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Japan Battles Partial Nuclear Meltdown
Hugh Pickens writes "Japanese nuclear experts are working to contain a partial meltdown at an earthquake-stricken nuclear power plant north of Tokyo, as fears grow that the death toll from Friday's massive quake and tsunami could reach the tens of thousands. A partial meltdown, experts said, would likely mean that some portion of the reactors' uranium fuel rods had cracked or warped from overheating, releasing radioactive particles into the reactors' containment vessels. Some of those particles would have escaped into the air outside when engineers vented steam from the vessels to relieve pressure building up inside. Adding to problems at the site, hydrogen was building up inside the Number Three reactor's outer building, threatening an explosion like the one that blew apart the Number One reactor building's roof and outer walls on Saturday. However, it remains unclear how far radiation has spread from the facility. Some local residents and health workers were diagnosed with radiation poisoning in precautionary tests, but they show no outward symptoms of distress. 'Even if you have a radiation release, although that's not a good thing, it's not automatically a harmful thing. It depends on what the level turns out to be,' says Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a US industry group, adding that a person exposed to the highest radiation levels measured at the Fukushima site would absorb in two to three hours the same amount of radiation that he would normally absorb in 12 months – a significant but not necessarily injurious amount, especially if exposure time was short."
I think it's incredible how safe their reactors are and when you consider what has happened, I think this should calm many people's fear of nuclear energy.
Now, the disposal of the waste ....
Despite all the tech developed since 1986, coverage of the progress of the cooling of the Daiishi plant has been absolutely atrocious in terms of speculation and lack of, well, at least one independent person , organisation or government (i.e. not this press release site, now down) providing reports containing hard facts, e.g. telephoto / satellite imagery, radiation count, etc.
To repeat myself from yesterday:
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, 4 and 6.no-one
All around. al jazeera/bbc have been decent, but still - not what it needs to be. Fox, CNN, MSNBC have all been sensationalist garbage - as usual. What else is a decent source of news anyone else has been following?
Hopefully this turns out to be nothing as bad as it could be. The reactors are dead, but lets hope that is the least of the issues.
Why is there not a game called tsunami? or would that be in poor taste?
FWIW, since the amount of decay heat the reactor can generate is a known quantity based upon the power of the reactor, the question becomes: is the containment vessel able to contain that much energy in the event of a loss of cooling? They're supposed to be able to.
Just what we need to speed along nuclear adoption here in the US.
Where's Jane Fonda when you need her?
If we're lucky, this will only set us back another 30 years.
'Even if you have a radiation release, although that's not a good thing, it's not automatically a harmful thing. It depends on what the level turns out to be,' says Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute
To repeat myself from yesterday, the public should trust the pronouncements about things that can kill you for thousands of years from industry shills why, exactly?
Radiation is either ionizing or it is not. There is no "harmless ionizing radiation". Being exposed to ionizing radiation means that you're taking a risk of fatal damage to your body, no matter how little radiation you're exposed to. This only becomes gradual on a statistical level, i.e. when you look at what percentage of a large group of people is affected.
Exposure to ionizing radiation is natural, so we always live with this risk, but that just means that we can't reduce the risk to zero, not that increased exposure to ionizing radiation is harmless until a certain threshold is exceeded.
This is an argument, not against nuclear power, but in favour of transparency in the design, planning, build and monitoring processes. That, however, would demand equally grown up behaviour from the antis. I do feel that part of the problem with nuclear power has been the culture of secrecy fed by, to be frank, the scientific and engineering ignorance, emotionalism and sometimes near-hysteria of the antis.
In the early days of railways and canals there was similar "anti" hysteria - clergymen claiming that canals would be destroyed because it was blasphemy for men to ape their Creator by making rivers, idiots claiming that travelling at speed would prevent people from breathing - but the benefits were so enormous that people largely ignored them. The problem with nuclear power is that most people are not equipped to understand the potential benefits, so all they hear about is the potential downsides.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
AFAIK just getting high levels of radiation isn't that harmful. Some cells will die and if you survive that you'll recover. Radiation is just electromagnetic emission. The real danger is the radiation emitting particles. If they get out in the air and contaminate the biosphere you'll end up with an area nobody can live in like Chernobyl and thousands of people dying from cancer and other diseases related to long exposure to radiation can lead to. So the question is how much of these particles have escaped.
So when does Godzilla turn up to kill those that survived the quake, tsunami, and fallout?
Just after the Shinmoedake volcano has erupted.
The site looks almost identical to Fukushima: google earth link
I found this to be a good source for uncommented information: http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/. I cannot vouch for the veracity of the source, but it does not seem to be very biased.
Unfortunately the nuclear accident seems to have overshadowed reports on the real human tragedy - the tsunami and the earth quake. Especially in Germany, media are instrumentalizing the incident and are plotting doomsday scenarios. The worst of all seems to be "Der Spiegel", which I held in much higher regard until yesterday.
The following document is a good source of info regarding the situation at the Fukushima reactors. See the section titled "BWR 3/4 Perspectives", including the parts regarding station blackout (SBO), transients with loss of coolant injection, and transients with loss of decay heat removal (DHR). (The remaining parts of the BWR 3/4 section don't appear to apply.)
Core damage frequency perspectives for BWR 3/4...
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
It's not getting much press, but the Unit #1 reactor was scheduled to be closed in two weeks. (Those links don't show the exact date, but I think it was March 22.)
It's sort of like the old cliche about a cop getting shot in the month before his retirement.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
These are reactor designs from the 1960s. Green opposition has successfully stopped the development of newer and safer control systems, so we are left with 50-year old technology to resist the largest earthquake/tidal wave ever seen in Japan.
Nevertheless, the reactor technology worked, and shut down the reactors. Then the water damaged the support services which were cooling the reactors down, meaning that they had to get permission to vent short-lived radionuclides in an unsafe manner. They did this - one site was unlucky enough to get an aftershock as they did it, which precipitated a hydrogen explosion in an unmanned part of the reactor building. There was one death and 4 light injuries. By now the reactors will all be cooling down, and there will be no more incidents.
In the meantime the gas and oil refineries, with the benefits of the latest technology, caught fire and exploded, causing many deaths. The sea defences were overrun, causing MANY THOUSANDS of deaths. But the headline news is about whether the reactor fuel rods have got slightly overheated....
I think the press has its priorities wrong....
The average TV viewer in the US has about a five minute attention span thus are only interested in the highlight-reel moments. I don't blame our media for creating an oversupply of useless, sensationalist drivel, they are simply responding with what they think WE want. Obviously, we want more TMZ! You know - the stuff that really matters. If I want any real analysis of world events, I'll just turn on The Daily Show.
