Cold (i.e. room temperature) sodium only sizzles in water, releasing a little bit of hydrogen in the form of bubbles, unless it's not a "small chunk".

Now, hot, liquid sodium... that's a different story. Don't blast that with a firehose... (didn't this happen with a reactor in Europe once?)

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[E-Lad]

Yeah, it's psychotic to want sodium cooled naval reactors.

The Soviets experimented with metal-cooled reactors in their Alpha class submarines. I believe the reactors in those boats employed bismuth, though. The problem with metals is that it was a maintenance nightmare. The ruskies had to build piers with steam plants on them just for the Alphas so the they could dock and shut down their reactors, less the liquid bismuth solidify in the coolant pipes and essentially writing off the entire boat. I do believe at least one Alpha was lost this way.

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[BlueParrot]

Actually their main problem was that the plants they built ashore in order to heat the reactors didn't manage to supply enough heat so they ended up running the reactors non-stop without service, and they were not designed for that so they eventually broke under the stress. Also, lead-bismuth and sodium are very different coolants. While sodium reacts explosively with water , lead does not. Lead does however corrode steal quite aggressively while sodium is completely non-corrosive to steel ( unless it is mixed with air/water ).

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[DerekLyons]

I remember reading about some fracas with some congressman wanting to install sodium-cooled nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers. Hyman Rickover, who was running the Navy's nuclear-powered fleet at the time, got hauled in front of a congressional panel; he dropped a small chunk of metallic sodium into some water and asked, following the ensuing fire and explosion, whether there were any questions.

An urban legend without a shred of truth to it. Rickover in fact was initially in favor of sodium cooled reactors - because, in theory, they would allow plants that were more compact and higher power than water cooled reactors. However, as usually happens, theory and reality failed to jibe. Sodium plants turned out to be heavier, more expensive, more complex, and far more maintenance intensive that water cooled plants.
 
Ever the pragmatic engineer, Rickover chose to stay with what worked and cancelled the sodium reactor program.

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[jjackalb]

Lead does however corrode steal quite aggressively Good thing the Alphas were titanium.

-Joel

PS Yes, I know, the pipes probably weren't.

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[b0s0z0ku]

An urban legend without a shred of truth to it. Rickover in fact was initially in favor of sodium cooled reactors - because, in theory, they would allow plants that were more compact and higher power than water cooled reactors. However, as usually happens, theory and reality failed to jibe.

Didn't one of the Russian sub classes (Alfa?) use a lead-bismuth cooled reactor? That allowed the reactor to run hotter and hence more efficiently, but without the explosion risks of sodium + water.

-b.

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[DerekLyons]

Yes. They also (literally) bricked IIRC two reactors because the systems needed to keep the liquid metal hot, failed.

Re:Sodium reactors and the Navy

[DerekLyons]

In particular, because it doesn't boil at the temperatures used you don't have any pressure in the reactor, so an explosion or leaking of primary coolant is a lot less probable ( and sodium or not, leaking of primary coolant would certainly be a show-stopper for a naval mission ).

Even so - what finally doomed the S2G (Seawolf) plant was leakage in the primary heat exchangers and in the superheaters. The Navy used twin wall heat exchangers, with a layer of mercury between the sodium and water sides, and both the sodium and water sides had persistent leakage problems.
 
To be fair, the S2W (Nautilus) plant also had leakage problems early on - but they turned out to be fairly easy to cure, unlike those in the S2G.

I find it odd

[stox]

If there was any radioactivity in the area being videoed that there is no observable scintillation. Did they use shielded video cameras?

Re:I find it odd

[BlueParrot]

There wasn't any radioactivity in the area. The leak occurred in the secondary loop which is not radioactive. The primary loop is inside quite a bit of shielding so even if there was a leak there you couldn't just walk up to it with a video camera.

Re:I find it odd

[Dubpal]

According to wiki The leak occured in the plant's secondary cooler, so the sodium within was not radioactive.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The next generation of nuclear power reactors is on the drawing boards today, and they aren't pressurized liquid sodium. They aren't fast-breeder reactors or its sister design the Integral Fast Reactor which has the benefit of producing no long-term radioactive waste (it decays to original levels of radioactivity after only 200 years or so).

Too bad.

Those arn't space suits!

[BobSixtyFour]

They're top-secret nuclear-powered "Gundam" or (Generation Unsubdued Nuclear Drive Assault Module) Mobile Suits!!

Quite right, and since the dawn of the human race

[Kupfernigk]

We are descendants of a hunter gatherer species. For a long time our energy source was our own muscles, and in order to get plenty of high quality food to supply them, a relatively small primate had to learn to kill animals large and strong enough to kill it. The rewards of risk taking (i.e. hunting large ungulates) presumably outweighed the risks, because eventually we learned to domesticate them. There seems to be some evidence growing that civilisation was a step backwards caused by climate change because, even with intensive farming, humans have to work much harder to get sufficient food. Hence the pyramid system feeding the rulers and warriors, the priests that justified it, and the conflict between nomads and town dwellers.

We are also poor at judging risks outside our biological programming, which is why we deem it a reasonable trade off to have over a hundred thousand people a year across Europe and the US die in accidents, rather than have universal public transport. If a hundred thousand deaths a year is OK so we can go to the office exactly when we feel like it, why isn't it OK so we can turn on the dishwasher exactly when we feel like it? - and that's meant to be a serious question.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[WindBourne]

3rd gen are past drawing board. The FBR and IFR are gen 4, and are almost certainly going to happen.

WRONG

[WindBourne]

this is a prototype of a power station. Most breeders today are too small to generate more power than they consume, but once scaled up, they will. ALL future reactors will be breeders in advanced countries will be breeders. It is far too expensive for them not to be.

Re:WRONG

[Chandon Seldon]

ALL future reactors will be breeders in advanced countries will be breeders. It is far too expensive for them not to be.

