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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."
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.
It's one of these annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus.
We need to bulldoze the plant before it blows and build a new one!! Is fusion available yet?
See: http://slashdot.org/submission/1496534/JapanCaesium-measured-melt-down-may-have-started
Collide baby, collide!
Yes, and if the (unlikely) worst happens and a baboon turns into a massive black hole, the current recession is child's play. What a dumb argument.
Nuclear power plants are safe. Not perfectly safe. Not zero risk. But they kill a hell of a lot fewer people than coal, the usual alternative. The worst-case scenario for this nuclear power plant is bad, but not out of proportion to other problems this exceptionally large earthquake has caused.
Have you seen pictures of Japan? Oil refineries have literally, actually, factually blown up, releasing who-knows-what into the atmosphere and water. People are freaking out because a nuclear power plant has released small amounts of harmful radiation and might release moderate amounts. With plenty of warning.
The story here is not that a power plant was damaged and might release toxic material. It's that everyone is going bugnuts crazy about that when entire towns are inundated and/or on fire.
If this turns out to be nothing it's going to be used as FUD against nuclear energy for years to come.
Not really, middle of Tokyo has a ridiculous population density but the more rural regions have a relatively low population density.
The reactor came online in 1971.
As for an 8.9 - 8.9 would make it like the 7th most powerful earthquake recorded.
You also have to realize - meltdown is very very bad, but we're not talking Chernobyl here - a bit worse than Three Mile Island, but the reactors are properly designed and the worst of it should remain contained until other action can be taken.
Learn about Photography Basics.
the earthquake wasnt the problem. it was the tsunami. it caused damage which brought the emergency diesel generators offline. these plants at fukushimi were offline for most of 2008 and 2009 for earthquake upgrades and it looks like they worked for the most part. right now any damage is because they had no power and were relying on RCIC and other passive cooling systems, and even now have limited electrical power and probably limited heat sink capability. IAANE
The reactors won't impact the global economy appreciably - it's *highly* unlikely that anything is going to blow up, anyhow. It's sounding like they had a partial scram, with primary coolant system failure afterwards.
Nuclear power *is* safe. You're seeing a disaster the scale of which is nearly unimaginable, and appropriate action is being taken. You don't fix these things overnight.
Learn about Photography Basics.
How many people died from the Japanese nuclear accident? Zero, so far. How many will die? Donno, but probably 0. How many died in America's worst nuclear accident ever (3 mile island)? Zero.
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. How many people died in coal mine accidents? Beyond count. How many died building hydroelectric dams, which are very "green"? A lot, 112 for just for one dam (Hoover).
Since most foreign media just use NHK news, here is the link to their english website:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/index.html
I am in japan and following this very closely
Nuclear power plants generate heat with fission, they fundamentally are unable to "blow up." It is not merely unlikely, it is simply impossible. No one has to face to the prospect of any nuclear power plant going up in a fission fueled mushroom cloud, but we all will have to face the fact that you are poorly informed.
Considering Fukushima I 1 reached first criticality in in 1971 and Fukushima I 6 in 1979, the technology and designs used is probably from the late 50s to mid 60s. Back then much less was understood about earthquakes and effective countermeasures. And it wasn't the reactor itself that failed, the fault seems to be with the backup diesel generators meant to power the emergency coolant system.
Let's see what happens. For now it's just unsubstantiated reports. I mean the article quoted on the first page is from the CBC, as in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Also remember, this was the 5th largest earthquake this century, and the biggest to hit Japan in 140 years. Some things you simply can't plan for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Is it opening up a whole new can of worms to ask how many people the CO2 emissions from coal will kill over the next few centuries as well?
For some perspective, do people not also die mining the fuel for nuclear reactors? I imagine the risk is still far less because nuclear reactors get so much more energy per mass of fuel, but it's hard to believe that no one ever dies in the process.
Well they can blow up conventionally. Chernobyl exploded because the reactor's graphite moderation rods caught fire and the uranium fuel produced so much heat that the structures covering the reactor became pressure vessels and exploded.
Chernobyl didn't have a massive containment building like all western reactors do.
There's a lot of misinformation flying around.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12721498 [bbc.co.uk] (watch the movie)
Steam was released on purpose.
Based on just this discrepancy between the BBC and the CBC articles, /. might be a bit careful on it's reporting right now...
Everyone's getting excited over the nuclear plants, and ignoring the thousands that are still are dying due to just water. Why is radiation so much scarier? Water kills faster. /rant.
5 Japanese died in a reactor accident with a partial meltdown covered up by the government. News released in 2007.
Hooray for your lies.
Not to undermine your general argument there, but the fatality rate at the Hoover dam was largely due to the labor laws and technology of the time; occupational health and safety was unheard of, and safety harnessing was limited. Constructing such a massive dam today would be much safer.
Uhh... Given that Japan has an area of 377,944KM^2, that would be a total of 142,814,833,112 people - several times more than live on the planet earth.
The highest population density of any country is Macau, which has roughly 18,500 people/KM^2.
It is all relative, their backup generators are likely well into the megawatt class and much bigger than a firetruck.
Although I agree with your general assessment. In regard to dying from doing too much LSD, I think that is a quite low probability given its relatively high LD50 compared to what is usually taken. Information gleaned from an overview of the Wikipedia entry and its sources (along with Erowid) suggest no documented deaths linked to LSD usage alone.
The chances of the reactor blowing up are next to zero. The biggest problem will be either a core breech(aka melting through the core chamber), or a slow uncontrolled cooling of the control rods because of damage by them being too hot. However considering that the CBC article is hours old already, and they've been slow venting, and finally have the ability to turn the pumps back on to get water into the chamber it should be controllable unless something happens again.
Now, let this be a lesson to anti-nuke nuts. Most reactors built within the last decade or two have two redundant systems for moving water. Steam, or mechanical. This series of reactors doesn't. You know why? Because in Japan, anything that could possibly at all, maybe related to nuclear, or radiation makes environmentalists go batshit crazy.
But it doesn't help that the reactors were built to withstand at least a 9.0 and it was hit by a 9.1, and I've heard it may be revised again as high as 9.4.
Om, nomnomnom...
Or who have died from the radiation emitted by coal fired power plants.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
His point still stands. Thanks Captain Pendant!
Statistically the number of people who die prematurely due to power production using coal is roughly 40,000/year(ok this is an national resources defense council number but the science is good). This includes people dieing in mines due to collapses explosions, people dieing prematurely due to working in a mine their entire life(lung cancer), but most importantly people dieing prematurely due to the increased risk of cancer of living near a coal plant. The number for nuclear is 0. For that matter the total number of premature deaths due to radiation in the population surrounding Chernobyl was roughly 40,000. So as many people in the US are dieing yearly due to coal production as died in total due to the only significant release of radioactivity to the public in the history of civilian nuclear power in 60 years.
You can ask people living in Hamilton, Ontario. Before I looked they had the highest rate of lung cancer, and were downwind of a massive coal power generation plant.
Om, nomnomnom...
The comma was used as a decimal separator in this case. So 377,873/Km^2 is 377.873/Km^2. Problem solved.
They're already using fire trucks and pumps in an attempt to cool it down, but they need more.
It's not a fire. They need enough water to emerse the reactor faster than the evaporation rate, and they may need additional equipment from both the Japanese Self Defense Force and the US DoD to accomplish that.
You are comparing apples to oranges.
Drugs shouldn't have much to do with nuclear energy safety. Moreover, if you start asking about coal mine accidents, you should also consider uranium mining accidents. I have to admit I didn't find much about any accidents, but there are a few. (and probably I would have found more if I had been looking harder) Of course, with nuclear energy you often can't directly find correlation with accidents. What about permanent disposal. How do you know everything will be OK with the nuclear waste we have produced up to now. It has only been a few decades of nuclear energy, so it will take some time before these materials are not dangerous any more.
People are freaking out because a nuclear power plant has released small amounts of harmful radiation and might release moderate amounts.
No, not people. The news media. Of everything going on in Japan this is what they are focusing on. I'm mildly disgusted at the news coverage all in all. The primary coverage initially was the effect on the stock market, and now it is nothing but these reactors. Far, far more environmental damage is being done by all matter of other noxious things burning and leaking. Oh, and I'm pretty sure people are dead, dying, entrapped, homeless, etc, already. Yet the focus is on what *might* happen with a nuclear reactor, as if the thing is going to go up like a thermonuclear bomb.
Better known as 318230.
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.
LSD is effectively non-toxic in humans. People occasionally do stupid things while on LSD that result in death, but keep in mind that people also do stupid things while excited, agitated, or depressed.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
But a nuclear reactor experiencing trauma without immediate human intervention by experienced and well-trained engineers could be a massive disaster.
Containment walls can be breached, and in the event of a large-scale disaster it's quite possible that no humans will be nearby who are able to deal with such a disaster.
While a nuclear reactor can be run safely, it's only as safe as long as there are people there to tend to it in case something goes wrong; and if there are not, it's potentially dangerous for people many miles away.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
According to this Japanese article, TEPCO (the power company that runs the reactor) reports that at about 3:30 pm local time (1 hour 40 minutes ago) an explosion was heard and white smoke could be seen coming from the number 1 reactor. A few workers have been reported to be injured. :(
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20110312/t10014627881000.html
>>Wonder how many of the usual "Nuclear Energy is cheap, safe, clean and does the dishes AND the laundry" posts we get today.
I'm more concerned with the terrible track record of reportage on the subject. The news is already reporting that there is 1000x times normal radiation in the town. (http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-nuclear-plant-2011-3) with my friends on Facebook writing posts about Godzilla and whatnot.
It's 1000x normal *inside the containment building*, which is exactly what those things are there for.
I'd much rather have been living next to the nuclear plant than the Chiba oil refinery during the earthquake.
Japan ? Check.
Nuclear stuff ? Check.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla
'nuff said.
What where the options for a (not the USA with magic cash) country to get out of spending more and more and more on oil/energy imports?
They did the national cashflow, some projections and hoped a big spend would let them escape the need for so much oil and have a positive national science PR flow on in other areas.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Modern nuclear power is safe, but we didn't put containment domes on modern reactors for nothing.
In retrospect that reactor should have been replaced years ago in a country like Japan.
>>cheap - not really; subsidies are usually needed. but then, subsidies are needed for practically all power generation that isn't coal or gas.
Nuclear has the lowest subsidy rate of any green technology (including 'clean' coal and gas). Normal coal and gas aren't generally subsidized at the power plant level.
I've posted the subsidy rates for various sources of energy on here before. IIRC, it's something like 10-20% for nuclear, vs. 40-50% for other green technologies.
The OP was wondering about passive safety. Passive safety is when the laws of physics make the reactor disable itself before it overheats e.g. due to the shape of the reactor where the nuclear material expands with heat and then spills out of the reactor into a separate container so that there is not enough nuclear material to sustain a reaction. In such a design the heat that would ordinarily be the problem is what shuts the reaction down with no intervention or electricity required. Cooling by a diesel generator is an active safety system - the diesel generator is actively fighting the physics of the situation to prevent an accident. A passively safe reactor fails by shutting down, an actively safe reactor fails by e.g. spewing radioactive waste. The kind of reactor you want is the passively safe kind, so the OP is wondering what kind of idiot built a reactor that isn't passively safe. Probably the reactors were built before such ideas were developed or perhaps the whole thing is actually fine and the news stories are exaggerating.
"death from LSD" usually means "death from doing stupid things while high on LSD". Just like acute alcohol poisoning rarely have fatalities but impaired driving kills thousands each year.
If there's no one at the reactor to tend it and there's no way to get people to the reactor than it doesn't matter what happens to it. Everyone who could possibly be effected is already dead or dying.
Don't agree, then please tell me what would destroy the massive containment systems around a reactor, kill most everyone at the power station and do enough damage to cause a failure without doing the same to everyone in the vicinity.
I want a MANLY power plant that can create a 30-100 km dead zone of mutants and a death plume that has a global reach.
OK, but why do you think coal is so manly?
They do, they have batteries but like any batteries backup, capacity is limited.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Steam explosions, spontaneous decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen at high temperature+pressure or hell ... terrorism. There are ways to get a reactor to explode even though the fuel can't.
You know that you have other options than to watch american media news on the Internet, right ? My recommendation is to get your news from two countries with somewhat opposing political agendas ... it's amazing how the same events have completely different interpretation from one side of the border to the other. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle.
better look into the same for uranium miners, then.
And oil well workers.
This space available.