We don't yet have any idea of the true nature or extent of what's happened, but if the radioactive material did breach the base of the containment structure, could we be looking at a potential for widespread groundwater contamination, potentially extending over a very wide area? One danger among so many others, of course?
Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, has written his take on the events, and why he's not worried about it.
I haven't finished reading this story yet (it's quite a few pages), but it's pretty interesting so far.
-- # man women
Some people will see this incident as yet another argument against nuclear energy.
I think it's yet another indicator that much of the world's nuclear infrastructure is aging, and that we should be building new, safer reactors. I don't work in the industry, but I don't believe that any of the pressure-related problems being experienced at the Fukushima reactors would or could occur in a molten salt reactor.
In the beginning they said there's no radiation leakage hazard, hours later they said ONLY four people within 10 miles infected by radiation.
So tell me how these four people infected? By television radiation?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
IANANS, ( I am not a nuclear scientist), but I thought ALL reactors had an autoscram system, that detected coolant problems and was supposed to retract the rods from the reactor. Was i just dreaming this, or does it exist??
But had their license extended 10 more years. I guess that the officers that did this now must be contemplating suicide at the moment. If I were in their shoes, I would.
An additional systemic problem, that I expect that government officers and utilities managers from Japan at last tackle in view of the current emergency if politicians can stop the stupid political bickering that goes at the moment, is that the country has 2 separate electrical grids, one for eastern Japan and one for western Japan, working at different frequencies, so even if western Japan has spare capacity, and I bet that they have, they couldn't do anything to help to meet demand from the other half of the country, even if most transmission lines in eastern Japan are in good shape. I guess that this problem weighted in the decision to not get decommissioned the unit 1 as programmed.
Now Tepco, the plant operator has announced that it will implement rolling blackouts starting next Monday. Hopefully, they will manage to put a few of the conventional power plants units that got damaged online in a week. The neat thing is that all hydro power plants are online and undamaged, at least in Tepco's service area. Having witnessed the damage that suffered some of our company's power plants by the 7.6 earthquake of january 21st, 2003 in Manzanillo, Mexico, I believe that they could manage to get all conventional power plants online in a month. I was impressed that the lights were still on in many of the towns damaged by the tsunami.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Now, I'm not a huge fan of nuclear power. Not for the usual "GAAAH! RADIATION! WASTE! YOU'RE MAKING GAIA CRY!" reasons, but because humanity (and more precisely, human bureaucracy) is often far too gaffe-prone to be trusted. Running a nuclear plant isn't amenable to cost-cutting or tight-fisted cost-benefit assessment.
But the way the affected reactors and their operators have performed has been almost perfect. Consider the fact that the buildings themselves are intact after what nature just threw at them. Pretty astounding. Sure, by the look of it, we've already breezed through several failure modes, but reaction has been halted and sea-water is readily available to keep the thing cooled without the core making a bid for freedom. Still, as I understand it, worst-case is the core splurges itself over the inner containment floor and eventually cools anyway.
Of course, there'll be a post-mortem over why standard cooling couldn't be restored, the results of which will be interesting (and no doubt, instructive).
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Tens of thousands of people were probably killed by the quake and the resulting tsunami. But anti-nuke activists will consider this the worse tragedy...
It seems to me a little too early for the geek to be breaking out the champagne.
These reactors - plural, remember - have no containment structures. There could still be major aftershocks, a second tsunami.
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
---Winston Churchill
...linking to those links?
The media in Germany give the impression, that the quake provoked the problems. But actually the cooling diesels worked fine until the tsunami hit the plant. That caused the diesels to stop working and hence the failure of the cooling system. But as everybody understands that there can be no tsunamis in Germany the quake must be the culprit, so the public can be scared with the idea of a quake in Germany, too. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/RS_Venting_at_Fukushima_Daiichi_3_1303111.html
Btw this is not a flame or anything, I am genuinely curious. I read that TEPCO believes that reactors #2 and/or #3 have suffered a partial meltdown but they cannot send technicians to inspect at close quarters since radiation levels in the vicinity of the containments are way too high. Aren't there any robot sentries similar to the ones used to defuse bombs that could be sent instead?
Du kan glomma dina ensama stunder, du kan lita paa teknikens under - Wilmer X
I just want everyone in the New York City area to rest comfortable tonight with the knowledge that they built the Indian Point Nuclear Facility RIGHT ON TOP OF THE RAMAPO FAULT LINE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramapo_Fault#Earthquake_hazards_in_the_New_York_City_area
Morons.
Fault Lines never die, they just fade away. So while they have a big one in Japan or California every 100 years, it might be every 100,000 years for the Ramapo Fault Line. So we could get a big one tomorrow, or in a thousand years. No one knows. But its not like you even need an Earthquake for something awful to happen at Indian Point: its old and crumbling. It has frequent safety violations and infrastructure failures. Any number of problems could happen. From human error to just plain catastrophic failure due to age.
I'm not against nuclear power. Modern Pebble Bed Reactors are extremely safe: you can stand up and walk away from them, nothing happens. But the Indian Point Nuclear Facility is ancient, crumbling, outmoded technology, and it needs to be shut down ASAP. Just like the one in Japan that is failing:
Its like an old car: if you insist its time to get rid of the junker, it doesn't mean you are against all cars.
Listen carefully, those who are for more nuclear power, as am I: you have to understand the greatest enemy of wider use of nuclear power is not tree hugging hippies, but old nuclear reactors, based on technology that requires constant monitoring, in decrepit states. Because when, not if, they fail, all of public opinion moves against nuclear power. We need to shut down the old shoddy Indian Point Nuclear Facility NOW.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Even if your pro- or con- nuclear power: the fact that Japan lost 10 GW with this disaster is something that should shake some people up. Even with the most safest nuclear power plant designs, safety is often based on a (partial) shutdown of the facility. This would mean that for large powerplants of several GW the impact when this happens (for whatever reason, not just huge disasters) is huge.
By using distributed and smaller power plants, this problem can be more or less avoided. Provided that the infrastructure takes into account a possible partial loss of power, that is. And that is a big plus for alternative energy sources, like wind or solar: these can be setup distributed.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
> but because humanity (and more precisely, human bureaucracy) is often far too gaffe-prone to be trusted. Running a nuclear plant isn't amenable to cost-cutting or tight-fisted cost-benefit assessment.
Exactly. Imagine the fiscal debate around replacing pre-Chernobyl reactors. Current US gov arguing about cutting tsunami warning systems the day of the Japanese tsunami. Now imagine a 9 earthquake in LA with our, shall we say, post-modern approach to regulation. There's a reason Tokyo didn't fall down and it's not the hidden hand of the market. (FWIW I have no specific knowledge of LA building codes. Mentioned purely because /. doesn't have enough hot air)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Follow the money - Greenpeace is run by the oil interests, they use it to harass their competition.
