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."
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 ....
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
All around. al jazeera/bbc have been decent, but still - not what it needs to be. Fox, CNN, MSNBC have all been sensationalist garbage - as usual. What else is a decent source of news anyone else has been following?
Hopefully this turns out to be nothing as bad as it could be. The reactors are dead, but lets hope that is the least of the issues.
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."
AFAIK just getting high levels of radiation isn't that harmful. Some cells will die and if you survive that you'll recover. Radiation is just electromagnetic emission. The real danger is the radiation emitting particles. If they get out in the air and contaminate the biosphere you'll end up with an area nobody can live in like Chernobyl and thousands of people dying from cancer and other diseases related to long exposure to radiation can lead to. So the question is how much of these particles have escaped.
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.
The following document is a good source of info regarding the situation at the Fukushima reactors. See the section titled "BWR 3/4 Perspectives", including the parts regarding station blackout (SBO), transients with loss of coolant injection, and transients with loss of decay heat removal (DHR). (The remaining parts of the BWR 3/4 section don't appear to apply.)
Core damage frequency perspectives for BWR 3/4...
Getting tired of Slashdot... moving to Usenet comp.misc for a while.
We just did, from you, in a futile attempt to change the subject with a double-reverse straw man.
Thanks for disqualifying yourself early from any reasonable debate about this extremely grave meltdown unfolding in Japan.
--
make install -not war
I work for a company that works with radioactivity, and the reality is shocking. I have been told that since there is no "standard" level deemed harmful, that they can get away with all kinds of shit. Because a small amount of radiation could cause cancer and some can be exposed to large amounts without issue, that they can do basically whatever they want. It was found that a wall that was supposed to be shielded was not and that workers on the other side of it had been getting nailed for years... they covered it up and covered their asses ASAP. I would trust NOTHING when it comes from a corporation or government agency on this subject.
This is a real shame and greed once again rules the day.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
It's not getting much press, but the Unit #1 reactor was scheduled to be closed in two weeks. (Those links don't show the exact date, but I think it was March 22.)
It's sort of like the old cliche about a cop getting shot in the month before his retirement.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
So you'd rather listen to the FOX news shills, the anti-nuclear shills, the oil shills, the donation scammers and the govt shills?
I'm sorry but what he's saying sounds about right. People have some kind of paranoia when nuclear is mentioned - you only need to look at the current situation! A quake of incredible magnitude quickly followed by a massive tsunami will probably kill tens of thousands leave the entire countryside ravaged for years, but the news are all focused on a handful of nuclear power plants that are having some problems. Even Chernobyl only killed 50 people! If you want to account for cancer diseases and such, bring that up to 500 or even 1000 if you want, but it's an unrealistically high estimate. And that's Chernobyl; it is absolutely impossible to end up with this result in the current situation.
These are reactor designs from the 1960s. Green opposition has successfully stopped the development of newer and safer control systems, so we are left with 50-year old technology to resist the largest earthquake/tidal wave ever seen in Japan.
Nevertheless, the reactor technology worked, and shut down the reactors. Then the water damaged the support services which were cooling the reactors down, meaning that they had to get permission to vent short-lived radionuclides in an unsafe manner. They did this - one site was unlucky enough to get an aftershock as they did it, which precipitated a hydrogen explosion in an unmanned part of the reactor building. There was one death and 4 light injuries. By now the reactors will all be cooling down, and there will be no more incidents.
In the meantime the gas and oil refineries, with the benefits of the latest technology, caught fire and exploded, causing many deaths. The sea defences were overrun, causing MANY THOUSANDS of deaths. But the headline news is about whether the reactor fuel rods have got slightly overheated....
I think the press has its priorities wrong....
Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, has written his take on the events, and why he's not worried about it.
I haven't finished reading this story yet (it's quite a few pages), but it's pretty interesting so far.
-- # man women
But had their license extended 10 more years. I guess that the officers that did this now must be contemplating suicide at the moment. If I were in their shoes, I would.
