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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."
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
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 and use it at every chance to fight against the building of more modern and much, much safer designs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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."
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.
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?
Many of the anti-nuclear lobby are cut from the same cloth. When I was at school, we had a visitor from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. We eventually got onto nuclear power, and he was opposed to that too, for some reasons that almost made sense. Then I asked him about fusion research and he was also against that, but his rationale became even more stretched.
There are some real problems with nuclear power. In my view, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but it's impossible to have a rational debate when one side refuses to even try to understand the underlying scientific and engineering issues. Unfortunately, in recent years, rather than seeing more rationality from the anti-nuclear crowd, we've seen increasing ignorance of science from the the pro-nuclear side, making the entire debate akin to an argument about sports teams.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's an attitude I find strange as well. Personally, I'm anti-nuclear weapons, but totally pro-nuclear for terms of power generation - indeed, it was trying to understand how the hell a nuclear bomb could be so destructive that got me interested in physics.
IMHO, it was the arms race that totally got nuclear power generation off on the wrong foot; too many reactor designs optimised for producing weapons-grade fuels, and then often dual-purposed to power generation almost as an afterthought. My parents lived through the Windscale disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire and I remember my father explaining to me what a stupid design for a reactor it was, and how we were saved more by luck than judgement, and there were echoes of this in the RBMK/Chernobyl designs.
Hence nuclear power was forever tarnished by the short-sightedness of everyone trying to build their own nuclear stockpile, which produced dangerous and inefficient reactor designs. Compare with modern designs like CANDU which, as far as I can tell, have been designed for power and safety first, with capability for weapons-grade loads very much an afterthought - if it's even possible. But nuclear power (both fission and fusion) won't shake the public stigma for decades, if not whole generations, because they're hard for the layman to understand even without the news going ARGH NUCLEAR!!!!! at the drop of a hat.
Back on topic - I'm frankly amazed this whole thing with the Japanese reactors wasn't worse. Wikipedia currently has the total amount of energy released as 600 *million* Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, we've all seen the videos of the tsunami hitting the coast (and these stations were in a region closest to the epicentre); I was dumbstruck at the scale of it all. And yet despite near total failure of all cooling systems, there's been no massive release of radiation. It's a testament to Japanese engineering and professionalism that they're doing as well as they are - look at how few casualties there were due to structural failures (not to mention all those people already alerted by Japan's best-of-breed EWS and extensive training in how to deal with such a situation), in one of the most massive earthquakes on record. They're happily prepared to junk the reactor core - worth billions, especially when you factor in cleanup costs - in order to limit damage. What's happened in Japan is an utter catastrophe. The nuclear reactors are a tiny, tiny fraction of this but it receives disproportionate attention in the news because, judging by the reaction of a lot of my friends here in the UK, it appears to be something we (and, by extension, the news) care about more than all those already dead or missing, and the (hundreds of?) thousands homeless or without power or drinking water.
Rant over. FWIW, I'm not a nuclear scientist but have a degree in geology, and nuclear power is one of my pet pipe dreams (don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of wind and solar plants as well, and the brother-in-law runs a biogas plant in Germany). I also have a bunch of friends in Tokyo, who are thankfully fine. Happy to receive criticism if I come across as overly optimistic.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
I know this might be just Paranoia, let me get something straight first: I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just saying I have my doubts.
Have you noticed how Greenpeace seems to be an appendage of the big oil industry? I mean, they attack oil all the time, sure. But how effective are they against oil? Not effective at all. They haven't managed to make a single dent in the oil proliferation. On the other hand, they have attacked every single change we got at alternative energy sources very effectively. They are mostly responsible for keeping the population scared regarding nuclear power. They are the ones that have equaled nuclear power plants with nuclear weapons, even though the two are mostly unrelated (a nuclear reactor is far, far away from a nuclear bomb). Find anyone and tell them "Nuclear Reactor" and they'll think of a mushroom cloud and dead kittens, and other things unrelated to nuclear power. They attack battery production, and all kind of industries that can provide us with real alternatives.
Nuclear power as we know it today is not the final solution, but it's certainly better than Oil, and we could be running 100% on Nuclear Power and electric vehicles powered by said energy if it weren't for this tree huggers. Follow the money.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?