You are plain wrong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_nuclear_safety
The outer walls of the Reactor 1 building have partially blown off, leaving only what looks like a steel frame. NHK is saying that a sensor within 5km of the plant is detecting radiation levels approaching 1015 microsieverts - that is apparently a year's worth of radiation exposure each hour.
People in the danger zones are being told to cover faces with wet towels, avoid eating vegetables and other fresh foods, and refrain from drinking tap water. Things seem to be happening quickly.
What kind of redundancy did you have in mind? They already have 10+ different sources of power, batteries one of them. It's not like they didn't have generators. They did. They survived for about an hour. This kind of thing is not really predictable.
The magnitudes of disasters like earthquakes follow a known distribution, so you know approximately how often they happen.
It just usually isn't worth the effort of doing so. (read that as unprofitable)
Deleted
Wonder how many of the usual "Nuclear Energy is cheap, safe, clean and does the dishes AND the laundry" posts we get today.
Face it: if the (unlikely) worst happens and a reactor does blow up in japan, the current recession is child's play.
Well, I think you'd have to have some pretty big blinders on to focus on the problems with the two nuclear plants while ignoring the catastrophic failure of a hydroelectric dam that destroyed 1,800 houses after the quake.
They just had an 8.9 magnitude earthquake, for goodness sake - a lot of the infrastructure has been compromised, and more will likely go wrong over the next few days. The potential failure of a nuclear power plant is certainly horrible - as is much else that's happening over there, right now.
#DeleteChrome
Live updates including the status of the Daichi 1 reactor: http://live.reuters.com/Event/Japan_earthquake2
How many people have died from this accident so far?
0.
How many died from Three Mile Island?
0.
So in 56 years of civilian nuclear power no one has died in the West from it.
In 2007 for example, 47 coal miners died in the United States from mining accidents, an energy source that puts out more radiation than nuclear power.
In 2010 the Anacortes Washington refinery fire killed 5 workers.
If we are going to discuss energy safety, oil and coal seem to be better topics than nuclear fission.
i know what he was saying, but what i am saying is the earthquake was not the problem. and its only in the last couple years that reactor designs with passive gravity driven cooling systems have even gotten certifications for design. this is due to the regulatory process. if we didnt stop building plants, and the process wasnt as cumbersome, many plants would have passive gravity driven cooling systems which can run for up to 72 hours unattended after this exact accident scenario.
100,000 coal miners died in the US from mining accidents between 1900 and 2011.
Has anyone stated how this could happen? My understanding is that it was essentially a graceful loss of coolant. Why didn't they just shut them down earlier? Did they unsafely operate them so that Tokyo wouldn't go dark? Or was the failure less graceful than the initial reports I heard?
Learn to love Alaska
Because the fire departments are dealing with scores or hundreds of other fires and the nuclear coolant is a closed loop of radioactive water, you can't just hook a hose up to it.
I suspect the nuclear power planet is the least of their concerns and to be honest given the history of nuclear power I'd say it's still doing a lot better than oil and coal has.
Do Fukushima I or II have containment domes? The LA Times makes it sound like it doesn't.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-japan-quake-nuclear-20110312,0,2627198.story
And how many people have died from commercial nuclear power in the West? None.
You know that coal puts out more radiation than nuclear power right?
Hell Obama even felt the need to mention oil in his comments about China. I think that's well out of order. Are people really that addicted to oil that that could possibly be a concern when this happened in Japan?
See here the hull exploding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg4uogOEUrU#t=43s
1266953+17
Because I'm pretty sure it requires a generator that runs on more than a few gallons of petrol.
You mean that because we haven't seen e.g. any natural disaster that could cause a meltdown, we're safe? To quote from a great movie: Can you guarantee my safety?“ or the safety of the West“? I tend to disagree.
How many people died from the Japanese nuclear accident? Zero, so far. How many will die? Donno, but probably 0.
"Donno" and "probably" can't stay in the same phrase. It's so easy to play the big men when it's other people finding caesium in their lungs.
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.
I wouldn't know, the 60s are over and LSD is so out of fashion. We should balance the count with yuppies who die in sex games involving rubber, cocaine and Nazi costumes.
How many people died in coal mine accidents? Beyond count.
You say that as if uranium grew on trees. Moreover, if you take into account what happened in soviet coal mines, you'll have to count what happened in soviet nuclear reactors, too.
Wonder how many of the usual "Nuclear Energy is cheap, safe, clean and does the dishes AND the laundry" posts we get today.
Here's a car analogy for you.
You're judging the reliability and safety of today's cars by what was around in 1960s (when the Daichi Plant 1's GE reactor was designed). To recap: seat belts were a novelty and people generally shunned them, no air bags, no ABS, car bodies did a relatively poor job at protecting both car occupants and pedestrians.
Guess what: the affected hardware at Fukushima is Mark I GE boiling water reactors, installed in early 70s. Those are designs from the 60s, with well known deficiencies. In a modern reactor pretty much as long as containment hasn't been breached and external heat dump is available (cooling tower still standing), the turbines should be able to operate and cool it down. The GE Mark I is dependent on external electric power for operation of the pumps, it doesn't use its own steam power directly to power the coolant pumps. Thus you have a system where you can trip some breakers and overheat the reactor. We know better now. You should too. Is googling so hard?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I think the sole fact that in the USA, there are more deaths by utilizing wind power versus nuclear that shows the safety of nuclear.
And there are disaster scenarios for every plant. This is what safety regulations are for, to prevent a disaster like the Gulf oil spill a short while ago.
Humans are notoriously bad at estimating real risk.
We're afraid of flying in airplanes, while we cheerfully get in our cars for the drive in rush-hour traffic.
Nuclear power has risks, indeed, but aside from pie-in-the-sky fantasies about renewables that simply are either unproven or nowhere near competitive, the fact is that all power-generation systems have dangers.
Humanity needs power, and lots of it.
The successful effort by the left to derail nuclear power through much of the 1980s and 1990s led to the establishment of many more power plants using conventional coal or gas - which have their own pernicious effects. Is an X% increase in cancers over a large area "better" than a Y% risk of nuclear plant catastrophe?
Arguably, Germany has shown the way toward intrinsically-safe nuclear systems with PBRs being a truly fail-safe design as long as there is gravity.
I guess my point is that nothing is "safe"; everything is a tradeoff between economy, risk, and value. The first time some caveman accidentally dropped a haunch of antelope into a fire and realized that it was WAAAAY more tasty than the raw stuff they were all chewing, I'm sure there was some other caveman on the other side of the clearing whinging about the dangers of increased carcinogens and obesity.
Sure, continue to invest and develop renewable technologies. But right now "hoping" for renewables to supply our appetite for power?....one might as well wish for a team of unicorns to do it.
-Styopa
They had how long from the earthquake until the tsunami? And why didn't they react faster? If they were shut down after the quake and before the tsunami, what would the effect have been? Why wasn't there a matching generator in the air and there in under an hour? Would that not have mattered?
And people made fun of New Orleans for having pumps that wouldn't work if the area they pumped actually had water in it (the electricity went down and the backup generators were underwater, and other such problems). This is a nuclear reactor that had a predicted wave of water hit and the plant wasn't already shut down, and the backup was unable to survive in order provide local power. I've actually been to a nuclear power plant in TX. I asked about how they get power, and they pointed to the power lines coming back in. It seemed silly to me as an 8 year old then, and it seems silly now. They could have had a small generator on site to work off waste heat in the case everything else went down. Instead, they have a nice big diesel generator that didn't survive and without power, they are melting down, rather than a backup in the most secure area of the plant providing emergency power. Or at least, shut the damn things down whenever there's a massive earthquake, even if they are 2 km inland and incorrectly guess that the wave wouldn't hit them.
Learn to love Alaska
Captain "Piece of jewellery worn on a necklace"?
They brought some in and didn't have the right cable on hand to plug them in. Last I read they tried to airlift one in but the reactor building has exploded so I guess it didn't work out (maybe the cooling came too late).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Same thing just happened to the Japanese reactor. Well, the building exploded and the cause isn't officially reported yet but it's pretty likely that the reactor popped from overpressure.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Even if the fission reaction is stopped immediately (all reactors can do that almost instantly) the accumulated fission products are going to release tremendous amounts of heat by decay over the next hours and days.
As for that being the worst that can happen, no. More than one reactor meltdown, breach of the concrete containment, and onshore winds would be the worst that can happen. I believe they are losing control of several reactors at three plants presently. A meltdown at one reactor would naturally prevent gaining control of another reactor at the same plant. But the wind is blowing out to sea at the moment.
And cesium isn't going to be helping the fishing offshore either.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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 ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
After seeing this will be you call renewable energy unsafe as well? What about this or this?
When I'm told by multiple reputable sources that every nuclear reactor is susceptible to this sort of failure, then I'll agree with you that the technology, as it exists, is unsafe and should not be used.
On the other hand, I'm relatively certain that there are nuclear reactor designs that don't require an off-site power plant to provide cooling (and is susceptible to earthquake damage), nor ones that require a backup diesel generator (susceptible to flood). In fact, I'm relatively certain that there are reactor designs that immediately drop below critical mass in the event of an emergency, due to their very design.
Are there reasons why Japan built reactors susceptible to these problems? Probably. And those reasons, political, social, financial, should be found and corrected. If necessary, all the existing plants with the "flawed" designs should be safely shut down. But then they can build better, inherently safer plants.
I pay a power company to provide 100% wind power equal to my usage, btw, though obviously the pressure that pushes electrons in and out of my house in a sinusoidal pattern might come from anywhere on the grid.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Hurricanes hit nuclear power plants in the US. No problems.
The single event that caused human deaths was a Soviet reactor without containment structures and a response that was bungled at the local and regional levels.
This Japanese reactor, unlike those in the US, Canada, France, UK, Germany and just about everywhere else also lacks a containment dome.
Biggest Japanese earthquake in 1400 years just happened too, its not like nuclear reactors are running around killing people yearly.
If one were to be a conspiracy theorist: it's a Made-in-the-USA trojan horse, a rare but strong 60s vintage design that breaks about every rule in the book.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
The successful effort by the left to derail nuclear power through much of the 1980s and 1990s
Why is it that people are such blinkered assholes when it comes to politics?
You say "The left" - but an accurate accusation would be "nuclear opponents".
I'm what you would label a "lefty" but I'm all for Nuclear technology.
I expect better from the Slashdot crowd.
If humans used Thorium reactors instead of Uranium reactors, we would not have problems like these.
IIRC Chernobyl was considered obsolete and due to be decommissioned when it blew up in 1986.
You don't need a completely passive system to be better than the GE Mark I BWR fuck-up. All it'd take is to have coolant pumps that operate on the steam generated by the reactor itself. Those could be backup pumps, and they could have retrofitted it years ago. In the aftermath of this quake, they'll either have to do just that, or decommission the plants.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
There *are* double level backups. The final level of backups are batteries. And those are dead by now.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
There's been an explosion:
(Go to 0:47)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPQ9qgry9C8
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Yes. It is safe. We don't refrain from crossing the road on the basis that it's dangerous, after all, and the risk of being killed by a modern nuclear power plant is several orders of magnitude less than the risk of being killed by a road traffic accident.
Maybe ask this question near nuclear reprocessing sites, like LaHague and Sellafield for example.
Your argument is like the tobacco industry saying no one ever died of smoking since no one asphyxiated directly on the smoke they inhaled while smoking their cigarettes.
Wonder how your argument goes 10 years from now when the cancer from today's "accident" hits....
After seeing this
Nobody was killed and no radiation was released that will affect generations to come.
What about this
"At least eight people have been killed and 60 others are missing" and no radiation was released that will affect generations to come.
or this?
Nobody was killed and no radiation was released that will affect generations to come.
No way of power generation is 100% safe. You'll never be able to rule out human failure. That leaves only to consider the side effects when ("when", not "if"!) something goes wrong. That's why people don't want nuclear power.
Cool, Stalker in Japan!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Do you drive cars designed in the 60s in Germany? Would you drive them if the engines were merely upgraded to modern, less-polluting versions? No? Why? Because those things were mostly unsafe deathtraps, with piss-poor handling. The reactor in question is at beast an early 60s vintage design that came online in 1971. It's a textbook safety engineering fuckup. Why do you mix politics into this discussion? You have an old, fucked-up design that should have been offline by now. End of story. Do you judge the safety of cars in general by what came off the end of Chevrolet production line circa 1965, too?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You insensitive cold!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
How would a thorium/pebble bed reactor cope under this sort of situation? Much better? Or much the same?
