Third Blast At Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant

iamrmani was one of several people reporting updates on the Fukushima Nuclear plant that has been struggling following last Friday's disaster. A third explosion (Japanese) has been reported, along with other earlier information. MSNBC has a story about similiar reactors in the US. We also ran into a story which predicts that there won't be significant radiation. But already Japan is facing rolling blackouts, electricity rationing, evacuating the area around the plant, and thousands dead already.

Comments

B.O.C

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no, they say he's got to go
Go go Godzilla, yeah
Oh no, there goes Tokyo
Go go Godzilla, yeah

Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, the fuel rods are exposed and undercooled now. We should brace for a meltdown, which (fortunately) won't be as much of a disaster as Chernobyl. It will be obviously worse than Three Mile Island, though. Let's hope that the population has evacuated the region.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if this footage is anything to go by, I'd say those poor folks are hosed.

Re:Meltdown?

[kylegordon]

A meltdown... into the bottom of the containment vessel.

Yes, it'll be a pain to tidy up, but it will be nothing like Three Mile Island.

Read http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

Re:Meltdown?

[Ash Vince]

Apparently, the fuel rods are exposed and undercooled now. We should brace for a meltdown, which (fortunately) won't be as much of a disaster as Chernobyl. It will be obviously worse than Three Mile Island, though. Let's hope that the population has evacuated the region.

Normally I wouldn't reply to ignorant AC's but this takes the biscuit.

About the only good thing about Chernobyl was that it was inland so the meltdown did not reach the water table. In this case we have a Nuclear Reactor going critical right on the edge of an ocean. If this reactor melts down there is a very real risk it will contaminate the worlds oceans with radioactive waste. That will be a lot worse.

Also, I would be interested to know how much this thing could raise the temperature of the worlds oceans by, if at all. If anyone has any actual information please post a link (or a huge amount of maths justifying their theory)

Re:Meltdown?

[benjamindees]

Also, I would be interested to know how much this thing could raise the temperature of the worlds oceans by, if at all.

You're a retard.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, I would be interested to know how much this thing could raise the temperature of the worlds oceans by, if at all.

Ever try heating a swimming pool with a lighter? The chances are about the same.

Re:Meltdown?

[zero.kalvin]

Nothing detectable on a whole ocean (I think). Even if the rods pack a big punch, you have around 1,260 billion billion Litre(or Kg if we assume it's pure water, even though it isn't) of water in the oceans. So you need around 5 million billion billion Joule to raise the oceans temperature by 1 degree Celsius. That's several orders of magnitude of the reactors ability.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

About the only good thing about Chernobyl was that it was inland so the meltdown did not reach the water table.

Not exactly, the only reason Chernobyl didn't contaminate the water supply was because they dug underneath the melting core and flooded the place with concrete. Chernobyl was actually built on top of (or at least close to) the water supply.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need a "huge amount" of math. The oceans have a combined volume of about 1.4e18 m^3. Considering a it has a constant density of 1 g/cm^3 (standard water density. It's actually higher for ocean water, but let's make the approximations very conservative). With a heat capacity of 4187 J/kg*K (again, for standard water), this means you need about 5.7e24 J of energy to get the water one single degree higher. To get that amount of energy, you need to convert about 64000 tons of matter into energy. That's definitely not going to happen with a nuclear reactor, which doesn't have even 1% of that amount in fissible materiel (And fission doesn't convert 100% of the mass in energy)

See that this is a totally different process to global warming, where gases and particles in our atmosphere trap the energy transmitted to our planet by the Sun. You should worry about real problems like this, not to an insignificant amount of radioactive material being dissolved into a huge amount of water that already has much more radioactive materials naturally dissolved.

Re:Meltdown?

[pahles]

You do know that in the past dumping barrels of nuclear waste in the ocean was quite common? Barrels that were not treated and are rusting away as we speak?

Not trying to condone it, but there are no known effects on a worldwide scale up until now...

Re:Meltdown?

[Securityemo]

That writeup was a godsend. So, if they've flooded the uncooled reactors with boric-acid and seawater nothing could possibly go wrong - and if they had been unmanned and allowed to meltdown, nothing would have gone wrong either. And the materials released in the radioactive steam decay completely within seconds.

Re:Meltdown?

[cvtan]

I hope it is like Three Mile Island - no fatalities.

Re:Meltdown?

[Securityemo]

According to the writeup, fatalities are impossible - unless you where standing on the thin roof when it collapsed from the hydrogen gas explosion.

Re:Meltdown?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Excellent link, thank you.

So many people think of "nuclear meltdown" as "nuclear explosion". Not the case. Meltdown is just that; Melting down of the fuel. Gravity dictates that this fluid fuel will go down, so meltdown is of very little concern to anyone except the reactor ops. Remember that reactor 5 at Chernobyl exploded because of their idiocy on several levels, not because of any fault with the plant (which would have functioned perfectly well if the operators had followed procedure correctly and vented the pressure vessel when required).

I say bravo to the Japanese. They've done very well throughout all of this. The deaths reported are a result of a 9.0 earthquake and linked tidal wave, not any nuclear incident, and that just goes to show how safe it is. Interesting factoid from the article; The reactors were designed to withstand an 8.3 Richter scale quake. As the Richter scale is logarithmic, they withstood a quake seven times their maximum. The only "Woops!" point was when they shipped in portable generators to replace the tsunami-swamped diesel backups... With the wrong plugs.

Seriously, read that article and turn off CNN / Fox. They're actually lying to you.

Re:Meltdown?

[TheRaven64]

I can only assume that you live in a space station and have never visited Earth. If you had, then you would have some idea of how big the world's oceans are (and, indeed, of how to use an apostrophe, but that's a different matter) and would realise that even dumping the entire reactor in the sea would have a negligible effect on the radioactivity sea water worldwide, although it would cause local problems, more related to the toxicity of various elements in the reactor than the radiation.

Re:Meltdown?

[The Grim Reefer2]

Also, I would be interested to know how much this thing could raise the temperature of the worlds oceans by, if at all. If anyone has any actual information please post a link (or a huge amount of maths justifying their theory)

Considerably less than these numerous naval tests. Which were immeasurable.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there won't be an explosive release as in Chernobyl. However, since the fuel is exposed (and as a material gets hotter, a bigger part of it evaporates), it will result in a bigger contamination than Three Mile Island.

