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."

Comments

Considering .....

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ....

Re:Considering .....

[TheRaven64]

If you're going to be sarcastic and resort to ad hominem arguments, you might want to try understanding the topic at hand first. A kilowatt is a measure of power, not of energy. You almost certainly did not use 344kW last month, you used 344kWh - a measure of energy - equivalent to 344kW of power for one hour, or about 0.47kW averaged over the month. Peak usage for a small house is very unlikely to be over about 3kW, maybe a bit more if you've got electric heating. 27kW per house would be enough that you could use your peak electricity usage 24 hours a day. If you'd used 344kW, then your total energy usage would have been 251120 kWh. About the cheapest that you'll find electricity is 5/kWh, so this works out at $12,556 in electricity costs per month - more realistically, you'd be paying about twice this. Or, to put it in perspective, your 'small postage stamp house' would be using more electricity than a moderate sized datacenter. You'd also be drawing quite a bit more power than a typical residential power main can handle.

Re:The expensive is driven mostly by lawyers.

[Anthony Mouse]

All non-fossil power generation is "hooked on subsidies" -- until we internalize the environmental costs of fossil fuels, nothing else is competitive and so everything else has to be subsidized.