For video of this incident, the explosion is at 1:22
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What's the danger of solar or wind power?
(Not claiming there isn't any. If there's a danger I'd like to be aware of it)
Fact 1: this was an old nuclear reactor without a satisfactory containment solution;
Fact 2: this was an old nuclear reactor without passive safety: i.e. power is required to prevent meltdown, rather than meltdown being prevented by design;
Fact 3: backup generators and batteries were supposed to deal with Fact 2;
Fact 4: you can only have so many on-site backups;
Fact 5: Chernobyl's failure was the result of a very dangerously planned and even more dangerously aborted attempt to test what would happen if Facts 1 to 3 applied;
Fact 6: while everyone's learnt the lessons leading to Chernobyl's failure, older reactors have not tackled the problems which led to Chernobyl deciding that tests in Fact 5 were necessary in the first place.
Fact 7: one side of the debate will conclude that nuclear power is universally evil; the other side will claim that circumstances were so shockingly unlikely that they could not have been planned for, ignoring in particular Facts 1, 2 and 6.
HTH.
If it takes one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded to knock a nuclear plant over, I think we're still relatively in the clear. Oil refineries seem to go pop the moment someone sets a firework off too close to one (and that smoke isn't exactly clean you know)- and do you want to know what's happened to the Japanese sewage processing system? Coal power plants throw out more carcinogenic toxins in a regular working day than those plants have since this disaster- and that sewage gets routinely dumped in the sea even when the sewers aren't dealing with a 10 meter tsunami.
It will truly suck if those nuclear plants turn into a major disaster- but then you can throw it on the pile of hundreds of other major disasters Japan is currently faced with.
I'm in Tokyo, and my Geiger counter is showing just background radiation.
Hopefully it will stay that way (160 miles away).
Even Chernobyl has killed fewer people since 1986 than died from coal mining in the same period.
Lets say Fukushima causes as many deaths as Chernobyl which has been 4-5000 in 25 years. In China 150,000 coal miners died in the same period.
Taking out nuclear power is going to lead to more natural gas and coal which are going to lead to higher prices and more CO2 emissions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country - 14% of the planet's electricity is being generated with very few accidents or deaths.
Nothing is ever safe, but people have to realize that all forms of power generation are going to lead to side effects.
And I am sympathetic to the cancer dangers, I've had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and had alot of radiation therapy that actually caused a second cancer 10 years after my first radiation regime.
You're close: this was a substandard US reactor design. It doesn't really matter who does the bad job at designing, if the job was done wrong then it's done wrong. Somehow people forget that there must be quite a few of those Mark I BWRs out there still running. They have known flaws. To top it off, the reactor manufacturer (GE) colluded with operators of the Japanese plant in question and have a disturbing track record of lying through their teeth (mirror here).
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
When they've burst out with the 88.000 (eighty-eight-thousand) people missing in Japan, which they've supposedly picked up from Kyodo news agency.
Which then got copy/pasted all over the internet by every damn blogger and news agency out there. So now, it gets parroted around like it is a fact.
It turns out... it was a typo. Or a mistranslation. Or a googling error considering that some reports mention it as 110.000 missing.
BREAKING NEWS: Death toll from Japan quake rises to 110, 350 missing: police Note ... 200-300 bodies found in Sendai after quake, 88 others killed ...
See? Right there. "110, 350 missing"!
*headdesk*
And here I thought that one would actually have to know how to read if one wanted to be a BBC journalist.
FFS... 88000 people can't go "missing" in such a short time. It's technically impossible. Why?!
Well, besides the fact that 88000 people take up quite a lot of space and someone would pretty fucking soon notice them and proclaim them dead or found (identified or not) - you can't really know that there are 88000 people missing unless you can actually account for 88000 names. Or at least 88000 bodies.
And it takes a bit longer than 24 hours to compile a list of 88000 actual humans.
Let's say that it takes 5 minutes for a person to fill out a "missing persons" form, and for someone else to input that into a database.
If the reports were coming in non-stop from 100 locations that would make it 4400 minutes just to gather all the reports ( 88000 reports divided by 100 locations times 5 minutes i.e. (88000/100)*5 ).
That comes out to about 3 days of non-stop report gathering alone.
It would actually take about 10 times that, at least.
There simply was not enough time yet to gather that kind of actual data.
And again... If you know of 88000 actual people (Name, date of birth, address etc.) that are missing - just look for a really big pile of people somewhere.
Pretty sure you'll find a lot of them there.
Well... unless there were aliens involved. Then all bets are off.
Except the one with the time it would take to compile a list of 88000 names and addresses.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Bravo, well said.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You know that coal puts out more radiation than nuclear power right?
People keep on saying this but the thing they seem to miss is that they are un-enriched isotopes, i.e they are at natural levels from the coal smoke. Radiation released for a nuclear power plant is far more radioactive, per microgram, because first they have been enriched to fissile levels and then they activated within a fission reaction.
I know it's not just you but it's a really misleading idea. The reality is that radioactive isotopes released from a reactor are vastly more varied and concentrated than anything a coal plant will *ever* release.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Here's video of the reactor exploding.
I'm not going to argue with you. I like nuclear power. But the best time to advocate for nuclear power is not during a crisis when up to five reactors at two nuclear power plants are in danger of losing containment. If you want to be effective in your advocacy the best choice is to shut up until the crisis is over. Engaging in a nice nuke power flamewar in the middle of the crisis is not really helping your cause. It just makes it look like you'd advocate for nuke power no matter what or when. That doesn't build your credibility, which is the most valuable resource you have in a good flamewar.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Folks, I undersand it's not the same kind or reactor design but... ... I saw the footage of the explosion: fireball, shockwave, debris & plume.
Having heard that the core pressure was 2.5 times over design limits, to me it looks the core tore itself apart :(
beeb footage
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
This 40000 number is valid only for prehistoric coal-burning technology. Modern plants filter practically all of the ill-making substances from the smoke.
0x or or snor perron?!
Yah, post doesn't make sense doesn't it? well, hasty editing... Point is: this looks like Chernobyl to me. Do you think the core vessel has blown apart exposing all it's fuel and radioactive material?
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I don't follow the logic. Seems almost any time someone is giving an estimate qualified with "probably," they don't know the actual answer.
Biggest Japanese earthquake in 1400 years just happened too, its not like nuclear reactors are running around killing people yearly.
Actually, yes they are. The reason they are is that once a radioactive isotope is released into the environment it bio-concentrates in the food chain. If it is eventually eaten by a human it will continue to be a radiation emitter inside the body. Where it ends up inside the body depend on the element it analogues. For example, caesium (138 - I think) looks like iodine to the body - so the body deposits it in the thyroid gland. As the radionuclide emits radiation in that part of the body cancer begins to gestate expressing itself as full blown cancer at the end of the incubation period.
DOn't forget it's not just reactors that release radioactive isotopes, but the whole process. Chernobyl, Windscale and TMI are still killing people today and will go one killing people whenever a radioactive isotope from those accidents is ingested. Once the person dies and decays (or worse is cremated) the isotope is freed from the body and the process begins all over again until the radionuclide decays into it's daughter product.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The US estimates 320 radiation caused deaths world wide from coal electrical generation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation#Human-caused_background_radiation
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/202/4372/1045.abstract
Nuclear power puts out 1% of the radiation that coal does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_nuclear_power#Risk_of_cancer
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/calculate.html
Do you live within 50 miles of a coal fired power plant? - .03 mRem/year .009 mRem/year
Do you live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant? -
Coal releases Uranium, Thorium, Radium, Radon, and Polonium into the atmosphere, how are those less radioactive than what a nuclear powerplant generally doesn't release?
So, keep quiet and let the echo chamber spread FUD? Lets watch some reruns of the China Syndrome while we are at it.
Thats exactly what set nuclear power back after Three Mile Island, throw science and reality out, let the anti-nuclear folks politicize it and throw logic out the window.
Just announced on the NHK channel.
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Two are known dead.
Nuclear power may be completely safe if done correctly. Near the shore of an island formed by volcanic activity may not be the correct place. That may be a better place for geothermal power. But I haven't got the heart for the argument today. Today my heart goes out to the families of the lost, to those suffering now, and to those who may be soon.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'd estimate the chances of the pressure vessel having blown up slightly higher than 0 at the moment.
see the diffrence with oil we all semms to keep paying stupid prices for rather then braking away. it only destorys are envirment a problem they push off on the next gen and keep pusing off untill a we run outts oil or b it destorys enough we have no choice but to walk away. dont forget the billions people make off price fixing bribes and owning the goverment. Nuclear on the other hand when something goes wrong thers no putting it off and everyone dies slow painfull deaths and the land is useless for centerys. its a faster killer then oil where you can put it off for years. at least at the point where it kills us.
These days most coal power stations only give out CO2, water and heat, and some even have CO2 capture and storage.
please dont think im anti nucler you just asked why people havent used it even thow in realty is safer.
Tokyo Electric Power Company is providing regular updates with real information:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/index-e.html
It appears the news services are reporting from a parallel universe where things are completely different.
thats the media for you. if it was a small leak like japan said its probly no more of a issue then when are island plant leaked it killed none they all got out in time. as for the envirmental damage its not as extrame as you might think the gulf spill is gonna be far wworse then this ever can be unless it releses a gas cloud in the atomphsher. they can contane and cleane this in a matter of weeks. why would i say this plaint would be less damage even if it totaly expoloded its only a few hundred miles glowing. the gof spill destoryed the entire goulf cost. and to be honest the time it will take for the goulf to recover if they dont manage to spill anything else in a few hundred years witch will never happon is as long as radioactiv halflife.
Chernobyl killing 4,000 people, 60,000 with thyroid cancer, 600,000 others effected in some other way.
If you really want to know, here's the press releases from TEPCO which runs the plants. It's far more informative and far less alarmist than most of the reports going around. Yes, they are evacuating. Yes, there has been some unknown level of radiation leakage, but we don't know how bad it is just yet.
Those who want to review how the safety mechanisms of a BWR work should read this.
As I said in some other posts, two are known dead. Five reactors at two plants may be losing containment. You can see the explosion at 1:22 in this video. That's the outer containment being blown off a nuclear reactor, so if the inner steel containment is breached, the worst will happen. And it looks like that's going to happen, though it's not reported to have happened yet.
There's a time for blame assessment, for dispassionate analysis of the costs and benefits, for discussion of how modern technologies are better than the technologies afforded these plants from the dark ages of fission. Today is not that time. Today is for expressing regret for the loss of life, the pain and suffering of those affected, to rally what support we may. Today would be a good day to express hope that all five reactors don't go up.
Also, some backup planning would be good. Prevailing winds and ocean currents take the output from this particular location in Japan past Hawaii and then curve back for another tour of Southeast Asia. On a bad day for the US though, the winds and currents tend a bit further north, and deposit their gifts on the West coast of the US, falling as rain in the Sierra Nevada range and the Rockies. If you're downwind of this thing now would be a good time to review your knowledge of the physical effects of radiation exposure. On a bad day I'm downwind from this thing and that matters to me personally, no matter what my opinion of nuclear energy is. Generally I'm for it, but today would be a bad day to hit me up for support for it because this event could, in the worst case, decrease the lifespan of my children.
Now, do you really want to argue about this here and now, or maybe wait a bit and see if the worst case didn't happen?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It will take the media and Japan a while to circle around to what caused the explosion, so I'll explain it now.
The explosion you see in the videos aligns perfectly with the Fukushima Daiichi No.1 reactor building seen here (forth square building from the left.)
The BBC has provided this incredible before/after photo where you can actually see the reactor building structure with the walls removed by the explosion: the metal framework is still intact.
The exact same thing happened with TMI-2 in 1979. The hydrogen burn occurred inside the containment dome. The Fukushima reactor doesn't have such a dome, so the hydrogen accumulated in the reactor building.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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.
Well, Ketamine can definitely kill you. As for LSD, IIRC there has been one or two verified deadly overdoses from obscene amounts (one apparently involved someone finding pure LSD in powder form and mistook it for amphetamine, basically taking hundreds of times the regular dose.
Also, a lot of the anti-nuclear people aren't "hippies", they're the same people who are terrified of everything, regular people who demand perfect safety in every way.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The spare diesel generators had to be placed 2 -3 kilometers inland, on a hill, not on the shore near the nuclear plant. And connected to the plant by 3 kilometers electrical cable. This way the generators would not be damaged by a tsunami.
Am I the only engineer who realizes it? Am I that talented?