If people were rational, that would be true. Unfortunately, they rarely are. For example, almost all of the new reactors being proposed in the USA today are the same obsolete 1970's PWR reactors that we already have.

If the anti-nuke activists would accept that modern breeding nuclear technology is safe, clean, and sustainable and protest obsolete reactor designs we might get somewhere. As it is, all we're going to get is coal plants and a couple new PWRs (which will turn a bunch more uranium ore into highly radioactive 1%-burned nuclear fuel).

I am amazed that we are not doing nuclear ships

[WindBourne]

Yes, several were built and were decommisioned. But first they were designed poorly and that was when oil was CHEAP. Now it is pricey. We would be smart to either build nuclear ships or perhaps even better would be to build the bering strait brdige or tunnel.

Re:I am amazed that we are not doing nuclear ships

[Loke the Dog]

I've been considering this for a while now, with oil recently hitting 100 USD.

Modern cargo ships are very efficient, and their fuel is very cheap compared to other costs actually. Building and maintaining the ship is probably the biggest cost. Nuclear ships would make the ship more expensive, would require a better educated and more expensive crew, while potentially making the fuel cheaper.

Now, lets say that oil went up to 1000 USD per barrel. The problem is that nuclear power is a good on a large scale, and the largest ships are tankers. With oil so expensive, it will probably be so rare that the demand for new tankers is very low.

Also, there are trains that already run on "nuclear power". They are usually many times faster than cargo ships, and time is money in transportation. If oil gets more expensive, we'll probably see more transportation on rail rather than nuclear cargo ships. So yeah, more bridges and tunnels for trains is probably the more likely effect in a world where nuclear power gets more common while oil gets more expensive.

Its sad that people still don't quite grasp the effects of living on a round planet. The bering strait bridge seems completely useless to people, but its actually the straightest path between china and america. The fact that its very desolate is just an advantage for goods transportation.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[blind monkey 3]

Well said, I fully agree, that's why it is important that this sort of information should be suppressed. It gives stupid people ideas about things they know absolutely nothing about.
It is important that governments should legislate that whoever "leaks" these sorts of things are classified as terrorists and should be locked away for life at the very least.
Governments have highly intelligent professionals advising the cream of our society (our politicians) who in turn make judicious decisions based on fact. As a safeguard, our politicians select judges who are impartial and above reproach to make sure that the best interests of the people are looked after.
These sorts of stories are so easily distorted and used to inflame situations that anywhere they "discuss" these things should immediately be shut down as it is obvious that those forums are deliberately manipulating the stupid people in our society, if people want to know something about nuclear power, they should contact their government.
Nuclear power is safe, this minor technical problem they experienced was well contained and it is a pity that now the stupid people will miss-interpret the events - one very good example why our democratically elected governments need more control over the media and the internet. Immediately lock up the families that are suing the Japanese government I say, more stupid people doing stupid things.
Misleading stories (nothing happened and yet the story - a fairytale I say - implies that there was a risk to people) do not help in the betterment of our society.
Please people, do not worry, your government is here to look after your best interests, Nuclear power is safer than any other form of power, your government will ensure it stays that way. Your government would not lie to you.

why sodium?

[RelliK]

Why do they use sodium to cool reactors? It reacts violently when exposed to water producing highly corrosive NaOH. Why would you want to use that stuff? Seems like a really bad idea.

Re:why sodium?

[BlueParrot]

A number of reasons:

a) It is liquid at temperatures suitable for the reactor operation meaning you don't need any pressure in the cooling system. In contrast pressurized water reactors and gas cooled reactors need to keep the entire core under high pressure.

b) Sodium is a metal and hence conducts heat very well, this allows you to build a very compact reactor that is still capable of dissipating its heat after shutdown even if the cooling pumps were to fail.

c) Sodium doesn't absorb neutrons nearly as much as water does, and this allows you to build a reactor which produces more plutonium than it consumes, thus eliminating the need to enrich uranium.

d) Sodium atoms are heavier than hydrogen atoms, so the neutrons will not lose their energy as quickly. As a consequence the neutron spectrum is a lot harder, and capable of destroying much of the long-lived waste. The Waste from a breeder reactor would hit uranium levels of radioactivity in 300 years rather than tens of thousands of years.

e)While sodium is corrosive when mixed with air or water, pure sodium is almost completely non-corrosive to steel. This is in sharp contrast to 300 C pressurized water with boric-acid dissolved in it. A sodium cooled reactor generally experiences virtually no corrosion to the reactor core unless an accident occurs.

Basically, if it wasn't for the fire-hazard sodium would be close to an ideal reactor coolant.

Re:why sodium?

[Iguanadon]

The reactor design, a fast breeder reactor, is more efficient than other reactor types, but requires liquid sodium to cool the reactor. As long as its kept in a sealed loop it's as safe, if not safer, than pressurized water reactors. I believe new breeder reactor designs don't require liquid sodium at all. (I could be wrong though)

Re:why sodium?

[schnikies79]

The NaOH isn't the problem. Sodium Hydroxide can be easily neutralized.

The problem is when Na comes in contact with water, it gives off hydrogen gas, and being that the rxn is exothermic, the hydrogen can be ignited resulting in an explosion.

2Na + 2H20 --> H2 + 2NaOH

Re:why sodium?

[BlueParrot]

No you are right. Lead, Bismuth, Helium, Molten Salts, and even Water has been suggested. As for the last one, water is often claimed to be unusable in a breeder reactor because it absorbs too many neutrons. However, this is only true if you run the reactor on plutonium and use a thermal low-enrichment neutron spectrum. It is quite possible to design water/steam cooled reactors that have a fast neutron spectrum, and if you use heavy water it is even possible to design breeder reactor running on U-233 / Thorium in a thermal spectrum.

Sodium still has some advantages thou, such as favorable melting/boiling points, no long lived radioactivity under neutron irradiation , low corrosion rates against steel, and superior heat conductivity.