The excuses from the nuke true believers are amazing:
It is old, it is the Die Greunen, if only they did this, that or the other thing, all the new ones are perfect, the radiation is harmless, the cost of a new one will be so cheap it will be unmetered.
A Black Swan is an event that has a highly scalable result, good or bad. This is a bad result , but amazing isn't it that no one could have predicted that
Japan would have earthquakes and tsunami. The world is full of old nukes, we have 2 near me in Minnesota. But they keep running them as much as they can in the flood plain with record floods predicted this year. Why shut them down for the flood season? Probably we won't have a problem. And if we do we will hear the same excuses.
When you design systems that can have huge scalable catastrophic results and make lots of them the probability of terrible things happening goes way up.
No one is decommissioning the plants here in the USA, they are running long past design spec in earthquake zones and flood plains. Look at the history,
every 10-20 years there were a reactor or 5 disasters.
Now most nukes are old, is the probability going to go down for these Black Swans? No
Why off topic? Godzilla was a product of the fear from the nuclear explosions in Japan. If the fear of radiation returns to the popular culture, Godzilla may very well return.
Have gnu, will travel.
Is there already a release-date for Stalker-Fukushima set?
BBC reporting;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12726297
"Japan's nuclear energy agency has declared a state of emergency at a second nuclear facility, at Onagawa, after excessive radiation levels were recorded there.
It said cooling systems at all three reactors at the Onagawa complex, which were automatically shut down after the earthquake and tsunami, were functioning properly and the rise in local radiation levels might have been caused by the Fukushima leak."
Onagawa is around 75 miles north of Tokyo
Its like an old car: if you insist its time to get rid of the junker, it doesn't mean you are against all cars.
But if you can't get a new car (like they can't in Cuba) you just keep patching up the old heap (like they do in Cuba).
Have gnu, will travel.
I haven't been able to find any other sources for this:
Italian TV channel Sky Tg24 reported yesterday that there was an un(?)intentional leak of information at Japanese TV station NHK. A NHK news reader allegedly reported that the Fukushima plant (unclear which one) had been deserted by workers and technicians. She was interrupted by the anchor who said "This wasn't supposed to be read on the air."
Japan earthquake and nuclear power plant: censored information (Italian, with video)
German translation
Has anyone heard about this from another source? I couldn't find the NHK footage either. The Tg24 article linked from the blog post doesn't mention it. The blog post mentions other sources but for whatever reason doesn't name them. Canard or censorship?
Citation needed. On the other hand, here's a citation of my own: Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies. And China, France, India, and Russia do not have the US's lawyers or environmental laws.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
10,000 killed by earthquake/Tsunami will be nothing compared to the Gigantic Mutated Creatures that will follow this Radiation leak! AT LAST! Sharks with frikken Lazer-beams...Bwa-hah-hah-hah!
"It's an imperfect world,screws fall out..."
Chernobyl was absolutely harmless. Bring'em on!
Come on... how much does one get paid for your kind of job? Where should I apply?
Considering subsidies for nuclear power, it would have been cheaper to not build nuclear power plants and just give electricity away to industry for free. http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear_subsidies_summary.pdf
The parent comment about nuclear reactors being "safer" doesn't mean very much at all when the alternative is thousands of years of nuclear contamination. Just because one thing is "safer" than another in no way means that the first thing is safe. Hopping on one foot on top of a fast-moving train might be 'safer' than doing a one-handed handstand on top of the same train but that doesn't mean in any way that it's a safe thing to do, even if it were 'much, much safer'.
The reactors of today are the ones that have not melted down yet. Does not make them safer.
Fill the Great Lakes and every coast, the Gulf, and all of the Alaskan Coast with towers?
Not needed in the USA. The Rockies contain enough potential wind energy to power the 48 contiguous states. Of course the West Coast from BC to southern CA contains a lot too. Turn eastward in SCal going through AZ and NM to west Texas and there's more. On the East Coast hike up the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine to find more prime wind energy. Of course you can find more offshore but plenty can be found on land.
And that's just considering wind. A Solar Grand Plan goes into how solar power can supply "69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050". Not only does Nevada have a lot of solar potential but it also has a lot of potential geothermal and wind energy.
Of course the pseudo-environmentalists NIMBYs will oppose these.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Wow, not only do you blame the victim but you do so anonymously. Shameful. This happened because while the US was closing Humboldt 3 for seismic issues, it was pushing atoms for peace on its very seismically challenged client state for its own profit.
Meanwhile, Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a US INDUSTRY GROUP, said some stuff downplaying the possible dangers of the situation with the purpose of preventing the build-up of opposition to nuclear power.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
that people 300 years from now will see them as the few beacons of rationality and guardians of beauty and true value in an era in which pure-greed-driven anarcho-captialist industrial civilization went insane and tore down its own home and the neighboring residents.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/ken/hell.html
http://allafrica.com/stories/201012300325.html
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Video tape: Firefighter is on a ladder spraying water into the containment vessel with his pet Iguana on his shoulder. His pet iguana falls into the containment vessel.
Video tape the following day: A large reptilian silhouette moves towards Tokyo.
Translation of blog post:
Translation of Italian live report:
Compared to the deaths from coal plants nuclear power is a magical fairy playground.
You're leaving out other problems with nuclear power. People don't only suffer when there's an accident at a nuclear power plant, ask the Navajo Nation and other Indidenous peoples.
Now I'm not saying coal is safe and clean, I oppose it almost as much as I do nuclear power, but only counting Three Mile Island doesn't say much.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23676
Emergency Special Report: Japan's Earthquake, Hidden Nuclear Catastrophe
by Yoichi Shimatsu
Emergency Special Report I
The Wave, reminiscent of Hokusai's masterful woodblock print, blew past Japan's shoreline defenses of harbor breakwaters and gigantic four-legged blocks called tetrapods, lifting ships to ram through seawalls and crash onto downtown parking lots. Seaside areas were soon emptied of cars and houses dragged up rivers and back out to sea. Wave heights of up to10 meters (33 feet) are staggering, but before deeming these as unimaginable, consider the historical Sanriku tsunami that towered to 15 meters (nearly 50 feet) and killed 27,000 people in 1896.
Nature's terrifying power, however we may dread it, is only as great as the human-caused vulnerability of our civilization. Soon after Christmas 2004, I volunteered for the rescue operation on the day after the Indian Ocean tsunami and simultaneously did an on-site field study on the causes of fatalities in southern Thailand. The report, issued by Thammasat and Hong Kong Universities, concluded that high water wasn't the sole cause of the massive death toll. No, it's buildings that kill - to be specific, badly designed structures without escape routes onto roofs or, in our greed for real estate, situated inside drained lagoons and riverbeds, or on loose landfill. In the Tohoku disaster, an ultramodern Sendai Airport sat helplessly flooded on all sides while nearby a monstrous black torrent swept entire houses upstream.