Notice that the design of BWR reactors has a significant "flaw", as far as disaster prevention is concerned. The graphite rods that absorb neutrons and stop the chain reaction are inserted from below, requiring power to do so. In other designs, the rods are inserted by gravity from above, requiring power on an electromagnet to stay out of the core. That's a much safer design, and much more common than what's used at Fukushima.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen a lot of stupid on Slashdot over the years. This post easily tops them all. I can only assume it was intentional.

Re:Meltdown?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Should the meltdown reach the sea, I probably won't be eating the local sushi for a while, some of those radioisotopes are either chemically nasty or fairly peppy alpha emitters.

Thermally, though, almost totally irrelevant. The three reactors that are running into trouble are a 460MWe and two 760MWe units. In rough numbers, I think that such plants might manage efficiency in the ~25% range, which would correspond to total heat outputs of 1840MW and two at 3040MW(under optimal, full-power operating conditions). 1 calorie is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1gm of water by 1 degree celsius, 4.184 joules. If we go with our(pessimistic) assumption that the meltdown mass is putting out heat equivalent to the reactor operating as designed, that means 1840 million J/s or roughly 440,000,000 calories/s. That would mean that, per second, at maximum output, the core would be good for raising the temperature of 440,000L of water by 1 degree every second.

More plausibly(because there is no way that a meltdown blob is going to come in contact with that much water that fast), it will superheat the water immediately surrounding it, generating some very, very toasty steam(some of which will lose energy to the surrounding water, heating it, some of which will escape into the atmosphere). Thus, a fair percentage of the thermal energy will into the atmosphere, or into overcoming the enthalpy of vaporization of water, which is fairly high.

Even if 100% of the thermal energy from all three crippled reactors went directly into heating water (7920MW or ~1.9 billion calories/s) it would be facing the ~1.34442 x 10^21 L of water in earth's oceans. That would provide ~1.4x 10^-12 calories/s for each Liter. If we make the (highly pessimistic) assumption that the reactor meltdown blobs would continue at full power for a decade(315 569 260 seconds), that would correspond to a 0.000445977891 degree (celsius) rise in world ocean temps.

Spilling the fun stuff that you find in a live reactor is a terrible plan. Wholly ill advised. Don't do it. Not really a thermal concern, thon,

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone copy the article text? I can't get to it.

Re:Meltdown?

[Securityemo]

If the description of the reactor containment in the link is accurate, no, the fuel is not "exposed" as such. It is sealed inside a massive containment vessel, that prevents contamination of the surrounding area. And in any case, the reactors are full of seawater now, that will not evaporate due to the residual heat. And the boric acid apparently stops the nuclear reaction in the same way the control rods do.

Re:Meltdown?

[milkmage]

unfrotunately, the NYT is reporting a handful of workers with radiation sickness.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/world/asia/13nuclear.html

"The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that as many as 160 people may have been exposed to radiation around the plant, and Japanese news media said that three workers at the facility were suffering from full-on radiation sickness."

Re:Meltdown?

[Securityemo]

There's some interesting information buried inside that article too: they keep spent fuel rods in a pool in a nearby building or somesuch, that (if uncooled) will also melt. I saw pictures of such a storage once; it looked as if the fuel was gripped by industrial robot cranes and pulled into a "submerged" underground pool through a tunnel.

Re:Meltdown?

[Quiet_Desperation]

It doesn't matter. Humanity will overreact as usual, and any failures of these old reactors will completely kill *any* public discussion of new nuclear tech for decades to come. Better hope there's some massive breakthrough in solar or wind or something else, because one door to energy independence was just slammed shut this week.

Re:Meltdown?

[olsmeister]

Thank you for this link.

Re:Meltdown?

[orange47]

you recon Godzilla is 'not detectable'?

Re:Meltdown?

[kyuubiunl]

Worse than Three Mile Island? Just because it is billed as the "Worst Nuclear Plant release in US History" does not make it terrible. That statement literally says OUT OF WHAT HAS HAPPENED, this one trumped it. There were no significant releases other than noble gasses that would have decayed within seconds, the gas drillers are atomizing freaking radium226 into the air, and you think some irradiated NITROGEN is a problem? Try radioactive rain, irradiated garbage dumps that aren't designed to hold radioactive materials, and an irradiated water supply. Drink up. READ some

Re:Meltdown?

[maxume]

The control rods are not graphite (the composition varies across designs, but graphite would not be a usual component, it is a neutron moderator, not a neutron absorber), they are hydraulically actuated (so they have no immediate dependency on electricity to operate), and every reactor of the boiling water type (that was built in that era) uses the underneath geometry.

Re:Meltdown?

[tibit]

Yeah, because someone's nightmares are a good thing to "go by". The "footage" you refer to is fiction. That's all there's to it.

Re:Meltdown?

[TheLink]

I think BP's damage to the Gulf of Mexico will still be more in comparison.

Re:Meltdown?

[arogier]

Three Mile Island was nothing compared to decades of open air nuclear weapons testing.

Re:Meltdown?

[voidphoenix]

Until Godzilla shows up... :)

Re:Meltdown?

[Scrameustache]

A meltdown... into the bottom of the containment vessel.

And what's stopping the container from melting?

Re:Meltdown?

[spun]

Wait a second, so you are saying that according to the writeup, it is absolutely impossible for anyone to die... unless they were caught in one of several very large uncontrolled hydrogen gas explosions. Do you, ah, do you simply not see the inherent ridiculousness of that statement? "Look, as long as you manage to avoid the terrible dangers, you're perfectly safe," is really stretching the definition of 'safe.'

Re:Meltdown?

[durrr]

The thermodynamic laws that govern this universe? Don't try to win green-point by being more stupid than you really are, because all such points availible have been won already.

Re:Meltdown?

[MightyMartian]

Is there any other topics you pontificate on where it is evident that you know so little about the subject matter? The whole bloody reactor is sitting in a containment vessel designed precisely to prevent large scale radiation leaks.

But presuming that in fact somehow a large amount of radioactive material did leak into the ocean, it would hardly poison the world oceans or even the Pacific Ocean.

I'll put it in a nice simple Creole for someone as evidently stupid as you...

Ocean very big... radioactive materials very small...

Re:Meltdown?

[Securityemo]

Ye-es. Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying, actually.

Re:Meltdown?