Re:why sodium?

[nietsch]

So where does the Oxygen come from that the H2 reacts with? A reactor core is a less then habitable space, nothing would be lost if you made its atmosphere inhabitable too by removing O2. In a controlled environment it is not that hard to avoid exposure to water or oxygen, and a fast breeder is very much a controlled environment.

Re:why sodium?

[rabiddeity]

Basically, if it wasn't for the fire-hazard sodium would be close to an ideal reactor coolant.

So in other words, a sodium-cooled breeder reactor would be ideal in places where liquid water doesn't naturally exist... like Mars, or the moon?

Re:why sodium?

[mark_osmd]

Why does it even need to be a fire hazard, can't they flood the reactor building with a non-reactive gas like nitrogen or CO2 (or much more expensive, helium)? Mark

Re:why sodium?

[JonathanR]

Because the sodium/water reaction does not need atmospheric oxygen to sustain the reaction.

2Na + 2H20 -> 2NaOH + H2

Thus any blanketing atmosphere would have to be kept quite dry. Not impossible though. Interting would only assist if H2 production was anticipated.

Re:why sodium?

[marcosdumay]

"Sodium atoms are heavier than hydrogen atoms, so the neutrons will not lose their energy as quickly. As a consequence the neutron spectrum is a lot harder, and capable of destroying much of the long-lived waste."

That I don't understand. Wouldn't it be better to have low energy neutrons, so they have a biger wave and hit more atoms?

"pure sodium is almost completely non-corrosive to steel"

And that sentence is an understating. I've seen equivalent stuff at other comments (are people afraid of it apearing too good?) but didn't fell like replying... Sodium is completely non-corrosive to stell. If one puts some corroded steel and liquid sodium in contact, he'd get non-corroded stell out of it. But, of course, the sodium would oxidize (and increase in volume, mass, heat capacity, melting point...) what is bad.

Re:why sodium?

[marcosdumay]

You can't keep helium inside anything for long, not even a nuclear reactor. And all the other gases you cited would react with sodium.

Re:why sodium?

[mark_osmd]

I replied but didn't see it show up so here's the 2nd try, Another possibility would be Argon, it's less leaky than Helium. But molten lead or salt seems to be better at avoiding the chemical reactivity as someone pointed out. You'd think if sodium was so much trouble it wouldn't be under research for Gen Iv reactors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

Re:why sodium?

[marcosdumay]

I don't think it is too much a problem. Sodium is a clear winner used inside sealed metal boxes, and much less dangerous than water vapour.

I was just telling why the proposed solution wouldn't work.

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[sjames]

It's more of the poor risk analysis. Deaths from coal based pollution and auto accidents happen daily in a series of small dramas affecting a handful of people at a time. When a nuclear accident happens it's all over the news and millions are involved in the same drama at the same time. That skews our risk assessment so that the emotional reaction to the infrequent large event is much greater even though the many small and frequent events kill far more people.

reletive novelty also plays a role. A video of one guy being killed by a bull will get a LOT more airtime than a thousand fatal carcrash videos will.

Jaws scared a great many people out of the ocean. I would guess that many times more people have died on the way to or from the movie than due to shark attack.

Not in this case, apparently

[Len]

According to Wikipedia,

Fortunately, the leak occurred in the plant's secondary cooling system, so the sodium was not radioactive.

"Secondary" means that this sodium didn't pass through the reactor core so it didn't become radioactive.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[Anonymous Coward]

wow such arrogant dogma. you sound just like the iraqi information minister.
Nothing will stop nuclear power eh? the actual specifics of this latest cover up don't matter to you? if this stuff is no safe, they wouldn't want to cover it up surely?
I bet you posted this before you even looked at the details of the story didn't you.

A minor correction...

[Jesus_666]

Breeders can be used to reduce nuclear waste. The reduction of breeders does not help with that.

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[canUbeleiveIT]

There seems to be some evidence growing that civilisation was a step backwards caused by climate change because, even with intensive farming, humans have to work much harder to get sufficient food.

While your statement about civilization being a step backwards may actually turn out to be true, the assertion that "humans have to work much harder to get sufficient food" is hard for me to agree with. In the US, we now spend a smaller percentage of our incomes on food than at any point in history. 2006 figures show that percentage to be 9.5%.

If we were still living in a cave, we would definitely be spending more than 9.5% of our waking hours in the pursuit of our meals. I produce quite a bit of what our family eats as a part-time organic farmer, but I can attest that it is impossible for me to compete on a cost basis with agribusiness.

Now whether the food these megafarms produce is as high quality or is as safe to produce, I have my doubts.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[onion_joe]

from your sig: 01110101 00100000 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011 well, apparently I am.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think it's your kind of arrogance that is more dangerous. Your comment suggests that government can do no wrong. Yes, there are smart and honest people in government, but it's not those people that necesssarily have the power, it's the corrupt ones. If you think judges are impartial, I think that's quite naive.

Democratically elected governments do not remain so for very long if they are allowed to muzzle citizens and the media.

Sodium is not all bad

[sjames]

It does have a habit of reacting explosively with water and can burn in air, but it isn't all bad for a nuclear coolant.

One benefit is that in a pool style reactor molten sodium can have enough surface area to radiate the excess heat away so that the fuel doesn't melt should the reactor get out of control (including a total failure of the primary and secondary cooling loops). In that scenerio, the sodium will remain liquid and so noit carry radioactive materials out of the containment building.

In a sense, it mandates a strong security measure, maintaining an inert atmosphere in the containment building. Anyone entering will need life support.

For the most part, the additional dangers can be controlled by not building the reactor on a flood plain.

Whatever...

[onion_joe]

What is this? some shaky "video footage"?

My fellow slashdotters, have we not yet reached the point where any digital photo/video evidence must be called into question?

I think we have, IMHO.