The story here is not that a power plant was damaged and might release toxic material. It's that everyone is going bugnuts crazy about that when entire towns are inundated and/or on fire.
The story is actually about explosions in one nuclear power plant, residents warned to stay indoors, turn off air conditioners, not to drink the tap water. If they have to go outside, to cover up completely, wear a mask and cover their face with a wet towel. Radiation released per hour is more than the recommended limit for humans per year. Obligatory link: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/12/3162450.htm
BM3
That is not correct, RBMK type reactors were built without any containment.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
These reactors shut down within seconds of the earthquake, just like Three mile island. However, there's this dirty fact that the nuclear lobby don't tell you you much about: Even when a reactor is successfully shut down, it is still producing 100MW of energy for several days, due to the heat produced by decay of fission products with short half-life's that were produced while the reactor was still running. Therefore there's no "fail safe" mode - if you shut down a reactor and leave it without cooling, it will quickly melt down. It requires cooling for several days after to be safe.
One thing about wind power. In the event of an earthquake, a terrorist attack, a greedy company cutting corners like BP, incompetence or human error nobody needs to worry about the breeze getting out.
Because it's immaterial. They would need to shut it down perhaps a week before cooling was lost. A BWR that has been shut down will generate enough heat to violently self-destruct for at least a day or two, and enough heat to sustain internal damage perhaps for a week, IIRC.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I can only hope this will help put an end to any new water/water nuclear power plants being planned or built, and get people thinking of de-commisioning the existing ones. This isn't 1955. We know better, We have alternatives. It's time to bury ALL of these dinosaurs.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
If people as disciplined and conscientious as the Japanese can't do nuclear power safely, what chance do we have. Would you want a company like BP running a nuclear power plant or building one?
According to the (in)famous alt.holiday.suicide files, the only way to overdose on LSD is to have a really big sack of it land on your head and crush you. Of course, as other have stated, if one does a large amount of LSD one may attempt to fly, or other unsafe behaviour.
sustainable living
Exactly which nuclear energy safety standards did this reactor violate? Most reactors in the world are from the 70-ies or older. Not because of evil hippies, but because it is extremely expensive to rebuild nuclear power plants once every 20 years because of stricter regulations. Alternative energy wouldn't be so alternative anymore if the real cost of nuclear energy wasn't hidden away from the public through lax regulations, tax subsidies and insurance waivers.
Football Odds
Cores were retracted? WTF? You mean they removed the fuel rods? From a "hot" reactor? In a day? By magic? Look, all they did, and all they could do, was to stop the chain reaction -- that's what a shutdown does. They inserted (not retracted) control rods to stop the chain reaction. This likely has happened during or very soon after the quake was over. This does not make the reactor magically stop producing heat! The reactor, after a shutdown, produces decay heat that may be a couple percent of normal full-power output. We're still talking about megawatts of heats. Without active cooling, the BWR in question will self-destruct, yes, even after a shutdown. The reporters fail to explain the basics to the public: that's not new.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
600,001; my time was wasted being a grammar nazi on your improper use of 'effected' where you should've used 'affected', on a post that you never would have made if Chernobyl hadn't happened (so make that 600,002). Talk about the butterfly effect... Or maybe it's the inverse butterfly effect; a nuclear power plant explodes, and 25 years later, some guy (me) acts like an ass on the Internet.
Hydrogen burn isn't a very energetic event, which is why the Reactor Building framework is still intact. This means the Reactor Vessel is still intact and bolted upright to the floor with the damaged core inside. The RV and the steel containment around it is a very robust container, much stronger than the framework of the building.
All cooling apparatus is gone. If the detonation didn't disable it the fire will. So total core melt is almost certain.
TMI-2 melted 50% of the core which pooled at the bottom of the RV. The RV did not rupture despite the intense heat. It is possible this RV may also not rupture, especially if any cooling can be applied to the outer surface. If so then widespread intense contamination may be avoided.
If the RV does rupture then we'll have molten corium pooling on the concrete floor uncovered before God and everyone. All bets are off at that point.
FYI the reactor is a GE Mark I BWR with steel containment. Details here(PDF). A very old, before-mandatory-concrete-containment-dome system.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I've seen a lot of pro-nuclear advocacy on this site, and I feel that people need to have a perspective on what that choice represents. It's opportunity cost. That's a term for when you give up your chances on one side in the pursuit of another. If your choices are poor your loss includes what you did not pursue when you had the chance.
Right now we have gotten wind down to where it has much to offer and very little drawback. Laddermills can provide power 24-7. Offshore windfarms have been heavily studied and show little impact. A better grid could distribute the uneven power effectively. Ribbon generators and windbelts can, in arrays, compete with solar panels.
Where heat is needed we can concentrate solar thermal energy, whether through passive solar buildings, solar towers and troughs which heat molten salts to 1000 degrees Fahrenheit for storage in insulated tanks to drive turbines 24/7. You can even get hot water from running hoses through a compost pile - several compositions yield a proven 140 degree internal temperature and you're getting fertile soil too.
If you do in fact need electricity, solar panels on a microgrid close to their point of demand circumvent our hugely wasteful grid with its losses due to resistance and the unnecessary surplus generated by redundancy of huge, centralized powerplants.
These are not perfect, but when you consider the subsidies fossil fuels and nuclear plants require, the wars being waged to control their supply, and the costs of pollution whether we're paying them now or ignoring it at the peril of future generations, we are being very foolish to waver in the pursuit of a resilient, safe energy supply.
In the words of Bill Maher on offshore wind turbines: "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash."
Supporting links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laddermill
http://www.truth-out.org/wind-energy-can-power-much-east-coast-study-says63637
http://inhabitat.com/windbelt-innovative-generator-to-bring-cheap-wind-power-to-third-world/
http://gliving.com/power-tower-wind-turbines-a-brilliant-idea-in-this-issue-of-metropolis-magazine-may-2009/
http://www.solarreserve.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_trough
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/EETD-microgrids.html
Why does the world still continue to operate (and even build) BWRs? They're a very poor, cheap design. I believe a new one is being built in the USA just now.
There is no secondary cooling circuit, so active steam goes through the turbines. That means that the turbine halls are radioactive to begin with.
The problem we are seeing here is failure of post-trip cooling. This implies a lot of things wrong with the design and possibly maintenance and operation, and I'm sure the full details of what went wrong will be made available to the public after the investigation.
I feel very sorry for the Japanese and everyone else in Japan just now. The best we can hope now is that the lessons learned from this disaster will give the world better and safer nuclear power stations. We need them to survive and prosper as a species.
Stick Men
"Nuclear power plants are safe. Not perfectly safe. Not zero risk."
Then why can't they get any insurance?
Convince the insurance industry so they'll insure the reactors, then I'll gladly concede that point.
If I get reimbursed for my real estate to go live somewhere else I'd be ok with the risk.
As it is now, _I_ have to cover the risk. I'm not amused.
Here is one Japan guy translating the news: http://www.ustwrap.info/multi/foxtokimekitonight::tbstv::yokosonews::nhk-gtv
if, after a natural disaster, an energy technology has the possibility of redoubling on that disaster, that technology is NOT safe.
quake devastated japan. but meltdown can make any percentage of it, a desolate wasteland. this may be a high percentage.
Read radical news here
Just saw an official press conference on Japanese TV. The containment vessel is intact. The concrete shell was damaged by a hydrogen explosion. Boric acid is being used as a neutron poison. It's not pretty, but it looks still to be under control.
You have to put this in perspective. We just survived one of the biggest earthquakes ever. Hundreds were killed by horrific tsunamis. tens of thousands are homeless in winter conditions. And yet the hysteria in the western media is over a power plant that is still contained. A bit of perspective please.
Shutting down the reactor doesn't cause the reactor to go cold instantly. It stays hot for several days after the reaction stops and coolant needs to be kept flowing during that time.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Jeez. Just look at this journalist. He reports an explosion at a power plant, and rushes to assure his audience that it wasn't a nuclear blast. I'm just speechless. It is utterly and completely impossible for a nuclear power plant to explode like a nuclear bomb, but this guy evidently has no idea. "NPR's Jon Hamilton tells us was NOT a nuclear explosion." Thanks, moron. Nuclear plant trouble is scary enough without intentionally lying to the public.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Sir, you are an idiot.
From earthquake epicenter to the plant is 150km. The wave was measured at 800km/h, so the wave would have hit the plant 11 minutes later.
TEPCO news releases state that the reactors were automatically shutdown at 2h48PM, and the USGS states the quake took place at 2h46PM, so they were shutdown before the tsunami hit. The issue at hand is because of the residual reaction heat that needs to be dissipated by cooling, which was running normally until the tsunami hit a few minutes later.
As for backup equipment, have you seen the state of the country? The US Airforce assisted within a couple of hours with coolant dropoffs and the Japanese military moved generators in place inside eight hours if the BBC can be trusted.
Oh, and one more thing, those tour guides at the Texas plant lied to you, or misunderstood the question. ALL power plants have diesel or gas-turbines to provide startup power in case of a grid loss. A plant will draw from the grid if available, but it will have backup generators available for a cold-grid start.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
This particular design? Well, a single, localized failure can lead to a self-destruction due to loss of cooling. When I was looking at some pictures of a different Mark I installation over a decade ago, it would appear that you could take out that reactor by a single grenade, placed by the right electrical panelboard. Or by throwing about a dozen circuit breakers. This was still not entirely fatal, but required several manual actions to bring up backup cooling. If the control building where the operators reside collapsed due to a quake, you'd be pretty much guaranteed that all units at Fukushima would overheat and suffer steam explosions.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It's not about stricter regulations or standards, it's about good engineering. You can't regulate your way out of reality, so to speak. 60s happened to be a period of lousy engineering in both cars and nuclear reactors. Too bad, but that's how it was.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Thanks. Are you serious? Do you really have a geiger counter? Do you have a website I can check for updates?
http://yokosonews.com/live
Let China know about that. Doubtless they'll halt their immense reactor program immediately.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
So if you look at coal and include the numbers for mining and radiation induced cancer around the coal plants, from where exactly do you think all the uranium comes? So the number on the nuclear side is definitely not zero, and Chernobyl was not the only accident (I am thinking Majak, with unknown numbers of people harmed, small spilages all over the world etc.).
Still, coal is probably worse in deaths/MWh or whatever measurement you want to use, but your numbers for nuclear are not correct, although the US is pretty good in outsourcing the negative effects of it to Niger or other countries.
What you want is PACER, the only nuclear fusion plant whose construction is a "mere" engineering problem. Power by blowing up hydrogen bombs!
While an 8.9 earth quake might have been one of the strongest ever measured, I'd think that this would be something to design for in a country like Japan, where it was likely to happen at some time. As far as I know, the reactors were designed to a maximum force of 7.9, and in the high risk areas to 8.2.
One has to remember that 8.9 releases about 30 times more energy than a 7.9 earth quake though.
They only become so because they are staffed with a lot of people that know how incredibly dangerous they are and work hard to prevent accidents.
It's actually idiots like the above that push the fluffy "safe" "clean" image of nuclear power that are counterproductive and holding the entire civilian nuclear industry back. Heavy industry of all kinds is full of incredibly dangerous shit and none of it becomes any less dangerous by pretending the problem has gone away - in fact the opposite happens and people die. Why do these idiots think nuclear is different and run by magic puppies or something?
All of the current leading edge advances in civilian nuclear power are due to knowing how dangerous everything is and taking big steps to reduce that danger. That's a hell of a lot better than the total idiocy of trying to pretend there never was a problem in the first place.
In this story it's about some incredibly dangerous technology being treated with the respect and preparation it deserves resulting in the successful completion of a disaster plan. If the "nuclear is totally safe" idiocy was applied then there would be no disaster plan and most likely another element to the disaster.
The Moorlocks have to work incredibly fucking hard for the stupid Eloi to keep their stupid mindset of a "safe" world.
This could be very dangerous needless to say. I suspect that we have the next Chernobyl on our hands. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
The Swedish government has asked all citizens to leave Japan as soon as possible.