Other threats are built into the vulnerabilities of our critical infrastructure and power systems. The balls of orange flames churning out of huge gas storage tanks in Ichihara, Chiba, should never have happened if technical precautions had been properly carried out. Whenever things go wrong, underlying risks had led to a liability and, in a responsible society, accountability.
Most people assume that the meticulous Japanese are among the world's most responsible citizens. As an investigative journalist who has covered the Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake and the Tokyo subway gassing, I beg to differ. Japan is just better than elsewhere in organizing official cover-ups.
Hidden nuclear crisis
The recurrent tendency to deny systemic errors - "in order to avoid public panic" - is rooted in the determination of an entrenched bureaucracy to protect itself rather than in any stated purpose of serving the nation or its people. That's the unspoken rule of thumb in most governments, and the point is that Japan is no shining exception.
.
So what today is being silenced on orders from the Tokyo government? The official mantra is that all five nuclear power plants in the northeast are locked down, safe and not leaking. The cloaked reality is that at least one of those - Tepco's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant - is under an emergency alert at a level indicative of a quake-caused internal rupture. The Fukushima powerhouse is one of the world's largest with six boiling-water reactors.
Over past decades, the Japanese public has been reassured by the Tokyo Electric Power Company that its nuclear reactors are prepared for any eventuality. Yet the mystery in Fukushima is not the first unreported problem with nuclear power, only the most recent. Back in 1996 amid a reactor accident in Ibaraki province, the government never admitted that radioactive fallout had drifted over the northeastern suburbs of Tokyo. Our reporters got confirmation from monitoring stations, but the press was under a blanket order not to run any alarming news, the facts be damned. For a nation that's lived under the atomic cloud of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, total denial becomes possible now only because the finger on the button is our own.
People are the best defense
Despite the national addiction to nuclear power that keeps the neon lights bright over Shibuya's famous corner, Japan still remains the most prepared of all societies for earthquakes, tsunami, co
(replying to self) Funny how context impacts your language even when translating
The Prime Minister has had to blow off the press conference
Sorry for the Germanism, it should be "cancel the press conference". I guess press conferences can be an occasion for blowing off steam before your core melts down...
[**] they didn't actually mean to criticize her attitude or the fact that the leak happened, but the apparent censorship
meaning, of course, the leak of information, not of radiation. On second thought they seem to be a bit ambiguous about whether they like the leak or find it irresponsible, but after all they're spreading it themselves.
Four problems in 50 years? Wiki lists at least 56 Nuclear reactor accidents in the United States which caused at least one death or $50,000 in damage. Of course we've had articles on Slashdot about what happened at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, as well as guards being caught sleeping on the job.
is actually a POSITIVE thing
Ah, I agree it's good there hasn't been more accidents.
Also, modern designs wouldn't have these problems. Modern designs remove 90% of the criticisms that you, and other, lay at their feet.
But those designs don't solve one important problem, nuclear power is still Hooked on Subsidies. Without government subsidies Wall Street, no matter how evil people think it is, will not pay for nuclear power plants to be built.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
a US industry group, adding that a person exposed to the highest radiation levels measured at the Fukushima site would absorb in two to three hours the same amount of radiation that he would normally absorb in 12 months
I understand the US industry group not wanting to panic people about nuclear power as what is going on in Japan already has a negative impact on their industry, but they should be promoting how safe nuclear power is (ie even after a massive earthquake, the system worked mostly as it should) instead of the B.S. like the above.
Saying that the dosage is just what you would have absorbed normally in 12 months is like saying that a drowning victim only consume the same amount of water they would have in three days. Radiation is more than just how much you receive over a long period. It also has to deal with the amounts received in a short period, too.
I've seen enough of these accidents every decade or so. Enough is enough. Get rid of it.
I wonder what the environmental community will say when/if Japan decides to close down their nuke plants and replace them with oil/coal/gas based power stations (there is no feasible way considering astronomical cost to use wind/solar/hydro to replace the output from all those reactors).
As far as safety, less people are killed per year from nuclear power generation vs fossil fuel generation (even adjusting for the difference of each respective production capacity). It may be a bit simplistic to use that as complete justification for the safety of nuclear vs fossil fuel but it definitely should not be blown off (no pun intended) and ignored.
That writeup by Dr. Oehmen is very clear and easy for a layman to understand. While the events at the two power plants in Japan are quite serious, they are not going to result in mass radiation poisoning or mass dreading that article helps put them in perspective with the other damage wreaked by the quake and tsunami.
Tangential as those qualifications may be, are any of the news articles written by people nearly as qualified? If he's not quite the perfect expert, that's still a lot better than listening to a random Slashdot AC.
The number one comment is that (new) technology will save us. Ummm. yeah. In Northridge CA, and in SF CA, bridges fell during earthquakes that were built to the (then) latest seismic standards. Bugs occur in control software. Human error (some idiots mixed up two valves at Diablo Nuke plant last year causing a scramble at the plant).
Nuke is clean and cheap is another common Nuke industry talking point parroted by the /. commentators. Nuke power is really the most expensive source of power when you strip away the hidden costs ($0.25 - $0.30/KW/hr). http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf
Worse, the contamination and fossil fuel use in mining uranium is invariably ignored by the pro nuke folks. A study by the Canadian government shows the safety risks: http://www.ccnr.org/bcma.html. Currently, most uranium is enriched using power from burning coal, making nuke power a very carbon heavy source of energy. As we transition away from enriching uranium in centrifuges for nuke plants (we have to, there isn't much uranium left to extract), perhaps this will change, but current nuke energy is far from carbon neutral., but then we have other issues (huge worker safety issues, and still waste issues) as we move to reprocessing fuel.
One guy said the extent of the Chernobyl disaster was 50 people died (as if the only deaths were those in the first weeks of the disaster):
Even the IAEA says that 4000 people will have died http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Chernobyl/pdfs/pr.pdf And, most literature not affiliated with pro industry groups has extremely high estimates of the total death toll (up to a million, but these groups also have an agenda, so the truth likely falls somewhere in between). Since the IAEA report doesn't include those immediately evacuated into other countries (a significant number), it is probably not even suitable as a lower bound.
Since the disaster contaminated hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of farm land, and only a few thousand square kilometers were excluded from agriculture (indefinitely) the effects will be ongoing for thousands of years. The contamination spread across Europe (western and eastern) and the UK.
One commenter said if meltdown, rods would puddle on the floor, no biggie-- FTA:
According to experts interviewed by The Associated Press, any melted fuel would eat through the bottom of the reactor vessel. Next, it would eat through the floor of the already-damaged containment building. At that point, the uranium and dangerous byproducts would start escaping into the environment.