-OJ

The answer depends on which leak they fix.

[xC0000005]

The sodium leak, or the knowledge of how bad it was.

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[TubeSteak]

We are also poor at judging risks outside our biological programming, which is why we deem it a reasonable trade off to have over a hundred thousand people a year across Europe and the US die in accidents, rather than have universal public transport. I doubt it has much to do with judging risks and more to do with costs. It's vastly cheaper to build & maintain roads than it is to build up universal public transport, since allowing everyone to buy cars externalizes storage, operating, and maintenance costs.

If a hundred thousand deaths a year is OK so we can go to the office exactly when we feel like it, why isn't it OK so we can turn on the dishwasher exactly when we feel like it? - and that's meant to be a serious question. We* all have to bear the costs of dirty power, compared to the few people who have to bear the costs of a vehicular related death.

*I use "We" in the most general way possible. "We" can be a small community, a large city, an entire country, or the world.

Geothermal power!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this country obsessed with nuclear power?

Recent studies have indicated geothermal power could cheaply provide energy for the entire world. With almost no ecological impact.

The earth is bursting with more energy than the human race could hope to exhaust. And it is already being harvested for electricity today. Yet almost no money is spent on geothermal research. And all the presidential candidates talk about is biofuels, hydrogen, solar, wind, and nuclear. Why isn't geothermal on the list if it is both practical and promising?

Re:Geothermal power!

[timmarhy]

because building large power plants on unstable geologically active ground is a shitty idea, and while there is plenty of geothermal heat for us to use it's highly localised and unsuitable for anything but situational power needs.

Re:Geothermal power!

[Torvaun]

Because the only decent places to harvest geothermal in the US are vacation spots. You go ahead and tell Wyoming that you're sorry about all the lost tourist revenue and degradation of the wilderness, but you need to start harvesting Yellowstone National Park. Otherwise you're stuck trying to transport electricity from Hawaii.

Re:Geothermal power!

[Mspangler]

"You go ahead and tell Wyoming that you're sorry about all the lost tourist revenue and degradation of the wilderness, but you need to start harvesting Yellowstone National Park."

Wyoming would probably be delighted to trade minimum wage, benefit-free jobs in tourism for high-dollar skilled trades jobs with benefits. It's the coastal city dwellers who will be flapping their arms screaming about the degradation of the wilderness. And the Robert Redford types, (made their money elsewhere, now want to retire to pretty scenery.)

The closer you live to the mountains, the more annoying they are. I was surprised to find this out when I moved West. So now I live in the Columbia Basin, where the nearest mountains are over an hour away. That's close enough.

Now slant drilling under Mt St. Helens would seem to be a good way to get geothermal energy, and not all of that is in Wilderness. But no one is doing it yet, which I find puzzling, so I guess the cost of other energy isn't high enough yet.

Re:Geothermal power!

[djupedal]

"Why isn't geothermal on the list if it is both practical and promising?"

Practical for what? Won't help a space station or Mars rover...won't help a fleet of aircraft to stay airborne or a submarine to lie submerged.

Sure, it can spin turbines that are coupled to generators, but how far can that electricity be pumped and still be useful? And yes, it can be used to heat buildings, but only locally, and only buildings.

The Japanese want to come up with as few ubiquitous energy sources as possible, without having to go back to the drawing board every few decades. Believe me, there is no doubt in their minds that they can find solutions where others have walked away.

However, their cultural bent on thinking they can make anything, even Mother Nature, conform to their will, for their bidding, is what worries those of us who have learned not to trust the boys when they say things like "It was only a false alarm. The emergency shutdown was only a precaution. There is no issue for concern with the nuclear powerplant and it will be back online as soon as we finish our lunch."

Re:Geothermal power!

[gr8scot]

The earth is bursting with more energy than the human race could hope to exhaust. And it is already being harvested for electricity today. Yet almost no money is spent on geothermal research. And all the presidential candidates talk about is biofuels, hydrogen, solar, wind, and nuclear. Why isn't geothermal on the list if it is both practical and promising? URL, plz

Did you hear that "whooshing" sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the sound of sarcasm zipping completely over your head.

Volume of sodium...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was trying to visualize how big a spill this was, but I didn't find 700kg easy to visualize.

700kg of sodium, which has a density a little less than water (0.968g/cm^3), would be less than a cubic metre by volume (0.723m^3 or so, or about 723 Litres), and would fit into three bathtubs (filled to the edge, they're apparently about 300 Litres or so).

Conversion to Imperial or kegs of beer equivalents is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Volume of sodium...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, a keg of beer is 16 gallons, which puts this at 11.9372746 kegs of beer.

Re:Volume of sodium...

[bdjacobson]

yes but how many libraries of congress is that

modded down by fagboys

[Anonymous Coward]

eat it you fags. apple is evil. the word is out and it's spreading.
 
welcome to slashdot, where apple is praised for the same things that microsoft has done to be hated.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he was being sarcastic.

Worse than what?

[Rie Beam]

Dangerous or not, how is this any worse than coal mining, products unearthed by miners who risk their lives for the sake of simply having work? I understand uranium must be mined, as well, but at the same time, the quantity mined is no where near that of coal, simply because you need less uranium to produce the same amount of energy as burning coal.

Also, let's talk about the environmental effects. My family actually has a history with this, living in West Virginia and finding work in the mines. Ever heard of a process called "strip mining"? Tearing the tops off of mountains and letting mining sediment flow into valleys and adjacent creeks? Nuclear waste is more dangerous pound per pound, but it also can be contained, stored, and most importantly, reprocessed into other nuclear fuels. Coal burns and releases carbon.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm willing to risk the occasional "breeder screwup" every couple of decades for cheaper, more environmentally-friendly fuel that doesn't involve razing land en masse and sending people into under-inspected mines because the product itself is simply so worthless unless produced in bulk.