[spun]

By 'exposed' they mean that the heat is so high that the rods are not bather in liquid water. Not so bad in a boiling water reactor like this one, which has a negative void coefficient, meaning that the presence of liquid water slows down the neutrons enough for them to interact and produce heat. The absence of liquid water actually slows down the reaction. However, the fuel rods can not be 'exposed' while the reactor is full of seawater. Being exposed means NOT being covered in water.

Re:Meltdown?

[hey!]

One of the many important lessons of TMI is how fallible people are at inferring the state of a complex system in unusual circumstances. Furthermore the *initial* state of a complex system at the outset of an even like this might not be what it is supposed to be. TMI-2's auxiliary coolant system was down for maintenance, which should not have been allowed unless TMI-2 was shut down. Right from the outset of the incident was that the operators consistently fit the data they had into incorrect models of the system's state.

The unreliability of human decision making in these conditions is why fourth generation reactor designs are much less complex and in some cases passively safe.

So the lesson here is to treat situational assessments in this kind of incident as highly suspect. The hydrogen explosions per se are not anything to be particularly concerned about, but I think we can take them as evidence that the operators don't have the plant under control. For example, the *second* explosion injured eleven workers, so even though the operators clearly knew that additional explosions were possible, they still had workers in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite the complexity of TMI's design, the defense in depth in that design succesfullly prevented serious public health or environmental damage from the TMI incident despite inevitable human error. I expect the same will happen in Fukushima. But there are no guarantees until the situation has been stabilized.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

DERP, ya think? Did you forget your sense of humor in your other pants, or is it 'stick up the ass day' at the butt plug factory?

Re:Meltdown?

[Securityemo]

Slight confusion of past and present tense there, yes. Current news says that one reactor is filled, and some unclear information says that the other two Fukushima reactors are in the process of being filled as well; the local Swedish news seems to be a bit confused at the moment, though, so that may or may not be true.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is were/where the new there/their?

Re:Meltdown?

[MrNemesis]

The amount of energy in the fuel. The linked article has the full explanation (seriously, read it) but the gist of it is: once the control rods are inserted, nuclear fission stops happening. But radioactive decay - from the uranium itself but mostly from the radioactive byproducts - keeps happening. Fortunately, the radioactive byproducts (caesium and iodine isotopes for the most part) are quite short lived, and the heat output will have dropped off after a few days.

The emergency cooling systems are there to remove this residual heat. If they fail for long enough, the core will start to go into meltdown. Fortunately, beneath the reactor is a massive slab of concrete underlain by a massive slab of granite - there to a) ensure any fuel spreads out to let it cool more quickly and b) provide enough ballast to act as a massive heatsink. There's not enough latent energy in the fuel to melt all the way through it.

Compare Chernobyl (the wikipedia page on that is a very good read if you're not aware of the details), which was incompetently designed, maintained and operated at any number of levels and had utterly shitty containment. Lots of the fuel there melted and, thanks to there being no big fat concrete/granite base there was a real possibility the fuel would leak out the bottom of the building and, ultimately, into the water table. They actually contemplated pumping liquid nitrogen into the soil under the building to mitigate this.

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, worse than Three Mile Island. A meltdown in a commercial power plant had only happened two times: Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. This, if confirmed, would be the third meltdown, sitting between the two others. Not as bad as Chernobyl. Already worse than Three Mile Island even if there isn't a meltdown (although I don't like to say it like this, because that's something the media will use to spread terror). Understand it now? [Yes, I'm the same AC as the GP]

Re:Meltdown?

[spun]

Okay, so aside from the THREE massive hydrogen gas explosions, the crane accident, and the dozens of injuries, this is all perfectly safe. Gotcha.

Re:Meltdown?

[tibit]

This doesn't matter. The reactors have successfully SCRAMmed by automated systems, probably while the quake was still underway. Had they not SCRAMmed, without cooling they'd be dry in short order, and the core would've melted not soon thereafter. Hours, tops.

Re:Meltdown?

[lingon]

"Obiously"? No, this will be exactly like Three Mile Island because this is the almost same type of accident (although the initial cause and reactor designs differs a bit). Thus, the end result will be a few totally hosed reactors and no radiation leakage to speak of to the environment (and electricity shortage for the Japanese people). That, and the clean-up from the worst earthquake and tsunami disaster to hit Japan in modern time.

Re:Meltdown?

[lingon]

There is no danger to people living around the reactor from a *nuclear* standpoint. The usual dangers apply for the hydrogen explosions, though.

Re:Meltdown?

[lingon]

What? There are no graphite rods in the Fukushima reactors, the neutron moderation is done by means of ordinary water. What you're talking about is a design flaw of *RBMK* reactors, i.e. the Chernobyl-type. Which, besides the graphite moderator, graphite-tipped control rods, lack of containment structure and control rods going in from below, had a number of other design faults, one of which was the ability to turn off all automatic safety systems.

Re:Meltdown?

[Lucidus]

I don't understand the part about 'the plugs didn't fit.' These guys are nuclear engineers, with access to the emergency response capabilities of an entire technologically sophisticated nation. Surely someone could rewire the connectors?

Re:Meltdown?

[spun]

Oh, well hey, I'm totally okay with getting blown up in a hydrogen explosion. It's that nuclear radiation stuff I can't stand, I mean, that stuff will kill you WAY deader than any old explosion will. You'll be super extremely totally dead, not just dead. Clarity in language is a useful trait, if you mean "safe from nuclear radiation but not other things" say that. Don't say "absolutely impossible for anyone to die," because you sound stupid, and if someone does die, then you also sound like an ass.

Here's a thought, how about the pro nuclear and anti nuclear folks SHUT THE HELL UP until this is over and we know how it went down. I'm seeing a ton of uninformed bullshit from both sides, meanwhile, bad things are happening and people are getting hurt or killed, so it's just a little bit insensitive for either side to start up their PR spin machines right yet.

Re:Meltdown?

[LanMan04]

Ocean very big... radioactive materials very small...

But American penis SO BIG!

Re:Meltdown?

[Ardeaem]

As the Richter scale is logarithmic, they withstood a quake seven times their maximum.

10^.7 = 5, not 7.

Re:Meltdown?

[osu-neko]

I'm seeing a ton of uninformed bullshit from both sides...

Welcome to /.! [notes user id] Oh, wait...

Re:Meltdown?

[osu-neko]

...explosions per se are not anything to be particularly concerned about...

o.O

Re:Meltdown?

[HiThere]

I can remember a time when I was worried about the barrels of arsenic that the Nazi's dumped during WWII. Untreated, but sealed in barrels (probably for transport). I wonder if they've rusted away yet?