An additional systemic problem, that I expect that government officers and utilities managers from Japan at last tackle in view of the current emergency if politicians can stop the stupid political bickering that goes at the moment, is that the country has 2 separate electrical grids, one for eastern Japan and one for western Japan, working at different frequencies, so even if western Japan has spare capacity, and I bet that they have, they couldn't do anything to help to meet demand from the other half of the country, even if most transmission lines in eastern Japan are in good shape. I guess that this problem weighted in the decision to not get decommissioned the unit 1 as programmed.
Now Tepco, the plant operator has announced that it will implement rolling blackouts starting next Monday. Hopefully, they will manage to put a few of the conventional power plants units that got damaged online in a week. The neat thing is that all hydro power plants are online and undamaged, at least in Tepco's service area. Having witnessed the damage that suffered some of our company's power plants by the 7.6 earthquake of january 21st, 2003 in Manzanillo, Mexico, I believe that they could manage to get all conventional power plants online in a month. I was impressed that the lights were still on in many of the towns damaged by the tsunami.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
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?
Why not just dismiss any valid arguments that don't support your position? Oh, wait...
The Admin and the Engineer
I just want everyone in the New York City area to rest comfortable tonight with the knowledge that they built the Indian Point Nuclear Facility RIGHT ON TOP OF THE RAMAPO FAULT LINE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramapo_Fault#Earthquake_hazards_in_the_New_York_City_area
Morons.
Fault Lines never die, they just fade away. So while they have a big one in Japan or California every 100 years, it might be every 100,000 years for the Ramapo Fault Line. So we could get a big one tomorrow, or in a thousand years. No one knows. But its not like you even need an Earthquake for something awful to happen at Indian Point: its old and crumbling. It has frequent safety violations and infrastructure failures. Any number of problems could happen. From human error to just plain catastrophic failure due to age.
I'm not against nuclear power. Modern Pebble Bed Reactors are extremely safe: you can stand up and walk away from them, nothing happens. But the Indian Point Nuclear Facility is ancient, crumbling, outmoded technology, and it needs to be shut down ASAP. Just like the one in Japan that is failing:
Its like an old car: if you insist its time to get rid of the junker, it doesn't mean you are against all cars.
Listen carefully, those who are for more nuclear power, as am I: you have to understand the greatest enemy of wider use of nuclear power is not tree hugging hippies, but old nuclear reactors, based on technology that requires constant monitoring, in decrepit states. Because when, not if, they fail, all of public opinion moves against nuclear power. We need to shut down the old shoddy Indian Point Nuclear Facility NOW.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The little old lady from Pasadena drove real fast and she drove real hard. She was the terror of Colorado Boulevard. Way to listen to the lyrics.
Even if your pro- or con- nuclear power: the fact that Japan lost 10 GW with this disaster is something that should shake some people up. Even with the most safest nuclear power plant designs, safety is often based on a (partial) shutdown of the facility. This would mean that for large powerplants of several GW the impact when this happens (for whatever reason, not just huge disasters) is huge.
By using distributed and smaller power plants, this problem can be more or less avoided. Provided that the infrastructure takes into account a possible partial loss of power, that is. And that is a big plus for alternative energy sources, like wind or solar: these can be setup distributed.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
> 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.
Exactly. Imagine the fiscal debate around replacing pre-Chernobyl reactors. Current US gov arguing about cutting tsunami warning systems the day of the Japanese tsunami. Now imagine a 9 earthquake in LA with our, shall we say, post-modern approach to regulation. There's a reason Tokyo didn't fall down and it's not the hidden hand of the market. (FWIW I have no specific knowledge of LA building codes. Mentioned purely because /. doesn't have enough hot air)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
A quake of incredible magnitude quickly followed by a massive tsunami will probably kill tens of thousands leave the entire countryside ravaged for years, but the news are all focused on a handful of nuclear power plants that are having some problems.
I realize that Slashdot is pro-nuclear, and hell, even I'm pro-nuclear. But please don't embarrass yourself or this site by referring to the ongoing disaster at Fukushima Daiichi as a plant "having some problems". I assure you the experts dealing with this problem are not minimizing the seriousness of what's going on. It's very serious, it's ongoing, and until the plant is stabilized, it's legitimate world news.