Not only downwind from Nanticoke, but include the steel mills in the industrial sector, the ones for many years that belched out noxious, and toxic fumes completely uncontrolled. Add in the few Coking facilities that Stelco operated, as well as the many other things. There are parts of Hamilton harbour that are considered to be more toxic than nuclear waste dumps due to the concentration of coal tar, and industrial sludge that ended up there. When I lived in Hamilton, everything in my apartment was covered with a film of soot from the truck traffic, the smog, and the steel mills, and I lived on the mountain. However, Hamilton barely gets the brunt of the shit they generate though, it all blows across the bay to Burlington, the smog was insane when I lived in Burlington, there were days during the summer when we were told to not go outside at lunch due to the smog levels, there were days were you couldn't see the lake from a block away there was so much smog. I firmly believe that nuclear power is far safer, think about it how often do reactors meltdown, or catch fire? Now compare that to how much shit that a single coal fired power plant, or anything for that matter belches out into the atmosphere in a given day....
It had to be done... It had to be said...
Nuclear on the other hand when something goes wrong thers no putting it off and everyone dies slow painfull deaths and the land is useless for centerys.
Why would that happen? It hasn't happened in Chernobyl, for example. The land is already being used as a wildlife refuge and there weren't many deaths in the first place.
It was verified as a hydrogen explosion, not a reactor overpressure rupture.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Where does all the Uranium come from? It could come from the Coal power plants if they bothered to filter the stuff instead of just discharging it into the atmosphere.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
The problem with coal is that even Western countries, like Australia where I live, are quite happy to put both mines and power plants near population centres because people don't realise how fucking bad the stuff is (the Australian government is currently trying to suppress a report showing the correlation by distance of asthma to coal plants).
However the hippies in the 70's and 80's scared people so bad with anti-nuclear propaganda that the Uranium mines are located in the middle of the desert. And people keep wanting to shut down Australia's only research and medical isotope producing reactor (and the morons say we should just import isotopes, because obviously flying in short lived medical isotopes is both cheaper and safer then producing it where it is going to be used).
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
What would the difference be between a nuclear plant and some other type of plant.? Really? Any catastrophic failure of a power plant could involve explosions and damage.
Yes, it would suck, but will the suckage be of a greater magnitude that the suckage from a coal plant exploding?"
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
Yeah, right. Only CO2, H2O, and heat...and SO2. and NOx. and particulate matter. hydrocarbons. Mercury.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
What would you sujjest for Japan then? They have no coal, natural gas or oil. Maybe they should try geothermal.
Hamilton is downwind of so much industrial pollution that it would be impossible to sort out the effect of the coal emissions...
.sig withheld by request
It does generate low level radioactive waste from materials exposed to neutron flux. Byproduct is never going to be hydrogen. Helium 4 and neutrons are a common outcome of fusion reactions that we think are viable.
How many died in America's worst nuclear accident ever (3 mile island)? Zero.
Depends on how you define "worst nuclear accident" and "in." (A) It's likely that some people died because of Three Mile Island, though not in it. If death is the measure of "worst," then we should count an accident at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls in 1961 that killed three people.
.sig withheld by request
I just heard a news reporter saying that this could be "another Three Mile Island". So I googled "Three Mile Island deaths". NRC says there were no deaths. Wiki says: "Based on these low emission figures, early scientific publications on the health effects of the fallout estimated one or two additional cancer deaths in the 10 mi (16 km) area around TMI.[38][unreliable source?] Disease rates in areas further than 10 miles from the plant were never examined.[38] Local activism in the 1980s, based on anecdotal reports of negative health effects, led to scientific studies being commissioned. A variety of studies have been unable to conclude that the accident had substantial health effects." Compared to deaths from drowning in the tsunami and the fumes from a burning oil refinery, another Three Mile Island is nothing.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
As you will well know, the trouble with nuclear power plants is that when they fail, they fail spectacularly. Just saying there have been 0 deaths lately is not saying much if you've just narrowly escaped a meltdown. And we know what will happen if even a *partial* meltdown happens: Chernobyl. It's then not just the initial meltdown, it's a large area that is rendered uninhabitable for a very very long time. Imagine one of those clouds going over a multi-million city and you know that the whole death count of the tsunami is just *nothing* compared to the fall out.
That and the nuclear waste, which seems to be an unsolved problem that is just silently ignored, we just store it indefinitely in locations meant for "temporary storage" and presto. Look at the way the Fins (very down to earth people) are trying to do to get rid of it. And that is just for a small part of their own nuclear waste. And Germany, where they stored the trash in a salt mine and now have to dig up the leaking containers. These are the countries that actually have the money to do things like that. I'll not go into the situation in Russia, because that just makes me sick to the stomach.
I'm all for safe nuclear energy. Saying that the current power plants are anything near the safety required is simply nonsense. Neither coal or nuclear energy is currently at a level where it can produce clean, safe energy at this time.
A 40 year old reactor that was poorly maintained/upgraded fails in mag 9.2 earthquake and has probably ended any possibility of new plants being built in the united states for at least 20 years. Not only could this kill or injure a large amount of people but it's a setback for the only realistic option we had to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and global CO2 reduction. Sadly this will be reported as a failure of the technology and not the people that maintain it.
"Next to zero" isn't zero.
You're wasting our time with this argument. There's a non-zero chance that you do something horribly destructive. What should we do about that?
If you're going to compare deaths from the two modes of generation, you should at least include deaths from uranium mining. Uranium miners probably have elevated cancer rates: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/pgms/worknotify/uranium.html And of course uranium miners die in regular accidents just like coal miners, e.g. this one last year: http://www.aggregateresearch.com/articles/19320/Uranium-miner-dies-in-rock-fall.aspx I'm not against nuclear, just bad statistics.
.sig withheld by request
Nothing is perfectly safe, life is just like that. The reactor will make the headlines, but it represents a tiny bit of the total damage done by the earthquake.
The greenies yammer about how much safer wind power or hydro power would be, but they have no concept that it would take literally millions of wind generators to replace these reactors, spread across zillions of square kilometers - or massive dams flooding just as much land - all of which the greenies would protest against. The result would in any case be unreliable, expensive power. And just how many of those wind generators and/or dams would survive an 8.9 earthquake?
Nuclear power is, in fact, incredibly safe. Look at Chernobyl - a far worse accident than what has happened in Japan. After the accident, the news was full of how tens of thousands of people were going to die of cancer. This was revised down to thousands, then to hundreds. In the final analysis, fewer than 100 deaths can be clearly attributed to the accident. It will turn out the same in Japan - fewer deaths that those cause by a typical major dam breach - which happen every couple of years.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
... and since plain old water *IS* toxic to humans in large quantities, I guess one could conclude that LSD is safe and water isn't.
Of course you'd have to be a moron to conclude that, but in your case that condition seems to have already been met.
What you want is PACER, the only nuclear fusion plant whose construction is a "mere" engineering problem. Power by blowing up hydrogen bombs!
The construction isn't going to be as bad as the maintenance. That's a crew who's always going to be in a bad mood.
and modded informative.
1 We don't know if the cooling system has completely failed (and you're accusing the power company of blatant lies)
2 We don't know if the explosion happened in the core power production (but they're saying it was a hydrogen explosion in the cooling system)
3 The same pictures would be seen if this is pressure release valves operating normally within the core unit.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Have you even looked at du related birth defects in Iraq?, do they count as nuclear industry victims?
It just presumes everyone will remain ignorant to just how many vectors for the nuclear industry to release radioactive effluent into the environment and believe in the magic that somehow coal is worse
Coal releases Uranium, Thorium, Radium, Radon, and Polonium into the atmosphere, how are those less radioactive than what a nuclear powerplant generally doesn't release?
Of course this stupid meme has to be qualified by the phrase “In normal operation” to distance the nuclear industry from it's many 'incidents' where radioactive elements are released into the environment. Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and a plethora of 'accidents' that, because it's “an accident”, doesn't get included in the radiation released by nuclear power plants cause it's “not normal operations”. Beside Nuclear power plants release Noble gasses roughly every two weeks, which whilst benign when released, decay into deadlier elements, and thats NRC standard operating procedure for all nuclear plants.
Nuclear power plants leak radioactive elements into the environment, it has happened and it continues to happen. The peaceful use of nuclear power will *always* be attached to nuclear weapons because *it can be done*. I've never heard of a city being blown up by a coal bomb, or a solar plant going critical. The fact is Nuclear power will never be benign, because it isn't. Not that I'm an advocate of coal, but the worst case scenario I can expect from a coal power station is a fire, the worst case scenario from a nuclear power plant is the rendering of 3000 Sqkms of land uninhabitable and nuclear fallout over an entire continent. That is the reality of a nuclear power plants no matter how this stupid meme tries to spin it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"The reactors won't impact the global economy appreciably - it's *highly* unlikely that anything is going to blow up, anyhow. It's sounding like they had a partial scram, with primary coolant system failure afterwards."
Now that the containment building has exploded, I was wondering if you'd like to revise your statement?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Spared me explaining that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Actually, there is pretty good data on the deaths directly associated with coal mining at least. See here. This data only goes back to the 30s when most of the miners had already unionized in the U.S. That's significant because on the top of their list when striking were things like an 8 hour work day, and being paid to construct safety equipment. The status quo was that miners only got paid for tons of coal and didn't get paid to create construction equipment. All told, in excess of 100k people have died directly due to coal mining accidents.
Oh, by the way, since you went off on the "anti-nuclear hippies", I'd just like to point out an example of a conservative lifestyle choice leading to deaths: in 2007 there were 613 accidental gun deaths and ~18,000 injured, and if you keep a gun in your home, you are four times as likely to shoot yourself or your family than use it in self defense. The point is that people act irrationally sometimes, not just liberals or conservatives.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
That the number of deaths due to nuclear power is zero is not actually true. There are deaths due to typical mining activities, but also many people died due to radiation exposure. Think about it... miners trapped down in an inclosed space breathing air full of radon and uranium for 10 hours a day. It's not a healthy way to live. Not to mention that the waste produced from the mining laced all the water downstream of them with uranium (in the article). The number of deaths due to coal is much, much higher, but nuclear power is not without it's own particular form of nastiness.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
...or am i the only one that came here in search of witty Godzilla comments? Come on /., how many opportunities like this do you expect to get??
>Captain "Piece of jewelery worn on a necklace"?
Don't forget his sidekick: Boy Bracelet!
There have been zero deaths in the U.S. associated with commercial nuclear power generation.
This is actually somewhat surprising to read. When I worked in the industry, I heard about an accident at a different plant, where the generator stopped turning for some reason and all the energy had to go somewhere; the turbine flew into pieces and scattered itself over a wide area, a piece of it landed on an employee's car in the lot and destroyed it. No deaths (or injuries, IIRC) from that incident, but I figured incidents like that are "common enough" that it would have killed at least one person.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
It is not so much oil itself as much America is quite dependant on oil to grow and deliver food. The entire population is very addicted to that stuff. Several hours without and the withdrawal pangs will set in. Go several days without a fix and you will die.
We are far enough away as not to worry horribly personally, but this is happening in the country I live in. My question to those familiar with such things on here is how effective is the technique they will use over the next two days of flooding the core with sea water? That is as much as we know technically at this point so I can't go into more details, not being an expert on nuclear power myself, but I would to here any info from the slashdot crowd on how this works and how effective it might be.
And to quickly summarize from this perspective for those outside the country trying to piece together news. All the reactors here (I believe) shut down properly when the quake struck, as designed. However Fukushima Dai-1 (No. 1) was also hit hard by the tsunamis which took out it's main and back-up generators which were used to pump cooling water into the cores. Late last night they were frantically trying to fly in generators but apparently they did not get there soon enough or did not work well enough and you have what we see now, a meltdown which has probably already begun (nobody here knows either). A lack of power to get cooling fluid into the core causing a possible meltdown, to simplify even more...
ok, I am not against nuclear power, but I see some logical fallacies here. First of all, there is no accurate tracking of cancer deaths due to radiation fallout - or deaths and illness due to thyroid problems etc. Secondly, the deaths per KW hour cited in the article are skewed due to some people dying working on single small turbines which produce very small amounts of energy. Third, wind power and roof installation of solar should become safer as the industry matures and common safety pitfalls are logged and steps are taken to mitigate them. Finally, smaller, distributed power sources like algae->ethanol, solar, and wind, that don't rely on large-scale engineering, don't tend to compound large emergencies. How many people will die as a result of being displaced or resources being shifted that could have been better spent on rescuing stranded, hungry and thirsty civilians?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
If you've got a question, son, just go ahead and ask it. There's no need to be a snarky little jackass.
Now, more folks know a large amount about nuclear power without being a D.O.P.E. (Doctor Of Pile Engineering), but apparently you can't fathom such a thing. I'll try to help you out.
The comment about not being a nuclear physicist relates to not being certain about nuclear power generation in a disorganized pile of uranium in the bottom of a reactor vessel.