Uranium isn't a solution to any major environmental problem, considering that such a novel idea simply doesn't exist right now. But it's still more than coal. It's something I'd be willing to put myself behind if a nuclear plant were proposed near my home.

Re:Worse than what?

[glitch23]

Dangerous or not, how is this any worse than coal mining, products unearthed by miners who risk their lives for the sake of simply having work?

Nuclear isn't any worse as far as danger is concerned and in fact it is safer. It is also cheaper and more efficient. I also live in WV (northern half) and my Dad is an ex-miner who worked in the mines in his 20s. He hurt his back in the mine and has had life-long pain ever since. I'm glad he doesn't work in the mines anymore. The guys don't get paid enough for the dangers present.

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[kvezach]

It's more of the poor risk analysis.

Damn, we're not Vulcan enough yet.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[blind monkey 3]

Err, I was being sarcastic, I took exception to the term stupid.... the idea was to point out that it is important to listen to all sides of a debate without belittling and effectively dismissing peoples concerns by comments like stupid.

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so true! I am in japan now and they go bananas every time I want to put soy sauce on my rice. In Sweden, and other parts of europe I guess, we can put soy sauce on the rice. But here in Japan it is not acceptible - sauce on rice is "dog food", very strange.. :) The most funny thing is that when I try to tell them "I like it better this way", they truly do not understand what I mean. It seems food here is not about eating in a way you like but rather eating in a way that the ancients developed thousands of years ago. Weird people.

So mod parent funny or informative! :)

Re:Mod parent up!

[quacking duck]

This is so true! I am in japan now and they go bananas every time I want to put soy sauce on my rice. In Sweden, and other parts of europe I guess, we can put soy sauce on the rice. But here in Japan it is not acceptible - sauce on rice is "dog food", very strange.. :) The most funny thing is that when I try to tell them "I like it better this way", they truly do not understand what I mean. It seems food here is not about eating in a way you like but rather eating in a way that the ancients developed thousands of years ago. Weird people.

Westerners often eat cooked rice which is drier and doesn't stick by itself, so some type of sauce is usually added to make it stick together better on a fork.

Traditional Japanese (also Chinese and probably other *ese) traditionally eat rice which is moist and sticky by default, obviating any need to douse it with soy or other sauce. Sauce from the various dishes is acceptable.

Rice was not meant to be eaten in isolation, but that's exactly what happens when you put it onto a plate...

Re:Mod parent up!

[gullevek]

The reason for this is, that if you put soy sauce on your rice, it means you are a beggar and very poor. Thats why it is very bad to do that.

It's acceptable if you have something on the rice already, for example raw egg, daikon, etc. Then you can put soy sauce on it.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

heh.
That's interesting as even though I am UK born and bred, I have eaten soy and rice only when poor.
Though I must admit that with a bit of butter, soy and rice is not a bad dish.

Re:Mod parent up!

[iocat]

It's probably best not to think about the food culture of other countries, it will always seem weird to you, just as your food conventions seem weird to them. So, you prefer water with your plutonium, others prefer sodium. Just try and see what the other people in the contamination suits are doing and follow their lead. In a worst case scenario, pretend you're allergic.

Seriously though, compared to America, Japan really doesn't have a "we do it your way" mentality with food. I once had to endure a twenty minute back and forth between a friend, a translator, a waitress, and (presumably) a cook because my friend tried to order his pizza without squid. Frankly, ordering *anything* without squid in Japan is probably a stretch, but what was worse, was that even after our translator was like "a special order is very difficult to do in Japan," which is polite translator speak for THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN, STUPID AMERICAN, he then spectacularly failed to take the face-saving bait offered by the waitress, "Are you allergic to squid?" and said "no I just don't eat it, I'm vegetarian." Here's a hint: If a Japanese person makes a suggestion like that to you in a service situation, take it!! I don't even know how this scene ended (but I do know the chef's next comment, conveyed by the waitress, was "but vegetarians eat squid"), but I do know it took a long time to finally receive my tasty beef curry, Japan's proudest culinary achievment.

Re:Mod parent up!

[vistic]

As a vegetarian, I think now I never want to go to Japan :-/ It sounds worse than China.

In China and India, I noticed on pizza they don't put much pizza sauce on there at all... really almost nothing... it's mostly just bread and cheese and whatever topping. If they put any sauce on it, I think they just use a perfume atomizer bulb to give it a dusting.

But... they have tons of ketchup at each table for you to put on top of your pizza.

Re:Mod parent up!

[jamar0303]

Worse than China? Hardly. At least Japan has health standards to be adhered to. In China, they're merely suggestions.

Re:Mod parent up!

[MoriaOrc]

As a vegetarian who's been to Japan, there's plenty to eat and most of it is good. Tempura and Udon are both very common foods that have a few non-meet varieties, and plenty of other meals (foreign and local) do come meat free. The only tricky part, really, is figuring out which ones are which. I don't know where the GP ate out (probably a much fancier place then most of the ones I did, if Squid was a mandatory topping on the pizza), but lots of places serve pizza with much more variety then that. You're right that they are a bit lighter on the tomato sauce then you're probably used to, though.

Re:Mod parent up!

[jrumney]

I'm not sure about it being a more fancy restaurant than that. Having worked in a cheaper Japanese restaurant, its more likely that all that was made fresh in the restaurant was miso soup, rice, and stock for the udon, soba etc. The pizza was likely bought in prepared and frozen, defrosted and toasted on demand (the restaurant where I worked didn't do pizza, but there were many other things on the menu that worked like that). That is the real reason why they can't offer variation. In a more expensive restaurant, or a speciality pizza restaurant where the pizza is made fresh, of course they'll bend to your requirements.

Re:Mod parent up!