A plant "having some problems" is a drop in power production, or a small tritium leak. At this point a catastrophic meltdown and containment breach seem unlikely, mostly because the reactor operators have resorted to essentially destroying the reactor by flooding it with doped seawater. There has already been some non-trivial radiation leakage, and a 20-km radius evacuation is underway. It really is newsworthy.
The lesson that pro-nuclear folks should be learning from this disaster is that Fukushima Daiichi and similar 1960s-era reactors should not be operating in the year 2011, and most especially not in an area with high seismic activity. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee that the experts who run the plants knew it before the quake.
While this particular incident seems to be under control, as long as these plants are operating, there's a very real possibility of a catastrophic meltdown somewhere, in the next few decades. And that will do ten times more to stop the deployment of nuclear power than Greenpeace --- or the Slashdot boogeyman of the day --- could ever do.
The average TV viewer in the US has about a five minute attention span
They only think I have a 5 minute attention span because I can't stand to watch that drivel for more than 5 minutes.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Citation needed. On the other hand, here's a citation of my own: Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies. And China, France, India, and Russia do not have the US's lawyers or environmental laws.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Fill the Great Lakes and every coast, the Gulf, and all of the Alaskan Coast with towers?
Not needed in the USA. The Rockies contain enough potential wind energy to power the 48 contiguous states. Of course the West Coast from BC to southern CA contains a lot too. Turn eastward in SCal going through AZ and NM to west Texas and there's more. On the East Coast hike up the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine to find more prime wind energy. Of course you can find more offshore but plenty can be found on land.
And that's just considering wind. A Solar Grand Plan goes into how solar power can supply "69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050". Not only does Nevada have a lot of solar potential but it also has a lot of potential geothermal and wind energy.
Of course the pseudo-environmentalists NIMBYs will oppose these.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
'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
To repeat myself from yesterday, the public should trust the pronouncements about things that can kill you for thousands of years from industry shills why, exactly?
Because that pronouncement is self-evidently true and no sane person would argue with it? Did you read what you quoted?
... Even Chernobyl only killed 50 people! If you want to account for cancer diseases and such, bring that up to 500 or even 1000 if you want, but it's an unrealistically high estimate. ...
Actually there have been 5000 cases of thryroid cancer in children diagnosed (though this is treatable). The World Health Organizations's Expert Group investigating Chernobyl expects cancer deaths in exposed groups to be 4000 or so.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Four problems in 50 years? Wiki lists at least 56 Nuclear reactor accidents in the United States which caused at least one death or $50,000 in damage. Of course we've had articles on Slashdot about what happened at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, as well as guards being caught sleeping on the job.
is actually a POSITIVE thing
Ah, I agree it's good there hasn't been more accidents.
Also, modern designs wouldn't have these problems. Modern designs remove 90% of the criticisms that you, and other, lay at their feet.
But those designs don't solve one important problem, nuclear power is still Hooked on Subsidies. Without government subsidies Wall Street, no matter how evil people think it is, will not pay for nuclear power plants to be built.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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
I understand the US industry group not wanting to panic people about nuclear power as what is going on in Japan already has a negative impact on their industry, but they should be promoting how safe nuclear power is (ie even after a massive earthquake, the system worked mostly as it should) instead of the B.S. like the above.
Saying that the dosage is just what you would have absorbed normally in 12 months is like saying that a drowning victim only consume the same amount of water they would have in three days. Radiation is more than just how much you receive over a long period. It also has to deal with the amounts received in a short period, too.
I wonder what the environmental community will say when/if Japan decides to close down their nuke plants and replace them with oil/coal/gas based power stations (there is no feasible way considering astronomical cost to use wind/solar/hydro to replace the output from all those reactors).
As far as safety, less people are killed per year from nuclear power generation vs fossil fuel generation (even adjusting for the difference of each respective production capacity). It may be a bit simplistic to use that as complete justification for the safety of nuclear vs fossil fuel but it definitely should not be blown off (no pun intended) and ignored.