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."
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."