[jollyreaper]

This is so true! I am in japan now and they go bananas every time I want to put soy sauce on my rice. In Sweden, and other parts of europe I guess, we can put soy sauce on the rice. But here in Japan it is not acceptible - sauce on rice is "dog food", very strange.. :) The most funny thing is that when I try to tell them "I like it better this way", they truly do not understand what I mean. It seems food here is not about eating in a way you like but rather eating in a way that the ancients developed thousands of years ago. Weird people. They didn't say anything when I did it. Must have thought "Meh, stupid gaijin don't know no better." They put mayo on their pizzas so I say the same thing about them.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Loke the Dog]

If you are unsure what to put on your plutonium when in a foreign country, it might seem like a good idea to have both water and sodium, just to be safe. But that would be considered very offensive, especially among educated people. People might even run away in horror.

Re:Mod parent up!

[gullevek]

erm, thats so not true. My coworker is Muslim and eats therefore only Hallal meat, and so whenever we go to a restaurant he makes sure the order is okay for him. They always comply. He never had any kind of issue.

On the other hand, I eat really anything, so I never come into the situation of "I cant eat this because of reason X". So hard to say for me.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

also Chinese and probably other *ese

Congolese? Calabrese? Lebanese? Maltese? Portuguese? Viennese?

Photo of the "mountain of sodium"

[this great guy]

Here is what they call the "mountain of sodium". This is a frame of the video, 6 min 12 sec in: http://download.yousendit.com/5B82D57A7547637B

Re:Photo of the "mountain of sodium"

[ashpool7]

Pay close attention to the floorboard on the right side, under the pipe. You can see the sodium taper up as a mound against the black.

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[number11]

I think it's your kind of arrogance that is more dangerous.

That's called "irony", son. It's one o' them literary tricks, like metaphor, where the writer doesn't actually mean what it seems like they're saying. I know, it's just plain wrong, but you know them liberal arts types. Think of it as the literary equivalent of that "there are 10 kinds of people" joke.

Slusho!

[GottliebPins]

Slusho!
No one can drink just six!

Jumped to death?

[icsx]

Was in really a suicide?

Eh

[zoltamatron]

I take this video with a grain of salt.

Video encoded with some wierd codec

[Animats]

The video is encoded with some wierd codec (WMV-9?) that tried to install itself but the firewall wouldn't let it. Bleah.

sodium oxide snow

[stinky wizzleteats]

Are they actually walking through sodium oxide snow? It looks like the sodium leaked, reacted with the air to produce sodium oxide, which is rather violently corrosive to things like humans, even if they are in a fire suit. I personally stay away from any chemical that is so unstable that it wants to be sodium hydroxide.

Re:sodium oxide snow

[marcosdumay]

"I personally stay away from any chemical that is so unstable that it wants to be sodium hydroxide."

You can fix that easily with just a bit of water :)

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[ivan256]

For a long time our energy source was our own muscles

You have demonstrated a lack of understanding of the concept of "energy". You have failed the entrance criteria for participation in an educated discussion of the concepts involved in this thread. It would be pointless at this juncture to bother rebutting the rest of the assertions in your post. Please turn in your login and password on the way out.

Thanks. Bye!

Re:what? - the white stuff isn't sodium

[Anonymous Coward]

This video is a joke & indeed there was no need to release the video. The white stuff is simply a chemical fire retardant. It was released at the fist indication of a leak in order to avoid a larger disaster, ergo., a massive fire. If you don't belive me that the white stuff isn't sodium, consider this. Look at the suits these guys are wearing - notice they have a bottle of air on their backs? That's a one way system. The air supplies them with the good stuff they need to stay alive in a hostile environment which in this case is a room full of chemical fire retardant. When they breath out, they exhale into the environment. If that white stuff coating everything and making the room foggy was sodium the whole place would go up in one big fire ball as humans tend to breath out a bit of good old H2O which of course would react very violently with the airborne sodium. If the white stuff was sodium, they'd be wearing rebreathers and they clearly are not! Rebreathers are large backpack units.

It's video interpretations like this that destroy the credibility of the anti-nuke crowd. Of course there's nothing wrong with that. The anti-nuke folks are primairly responsible for global warming because of their irrational fear of one of the safest forms of energy production. Breeder reactors for all!

Whoooosshh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of sarcasm, buddy? (I am not the GP, but I'm pretty sure the GP was being facetious).

Safety is not the issue

[nephridium]

The problem is the increase of nuclear waste material if a resurgence if nuclear power should occur. U-238 has a half life of 4.46 billion years, while the fissile U-235 still has a half life of more than 700 million years.

Have a look at the "Nuclear fuel cycle" and you'll see that it is in effect not a cycle at all, but a process in which at the end we have to dig up more and more holes to put the waste material into and hope it stays there to the end of time. So we got highly concentrated radioactive material dug into the earth. Who is to guarantee that coming generations maybe in 100, maybe in 10000 years will not accidentally be exposed to it and suffer from it?

Re:Safety is not the issue

[Chandon Seldon]

Have a look at the "Nuclear fuel cycle" and you'll see that it is in effect not a cycle at all, but a process in which at the end we have to dig up more and more holes to put the waste material into and hope it stays there to the end of time.

Yea, when you skip the "reprocessing" step in the fuel cycle you do have that problem. When you *don't* skip the reprocessing step, you can end up with an actual fuel cycle where only a small amount of fresh Uranium ore need go in and a moderate amount of mildly radioactive waste is removed on each cycle.

Note that when discussing fuel cycles, obsolete thermal reactors (like the ones in the USA) are basically useless. You need breeder reactors (with fast neutron breeder reactors like the one mentioned in the article being especially nice).

Take a look at the fuel cycle for the Integral Fast Reactor for an example of what I'm talking about.

Re:Safety is not the issue

[Jeffrey Baker]

Here's a hint: if something has a half-life of 4.5 /billion/ years, that substance is not dangerously radioactive.

Just google it...