At some point in the process, the walls of the reactor vessel â" 15 centimetres of stainless steel â" would melt into a lava-like pile, slump into any remaining water on the floor, and potentially cause an explosion much bigger than the one caused by the hydrogen. Such an explosion would enhance the spread of radioactive contaminants.
If the reactor core became exposed to the external environment, officials would likely began pouring cement and sand over the entire facility, as was done at the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine, Peter Bradford, a former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said in a briefing for reporters.
At that point, Mr. Bradford added, âoemany first responders would die.â
And, of course, we have the waste issue. Currently a few miles from my house, there are dry casks filled with nuclear waste from the Diablo Canyon nuke power plant. There is no place to safely dispose of this waste, so they just collect it on-site-- first submerged in tanks, now in dry casks. The vessels for this waste storage are not built to the standards of the reactor containment.
Finally, Nuke would not exist in the US
Seems Greenpeace dont like all kinds of *activists*.
Greenpeace sucks. But to me, advocating *for* nuclear power is beeing *for* people dying in accidents.
And dumping the waste on future generations.
Rumor is, actually, that a new Godzilla film has been in the works for a 2012 release (which seems appropriate). The last one was in 2004. One does wonder how this event will affect the Godzilla film. Godzilla films - and I've seen them all - have swung back and forth on how much they focus on nuclear energy and radiation, with the last time radiation was a key plot point being in the early 90's. The latest series of films haven't focused on it as much (though it's always a factor... I think in Godzilla 2000 he attacks a nuclear power plant to recharge or something - been a while since I saw it).
If a new film is indeed in the works, you can pretty much guarantee there will be a heavy focus on nuclear energy in light of this event. There have already been several films depicting "the big one", but we can probably expect new films to address the issue of total destruction by earthquake, too (that's never been something addressed very often in Godzilla films though).
Because it it did, the Sun would be the most evil entity in the Solar System.
Given that the poster doesn't seem to know or care about the difference between fusion and fission, I don't see how this possibly can be moderated insightful. Funny, possibly - but never insightful.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
Which is known as retirony
There's still not much hard information available. Most of the info coming from outside Japan is punditry or speculation. The major Japanese news outlets, NHK and Asahi Shimbun, seem to be having problems keeping up with events. Transportation within Japan is so disrupted that reporters can't get to the scene.
At this point, two reactors have lost all cooling systems. Both have had seawater with boron (a neutron absorber) injected as an emergency cooling measure. The Japan Self Defense Force had to bring in portable pumps, and the USAF flew in extra boron supplies. Those reactors will never operate again.
A major meltdown is unlikely at this point, with seawater being forced in. In a few days, the reactors will be cold, and a long, slow cleanup will begin.
Casualties from the reactor accident will be low. Bear in mind that Japan has lost at least 10,000 lives so far. Entire towns are gone. A big oil refinery in Tokyo is still on fire. Four railroad trains are missing. Food is running short in Tokyo. Power is out across sizable parts of the country. Roads are shredded in some areas. But, when the dust settles, Fukushima Daiichi will be responsible for very few deaths.
8 more people are now trapped in the modern day indefinitely as the 10 jiggawatts required to collectively power their time-travelling deloreans has been cut off at the plant.
From the way I understand it- it was the combination of factors NOT the miscalculation of one event.
Risk for Earthquake- the building was standing, working, safety factors started working, shut-down began. For an 9.0 Earthquake that's damn astounding. Seriously- I keep thinking about what if this happened in LA- and the results would probably not be anywhere near as good.
Having a tsunami right after that covers the diesel generators and floods them- not planned for. Tsunami by itself- sure- the building survived, everything was in working order- shut down still occurred. But, predicting a widespread power outage at multiple power plants across the nation during a tsunami with no transportation and access to national resources to work with battery and other power... like- you just cannot prep.
Seriously- this scenario is not a 'plan for'. I don't think anybody in risk management would be calculating the what if costs of "the 5th worst earthquake of all time, right off the cost causing a 30 ft tsunami, which cuts of diesel power. The tsunami effects all power stations along the coast, and the earthquake shuts down some more inland, with no possibility of power being restored. Meanwhile, minor technical difficulties happen at stations inland, because that's just how a crisis like this would work, and the power supply would be cut even further. In addition, the infrastructure of the largest city would practically be untouched creating the exact same power supply demands that were previously needed, creating extra stain on other reactors creating a higher risk of technical failure and blackout."
Somewhere along the line- risk management just says -" well, you are fucked."
Or much more horrifying, Giant Raymond Burr in a Speedo.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
To my fellow PS3 owners: if you happen to run Folding @ Home on your PS3 ("Life with Playstation"), have you noticed that the F@H locations for Japan have shifted significantly down and to the right on the world map? Or is it just me?
The only thing we can go on is the fact that the pro-nuclear lobby turn out repeatedly to be a bunch of complete liars.
Well then, you're not the sharpest card in the deck. If you make the converse argument that the anti-nuke lobby is nicker-bunched with liars, we would later discover that this nicker-bunch was funded by the pro-nuclear side for the purpose of instigating the brain-on-dialtone anti-liar over-reaction, ka-ching ka-ching.
Either way, you can't base a decision strategy on a perception that can be manipulated to mean something opposite to what you think you're observing. Chip-on-shoulder bright-lines are best relegated to sports blogs and radio call-in shows.
To reach a good decision on any issue, the strategy is to tune out the idiots in favour of the people with something useful to contribute; if the adults at the table take an intellectual risk, put forward a considered opinion, depart from the trusty never-say-you're-sorry ad hominem heuristic.
Failure to achieve a considered debate gives a rational person reason for pause, but even there, you can't be making blanket game-theory declarations, or some side of the issue will discover they can get the outcome they want just by starting a food fight. Pre-declaring an automatic response works equally well at the poker table, unless you're bluffing. "You a hustler, Amos?" Lucky if that ruse lasts you the night in a podunk pool hall.
I don't think there's any useful debate on nuclear as a self-contained category. Useful debate begins with the proposed fuel cycle. That leads to resource dependencies, weaponization risk, disaster profiles, and disposal mess. This tends not to happen. The pro side doesn't wish to enumerate specific risks and the anti side doesn't want it known that many of the specific risks are smaller than other risks already built into the system.
I would never vote pro-nuclear without first knowing the proposed fuel cycle. Generally I believe that nuclear done right would not pose significantly worse risks than other activities displaced (e.g. Nigerian oil despots, building some of the world's largest cities on earthquake fault lines). I'm not keen on our odds of doing it right.
