Slashdot Mirror
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."
We can't do anything to stop tsunamis and earthquakes.
We can do something to stop using nuke plants.
Even when there's a meltdown in progress in a place where the cause was inevitable (a big earthquake in Japan), you nuke fetishists will play word games to deny that we should stop these intolerable risks that are within our control to stop using.
Which is why no nukes are acceptable. Not just because of the tech risks. But primarily because the people and orgs running them, their entire culture, is so corrupt and obsessed with the marketing that even the most obvious demonstration of their catastrophic costs cannot stop you from continuing the sales pitch. You cannot be trusted to be realistic, even while a meltdown is happening.
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make install -not war
I think it will shut up nuclear proponets who claim meltdowns are so improbable that they are effectively impossible. This is a natural disaster that has occurred. Human disasters from human mistakes are far more plentiful.
The Admin and the Engineer
Everyone understands the potential benefits of nuke power: "power too cheap to measure", "totally clean power", "no dependence on foreign fuel", "totally safe".
Except those potentials are nothing but marketing hype. Nukes are expensive, dirty, dependent on foreign fuel, and dangerous. Three Mile Island in the late 1970s, Chernobyl in the mid 1980s, and now these. All along since they were invented nuke facilities have been dumping poison in our lands, seas and rivers, whether where the fuel is mined, processed, used, stored, or "disposed" (whatever that is).
"Antis" could see any of their persuasive arguments deleted by actual safety and transparency. The dependence on secrecy that you admit the nuke industry has turned to is counterproductive in every way, and is the fault of the nuke industry for making that choice. Not the fault of the people the nuke industry tries to trick with the secrecy.
We know the potential upsides. We've got over a half century seeing downsides - and knowing that even more are hidden, as those forced into exposure were always attempted to be hidden as long as possible. We're not a congregation of superstitious cowards. We are people protecteting ourselves from the undeniable dangers and damages we get while hoping for the unreachable potential benefits sold us.
And indeed the most obvious sign that we're being sold a scam is the conceit that the nuke sellers are the only ones smart enough to know what's going on.
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make install -not war