What I do know, however, is that for a nuclear chain reaction to occur, you need neutrons splitting off of uranium, and then those neutrons need to cause fission of other uranium atoms.
However, these neutrons from a fission event are traveling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, and at such speeds, they are unlikely to cause fission of another uranium atom. These neutrons need to be slowed to a 'thermal' state (near the kinetic energy of, say, water in an operating reactor) in order to cause the next fission event.
This is where the water comes in. The neutrons are slowed by the water to a thermal state, and in such a state, they are likely to cause the fission of another uranium atom, creating power and continuing the nuclear chain reaction.
When you've got a mass of molten uranium in the bottom of a pressure vessel, you don't have water in between the uranium atoms, so you can't slow down the neutrons to cause the next chain event.
Now, as to the heat conduction angle, normally the ratio of surface area to mass is high in normal geometry. A fuel pellet is about the size of a pencil eraser, a fuel rod is a stack of these in zircaloy cladding, and a fuel assembly is a cluster of these rods with space in between them (for the water to slow down the neutrons and carry heat away for power production.)
Now if you've got a molten pool of this stuff, the surface area vs the mass ratio is much lower. This means that heat removal (which is done with surface area) is degraded. As a consequence, the fuel heats up incredibly (until the decay heat falls off), but relatively little sensible heat is transferred to the steel reactor vessel- which can conduct heat away from the uranium pool at the bottom rapidly, especially if they flood the primary containment structure.
I have not, however, ran sophisticated computer simulations to these ends, nor am I qualified to perform a back of the envelope calculations to the same effect.
I am, however, intimately familiar with the normal and emergency operating parameters of a certain pressurized water reactor, and many of the physical principles are similar to that of the boiling water reactor in question. As such, I can compare the likely conditions in this reactor with the normal and emergency operating conditions in the reactor that I am familiar with, and make reasonably credible predictions- certainly moreso than you, or 95% of the stuff you've read so far.
But hey, there's no PHD in nuclear physics after my name. How could I possibly know anything relevant?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This calamity shows Mother Nature can still really kick ass...
And that's why we should cooperate more globally and not worry so much about fighting each other with all the advanced technology we have been creating. While this tragedy is horrible, just horrible, something like an asteroid strike on the Earth, a supervolcano eruption like in Yellostone, or a massive plague could kill billions. So, this should be a warning to our global society that we should cooperate more to prepare together for what Mother Nature can still dish out at random times.
See also:
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
And by me:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Like with Hurricane Katrina where the USA lost a city, this event will be a test of the Japanese character. The good news is, you can see in Japan aspects of what a healthy society looks like (unlike the USA during Katrina or before). Japan prepared a lot for this (good building codes, to begin with). Their leadership has responded immediately. People are helping each other. News is being posted right away through their advanced social networks. (Many individuals wanted to help with Katrina, and were turned back, and parts of the New Orleans area descended into violence and fear...) You can be sure, as a society, Japan will come through this even stronger and healthier and better prepared for the next event. I wish I could say stuff like that about the USA these days? I don't know, even as I have a lot of faith in US individuals in a crisis. But in the USA, government is painted as the enemy. We don't know what good government would feel like anymore, sadly -- government that is accountable, or plans well, or prioritizes human needs over short-term profits to a few.
With that said, more money put into solar energy research in Japan is probably a good idea... And if you are going to have nuclear power plants, designs like Hyperion power might make more sense (ignoring how you still need reprocessing facilities that might be at earthquake risk). That plant design was 40 years old. This book explains why old nuclear power plant designs are riskier:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter10.html
"The nuclear power plants in service today were conceptually designed and developed during the 1960s. At that time, it was deemed necessary to achieve maximum efficiency and minimum cost in order to compete successfully with coal- or oil-burning plants. The latter were priced at 15% of their present cost and used fuel that was very cheap by current standards. In order to maximize efficiencies in the nuclear plants, temperatures, pressures, and power densities were pushed up to their highest practical limits. Safety features were exemplary for that era, and even for current safety practices in other industries. But they were not up to present-day demands for super-super safety in the nuclear industry.
As the public became more concerned with nuclear safety, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission required that new safety equipment and procedures be added on, in the process discussed in Chapter 9 as "regulatory ratcheting." The amount of labor and materials for these add-ons exceeded that for the plant as originally conceived. With this added complexity, the plants became difficult and expensive to construct, operate, and maintain. Moreover, the level of safety was still limited by the original conceptual design.
By the early 1980s it became apparent that a new conceptual design of nuclear reactors was called for. The cost of electricity from coal- and oil-burning plants had escalated to the point where their competition did not require maximum efficiency from nuclear plants. Furthermore, the added efficiency achieved by pushing temp
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The chances of the reactor blowing up are next to zero.
Well it has blown up now, and I was just hearing the Japanese prime minister announcing the evacuated zone to 20km.
The biggest problem will be either a core breech(aka melting through the core chamber), or a slow uncontrolled cooling of the control rods because of damage by them being too hot. However considering that the CBC article is hours old already, and they've been slow venting, and finally have the ability to turn the pumps back on to get water into the chamber it should be controllable unless something happens again.
This sounds reassuring...
Now, let this be a lesson to anti-nuke nuts. Most reactors built within the last decade or two have two redundant systems for moving water. Steam, or mechanical. This series of reactors doesn't. You know why? Because in Japan, anything that could possibly at all, maybe related to nuclear, or radiation makes environmentalists go batshit crazy.
But it doesn't help that the reactors were built to withstand at least a 9.0 and it was hit by a 9.1, and I've heard it may be revised again as high as 9.4.
A lesson to anti-nuke nuts??? Oh I see! Disagreeing on nuclear policy makes one a flaky nut. How then are we going to produce sound policies, if people like you instantly jump on ad hominem attacks, instead of assessing a real situation for what it is: the Japanese have now to deal with a major nuclear disaster, itself in the middle of a horrible natural disaster, and you go on blaming those who dare to ask questions, and you dare come here on Slashdot telling us that those reactors are subpar, not because of industry practices, but because the industry could not build more of them.
Amazing, just amazing...
Just to put this all into perspective for those claiming doom and gloom regarding nuclear power --
How many oil disasters have there been in the past decade? (Spills, refinery fires, etc.)
How many people died?
How many in Japan due to the quake?
How old were the facilities?
How many coal disasters have there been in the last decade?
How many people died?
How many in coal disasters in Japan due to the quake?
How old were the facilities?
How many nuclear disasters were there? How old were the facilities?
Right... so when we look at nuclear power, it's still the safest. They're built with the most oversight, foresight, and regulation AND it took the largest earthquake in recorded Japanese history to damage the 40 year old reactor-- which still likely won't go into meltdown. And there's been plenty of time to evacuate everyone just in case it does.
Do we get ANY of that luxury with oil or coal?
(Note: I use oil, coal, and nuclear energy in this comparison because they are the energy sources that can be created just about anywhere. Geothermal, wind, water, and solar require very specific placements.)
Nobody's claiming the situation isn't already extremely bad. But a meltdown would still make it so much worse - it is not within the capacity of the world's economy to clean up the fallout of such an event, and Japan sure can't afford to have a large part of its land be useless wasteland.
Yes, people are misusing that event to further their own anti nuclear agenda. Distasteful, definitely, but that doesn't mean that the news' focus on the situation is out of proportion.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20110313/t10014635191000.html
The water cooling system of the plant itself cannot produce enough cool water because of the power loss or something.
Anyway, this means that they decided to basically trash the plant after everything is (hopefully) contained even though the reactor vessel is intact: The inside of the reactor will be contaminated by I-dont-know-what from the sea water and it will be almost impossible to reuse.
I think the company is taking the route that makes sense, even if that's because there's no other choice or whatever.
I really, really hope it's not too late.
That wasn't always the case. At Chernobyl, people were remarkably oblivious to the dangers of radiation and did some in hindsight incredibly stupid things. And that's a good thing, because their drive for self preservation would likely have prevented them to do what was necessary and a much worse second explosion would not have prevented. As an European, I'm grateful for those people's self sacrifice.
Nowadays, people are fully, maybe overly aware of the dangers of nuclear radiation. There won't be enough people willing to sacrifice themselves to prevent an worse outcome of a possible meltdown.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Media was obsessive with the celebrities like Charlie Sheen. Ugh.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Radiation is not an easy thing to attribute damage to and there is plenty of incentive to downplay the results. Results are expensive and difficult to find as well as easily diffused by skeptics since its not clear cut (which often is easy to mischaracterize even when its obvious.)
Russia has had a lot of medical problems go up in huge amounts over a long period of time which are reasonably attributed to the disaster. I saw a report long ago about this defect where children are born with holes in their hearts which was almost non existent before the disaster. They may live but the connection isn't reported upon-- if they die young it also likely isn't counted.
Others could try to attribute other things but unfortunately the impact is so small a margin of error is too high-- which doesn't mean it isn't a factor but we don't have the quality of data or big enough of an impact to attribute it; not a whole lot of motivation to resolve such things either...
Some think the global cancer rates are higher because of all those years of open nuclear bomb testing sending tiny particles around the world which would remain active for a long time. (Although we have other factors too - but say this is a 90% factor - its still a situation such that proof is impossible and nobody will admit it; just imagine the lawsuits... 1 molecule of high radiation in my body for a short period of time isn't something that is going to be detected. Plus you have all the people who don't get cancer or whose bodies defend against it which also make it an extremely difficult question to resolve.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This is a fair point but we didn't know about the health effects at the time. Also a lot of the worst cases were actually at uranium mining facilities specifically for defense purposes. Uranium mining processes have undergone a huge change in the last 50 years because of this. Today uranium mining is in large part in situ leaching which isn't actually mining at all just pumping water into and out of the ground.
As for backup equipment, have you seen the state of the country? The US Airforce assisted within a couple of hours with coolant dropoffs and the Japanese military moved generators in place inside eight hours if the BBC can be trusted.
So because some homes are underwater, they don't need to worry about a meltdown yet? I'm hope you aren't involved in anything resembling business continuity planning, as your priorities are seriously broken.
Oh, and one more thing, those tour guides at the Texas plant lied to you, or misunderstood the question. ALL power plants have diesel or gas-turbines to provide startup power in case of a grid loss. A plant will draw from the grid if available, but it will have backup generators available for a cold-grid start.
You misunderstood my point. They don't run off local power. Why? Because their generators are huge, and stepping down some power there is impractical when they want it at high voltage to send long distances to where the people are. But there's nothing that would stop them from putting in a smaller thermal generator that was run off the waste heat, generating a lower level of power suitable for local use. Obviously, an externally housed diesel generator was insufficient. There's enough power being released now to run a generator sufficient to provide cooling. Without diesel. From a generator that wouldn't have been damaged by the tsunami. And they didn't do it. And as an 8 year old 30 years ago, I had thought of that. And as an adult, looking at two nuclear incidents that would have been prevented if people didn't do what I had as an idea as an elementary school student, I just have to ask why. Or at the very least, secure the backups better such that they will work after a disaster.
It seems like a simple and fundamental design flaw to be able to meltdown any nuclear plant by disabling a fragile diesel generator and the unsecured public power lines going in (any of the lines going out, coming in, distribution near the plant, the transforming stations between the output and the return, or such). Either secure the diesel generator as a critical component (secured from not just a security perspective, but from any disaster the core is designed to survive) or have a more secure backup onsite for the unsecured diesel generator. That, or just shrug your shoulders when a meltdown happens and say "it was a tsunami, no one could have predicted that in Japan."
Learn to love Alaska
Well it has blown up now, and I was just hearing the Japanese prime minister announcing the evacuated zone to 20km.
The reactor vessel hasn't blown up. It's still intact, the containment structure went which is where all the steam was. Time to learn the difference.
This sounds reassuring...
It should be.
A lesson to anti-nuke nuts??? Oh I see! Disagreeing on nuclear policy makes one a flaky nut. How then are we going to produce sound policies, if people like you instantly jump on ad hominem attacks, instead of assessing a real situation for what it is: the Japanese have now to deal with a major nuclear disaster, itself in the middle of a horrible natural disaster, and you go on blaming those who dare to ask questions, and you dare come here on Slashdot telling us that those reactors are subpar, not because of industry practices, but because the industry could not build more of them.
Yes it should be a lesson. You can't stop safety upgrades because you're afraid of something and that's been an on-going case as most japanese reactors for the last 30 years. No ad-homs yet, but that's just fine. Then again, you can go learn japanese and learn exactly why things like this have happened in Japan. Once you do, you'll see it sits at the feet of hyper environmentalists with a anti-nuke agenda delaying everything for the sake of delaying everything.