If we aren't debating at the level of the fuel cycle, odds of doing it right are significantly diminished. The pro/anti debate is the natural terrain of foot-draggers and carpetbaggers.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the nuclear debate will be decided very quickly on the back on an oil price shock, much worse than any present complaints.
They are pumping raw sea water into a reactor primary coolant system. This sea water is coming into direct contact with partially melted fuel rod assemblies that are releasing caesium-137 (and no doubt other radionuclides as well). Cesium has been detected _OUTSIDE_ the reactor containment vessel, meaning that at least some of the fuel assembly structural integrity has been breached. There has been at least one hydrogen explosion _HIGHLY_ suggestive of a failure of some portion of the fuel rod cladding. The explosion took place in an outbuilding which no longer has any structural integrity. Radionuclides are being released in an uncontrolled manner into the environment both from the seawater and vented gasses. Every drop of sea water that is exposed to the failed fuel rods will be contaminated.
Previous attempts to poison the core (slow down the reaction rate) with boron were not productive. Once the coolant loop has been compromised with boron it is very unlikely that the plant will have any salvage value. Seawater will of course render the rest of the plant non-recoverable. The entire site will very likely become a museum of engineering failure for future generations.
Seismic activity and violent weather evidently played no part in the final design of this plant. Real nuclear power plants use a reactor design that allows for failure of external power.
The nuclear lobby are out in force today trying to put a positive spin on the nuclear disaster which is unfolding in Japan.
I agree, but I was thinking about what some politicians have said and worry about. Myself, I've stated many tymes government scares me more than any business or terrorists.
Terrorists have only killed a few thousand people in the last century, and the most advanced weapons they've got are motherfucking airliners.
Whereas in the same tyme period the NAZIs exterminated 600,000 plus people, Stalin massacred some 20,000,000, and Mao another 50,000,000.
The US, on the other hand, has murdered millions, and has access to the most advanced weapons in the world. In fact, the only country to ever murder other people using nuclear weapons is the USA. I'd rather put those guns in the hands of terrorists than in those of the US, I'd feel safer.
Not only has the US government used nuclear weapons against others, but the US has killed and massacred others or supported those who carried these killings and massacres. To take just one example then President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger supported Indonesia's dictator Gen. Suharto's invasion of East Timor, where 200,000 East Timorese were massacred. How many Chileans disappeared at the same tyme while Ford and Kissinger supported Gen. Pinochet's overthrow of a democratically elected government in Chile? How many Mayans were massacred by right wing thugs in Central America with Reagan's support? And that doesn't count terrorists governments have supported.
Yes, governments, all of them, scare me more than any terrorists.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I have dead family from the last US-backed military dictatorship (I live in Argentina).
And yes, government scares me more than anything else in this world.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Geothermal, solar, and wind
I look outside and while it's sunny, it's not windy - if my power supply isn't consistent it's worthless, so scratch wind and solar.
Many of those off the grid do great with solar and wind. A national smart grid can be supplied nationwide, solar can provide electricity 8+ hours a day, it's always windy somewhere, and geothermal always works. Ignoring this shows a bias, or ignorance.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Can you say geothermal? Like nuclear power plants geothermal power plants generate steam which turns turbines. So, pro-nuke hysteria just means more nuclear power plants are built causing more pollution. However more powerful is the negawatt. Every watt not needed is one less watt that has to be generated. And the negawatt pays off faster than any energy source.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
We can do much better now, but the anti-nuclear lobby has prevented us from getting anything built.
The anti-nuclear lobby has not prevented plants from getting built in China, France, India, or Russia. In the Forbes article Hooked on Subsidies it says "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
Imagine if there was an anti-car lobby with as much power. We'd all (OK a very small number of us would) be driving around in incredibly expensive and patched-up Ford Anglias and Morris Minors today. Everyone else would be going by horse or foot.
Imagine if petroleum wasn't as cheap as it was when cars were first mass produced what we'd be driving today. Without cheap petroleum we wouldn't be driving internal combustion engine vehicles, we'd be driving electric cars. The first one was built in 1828, before the Otto cycle, four stroke engine was invented. Well we might be driving vehicles powered by Rudolf Diesel's Diesel engine. However Diesel made his fuel from hemp oil, peanut oil, and other vegetable oils.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I have dead family from the last US-backed military dictatorship (I live in Argentina).
Sorry. The closest I am is I'm part American Indian so some long gone relations may of been killed.
And yes, government scares me more than anything else in this world.
I'm not an anarchist but I want government as small as possible. A justice system is about it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I am not talking about a Solar, Wind or Geothermal or any other pie in the sky type systems.
I am talking about advances in new physics that are making steady progress, has been known for decades and are ready to go right now.
Just as an example, lets discuss low energy nuclear reactions and why the trillion dollar energy establishment paid off M.I.T., (by threatening to not donate to their high energy/high temperature fusion program) therefore condemning all research on the topic as somehow unscientific.
Destroying articles, scientific research careers and papers and removing them from the public because they threaten the billions in research that is going nowhere after 50 years with nothing to show for it.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Reprocessing the spent fuel can remove all the extremely radioactively hot material which can then be fissioned in the reactor again. That'll break it down into much cooler material.
You might want to tell France how to do it then.
"France’s engineers tried harder than those in any other country to build and run breeder reactors reliably at a commercial scale, but ultimately they failed. The result is that even in France--the best real-world model of what reprocessing can accomplish--the technology remains a tantalizing but only partial solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Imagine you live in China, France, India, or Russia. Will the markets pay to build nuclear power plants? Or will it take government officials to decide what's built?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I don't know, let me check. According to the wiki article Wind power in Finland wind produced 143 MW with 118 turbines in December 2008. It says wind is the most popular energy resource in Finland. Now that doesn't say what the wind potential is so I'll continue... According to the Finnish Wind Atlas the south and southwest in coastal areas has plenty of potential. iea wind says wind is the second largest renewable resource with a target of 6 TWh/yr in 2020 (2,000 to 3,000 MW). It goes on saying that there's already 5,400MW to 8,000MW of wind power in planning or announced.
However that can only supply Finland with a fraction of it's electricity. According to Statistics Finland in 2009 the nation used 81.3 terawatt hours (TWh). More can be generated by adding capacity faster though.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You obviously did not read the Economist article, and the Economist doesn't spread environmentalist non-sense. So I conclude you're being nonsensical.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
A justice system requires making and enforcing laws, at which point scope creep is both inevitable and desirable. After all, I'd rather have power wielded by a democratic government - which I can influence - than corporations (which I can't).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I'm a New Zealander, my country is "nuclear free". We still have smoke detectors with "Americium", Nuclear Medicine etc, but not Nuclear Power, or weapons of mass destruction. On that last point, our police do not have guns (unless for an emergency call out etc, nutjob running wild with a gun endangering civil civilians), in general, we are a peaceful nation, the rest of the world likes us, things seem to be working out fine.