That's a much more reasonable worry. It's still silly on a global scale, but it might do serious damage to the North Sea...or at least to the North Sea fisheries. (People concentrate the minerals from the food they eat. Fish concentrate the minerals from the food they eat [other fish and plants]. And plants concentrate the minerals from their environment. So even if the cod are healthy, the people that eat them might not remain so.

(N.B.: This wasn't a Nazi war effort. This was cheap industrial waste disposal.)

From what I've heard, Tokyo Bay is so polluted already that if the radioactive materials escaped, it wouldn't do any economically significant ecological damage locally, so it's only the global effects that one need worry about, and those are so minor as to be barely measurable.

However, in meltdown, the operative word is "down", and what's down is a concrete base. The stuff isn't hot enough to melt through concrete. And it's not volatile. So when it's cooled down (as by lots of water) it's a solid.

They're going to have a really huge cleanup problem. I don't really see how they're going to deal with it. But I expect the problems to all be pretty local. And first reports say that even there, local isn't a huge area. That huge area being evacuated is just the government not taking any chances.

OTOH, I expect that Japan will now start putting a lot of effort into solar, wind, and sea power. (I'm not sure that they've got a good environment for tidal engines, though. But they've got plenty of shoreline for near-shore windmills. And they've got the silicon expertise to push solar cells. They don't have large deserts, though, so centralized solar power is probably not likely.) Even if it's a bit less economic, it will probably more politically attractive.

(OTOH, what is the true cost of a nuclear plant, if you count the full lifetime costs, including retirement. And count the government waiver of insurance for massive damages. [I don't know that the Japanese government offers this, but the US govt. does.] It's not inconceivable that the true lifetime costs for nuclear power are considerably higher than many of the others. The US subsidized it so long to facilitate it's nuclear weapons building that it's really not clear at all what all of the costs are.)

Re:Meltdown?

[HiThere]

No, I'd say (from my vast ignorance) that it will be a meltdown. Or at least a partial meltdown. And that this will make the job of cleanup very nasty.

It won't, however, be of any real problem to anyone who doesn't have to pay for the cleanup. (Outside, of course, of those already exposed to radiation. I'm not sure I trust the figure on that, but apparently only 3 really serious exposures.) During the cleanup I'd be surprised if another dozen people weren't exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation, albeit less intensely.

The precautionary clearing of the area will probably turn out to have been largely unnecessary. But it was reasonable to play things safe when one wasn't sure what was happening. ("And beside, there are plans in place for that, and we're too busy dealing with the tsunamis and earthquake damages to come up with new plans on the spur of the moment.") There will have been minor radiation release, but nothing to worry about. (At least not two days later.)

The cleanup, however, will be quite expensive. And then comes the problem of how to replace that source of power...

Re:Meltdown?

[riverat1]

Maybe we''ll finally get our sharks with lasers.

Re:Meltdown?

[raygundan]

The difference in energy between 8.2 and 8.9 on the Richter Scale would be given by the formula:

(10^0.7)^(3 / 2), or a difference of about 11x the energy.

Assuming, of course, that I got that formula and the math right, which may be assuming a lot.

Re:Meltdown?

[spun]

Yes, I have been losing the battle against uninformed idiocy on the Internet for almost two decades. You'd think I would learn by now...

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

The explosions reported so far are outside the core containment, so who gives a shit? The bad stuff is still sealed up.

Re:Meltdown?

[empiricistrob]

Close, but not quite:
V=1.4e18 m^3
m = 1.4e18 kg
E = (1.4e18 kg) * (4187 J/kg*K) = 5.8e21 (21 -- not 24)
E/c^2 = 65 metric tons

Still, your general point is absolutely valid.

Re:Meltdown?

[hey!]

Yeah, I reread what I wrote and see what you mean. It's called "grading on a curve."

The worst case is Chernobyl style radiological disaster, next to which a hydrogen explosion is no big deal and which a hydrogen explosion does not necessarily portend. In fact a hydrogen explosion is a possible side effect of steps to prevent a more serious steam explosion that would breach the reactor vessel and primary containment.

What's worrisome is that the second explosion injured so many workers. How did that happen, especially after the explosion in No. 1? It makes me think they seriously misread the condition of the No. 3 reactor.

Because of the various reactor designs, news on what is happening in Fukushima is difficult to interpret. Some reports say that "secondary containment" has been destroyed, but then illustrate that with a totally different reactor design in which the "secondary containment" structure is supposed to contain a core meltdown after a reactor vessel ruptures. That's not what happened here. Had that happened, it would probably be game over, because they'd probably have lost any control of the reactor along with the final line of defense against major environmental contamination. What appears to have happened is that the outermost shell of the reactor building was destroyed. It was designed with blow away panels for just this kind of scenario, so the destruction of the outer building doesn't imply the complete loss of control that the complete destruction of the containment structure containing the drywall would have spelled.

That doesn't make all this a happy scenario. Not by a long shot. But none of the specific information I've seen so far suggests that we aren't heading for a Three Mile Island style resolution in which environmental and health damage outside the plant is extremely limited. I hope officials are prudent and prepare for a much worse scenario than that, although under the circumstances that's going to be a challenge.

Re:Meltdown?

[BeanThere]

So you are saying it was stupid and pointless evacuating hundreds of thousands of people? "Hey townsfolk, don't worry, come back, the evacuation was a mistake, there is no danger, ha ha"

Re:Meltdown?

[BeanThere]

Know what I find even more irritating than the rabid "zomg nuclear, hysteria!!" anti-nuke crowd? The rabid "zomg it's totally safe" crowd, who will absurdly adamantly crow that it's all perfectly normal and safe and nothing to worry about when nuclear power stations frikkin explode in a series of huge blasts that can be seen, heard and felt 30 miles away, while fuel rods partly melt down..

Sometimes, taking the polar opposite of a stupid (e.g. anti-nuke) position, is intelligent. But sometimes, taking the polar opposite of a stupid position, is just being stupid in the opposite direction. This is one of those times.

I am pro-nuke. But I am realistically so, not rabid-cultist deny-there-are-any-risks-whatsoever pro-nuke. Hysterically claiming it's highly dangerous is no worse than hysterically crowing that it is risk-free and safe. No wonder the anti-nukers are jittery. Let's be honest, nuclear power is a somewhat risky business. And even the best of engineering is sometimes no match for operator error.