[Anonymous Coward]

...ass. From energysolutionscenter.org, cold-reduction mills use 126.5-148.5kWh per metric ton (1000kg) of product, just as an example. Wind turbines generate about 20kW at a constant 15mph wind. When most steel mills produce thousands and thousands of metric tons of product, wind power just doesn't cut it. Most plants are hooked directly up to a coal plant or nuclear for this reason.

Next time just look it up yourself and don't be a dick.

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[quanticle]

Forget car accidents. More people have died yearly from lightning than from shark attacks.

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[ChangelingJane]

Well, there's always cannibalism...

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[ChangelingJane]

In the US, we now spend a smaller percentage of our incomes on food than at any point in history. 2006 figures show that percentage to be 9.5%. The problem, of course, is that people outside of the US are involved in the production of that food as well. Just because Americans work less to eat, doesn't mean that's true of everybody across the globe. Somebody always ends up feeling the pinch.

Suicide

[Fizzl]

...Shigeo Nishimura, 49, jumped to his death...

I don't get these "suicide to save face" issues.
I like Benders approach better.
Bender: I am so embarrassed.. I wish everyone else was dead!

I want those 9 minutes of my life back!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see what we got here:

- Men in cool silver-space suits...check
- Grainy film footage...check
- Foreboding industrial design...check
- Ominous silence...check

Where the hell was the part where the mutant zombie comes out of nowhere to attack the lead guy, and camera falls to the ground, and we proceed to see massive carnage ensue? And then "6 months later" in subtitles...roll credits.

Seriously dissapointing...

Not a hoax?

[WarJolt]

If someone came up to me with those silver suits and asked me to go inside a radioactive nuclear reactor I'm pretty sure I'd be laughing hysterically. They seriously don't give them silver space suits and tell them it will protect them from radiation do they? I thought that was just in the movies. I wonder how many of those guys plan to have children...

Re:Not a hoax?

[elFarto the 2nd]

They'd stop alpha particles, and depending on how thick they are, they'd probably stop beta particles. Gamma rays though require much much more protection, like meters of concrete, which impedes movement slightly.

not a big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, this was so insignificant that a man killed himself over it. hell, i don't think he did kill himself. either it was a life-threating fuck-up that drove this man to kill himself, or it was someone afraid of getting caught lying, losing big dollars on energy profits, killing a man, and then making him the scapegoat to save face with the public.

utoi gaijin

[shoemilk]

Put a raw egg in it and you're fine. I know many a Japanese person who eat a bowl of rice, soy sauce and raw egg for breakfast. I asked why without the raw egg it's not cool and the response was "because it just is". Personally, I have to agree with them and think that you're weird. Japanese rice is miles better than the crap grains used in the western world. There's no need to dirty something that's already perfect (which is the reason I was told as to why soy sauce on rice is a no-no).

>It seems food here is not about eating in a way you like but rather eating in a way that the ancients developed thousands of years ago.
You must be new here (to Japan that is). Have you not seen a pizza menu? Did you just read my post about the raw egg?

Re:Quite right, and since the dawn of the human ra

[Mydron]

I doubt it has much to do with judging risks and more to do with costs. It's vastly cheaper to build & maintain roads than it is to build up universal public transport, since allowing everyone to buy cars externalizes storage, operating, and maintenance costs. Cheaper for who? We're talking about humanity here (or society), that means you have to add up both the public costs of personal transport (roads, road maintenance, waging wars in foreign lands, the environment) along with the private costs of personal transport (fuel, maintenance, the vehicle, storage). You can't just wave your hands and call the private costs "externalized".

Anyway, let me know what your calculation reveals. I'll give you a hint though, at least from an energy efficiency point of view: Gasoline consumption in New York is at the rate the national average was in the 1920s

Re:Nothing will stop the resurgance of nuclear pow

[Raenex]

A single carriage return is not a new paragraph.

Japan doesn't have a culture -- Japanese people do

[patio11]

You can get food your way in Japan. Really, really easily -- one way is to go into any fast food restaraunt. Hold the pickles, add more lettuce, special orders don't upset us because they're in the freaking manual. Seriously, though, there is a wide spectrum of culinary traditions in this country, from "The chef is the master, you are the student, you should be glad you were even allowed to choose to eat dinner at this restaraunt" to "Hum a few bars and I'll get you something in that general direction" to "Did you know there are 745,000 combinations of ingridients possible with this dish? We have 10 named varieties which are our most popular, or you can just pick one of the other 744,990."

There is also a wide spectrum of cooks having egos. (There is a bad habit among a certain type of Westerner to assume that any odd action taken by a Japanese person is because they are Japanese. That is one theory -- another is that the cook just can't be bothered to help you, or is excessively proud, or is just a disagreeable person. All of thsee will be right at least part of the time.) I assure you, if you visit enough hoity-toity restaraunts in NYC, you will fairly quickly find someone who would not be willing to accomodate a simple request that wasn't in their "vision" for the food. ("Where is the ketchup?" "THIS IS A FOI GRAS AND CAVIAR PATTE SERVED IN A LIGHT BALSAMIC VINAGRETTE."* "I like my foi gras with ketchup!"

(Sidenote: I do E->J and J->E translation in Japan as one of my work duties. I am not, however, a professional translator. The difference is that the folks who pay my salary pay me to *resolve* issues like "I just don't want squid" rather than just passively relaying the "Oh, we can't do that" response. I understand that the standard practice among professional translators is that you are supposed to not get in the way of the speaking parties at all -- this is why I am not a professional translator, I just translate for money.

P.S. For those of you considering a job in this general line of work, the pay is a heck of a lot better if you pitch yourself my way. Most clients do not appreciate the value of a beautifully articulated "The waitress says no" nearly as much as they do "OK, so here's what is going on here, and here is what I did to get you your squidless pizza. Aren't you glad you hired me." The same fundamental issue scales straight from "I can't give you pizza w/o squid" to "I can't approve that $1 million deal you are suggesting".)