;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand's_nuclear-free_zone
Our national stance AGAINST Nuclear weapons, power have gotten past American presidents pissy. During the 80's we got the "waaa, domino effect, if you dont support our totally awesome war machines playing around in your harbours, if you're not 100% WITH US,then you're AGAINST us, and others will back away too if your totally influential country of (at the time) less than four million stands up to The Good Superpower!"
You can read the transcript of a speech by our Prime Minister David Lange (long-e) as he stood up "to America", who are widely regarded as being beaten by this one man, from a small country on the issue.
Transcript http://publicaddress.net/great-new-zealand-argument/nuclear-weapons-are-morally-indefensible/
Audio http://publicaddress.net/great-new-zealand-argument/nuclear-weapons-are-morally-indefensible-1/
Its one of my nations defining moments, sort of like our "man on the moon", when we stood up for ourselves, when we declared we wanted nothing to do with this shit, when a major nation whined that we couldnt be friends unless we smoked behind the bikesheds with them, and we came out victorious.
During that "debate", we got similar arguments to now, stereotypes, personal attacks, Microsoft levels of FUD. There I go myself, dragging Microsoft into this
So far, what I've seen here, and elsewhere, is a general "waaa, whiny bitch Greenies dont understand, why dont they understand? Coz they're DUMB DUMB DUMB, this is SAFE dammit, but if its not, then the NIMBY Greenies are ALSO to blame, they're as bad as those who oppose drilling for oil in National Parks, its THEIR fault, what happened on the Deepwater Horizon, because they didnt let us do what we wanted, Drill Baby Drill!, by going ahead with this kinda unsafe - but that could totally be made awesome and stuff, if only they let us pump billions more into it! - technology! And then this technology ended up with Spill Baby Spill! waaaaaaa!!!111!!!"
Whether Nuclear as currently deployed a) is or b) is not safe is perhaps the wrong question. The issue might instead be, c) why use Nuclear at all? Given massive costs in building ("waaa, thats because of the greenies and red tape!") and maintaining Nuclear plants, in their terrible PR, in the genuine scares for negative effects.
New Zealand makes over 70% of our power through efficient, *renewable* sources, like hydropower. The shit works, it has for decades, it would otherwise be an untapped resource, its effectively "free", once you've built the station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_New_Zealand
One such local hydropower station is at Manapouri (or perhaps more accurately Deep Cove), I've been through the machine hall many times, its a tourist attraction, and has given me a real respect for both nature, and scientific achievement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manapouri_Hydroelect
---
There are also benefits [...] "peak uranium"
The benefit of not using uranium is that you save yourself the trouble of changing to something else when uranium runs out? Doesn't not using uranium just move that cost closer (and thus makes it more expensive, as the real interest rate is positive*)?
* Basically, if we postpone the transition process, we can spend some time preparing ourselves better, thus making it require less work i.e. be cheaper
Or am I completely misunderstanding you?
So do you have some proof? So let's play a little game: How many people have been killed by nuclear power in the US? This can be workers at the plants of civilians harmed by the effects. Now how about for coal, wind, natural gas, etc? You can also look in Japan. Look at how many people have been killed and injured in the nuclear plant problems, and then how many in oil and gas plants and so on. The numbers for the latter are a bit hard to find right now, however, since so many are still missing.
I know the answers to these, I'm challenging you to go do your own research, since I'm sure you'd reject figures I provided you. However I'll give you a hint: You find nuclear power has a very low casualty count.
Nothing is without risk, nothing without cost. You seem to have the idea that nuclear plants have a large risk, and others have no risk. Not the case.
Also something to consider, once you do the research and get the facts, is that there is a good amount of history for people to get confidence from. Nuclear power is not new. It's been around for over half a century. During that time there have been many problems, you just don't hear about most of them because they cause no injury or loss of life (Wikipedia has a list). So there is some reason for people to say "The controls in place do a good job of dealing with potential problems and the risks are mitigated to acceptable levels." It isn't as though they are just saying "Well we don't think anything will ever go wrong with the brand new technology!"
Life isn't about avoiding all risk, because you can't do that. Life is about assessing risk and choosing the best solutions overall.
I don't quite get why everyone on Slashdot is saying "there's just hysteria here, nuclear power is safe!" and posting strange analogies to bridge-building, steam engines and the like. It's almost a backlash against popular opinion (and the fact) that using nuclear power can have negative consequences.
It seems to me that nuclear power is unique, and that it is not comparable to other power sources or previous technologies. The main reason being the lack of control we have over the technology, and there are two particular areas that concern me: waste disposal and the safety issues.
The problem is that it's not just a matter of "how many people die" or "how likely an accident is", but that the consequences of nuclear power usage and accidents are so long-term. Perhaps the hysteria is due to the nature of radiation sickness, and the fear of dying from radiation poisoning, but just because there is some hysteria over one aspect of a story doesn't mean that all criticisms of nuclear power generation are somehow automatically discredited.
Consider that radioactive waste will remain harmful for 1000s of years - just an incredible legacy to leave the coming generations of humanity. In the case of a serious accident, we don't even have much control over where that harm will be done. Perhaps you can make some argument over global warming, but it's not the case that the choice is mutually exclusive between nuclear and fossil fuels for the next few thousand years.
The main issue I have is that we don't even have answers to the problems of nuclear waste, never mind the ability to cope with accidents. It seems a bad idea to use a dangerous technology that we haven't fully understood.
RS
no text
"Some local residents and health workers were diagnosed with radiation poisoning in precautionary tests, but they show no outward symptoms of distress." The NRC defines radiation poisoning as a dose of 200 rads or two grays. A little responsible journalism would go a long way.
The real problem with nuclear reactors is not that the cannot be made 100% safe.
The real problem is that ALL nuclear reactors cannot be made 100% safe.
In other words, there are many countries that want nuclear power, but few of them have the technology and culture to make them 100% safe and maintain them 100% safe for the duration of their operation.
And, if an advanced country like the U.S. has the nuclear power technology that can make 100% safe reactors, then this technology will not be shared with other countries.
That's the real problem with nuclear power. If unstable or underdeveloped or developing countries make nuclear power plants, then the danger is great, because these countries do not have yet the culture or the technology required to make them safe.
Just like with everything else, it's not the technology that is the problem, it's economics, politics and social issues.
I wonder whether Japanese nuclear power plants are publicly or privately owned (or a combination). I'm pro-nuclear power, but I don't trust American corporations to spend what would be necessary on safety and training. Executives get the biggest bonuses by SAVING money, not be spending where it needs to be spent. Since the regulatory apparatus is so controlled by the regulated entities (since we, as a nation, scorn public employees, and employees in general, but kowtow to executives), I don't believe even regulation can work where lots of money can be made. So while I believe in nuclear power, I very skeptical of American nuclear power.