And sometimes even the most well-intentioned, well-trained experienced operators can make mistakes, for example if - like at Fukushima - they've been working in crisis mode for days on end, are ill from radiation poisoning, no doubt exhausted ... know what caused the latest exposure of fuel? Human error.

Nuclear plants are run by humans. Nuclear does carry many risks, it is far from the simplest and most risk-free of human endeavours. Should we become hysterical about them? NO. But should we hysterically deny it carries risks? NO. What we should do is keep those risks in fact-based perspective. So what is the absolutely worst case scenario at Fukushima? Seemingly, that maybe a relatively tiny number of people die or get sick (especially compared to e.g. the number that die or get sick from coal power production), and that a portion of Japan say 30 miles radius in Japan becomes unlivable for a thousand years. Would that be the end of the world? No, not at all. Life will go on just fine for everyone. Basically the whole town will survive and be healthy. But the risk does exist of it happening. I remain pro-nuke, but hysterically exaggerating the safety of, or playing down the risks involved in nuclear power production does NOT help the pro-nuke case. In fact it does the opposite, because the anti-nuke people see it and picture folks like that - living in denial that there are risks - running these plants.

Re:Meltdown?

[dgatwood]

So many people think of "nuclear meltdown" as "nuclear explosion". Not the case. Meltdown is just that; Melting down of the fuel. Gravity dictates that this fluid fuel will go down, so meltdown is of very little concern to anyone except the reactor ops.

Unless/until it burns through the reactor vessel, through the concrete containment building's floor, through the bedrock underneath, and reaches the water table. Then you have a rather large steam explosion. Not saying that's likely, of course.

Re:Meltdown?

[brantondaveperson]

A Creole is a complete and not simple language. You're thinking of a Pigin.

Re:Meltdown?

[anagama]

Really? Now there is fire in reactor 4, as well as the explosions in one through three, the evacuation zone is being extended to 30 km, and radiation levels are going up.

Hubris == "nothing could possibly go wrong".

Re:Meltdown?

[Scrameustache]

If they fail for long enough, the core will start to go into meltdown.

That's the thing: the plant keeps leaking hydrogen and exploding here and there, the grid is down, there's still aftershocks happening, the plant has been leaking radioactive material already and if things keep going wrong, once the rods start melting what's to say the container won't crack and spray out the molten fuel?

I mean: I hope the worse is behind them, but it just seems like things are failing one after the other, and I don't share this optimism of yours about the safeguards needed to prevent the worse case scenarios.

Re:Meltdown?

[anagama]

This Josef dude is one of the overly confident/underly prudent types. As an example that Josef suffers from this dangerous deficit, he put his name to a document saying nothing bad will happen. Since then, reactors 1-3 have been exposed to explosions, a spent fuel pool is probably exposed to the air, and reactor 4 building is reportedly on fire. The news is no longer talking about micro-sieverts, it's now milli-sieverts. The evacuation zone has been expanded to 30 km, and NHK is describing what to and what not to do. For example, if you have laundry outside, leave it and don't bring it in. Turn off all ventilation equipment, etc. etc.

Josef Oehlmen is the acme of hubris, and thanks to the web, that's exactly how he will be remembered, which is a fair and proper consequence of his personality flaws.

Re:Meltdown?

[anagama]

Right, with reactor 4 on fire, the roof blown off a spent fuel pool and the cooling water possibly boiling off, and one of the reactors apparently leaking cooling water -- no danger at all. Fanboi.

Re:Meltdown?

[Meetch]

Bollocks. While the outcome was not ideal, the evacuations were just precautionary.

The reason for the explosions is due to the knowledge that the hydrogen/oxygen gas mix released would be marginally radioactive with a half life measured in seconds, and the intent was to contain the gas for long enough for it to be rendered inert. The risk of explosion was acknowledged, people were warned, and when when it did blow, well they had had opportunity to move people further away than they were. The escaping gases ARE raising radiation levels ... a bit. However, I think you'll find the radiation doses astronauts get are higher than those the bunnies outside the fences of the nuclear power plants are getting.

It takes a few days for a reactor that has had the control rods slammed into the shutdown position to cool down, and in the meantime the generator still generates some heat and needs some cooling. When the backups and backups of backups failed, they chose the less desirable route, in pumping in sea water. As it ain't pure water, you end up with slightly more radioactive matter with a half-life which is more like minutes than seconds, so less desirable, somewhat radioactive gas results, which is harmless well before it travels that 30km. There will be no noteworthy radioactive residue when the cool down is complete, except for what's in the reactor itself.

The reactor everyone's jumping up and down about has survived an earthquake and tsunami well beyond design spec, and as for the inconvenience of lost power. Yes, they lost backup and backup backup diesel generators, but they also had battery backups which held until mobile generators could be moved in. I also dare anyone to tell me what power generation scheme in that location at that time would not have failed, so of course there will be power rationing and/or blackouts.

The Japanese got the sum of their design and processes of their nuclear reactors right, and they are taking every precaution they can to ensure public safety. The biggest mistake was trying to contain the gas from the reactor instead of venting to the atmosphere, because the media are making it look like these gas explosions might be a sign that a meltdown is imminent. It isn't, but the media never let facts get in the way of a good story. Those responsible for the reactors are simply Doing The Right Thing [TM].

Re:Meltdown?

[Meetch]

I think we'll find the risks associated with earthquakes and tsunamis at say a gas or coal powered power station would be about the same. This tangent seems to have completely forgotten the magnitude of mother nature's fury which caused the issues in the first place.

Thousands were dead in minutes, and people seem to be insinuating that a fatality and some injuries after the natural disasters are beyond what might be considered statistically normal. Accidents happen, however unfortunate they may be.

Re:Meltdown?

[Meetch]

*cough*Hindenburg*cough* :)

Re:Meltdown?

[Anonymous Coward]

here's some off the cuff figures. Lets assume this was the largest power plant on earth and produced 1TW of power and that full 1TW of power is dumped into the pacific ocean. 1TW = 1 billion Joules / sec. ~4joules will raise 1g of water 1 degree C.this power source would raise 250million grams of water 1C every second or 250,000kg of water 1C in a second.

The pacific ocean is ~622 million cubic kilometers of water or 6.22e23 grams of water = 6.22e20kg of water. So it would heat the ocean 1 degree C in 2.488e15 seconds. This is almost 78 million years from a hypothetical super large power plant. Not to mention heat loss to other oceans and the air.