If you refuse to allow safety upgrades, you have blame.
Om, nomnomnom...
The chances of the reactor blowing up are next to zero. [snip]..Now, let this be a lesson to anti-nuke nuts.
Spoke too soon mate. Just 3 hours after you posted this someone else (symbolset) posted a link to a video of the reactor blowing up.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Eh? How much damage could a meltdown do? It's not going to destroy even as big an area as chernobyl did, and the soviets cleaned that up.
A truck bomb.
The reactor didn't blow up. The outer structure where all the steam and hydrogen was building up did. The reactor is still sitting there, humming along spewing heat.
Om, nomnomnom...
Two things should happen then:
How many centuries did mankind survive without electricity?
It was pretty obvious early on that the pressure vessel was going to go. Too much time, too many issues, with too many compounded issues. The reactor vessel is still sitting there, and hasn't blown up.
Om, nomnomnom...
Constructing it would be infinately safe because it couldn't be done. Hoover Dam cost millions (49 million according to some figures) in the 1930s with a huge labor oversupply. Today it would cost hundreds of billions to build in the US and it would take 50 years to get through the environmental impact studies and such. It is impossible to build such things in the US today.
Also, such construction would be monitored to ensure that nobody was killed. This level of monitoring and safety would ensure that no work was actually done. Large-scale construction pretty much has foreknowledge that it will cost X lives per mile of tunnel dug, etc. Regardless of how much attention to safety there is, someone will do somthing stupid and pay for it. Today there would be lawsuits based on "if you knew people would die, why did you do it?" Just that foreknowledge will prevent such large scale construction from ever taking place. You can't sue someone for not doing something, regardless of how interesting and important it might be.
Besides, ask anyone. We're not building dams anymore, we're tearing them down.
A. In the US we are not building hydroelectric dams any longer. We are, in fact, dismanteling hydroelectric dams for ecological reasons.
B. In the US the chance of building and operating a new nuclear power plant went from 1:10000 to more like zero. As far as the people blocking any sort of construction are concerned, the technology has now proven itself unsafe. It's over, folks.
It is not so much oil itself as much America is quite dependant on oil to grow and deliver food. The entire population is very addicted to that stuff. Several hours without and the withdrawal pangs will set in. Go several days without a fix and you will die.
Sounds awful. Of course, a good portion of the rest of the world is "addicted" (which is a stupid word to apply here anyway, we don't shoot up with the stuff or suck the vapors through our petroleum bongs) to the food which we grow using petroleum-based fertilizers and distribute worldwide with petroleum-powered cargo ships. Go a few weeks without a food fix and you will die.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yes, there are plenty of alternatives that can supply maybe 20% of the power we need! WOW!
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You do realize that as a society, we've probably will choose a) keep going until oil becomes scarce enough that we stop using it as fuel for cars. Then we'll switch over to something very similar, and keep going.
Nuclear on the other hand when something goes wrong thers no putting it off and everyone dies slow painfull deaths and the land is useless for centerys.
Why would that happen? It hasn't happened in Chernobyl, for example. The land is already being used as a wildlife refuge and there weren't many deaths in the first place.
It's interesting, really. I don't know how old you are, but I'm old enough to remember when "atomic power" was looked upon by the public as a safe, clean alternative to fossil fuels. It was the stupid, stupid, antitechnology, antinuclear proponents of the sixties and seventies that managed to frighten people to such a degree that we still haven't recovered from their insidious tactics. That's especially disturbing considering the advances in reactor and fuel-cycle technology that's come about since then. Remember the old Atomic Energy Commission? It's mandate was to promote the use of nuclear power. It was replaced with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, whose only real purpose is to delay the licensing and construction of new power reactors indefinitely, thereby causing more death and suffering as we continue to burn megatons of coal instead. Personally, I'd rather we had more nuclear power plants in operation, so we could use less coal and breathe less Thorium dust.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Chernobyl killing 4,000 people, 60,000 with thyroid cancer, 600,000 others effected in some other way.
Oh, please. Spare me your ridiculous barbs, Major. It's disingenuous, at best, to compare a Russian-designed graphite-moderated power reactor (i.e., a large pile of flammable material stuffed with fuel rods) to reactors built by well, pretty much anyone that actually knows how to build them. And you're also not taking into account decades of research and development in reactor technology. Stop knee-jerking, and start learning. One of the first things you should research is the general toxicity and inherent radioactivity of coal (Thorium, among other things) which results in cancers and other illnesses. There are far worse ways to generate electric power than nuclear energy, and we use them every day.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"A proper reactor like the ones typically employed in the US, will shut down automatically when power is lost to the core."
As someone else said, nuclear reactors don't have an "off switch". The control rods dampen the reaction. On a shutdown, reactivity drops by over an order of magnitude, but it takes minutes or hours to then ramp down to idle levels, and idle still does not mean none.
More significantly, even if you could wave a magic wand and kill all atomic reaction instantly, the core remains at operating temperature until coolant can remove all that thermal energy. And at the risk of stating the obvious, there is a *lot* of thermal energy in the core of a operating nuclear reactor. Most reports are saying their cooling system went offline in under an hour. Even with the magic wand, it would still be hot enough to melt.
All reports say the reactor scramed as soon as the quake hit, *before* the tsunami even arrived. The problem then became residual heat and lack of power for cooling. Coolant boiled off, pressure rose, the rods became uncovered, water starts turning into hydrogen...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Insuring ( or not insuring) nuclear power plants has more to do with security than safety/feasibility. Most local insurance entities can't cover the policy, they would have to purchase reinsurance , which are generally foreign. SwissRe isn't going to help w/o full architectural/mechanical specifications on the whole plant. Because of the sensitive nature of nuclear power plants, most states elect not to seek insurance cover.
Having said that, insuring nuclear power plants in the US is a bit easier with the Price-Anderson Act. There's a limited liability ( a cap ) for what an insurer has to pay out.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Actually, a lot of binge drinking idiots do die from alcohol poisoning. Either along or by stupidly taking pot at the same time, which keeps them from vomiting the alcohol back up. (Nice side effect on chemotherapy, very bad while overdosing on alcohol. You're supposed to throw up when you have too much alcohol, just like you're supposed to throw up when you've been food poisoned.)
And another subset die from what is technically suffocation when their mouth fills with vomit while passed out from alcohol, which should probably count as 'alcohol poisoning' as there is literally no other factor but alcohol, it's just the death was more convoluted.
Heavy metal poisoning is still considered heavy metal poisoning if it kills your kidneys and you technically die from toxic buildup because your kidneys don't work anymore. It's not some mysterious 'kidney failure', it's 'heavy metal poisoning leading to kidney failure'.
Likewise vomiting caused by your body trying to get rid of excess alcohol, and choking on it because your body is passed out because of excess alcohol, should probably be considered 'death by excess alcohol', and death by 'excessive' anything is normally called 'poisoning'. It's 'alcohol poisoning leading to suffocation', which is, admittedly, a weird way for poisoning to kill you, but still.
Unlike drunk driving, where they choose to drink and chose to drink. That, like all LSD deaths, additionally requires behaving stupidly. That is not solely due to the substance.
Incidentally, 'deaths by stupid behavior while on LSD' are probably in the double digits in the entire history of LSD. The 'jumping out a window', for example, was basically invented from a single event that probably did not happen that way. Even the few real documented actual deaths are people wandering into traffic or falling down stairs or accidentally badly cutting themselves through carelessness and not getting medical attention, inattentive stuff like that, not crazy freakouts when they leap through windows.
Although some low number of that is simply because almost no one makes actual LSD anymore, and never really has since 1980. A lot of the 'acid' out there, and even some of the stuff explicitly labeled as 'LSD', is DOB or DOI.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Newer designs along with effective regulatory oversight (like that in Japan vs. the captive b.s. we have in the USA) are held as the redemption of nuclear power's safety record. And yet Monju disproved both, when it's shiny new sodium-cooled Fast Breeder Reactor design failed *and* the regulator became involved in a cover-up.
Interested readers should note that the wikipedia article linked above has been well sanitized (nice job, nuke industry!), but there is plenty in the public record to show what a fiasco that was.
Nuclear plants cannot be insured fully because the price of maximum disaster is so big that the insurance company would be bankrupt instantly. In other words, no insurance company in the world can insure something that can create 250 billion dollars of damage, no matter how unlikely the event is. Even if the risk (probability * cost) is easily affordable for a single insurance company, they will not be able to insure themselves for when they have to pay 'cost'. The claimants would have to be bailed out, so you would foot the bill anyway.
I was not saying you ignore the meltdown because of the injuries, I was pointing out that the level of destruction caused is a massive disruption to any disaster plan. Hell, they might have a set of generators ready to airlift to a stricken plant. But if the warehouse is damaged or flooded or the district is on fire, then what? Their DR plan is quite deep, feed from the grid, or from generators if the grid is gone, or from batteries for 8 hours if the generators are down. TEPCO was shipping charged batteries to the plant within a couple of hours of the quake.
Now to the issues of backup power.
Firstly, the plant runs off the grid when the grid is operating. The plant feeds the grid in a balanced configuration and they draw off the power to run the plant from the grid, ie from the main turbines on site. A plant doesn't have another link to the grid just to power itself.
Secondly, the logistics behind adding a small thermal generator to run off waste heat doesn't make sense. Adding it in means extra hot zones or links to hot zones to run it when needed. You don't need it when the grid is live. If the reactor goes offline at the same time as the grid, you'll only get power out of the small generator while there is enough heat left. So you can cool down the reactor from that generator only to a certain point, then you have to switch in a diesel or gas turbine generator to cool it the rest of the way. Now you need extra switchgear and controls to handle that part of it.
Another reason to use separate technology is if the reason you're shutting the reactor down is because you've blown a steam fitting. Now you've got no way to run the small thermal generator.
So, since you will have to fall back on the diesel generators to finish the cooling cycle and to restart the plant until there is enough heat to run the thermals, why add the extra complexity to an already complex plant.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Cool, so you agree.
Funny how "I'm wrong" yet the news seems to indicate there's nothing passively safe about this plant.
Passively safe nuclear energy is nice in theory, but I've never heard of any major implementation in practice.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Whereas calling someone a moron when you disagree with them is a sure sign of a high IQ.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I haven't heard many reports of the dam break due to the earthquake:
Dam breaks in northeast Japan, washes away homes: Kyodo
The dam already caused serious damage, and we are all worried about what could happen with the reactor? At least they have a plan A, B, C with a reactor. How do you stop a dam break? I would rather have a reactor in my back yard than a dam.
Even when a reactor is successfully shut down, it is still producing 100MW of energy for several days
When a reactor is shut down suddenly (a reactor trip or SCRAM) it continues to produce heat at a rate of 10% of the power it was previously running at. So, if you have a large PWR that can do 2500MW thermal and you trip it (SCRAM) you will have to remove decay heat at a rate of 250MW immediately following the shutdown.
My old Magnox reactors used to do a mere 480MW thermal, so post-trip they did about 48MW thermal. That's still quite a lot of heat with nowhere to go if you don't keep the cooling on.
In the UK we have one commercial PWR, Sizewell B, in Suffolk. This reactor relies on forced circulation of the primary coolant (i.e. the water in the core) for post trip cooling. There are multiple redundant cooling circuits and pumps. Ultimately the heat gets dumped into the North Sea. It is possible to build the cooling circuits in such a way that natural convection of the hot water is sufficient to cool the core post-shutdown. As long as the pressure vessel and primary loop is intact (not unlikely) and the secondary and tertiary (IIRC) loops are also intact, you are laughing. I don't know if Sizewell B can do natural convection. I suspect not..
My old Magnox station was designed in the 1950s with slide rules, copious cups of milky tea and Wile - e - Coyote Acme blueprints. Magnoxes are (were) cooled by carbon dioxide and graphite moderated. The secondary coolant was demineralised water and the tertiary coolant was sea water.
The fault studies determined that, to ensure adequate post-trip cooling for a pressurised reactor, one gas circuit (out of 6) would be enough but at least two (IIRC) had to be in service. (It's been over 10 years since I left, so forgive me if the details are sketchy).
The decay heat (that 48MW post-trip) gradually dies away, and there was a period of time (a few days?) after which you could come down to single circuit cooling. The rationale was, that if that cooling circuit failed (the electric motor driving the gas circulator) you could get another one (of the remaining 5) in service within 24 hours and still not overheat the reactor core. "24 hours" was a nice round number picked out of the air to give plenty of time to get things sorted out.
