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."
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
Please have a look at this Japanese grid, they are isolated grids, based on this is what I based my observations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Power_Grid_of_Japan.PNG
My bad for believing in Wikipedia. Thank you for your critic, it prompted me to research more the subject.
A better map, more detailed that shows how really is actually the grid:
http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_grid/japan/graphics/japangridmap.gif
They have 2 FC facilities able to exchange 1200 MW at best, but the exchange between the two grids goes around 7-8% yearly, both ways, far, far less than what is needed at the moment and what they could provide, I doubt that Japan doesn't have at least 15% spare capacity in both grids. The FC are only able to replace units 1 and 2 from Fukushima Power Plant. 1200 MW are nothing versus the demand of eastern Japan. The reason that eastern Japan blackouts will be more bad than needed and Tepco's problems with their nuclear power plants comes in this report http://www.ieej.or.jp/aperc/pdf/GRID_COMBINED_DRAFT.pdf from APEC:
But power interconnections are far less developed between Japan’s electric service areas than within them. Thus, an issue has arisen with respect to what might happen to the reliability of power supply in Japan when a particular class of generating capacity has to be taken out of service. In August 2002, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was required by the Japanese government to take all of its nuclear power plants out of service since the utility had failed to report technical safety violations at some of the plants as required by law. Although subsequent safety inspections revealed that none of the violations presented an actual threat to public safety, continuing public distrust meant that nearly all of Tokyo’s nuclear plants remained out of service through the summer of 2003 and beyond. (emphasis mine) Since summer is when Tokyo’s power demand peaks, and since TEPCO relied on nuclear power for 29 percent of its generating capacity and 47 percent of its electricity generation in 200117, there were real concerns that power demand might not be met.
Normally, TEPCO would have had roughly 72 GW of generating capacity available to meet Tokyo’s needs during the summer of 2003, including 60 GW of its own capacity, 8 GW owned by Japan’s Electric Power Development Corporation (EPDC) and other generators in its area, and 4 GW from companies outside of its area. But with 13 GW of nuclear capacity remaining out of service (though about 4 GW of nuclear capacity had already been allowed to resume service), and with 4 GW of thermal power plants out of service for scheduled maintenance, the actual amount of generating capacity on which TEPCO could rely that summer was only around 55 GW. By comparison, the utility projected that peak demand would be around 61 GW if the weather were normal and 64 GW if the summer were hot. Hence, it had to plan for a possible 9 GW shortfall.
TEPCO’s plans for filling the gap between available capacity and possible peak summer demand included a variety of supply-side and demand-side measures. On the supply side, the utility anticipated that it could obtain 2,190 MW by restarting thermal plants that had been shut down due to their relative inefficiency and high cost, 760 MW by accelerating the testing and start-up of new plants, 700 MW by rescheduling thermal plant repairs, and 1,660 MW through extra purchases from neighbours. Somewhat more alarmingly, the utility hoped to obtain 3,200 MW if necessary through emergency supply measures such as power drawn from the trial operation of thermal plants and requests for neighbouring utilities to raise the output of thermal plants above t
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!