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."
Greenpeace are a bunch of pseudo-scientific frauds. They are fanatical fundamentalist tree huggers, facts aren't about to get in the way of their greenie dreams.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
The uranium already has been radioactive for a lot longer than that. They pulled it out of a hole in the earth, they can just dump it back in. Nobody is creating radioactivity, they are just moving it around.
Wow, 27 Kilowatt you say, we'll all be electrically rich. I have a small postage stamp house, relatively efficient, oil heat. I used 344 Kilowatts last month. You don't say how long it will take those 27 Kilowatts to be generated. And notice the oil heat, make that electric and I could expect to use about twice that amount.
The problem with you "alternative" energy types is that you have no sense of proportion. You could entirely cover the Sahara (according to a British study) in photovoltaic cells and still not cover Europe's energy needs.
That isn't to say we shouldn't move to more alternative fuels (we should), but to naively think that will be sufficient is just blind.
Are you retarded ? Nuclear has _no_ emissions and the waste is quite small for a year's worth of operation. Just dump it all back in the mine when the uranium ore is depleted and have a nice day.