* Sorry, I only eat at restaraunts that cost more than $15 when the client is paying, and then I'm having what he is having, so I have absolutely no clue whether this is actually a plausible French food combo or not. Bonus points: consultants get to eat at dinner, translators don't.

Re:Maybe they were just trying to fight the monste

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh... Kids today don't know SQUAT about sodium.

Politeness

[Kupfernigk]

Despite your low ID, you have demonstrated an inability to understand the difference between a colloquial expression and scientific discourse. This is a blog, not a peer reviewed journal. To be accurate, I could have said "our ability to do external work was entirely mediated by our muscles, whose energy source was the fats and carbohydrates which we consumed, converted by various enzymatic processes into an intermediate energy carrier called adenosine triphosphate." However, it would have had not the slightest effect on the accuracy of the rest of my argument, which to the best of my knowledge is based on current anthropology. The belief that the Near East civilisations evolved as the result of climate change has been extensively reported on in the last year. Another poster appears to have made the mistake of believing that agriculture is efficient, not understanding the difference between earlier civilisations and those with mechanisation driven by cheap oil.

Oh, and you are a pompous creep. But I guess you already knew that.

Alternatively...

[marcosdumay]

You could just put static public content on a regular file and distribute it using plain HTTP.

I bet any modern desktop is able to fill a several Mbps link this way.

Not a small gas leak?

[_KiTA_]

Oh... wow.

Looking at that video, that leak was a LOT bigger than I thought it was back in 95.

I mean, I was thinking like, a small spurt of gas then nothing, then everyone evacs, but no -- That video's like "Holy shit, there's a big glowing green cloud coming up from the basement, get the fuck OUT" level of leakage.

No wonder they tried to cover that up.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

And Layman Grandparent, educate thyself.

Two Thumbs Down

[StaticEngine]

I liked Cloverfield better, but at least the cinematography was on par.

No Comparison!

[StCredZero]

The danger inherent in the focal point of a Parabolic Solar Sterling generator is NOTHING compared to the dangers in Nuclear, Coal, Hydropower, or even Wind and Geothermal. Yes, it's really freaking hot in there. It's also really freaking hot in a fire. But there's one key difference. The focal point won't spread. It doesn't need to be extinguished. You can eliminate the heat by simply pointing the dish away from the sun. If you don't have the dish oriented so that the focal point falls on the ground, there is no danger of catching anything significant on fire.

Compared to just about anything else, there is very very little danger. What danger there is would arise from the systems for storing solar power for off-peak use. But even these are nothing compared to the potential long term impacts of Nuclear, Coal, and even Hydropower. (I lean towards mass produced flywheels.)

Take a look at the discussion on this wiki

[Anonymous Coward]

The claims made in the video are dubious at best. The video itself does not show much of significance. It is blurry and the area is covered in a white 'mist'. Most of it takes place in only a few rooms. This could be done in a college steam room even. I cannot see what this video could possibly prove no matter what. A coolant leak is bad. A fixed coolant leak is good. A sodium explosion is bad. Did that happen? If the video showed mishandling, fires and nasty things like that, this would be interesting. I truly wish this never appeared on Slashdot.

Re:Japan doesn't have a culture -- Japanese people

[iocat]

Man, you've wrecked my delicately formed story with your stupid knowledge and facts! And also kind of an offensive prejudice against Westerns and translators... So here's the epilogue: The translator was a friend, who did solve the situation (in fact it was she who told my friend, "dude, you should have said yes when she asked if you were allergic, it would have saved us all some trouble; always do that here."), the restaurant was Jonathan's, so the pizza was probably frozen, and "with squid" was the only option for pizza on the menu.

Lastly, there's a certain type of poster on Slashdot who always assumes the worst of others... don't be one. I obviously recognize that Japan is a nation of individuals, (and that, for instance, the fact that a taxi driver in Osaka was rude to me doesn't mean "everyone in Japan is rude," or even "those Oskans are rude,") but there are also clear differences in culture and mores between Japan and America, and while there are obviously great people and bad people in both places, I think you will find more willingness and familiarity with order substitutions -- on the part of customers and staff -- in Amercia.

Re:Japan doesn't have a culture -- Japanese people

[patio11]

I don't have a prejudice against translators -- I'm professionally trained as one. This included courses in professional ethics, in which I was taught such hypotheticals as "Opposite party says something outrageously offensive in front of client. What do you do?" The "correct" answer is to translate it, without passing judgement, missing not a single nuance. Lawyers are professionally required to zealously defend guilty people, translators are professionally obligated to maintain a certain distance from the matter at hand.

I am of the opinion that this is bogus, which is why, again, I don't translate professionally. (I also think that what your translator did was both correct and in the best interests of her client. There are agencies which would have made that the last thing she ever did, in an analagous situation.)

Here's a concrete example: I was once dealing with a female American biggywig (not a VP at Microsoft, but that general level of the stratosphere), a senior Japanese politician (think senator -- again, not actually a senator), and their various staffs. One staff member, on being introduced to the VP, said "Hello, nice to meet you. And my, do you have an amazing rack."

I just completely, bald-faced lied about what he had said. What was I going to do, torpedo the negotiations because the assistant to the deputy aide to the undersecretary of bumble is pathologically incapable of being a member of the human race?

Anyhow, I brought this up the next 3 times I went into professional training/ethics seminars/etc, and the answer was unanimous: bad translator. You should have said, in exactly as many words, "You have a nice rack." I cannot accept that that is the right solution to this issue, though I understand the reasoning behind it (the reasoning is that the translator is supposed to be an interchangeable cog, not a party to the discussion in their own right -- nobody asks the stenographer to excercize discretion, either). That is why I am not a translator.

I also don't have any prejudice against Westerners (last time I checked, I was still lily white), and don't harbor any bad feelings about you. I was criticizing a specific current of thought which, sadly, is not uncommon among Westerners (the reverse isn't uncommon among Japanese people, either).