France shows how nuclear energy works at its best - and it's run by the state. As for their waste policies, here's an interesting article: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html
What is justice? What is right or is corrected. Eliminate many of the laws on the books. For instance victimless crime laws. The War on Drugs? A big waste of tyme, money, and resources. Laws against prostitution? Where are the victims? Laws against fornication? Against sodomy? Against oral sex? Where are the victims? Getting rid of these laws will dramatically reduce the need for a justice system. Laws and law enforcement should be working on the harm personal acts afflict on the unwilling. Should there be a Law? is an excellent flowchart depicting the flow of reason that should occur in deciding what laws there will be.
I'd rather have power wielded by a democratic government - which I can influence - than corporations (which I can't).
I will handle this in two different ways. The first one being who gives corporations their power? Government does. If corporations have too much power it's because government gave them that power. Thirty years after Thomas Jefferson drafted the "Declaration of Independence" he wrote this warning:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
However there was a reason the first corporate charters were granted, yes they are granted by government. The first businesses to be granted a charter was the British East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Both were shipping companies, as hinted by their names, but shipping was a risky business. If either cargo, crew, or passengers were lost the ship's owners were liable. If pirates captured the ship killing people, or just stole the cargo, the owners had to pay for their loss. The same with sinkings such as caused by hurricanes. So if I as a small investor wanted to and had the money to invest in a ship, if that ship was lost I would be financially liable. Not only would I lose the money I invested but I could lose my home and everything I owned. So the British and Dutch crowns decided to grant some businesses a corporate charter giving investors limited liability. With these charters I could invest money in a ship and if the ship was lost all I'd lose was the money I invested. This allows society and many people to benefit, international trade is a common or public good.
I could go on but you should now have a clear idea why corporations exist. Now onto the second way. So you trust government more than businesses? Has any business, or group of businesses, killed as many people as governments have? The greatest number of deaths all at once I know of was Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster in India. The estimate with the highest number of deaths from it is 15,000, with an estimate of less than 600,000 injured.
Now how many people have governments killed or violated the rights of? NAZI Germany, over 600,000. Stalin's Russia, 20,000,000. Mao's China, 50,000,000. The US isn't guilt free either. The US, and state governments, have killed people and violated many more people's rights. Those in US prisons for non-violent drug offenses, and the US has the world's largest prison population? Their rights are violated on a daily basis. Throughout it's history the US massacred American Indian tribes. Up through the 1970s the US government's Indian Health Service had doctors sterilize Native American Women, forcefully and
Should there be a Law?
JAPAN EARTHQUAKE IS A US HAARP ATTACK,A PEARL HARBOR TO LOOT JAPAN. PETTY CASH FOR WAR BANKRUPT PENTAGON COFFERS,LIKE THE LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD REICH, TO SWITCH ATTENTION AWAY FROM GHADAFI "HUMANITARIAN" CONCERNS TO GOOD OLD FASHIONNED AMERICAN KOSHER BUTCHERY AGAINST INNOCENTS AND TO PROVOKE IRAN TO RESPOND AND CREATE THE LONG AWAITED "FALSE-FLAG" ATTACK TO START THEIR GENOCIDIDAL GEOSTRATEGIC "BRZEZINSKITE FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE" ON RUSSIA AND CHINA.
IT IS THE PINNACLE OF HYPOCRISY: “BY DECEPTION THOU SHALT MAKE WAR..(and blackmail,and racket,and plunder and murder for the talmudic banksters and their american “lube-boys)”
AND THE SELF-SATISIED AND CONCEITED AMERICAN GOYIM-CATTLE-SLAVES ARE CHEERING AND ARE MORE GULLIBLE THAN EVER..!
IT’S NO LONGER “BRAVE NEW WORLD” OR “1984 OR “SOYLENT GREEN” BUT IT IS NOW “ANIMAL FARM”..! :
Will U.S. HAARP Japanese Earthquake Be The Straw That Breaks Europe’s Back?
Suggest Pin Quote [+]
[link to blacklistednews.com]
HAARP Caused Japan Earthquake :
[link to http://www.ufo-blogger.com
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1393339/pg1
http://info.themicroeffect.com/?p=1648
In 1996, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation telecast reported the US
Defense Department was then in the initial stages of developing
“geophysical warfare”; YouTube.com now hosts the broadcast in two
parts, excerpted below.
Part 1, 7:13 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QkLTzesBxGE
Part 2, 7:13 minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QkLTzesBxGE
Though I cannot expertly assess the geo-political entanglements
outlined in the next clip by Jeff Steinberg, an media analyst for the
political action committee representing perennial presidential
candidate (and staunch Bush opponent) Lyndon LaRouche, the 10-minute
excerpt of his 7 April 2008 podcast alleges escalating hostilities
among the Asian Union (Russia, India but principally China), the
European Union and the U.S. North American Union juggernaut. Though he
does not mentions eco- or weather weapons, Steinberg claims “World War
III” is imminent.
Those observations are followed by experts observations about HAARP’s
likely expanded military applications: weather modification and, yes,
earthquakes. Around the 6-minute mark, listen closely to “radio
tomographer” Brooks Agnew cite his remarkable success during the early
80s in using directed 30-watt radio energy to find twenty-six untapped
oil fields beneath the earth’s surface; he then effectively
illustrates the impact of HAARP’s one billion-watts if it were
directed into the earth’s substructure instead of the ionosphere.CONTINUE HERE:
http://info.themicroeffect.com/?p=1648
MORE VIDEOS CONCERNING THE HAARP TALMUDIC “DECEPTION” WARS TO DESTROY AND STARVE THE WORLD BY EARTHQUAKES,TSUNAMIS,FLOODS AND DROUGHTS FOR THE ADVENT OF THE FINAL SLAVERY TO THE BANKSTERS “MASTER-RACE”..:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecLwVghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecLwVgvvTvU&feature=player_embeddedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InV0cVH6KZc&feature=player_embeddedvvTvU&feature=player_embedded
"What has to be mentioned once more [...] is the Japanese people's absolute calm"--- Wait ti they find out how badly they've been lied to and they start glowing in the dark.
And the reason I should simply accept this flowchart as authoritative is ?...
No, money - or more generally controlling resources - does.
No, it's because the government didn't do its job and rein them in.
So Thomas Jefferson once again proved himself a smart man. I wish his wise warning had been heeded. But why are you quoting him where said quote directly contradicts your position?
Gee, thanks, I had no idea :o.
I don't trust the government or, indeed, any powerful group or individual. I simply have more control over government than over corporations, so I prefer it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.