Basically if you think we could heat up the pacific ocean to any extent at all you must have never seen it.

Any discharge would cause local issues, but I'm confident that for similar reasons of SHEER VOLUME of the Pacific Ocean, any direct dump of nuclear waste would be negligible on the ocean AS A WHOLE.

Re:Meltdown?

[MrNemesis]

Well, there "leaking" hydrogen and there's leaking hyrdogen. The hydrogen releases appear to be a by-product of the coolant evaporating into steam, and then being cracked into constituent hydrogen + oxygen. In the first explosion this was vented off into the reactor building itself (i.e. outside the containment vessel), but was still volatile enough to explode and take away the metal shell at the top of the building; the superstructure remains intact. There's low level radioisotopes in these vented gases (most dangerously iodine) but the overall volume of them is low and they have a short half life - there's a big difference between leaking that and leaking reactor fuel, although the news don't seem to be aware of the difference.

There's multiple modes of failure built into the reactor, and if anything's going to break the reactor vessel it'll be the fuel melting through it (downwards) - it's strong enough not to crack under pressure, unlike the zero-containment reactor core at chernobyl (which literally had a crappy tin roof separating the reactor room from the rest of the world), and there's not enough latent heat to flash the coolant into steam (which is what blew the chernobyl reactor apart).

The fuel (mostly uranium oxide) is also the last thing to melt, at about 3000degC, the fuel rods themselves at about 2200degC. The things failing one after one another are doing so exactly as designed as far as I can tell, despite the fact the earthquake that hit the reactors was seven times larger than its official tolerances and was of an outmoded design with no passive safety (e.g. convective cooling systems).

Details still scant though, but the inquiry is certainly going to be interesting.

Re:Meltdown?

[anagama]

As it ain't pure water, you end up with slightly more radioactive matter with a half-life which is more like minutes than seconds, so less desirable, somewhat radioactive gas results, which is harmless well before it travels that 30km.

Tokyo is hundreds of km away and is up 23 times. Not a dangerous amount, but I doubt the wind can travel 240 km in seconds or minutes. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tokyo-radiation-levels-23-times-normal-officials-2011-03-15-04540

Secondly, there appears to be a breach in containment at reactor 2, although the radiation release could also be due to a fire, now out, at reactor 4's spent fuel pool (remember, reactor 4 was completely shut down before the quake). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12745186

400 milli-sieverts/hr measured briefly (reportedly, though trust is an issue) at the plant is a lot: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/15/us-japan-radiation-factbox-idUSTRE72E14R20110315

Airline crew flying the New York-Tokyo polar route are exposed to 9 mSv a year.

Seems like you fall in the overly-confident underly-prudent category.

Re:Meltdown?

[Scrameustache]

Thanks you for your detailed reply.

I'd read that the hydrogen explosion came from the zirconium casing being oxidized, which led me to think that the containment was failing hard. Your explanation for that hydrogen sounds less dramatic.

Re:Meltdown?

[spun]

Still think everything is peachy?

Re:Meltdown?

[spun]

You still feeling smugly correct in your assessment of the issue, or have unfolding events shown you the error of your overconfidence and lack of concern? And if you answer in the affirmative, even given the burning spent fuel and third explosion, what would it actually take for you to be concerned? This isn't about "green points" asshole. I'm both pro environment and pro nuclear power in general, in fact you'd have to be the dumb sort of environmentalist not to embrace nuclear, but this isn't a game, where the pro nuclear side wins if nothing bad happens, this is a very serious nuclear accident. People can be concerned and have honest questions without being eco-terrorists. The stupid points went to both sides.

Re:Meltdown?

[Meetch]

*sigh* ... half life of minutes means it halves radiation level measured every so many minutes, doesn't mean it disappears in minutes. Revise your math based on that.

Generally the most dangerous nuclear material is that with a half life comparable to the lifespan of a human, ie decades. Yes there are spikes of radiation, but they dissipate quickly. 23 times the normal levels? I receive a day's worth of background radiation in an hour... as long as that doesn't happen for a month it's not likely to affect my health.

The real problem is if the nuclear fuel escapes into the atmosphere - that's where you end up with clouds that are dangerous. It hasn't happened in Japan yet, despite the physical assault the earth has thrown at it. Radioactive gases have been vented, and are short lived, and low risk because it's total exposure to radiation that causes the real health issues.

So far I still only see reports of one worker exposed to levels of radiation that are equivalent to a few years worth of radiation in an hour. That person may get cancer, and has every right to be worried, but you can get cancer from inhaling coal dust too. Or smoking, or, depending on what the media wants to pick up and run with, eating potatoes, or breathing. The point is, don't believe the hype that the media is using to sell stories. They don't seem to know what they're talking about. As soon as someone admits "radiation leak" the media broadcasts "Chernobyl" and the average Joe starts overreacting. These stories are alarmist, pure and simple, and it's selling newspapers and online advertising, while at the same time putting enough fear into people to affect the rescue and recovery efforts from the natural disaster.

I were in Tokyo I'd keep an eye out for any official reports about a genuine containment failure, while continuing to live my life.

Oh yes, those who use this as a tool to fear nuclear power need also to remember that this is a 40 year old plant, and there is new technology in such things which prevents the chance of even a partial meltdown, period. Very clever stuff where the fuel is embedded in material that expands as it gets too hot, which effectively moderates the fission reaction and prevents it going past a certain point.

Re:Meltdown?

[anagama]

A half life of minutes -- fine, let's say 5 minutes. If I start with a ton of material, after one hour I have only 0.49 pounds. Wind at 240 km/hr is at the top end of a Category 4 Hurrican (Katrina was only a 3) -- doubt Japan is experiencing that right now from all the pictures of people walking around and such. How about two hours then, that's only a low end Category 1 hurricane -- by then, only 0.00012 pounds of that initial ton of material.

Clearly, because there are no hurricane conditions in Japan, something that doesn't decay in minutes is escaping.

Re:Meltdown?

[Meetch]

Math fail... firstly, pounds??? The units we're interested in are milli/microsieverts. Who's talking pounds? Look up the unit, you'll find Wikipedia has useful information on what constitutes a danger... look it up and repeat after me: Oh, it's not all that bad.

Secondly, think beyond the narrow-minded figure that "minutes" means no more than 10 minutes...