After a few weeks, the decay heat was so insignificant, that you could depressurise the reactor and introduce air and not really require any cooling at all. We used to do this to one of the two reactors each year for the biennial inspection. Once I spent a fortnight putting a video camera down thousands of fuel channels...
However, in the 1980s and 1990s when RISC workstations became available, they were able to do newfangled more accurate (less pessimistic) fault studies for all the old Magnox reactors, and found some surreptitious happy things:
All of the old Magnoxes were capable of post-trip cooling by natural convection! No forced circulation of the coolant gas required! This was a result of the large difference in height between the reactor gas inlets and the top of the boilers (typically over 100 feet/30 metres).
So as long as your old Magnox reactor had gas in it, and as long as there was cold water in the boilers, if the rods went in and you lost all gas circulators, they wouldn't overheat.
Stick Men
But if the warehouse is damaged or flooded or the district is on fire, then what?
Then you fire the people involved because a backup for such a natural disaster being in a vulnerable area for a disaster you are planning for is incompetent. You seem to understand my point, but still complain for some other reason. The only reason to have a failure of the nature they did is inadequate backups. The answers as I see them are that either everyone knew that and the cost of the necessary backups exceed the cost of a disaster (and cleanup), or the nuclear experts missed something an 8 year old pointed out to a nuclear engineer 30 years ago and was dismissed. I'm hoping the first, but your defense seems to indicate the second. "Why bother to have backups if your backups could fail" is a silly response, but that seems to be the best you can give.
The plant feeds the grid in a balanced configuration and they draw off the power to run the plant from the grid, ie from the main turbines on site.
There is no need for the "ie from the main turbines" comment. Whether those are or are not operational will not change whether the plant's primary power selection is essentially a standard industrial power feed. The primary power for the plant is not unlike any other factory in the area.
A plant doesn't have another link to the grid just to power itself.
Then the nuclear engineer at Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant lied to me. Or you are mistaken. The plant has no access to the power it generates to power itself. Its primary feed is exclusively externally-processed power from a regular grid feed essentially the same as any other factory or plant requesting the same voltage and amperage at that location would receive.
So, since you will have to fall back on the diesel generators to finish the cooling cycle and to restart the plant until there is enough heat to run the thermals, why add the extra complexity to an already complex plant.
Yes, you are right. Relying on diesel as the fallback worked perfectly.
Learn to love Alaska
The problem with this is that if the core is hot, or if the rods are distorted, or if the core is damaged, well, if anything, the rods don't fall in.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
Sorry, but you are quite wrong. The first power plant with the same reactor type (RBMK-1000) went online in 1973, the second generation of this reactor type (the same that was used in Chernobyl reactor block #4) first went online in 1978 or 1979. Chernobyl reactor block #4 went online in 1984 so at the moment of the desaster it was basically a shiny new power plant with a recently designed reactor. In fact, reactors of that design supply half of the nuclear power in Russia and one reactor of the type is still under construction near Kursk.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The GP's post is incredible informative but neglects consideration of where the fuel comes from. Like coal, uranium must be mined, and it takes quite a bit of mining and processing to produce the little bit of enriched uranium for the generators.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Eating 30 bananas in an hour seems quite likely to be fatal, I had no idea 1015us were that dangerous.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
For those who want an article with things like numbers and cutaway diagrams of the reactor, please see this article, from World Nuclear News.
On a side note, the fallout from the meltdowns is expected to travel the jet stream, naturally from East to West. Finally, something to get rid of all this frickin' snow, right!?
No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
Has anyone in Japan ever considered the consequences radiation can have upon local wildlife, such as lizards? Oh, I guess they have.
As you will well know, the trouble with nuclear power plants is that when they fail, they fail spectacularly.
Like deep-sea drilling platforms? Or oil refineries? Or tailings ponds near mines?
You do know that radiation isn't the only type of pollution that can kill tens of thousands of people and render large tracts of land unusable for long periods of time (impacting the livelihood of yet more tens of thousands), yes? I mean look at this explosion (one of several due to this quake): lots of people are going to get sick and die as a result of god knows what fumes that's spewing, and there's no way to even try to contain those fumes. How is that an acceptable risk to build while nuclear plants (the ones currently failing in slow-motion giving people time to evacuate and adapt containment strategies) are not?
That and the nuclear waste, which seems to be an unsolved problem that is just silently ignored
The nuclear waste "problem" has been studied extensively, and technical solutions already exist, both in terms of reducing the existing waste and in terms of reducing the amount of waste to be produced in the future. The only people ignoring anything are the NIMBY oh-it's-not-100%-safe crowd, and the only thing they're ignoring are the actual solutions which already exist and would be built today if not for fucking politics.
And Germany, where they stored the trash in a salt mine and now have to dig up the leaking containers.
Neat how all the waste was in one place where they could get to it to fix the problem. Funny how that doesn't work with the sort of exhaust that coal plants produce...
I'll not go into the situation in Russia, because that just makes me sick to the stomach.
Russia has a problem because they didn't care to handle the waste responsibly. First it was more important building the great Soviet arsenal, then it was more important raping what was left of the economy so there would be no money to deal with the problem. That's, again, a political problem, not a technical one. It certainly isn't restricted to the nuclear industry.
See China for more of the same.
Neither coal or nuclear energy is currently at a level where it can produce clean, safe energy at this time.
Correct, in the sense that nobody can guarantee you that no radiation will ever leak anywhere ever at all. However nuclear is demonstrably many times safe-er than coal, and will continue to be so even if both of these plants go full Chernobyl. It's silly to piss ourselves over the prospect of nuclear accidents when we already accept not just the risk, but the actual fact, of far greater environmental damage in order to run our coal-fired plants and drive our cars.
It's pathetic that we refuse to replace a terrible, continuously polluting, and highly prone to catastrophic failure solution with one that produces only a tiny fraction as much ongoing pollution and is only slightly prone to catastrophe, because the average person is under the impression that radiation is that much scarier than toxic fumes and iridescent mining sludge.
Pedantry won't make any difference, the explosion is already a PR nightmare for the nuclear industry.
Disclaimer: I'm not anti-nuke, I'm pro pebble bed.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"How did a nuclear reactor in an earthquake-prone industrialized country get approval of any sort if it could not resist a magnitude 8.9 earthquake?"
By being approved in the seventies with what was considered state-of-the-art back then and a bit of realpolitiks: you can either be completly safe up to a never seen earthquake level and a tsunami and be ruined or you can take a slight risk and be known as a world-level economic power despite of the fact of being a not so big bunch of islands with almost no raw materials.
I'd say Japan took the proper option.
Well, What do you expect when you name nuclear plants with names starting with 'Fuku'
FragHARD or don't frag at all
You mean like how we're all dead because of this one?
Vent gas? King Size Homer anyone?
That's the critical failure point we're dealing with now, which makes this a design flaw IMO. Backup power to the pumps should have been more robust. A few possibilities come to mind...
1. Provide battery backup sufficient to run the pumps long enough to cool the residual heat.
2. Don't site the diesel generators a few km away, keep them nearby. (If you can build a quake&tsunami-proof containment for the RV, why not do the same for the generators?)
3. Allow some method of of using the residual heat to generate electricity for the pumps, or simply use steam-power (mechanically) to drive the pumps.
I'm sure it would be more complicated/expensive than it sounds, but those extra costs would be a bargain compared to the cost of cleaning up this mess.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
As a confirmation of that, with the latest news, it appears that 1 technician died and 11 were wounded (we're not even talking about contaminated people).
(As a side note, not even the Japanese appear to be sure about what is happening exactly and if they will be able to avoid further damage, yet the IAEA already managed to rate the accident at one nice, reassuring grade below the Three Mile Island's one. Which makes me wonder how reliable it is to ask the bartender if the beer is good.)
One question at a time, please.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Exactly. Modern nuclear power plants are much safer now. And they are operated by the smartest and best paid workers in the world, so we don't have to fear that they may make mistakes. And even if they explode, no radiation will be spread across the land, nobody will be harmed. And we have solved the waste problem since then, so we no longer have to fear that the locations where we store the contaminated waste may some day release radiation into the environment. Oh, wait...
The Angels have the Phone Box
I somehow doubt that a catastrophic failure at an offshore wind farm or at an concentrated solar power plant would involve damage to humans on a scale compared to nuclear power plants or coal plants.
Nuclear and coal are not the only power sources, but they certainly are the worst ones considering their potential and innate risks.
The Angels have the Phone Box
The problem as it was before is the uninformed masses, and the anti-nuke scare mongers. It doesn't help that most of the western world has been sucking on the tit of hyper environmentalists with a anti-nuke agenda for the last 30-40 years either.
Om, nomnomnom...
If you can call abandoning the area "cleaned up", sure. Shame the Japanese don't really have the land to spare.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
An MD50 of LSD costs in the ballpark of $10. Given the LD50/MD50 ratio I'm sure this guy couldn't afford to kill himself with LSD. Much less an anti-nuclear hippie, right...?
FWIW, the TMI plant released: 13 curies, and the Chernobyl accident released: 1,000,000 curies [Soviet estimate]. Their reactor blew apart and their moderator caught fire, so it was really on a scale of its own. Second prize in this lineup won't mean too much, Japan.
In general, yes, but anyone trivializing the risks of LSD is in fact a moron, especially when doing so in a forum like this full of young impressionable people who might take that as a factor in deciding to try it.
You know what? I'd be perfectly happy to live literally next door to a spent fuel rod storage facility. You're free to live next to a coal ash pile.
To operate a coal-fired plant you maybe need an engineering degree, if that. Nuclear power plant operators (people, not companies) have to be licensed. Everyone makes mistakes, but to say that nuclear power plants are any more deadly is just silly. I'm sure coal ash is not a big revenue generator (until shit happens), whereas the word "nuclear" is politicized and everyone gets jittery if you as much as mention it.
The nuclear waste "problem" you refer to -- well, it never really was a problem in the first place. You must have never worked anywhere near any conventional power plant, because then you'd have known that no matter what the fuel (coal, oil, gas), the waste is a huge problem. Even with natural gas you have to install and maintain insane scrubbers to get the sulphur out. Everything dwindles when compared to coal ash problem, though. Spent fuel rods are concentrated, high- or mid-level waste that's quite limited in volume. When it comes to radioactive coal ash, everything is against you: the amounts are such that you can't store it while protected from the elements. When the wind blows, you get the dust everywhere. The rain leaches stuff out. If any sort of containment fails (say a layer of plastic liner underneath the pile), it's pretty much impossible to fix it -- good luck digging up a mountain of coal ash to replace the liner. The sheer amount of stuff makes it a fire-and-forget, get-it-right-the-first-time type of a deal. There is literally no money available to fix anything when it comes to leaking/disintegrating coal ash piles, and some of the old ones may collectively require billions USD worth of maintenance.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Forgot something: If Navy could get it right, why can't the utilities get it right? Are NUPOCs sprinked with fairy dust upon birth or somesuch? What you're saying is that there's no way to get correct people in those positions. Just go dig yourself a burrow...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
That's the critical failure point we're dealing with now, which makes this a design flaw IMO.
No shit, Sherlock ;)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
People problems are the same in power generation whether it's nuke or coal. You have the very same lapses in inspections and maintenance in both. The effects can be arguably just as disastrous. Coal ash sludge is toxic and it will pretty much permanently contaminate river- and lakebeds. Cleanup requires digging shit up, just like in a nuclear "spill": you remove the material and move it somewhere where the NIMBY crowd is thin enough. Kid you not. Never mind that coal ash is toxic due to heavy metal content, but it's also the worst kind of radioactive waste: volumunous low-level waste. High-level waste is relatively easy to handle, in comparison.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Saved me some time there.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's a part of his secrete identity. You might call it his "type 0" identity.*
*If you're not picking up on all the intentional typos by now, all I can say is "Whooosh!".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So in other words:
Everybody thinks: The.Risk.Is.too.Big.
But as usual the whatcouldpossiblygowrong crowd does it anyway.
Meh, I think it's purple anyway. That's all I can think of but I'm sure there's something else.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
1) I never said this plant used passive safety, nor did you mentioned this plant at any point. You spoke about "a nuclear reactor" in general.
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
The fans of nuclear power have been giving very interesting accounts of how this incident is just a paper cut. Right before the news keeps getting steadily worse and worse.