Nuclear Emergency Declared At 2 Plants In Japan

Hugh Pickens writes "CBC reports that Japan has declared a state of emergency and called for mass evacuations near two nuclear power plants following cooling systems failures that led to radiation escaping from a reactor at one location. The emergency declarations, which include five reactors at the two plants, followed Friday's 8.9-magnitude earthquake off the country's northeast coast. In a troubling announcement, Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official Ryohei Shiomi said a monitoring device outside the plant detected radiation that is eight times higher than normal and an evacuation zone has been expanded from three kilometres around the plant to 10 kilometres."

Comments

Dont mean to sound selfish

[merlock18]

But I was planning on going to Japan in a few months. I wonder how this will affect myself and Japans tourist undustry in general.

Re:So much for the safety of nuclear energy

[Solandri]

Now let's see... how many anti-nuclear hippies died from doing too much LSD or ketamine or whatever it is they do? Probably thousands.

No need to resort to ad hominem. Even an objective comparison of safety supports nuclear over green technologies.

There have been zero deaths in the U.S. associated with commercial nuclear power generation. Wind has already killed at least 13 people in the U.S. Solar has a huge problem in that roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S. If you're imagining every house in the U.S. with solar panels mounted on the roof, you should expect probably about 100 more roofer deaths per year from installing and maintaining them. In terms of direct deaths (i.e. excluding mining and pollution), hydro actually turns out to be the most dangerous power source worldwide due to deaths from dam failures.

Over it's 50+ year history worldwide, in terms of deaths per amount of energy generated, nuclear power is the safest form of power generation man has ever invented. Yes that includes Chernobyl (a reactor design not used outside of the former USSR). If you accept the high estimate of number of expected cancer deaths from Chernobyl, it's about 4x safer than wind (the safest green technology). If you accept the low estimate, it's 125x safer than wind.

Re:So much for the safety of nuclear energy

[tibit]

Moreso, the 60s vintage GE Mark I BWR is the culprit here. It's a design with serious safety shortcomings. IMHO all those reactors should have been decommissioned by now. They are not any sort of an indicator of how safe the up-to-date designs are. They are a similar safety disaster as cars of the same vintage. You wouldn't want to drive a 60s vintage Chevy as your daily commute car. The poor handling on recovery from the ramps is outright scary. Never mind what happens in a wreck. That's a solid car analogy right there ;)

Thorium

[MrQuacker]

If humans used Thorium reactors instead of Uranium reactors, we would not have problems like these.

Re:Thorium

[KonoWatakushi]

Though desirable, Thorium isn't even necessary; most any modern reactor design is passively safe. Read up on the Molten Salt Reactor for one example: the reactors run at atmospheric pressure, with no active cooling necessary. The reaction naturally stops if it gets too hot, and you can literally walk away at any time. As an added benefit, they can consume other reactors waste as fuel, obviating any further mining for the next century, and the waste they produce is much smaller it quantity and far shorter lived.

The anti-nuclear comments on that site are truly depressing, as are the ignorant responses to your own post. Coal has, and continues to kill far more people than Nuclear, both from mining, as well as respiratory diseases and cancer. Coal is not clean by any measure; it has put an immense amount of radioactivity and heavy metals into our environment--far more than nuclear.

Re:I've done this before!

[iserlohn]

No, blame us, for letting Big Oil get in the way.

Democracy without wisdom is nothing but mob-rule.

Evacuation radius expanded again, now to 20km.

[Boltronics]

Just announced on the NHK channel.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/

Re:If the Japanese can't do it

[cbhacking]

The problem is the outdated reactor designs. This is essentially the exact same failure as at Three Mile Island, although the Japanese appear to have omitted the containment dome that made TMI such a tempest in a teacup (almost no radiation actually leaked at TMI, due to the dome, but it looks like the Japanese reactors are already leaking significant amounts of radiation). The TMI accident was 32 years ago. Its design was 10 years old even then.

Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away, but installing newer plants, which would be of the modern and inherently safe designs, would allow the old ones to be decommissioned or at least overhauled. Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan) and an increasing energy demand that is already taxing our current grid at times (again, in the US, especially on the west coast), we simply can't afford to take the older plants offline.

Re:One thing about wind power

[IamTheRealMike]

The danger with too much wind power isn't that you get some kind of sci-fi meltdown. It's that sudden changes in wind conditions cause huge fluctuations in grid voltage that occur faster than can be balanced using hydroelectric dams or gas generator plants. If that happen it's possible for the grid to experience a cascading failure that disables the entire countries electrical system, requiring a grid-wide black start. Most countries have never performed a from-zero black start.

Re:What happens next

[cbhacking]

Simply put, this reactor design (especially without the containment dome) is less safe than Three Mile Island. We (the world at large) really need to modernize our nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, that's going to require building new reactors - we can't practically afford the loss of generating capacity to take the existing ones off the grid that long - and there is, as always, a ridiculous amount of opposition, largely from luddites who wouldn't know a molten salt reactor from a bomb shelter.

Re:I've done this before!

[TheLink]

Wisdom is not common sense.

It's just that there are so many fools nowadays that don't appear to notice or care (or may even be proud of it), so much so that just having "common sense" alone makes you wise in comparison.

Wisdom is the ability to respond correctly to the entire situation - which does not necessarily mean strictly providing the correct answer to a question. In contrast intelligence is the ability to provide the right answers (or questions), to questions.

For example: take the "Judgement of Solomon" story where two women claimed to be mother of a child.

Intelligence nowadays would mean doing a DNA test to prove who was the biological mother of the child.

Solomon's method determined who would be a better mother for the child.

Common sense now would be to do the DNA tests - since it is more likely to survive a legal challenge later. What would Solomon do now? I don't know I'm no Solomon :).

Re:I've done this before!

[Paul Fernhout]

"Is fusion available yet?" http://pesn.com/2011/03/07/9501782_Cold_Fusion_Steams_Ahead_at_Worlds_Oldest_University/

The real deal?

Re:Actual Information

[Jawnn]

Riiiiiight...
If history has taught us anything about nuclear power plant catastrophes, it's that the people responsible for the mess can be counted upon to lie repeatedly and often about what's going on. In fact, that's exactly what has been going on in this case. First it's, "Everything is under control." Then, "OK. We're having some problems, but there is no danger to the public and no radiation leakage." Then, "OK, we leaked a small amount of radioactive steam, but the public is not in any danger. The closest of you may want to move away, though." etc....
It's like they're reading from the same script the PR guys at TMI used.
And the public should trust the pronouncements of the Nuclear Energy Industry, about the "safety" of nuclear energy, why, exactly?

Re:Opportunity costs

[phantomfive]

Ribbon generators and windbelts can, in arrays, compete with solar panels.

See, this is your problem. They don't need to compete with solar panels. They need to compete against coal and nuclear. They can't. True, there are oil and coal subsidies, but there are also wind and solar subsidies. You also have to figure in the cost of a massive power grid upgrade, which is not cheap.

All factored in, if you put a high value on environmental and cost issues, then nuke is the way to go.