Say the half life of the radioactive gasses escaping the power station is 30 minutes. yes, 30. It's not unthinkable. In that case 400 millisieverts (reported to be an exposure at the reactor) becomes 25 millisieverts after 2 hours, or ~1.5 millisieverts after 4 hours, or somewhere in the region of reported levels in Tokyo after 5 hours or so. Is a 50km/h sea breeze enough for you in a tropical region? This means the radioactive material in the atmosphere is decaying fast enough not to pose a significant health issue. If there is enough exposure to worry about, people start taking iodine pills. Sure, iodine pills have even been distributed around the area, but how many have actually been taken so far? Possibly that one exposed worker, and whoever decided to panic. Yes, we're still quite peachy. Conventional fuel based explosions have happened at a nuclear power plant, because a byproduct of the residual reaction is an ideal, carbon-free, fuel (H2), and it ignited. When the reactor shutdowns, which have been hampered by the problems at the plant, complete, then the properly protected experts can have a look and the full story on how much dangerous nuclear matter has been released into the atmosphere will come out. I think you'll find it's negligible. The Japanese should be worrying about other things than the potential for a nuclear holocaust.

Re:Meltdown?

[anagama]

N. Japan is not tropical and wind speeds currently 1.6 km/h with gusts up to 6.4 km/h. There have been winds up to 26 km/h today, but even so, that would be a 9-10 hour journey if it blew at 26 constantly (which it did not).

http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/47671.html

This all kind of stupid anyway. Reactors #2 and #3 have probably breached and there is no containment on the storage pools. If you insist on suggesting that only noble gasses and no cesium or iodine have been released, well, have at it and enjoy the acid trip.

Re:Meltdown?

[Meetch]

So... ummm, can you tell me what the wind speeds were for the handful of hours prior to the reported elevated levels, or even how long the elevated level was recorded for in Tokyo? I'm only particularly interested in facts to prove me wrong, not speculation. :)

Nobody really bothers with reporting good news (great news, yes, good news doesn't sell). Bad news of any kind loves to spin. If the radiation levels vary significantly over even the next week (this must include going down) then there are no dangerous radioactive materials involved - such things have significantly higher half lives than seconds, minutes, or hours... even days.

Despite the explosions, this "disaster" is still officially at least 1 level lower than TMI ever was, and that was more bark than bite. No meltdown. Some heavy-ish elements in the reactor may be somewhat dangerous to get close to for a while, and if they escape they will be of mild concern because they can't sustain a reaction like you get in a nuclear reactor, whether it be for power (Uranium/Plutonium and other scary stuff) or medicine (not so scary, but still troublesome to carry lumps in your pocket). The half-life of those materials within the reactor will be what determines the time it takes from the control rods being inserted to the reactor going cold (and yes there will be significant residual radiation inside the reactor in normal circumstances). Current temperatures within the reactor simply won't be high enough to vaporize much that could be a threat. It's just better for you not to inhale the stuff that is out there, just as it's better for you not to inhale cigarette smoke.

Journalism

[bogeskov]

Poorly constructed sentence that last one, insinuating the deaths are related to the nuclear plant.

Re:Journalism

[HungryHobo]

regular natural disaster deaths aren't as sexy as nuclear ones.

last I heard they were pumping seawater+boron into the reactors, anyone know how's that working out?

Re:Journalism

[SuricouRaven]

Destroying the reactors beyond repair. Turning to seawater cooling means they have given up all hope of salvaging the reactors in a working state, and will settle for just non-exploding.

Re:Journalism

[fredjh]

It's disgusting; CNN.com's current main page headline is "Japan's reactor problems mount; death toll rises."

WTF?

Re:Journalism

[toQDuj]

Quite, that is some nasty reporting from someone who either has an agenda or who doesn't understand fuck-all. Also the rolling blackouts are due to the power plants having been shutdown. What do they expect? I have not heard about rationing, merely the president asking for people to conserve what they can. Lastly, most of the US does not suffer from earthquakes or tsunamis, so those similar reactors should be fine.

Someone is trying to blow this story sky-high. Why do they not focus on where the actual deaths are? Fucking media-journalice.

B.

Re:Journalism

[toQDuj]

Well, there were more injured in the second blast, perhaps that is how they spin it. There is a powerful anti-nuclear lobby active at the moment.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

I think all reactors in Fukushima I are almost end-of-life (all built in the seventies anyway), losing the reactors now is not the massive financial problem it could have been.

A dirty explosion would of course be worst possible outcome but that's not at all the situation now: saying they "will settle for just non-exploding" is just plain wrong. They are trying to control the cooling now, sacrificing the reactors if need be. This is looking better by the hour (even with these explosions), but if that somehow fails and the core(s) actually heat enough to melt down, that still doesn't mean there is going to be a dirty explosion: "controlled meltdown" is something .they actually practice.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

America Fail

Re:Journalism

[RobertLTux]

small correction

the CORES are slag but they will be doing a more or less normal refueling after the rest of the plant has been repaired/upgraded.

Re:Journalism

[fishexe]

Journalism? We don't do that here, go look somewhere else.

Re:Journalism

[slim]

Could it be that the headline writer expects you to know about the earthquake and tsunami already, and to be capable of applying context to the headline?

Re:Journalism

[borrrden]

Yes, there is rationing, though it was largely avoided today due to conserving efforts by train operators and large companies. 7 prefectures have been divided into 5 groups, which rotate among 3 hour power outages as needed. Today only group number 5 (5 - 7 pm) was needed. They are planning it again tomorrow, though. Since the trains are set to expand a bit, I assume that they will need to implement more of those outages.

Re:Journalism

[Artraze]

No.

(Can you even be serious? The way nuclear power is portrayed these days? Give me a break.)

Re:Journalism

[fredjh]

Of course, it could be that, but it's far more likely he's trying to link the two (otherwise it's a completely inappropriate use of the semicolon). Bias in the news is not about lying, it's about creating emotional responses one way or another and getting people to link things together in a way that suits your agenda... in this case, an anti-nuclear one.

CNN.com are not the only ones, and there is even a link to an article insinuating American plants aren't safe (even though they come out and say it). This is persuasive writing... not necessarily factually incorrect, but not journalism, either.

Re:Journalism

[CnlPepper]

Sorry to dampen you optimism, but these reactors are going to be totally useless after this. The reactor vessel will almost certainly be beyond repair and it is central to the entire plant. Economically it would be easier to just build a newer design of plant.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

(Can you even be serious? The way Americans are educated and journalist report these days? Give me a break.)

There, FIFY.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, Good Morning America this morning (2011-03-14) seems to want to prepare everyone for a Chernobyl disaster. The failing reactors use a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) instead of the RBMK design of Chernobyl; by the sounds of it this design is rather safer, but I am not qualified to say how much. In the video, the reporter says this incident rates a "4" where Chernobyl is a "7". Their "Resident Physicist" then goes on to say it "should be a 6". Then the other guy (sounds like a lobbyist, "worked with the government on [nuclear stuff]") says it could become a Chernobyl-type incident, and goes on to say it in such a way that it sounds like he expects it will.

I am sure that there 20 million Americans who are now expecting a nuclear cataclysm that weren't when they first awoke today...

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

I know. I saw a (French?) woman on some news channel earlier talking about how the nuclear industry has promised something like Chernobyl can't happen again and here they are wrong about that. And yet nothing even close to Chernobyl has happened yet. For here it is already a forgone conclusion apparently. If it doesn't melt down, they they were actually right (well, right this time I suppose).

I don't mind when someone has an agenda, as long as they put out there exactly what their agenda is and why. Reporting things inaccurately or intentionally misleadingly should be a punishable offense (loss of use of public airwaves at least) IMHO.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Chloride contamination of the of stainless steel plumbing of the flooded reactors will put them permanently out of commission.

The other reactors may return to service after a few years of repairs/recertification.

Re:Journalism

[vlm]

Sorry to dampen you optimism, but these reactors are going to be totally useless after this. The reactor vessel will almost certainly be beyond repair and it is central to the entire plant. Economically it would be easier to just build a newer design of plant.

They were planning to build two new reactors onsite, # 7 and #8. They'll probably end up with new ABWRs to replace the old clunkers. Note that a single ABWR outputs as much power as three BWR-3s or two BWR-4s so yanking three 40 year old dinosaurs does not necessarily mean they need to build three new ABWRs to take their place... My guess is they'll get one.

I'm hardly on their board of directors but most likely instead of adding 2 new ABWRs they'll probably simultaneously build the currently planned two, decon the old units 1 / 2 / 3 and build a nice new ABWR on top of the old site of 1 / 2 / 3.

Its is possible, that after this excitement, they'll yank all the old BWR-4s and the one decent BWR-5 and replace the whole works with ESBWRs. A pity GE gave up on the SBWR... That design would have been pretty much inherently safe in this situation. Of course I'm a little fuzzy on dates, I think the SBWR design was done a decade or two after the BWR-3 and BWR-4 were built at Fukushima and I don't remember why GE gave up on the SBWR design anyway (maybe the navy or other govt considered it too "sensitive", despite the navy's fondness for PWRs?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents#Reactors

Re:Journalism

[Steve Max]

Just to give some scale to the show's ignorance, a Level 6 Nuclear Accident is something like the Kyshtym disaster, where 80 tons of highly radioactive material were released into the atmosphere. Level 5 Accidents include Three Mile Island and Goiânia, where 250 people were heavily contaminated and 5 died from the direct consequences of Cesium-137 exposure (without counting cancer victims, miscarriages and children born with severe problems). Most Level 4 Accidents actually caused at least some deaths, so the classification of Fukushima at Level 4, despite official, may be a bit premature.

Re:Journalism

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

As it happens Unit 1 was scheduled to be shutdown and decommissioned in March, 2011.

Re:Journalism

[HungryHobo]

I thought the Kyshtym disaster was preceded by far worse years of dumping radioactive material into the local river.

That wiki briefly mentions the dumping into the river Ob but from what I've heard from other sources more was dumped into the rivers than was in the tanks which exploded.
All of course surrounded by the iron curtain style secrecy.

oh those soviets. what cards.

Re:Journalism

[rvw]

Destroying the reactors beyond repair. Turning to seawater cooling means they have given up all hope of salvaging the reactors in a working state, and will settle for just non-exploding.

Whether using sea water will destroy these reactors or not is a non-discussion, as these reactors were scheduled to retire by the end of this month. Tim van der Hagen, Dutch nuclear scientist has said so last Sunday on Dutch tv.

Re:Journalism

[jbengt]

Do not assume malice where incompetence is plausible.

Re:Journalism

[fredjh]

Those are good words to live by, however the media (both conservatively and liberally biased) have demonstrated that, in their cases, it is malice.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on a number of factors, the reactors may or may not be destroyed, only damaged. Admittedly, the vessels are huge and unwieldy, but it's possible they could be removed for replacement once all the fuel is removed and any threat of excessive radiation eliminated. That said, even if, like Chernobyl, they choose to encase that particular reactor in concrete, the remaining reactors in the plant could still be re-started once any physical damage to the plant is repaired. As much as you may not like it, TMI is still operating two of its reactors even now, many long years after the partial meltdown of a third, and has been doing so safely all this time.

I do agree that nuclear power is dangerous, but until we come up with some better form of large-scale power generation that is not dependent on fossil fuels, we need to use what we have available. Our fossil fuels will run out. We'd better come up with a replacement soon.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like they met their schedule.

Re:Journalism

[RobertLTux]

due to containment issues its not like you can just pop down to RadioShack and get a new core plus with the damage it may be within the same order of magnitude to just rebuild the reactor.

Re:Journalism

[TheLink]

Not all of them. Just #1.
http://www.icjt.org/npp/podrobnosti.php?drzava=14&lokacija=818

They are all pretty old anyway ( but have allegedly been used for interesting stuff before: http://www.mail-archive.com/envorum@ypb.or.id/msg00425.html )

What I'm wondering about is China. China gets big earthquakes too and they're building dozens of reactors. Many with the AP1000 design that some people don't think is safe enough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#Safety_concerns

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, we are like totally impressed with your knowledge of BWR/SBWR/ABWR and PWRs.
So like totally impress us with a follow up post on what all those mean.

Re:Journalism

[coldsalmon]

... a completely inappropriate use of the semicolon...

The only inappropriate thing here is your criticism of a perfectly safe punctuation mark based on extreme examples from outdated and irresponsible sentences. Sure, the semicolon should not be used to separate dependent clauses (for example), but this type of thing is totally preventable with modern, transparent journalism. (There was a case of this exact thing occurring in a major western publication just last year, and it was fixed within hours.) The semicolon is not dangerous, but public ignorance about the semicolon can be very dangerous.

Re:Journalism

[Frosty Piss]

So like totally impress us with a follow up post on what all those mean.

So like totally impress us with your leet skilz at using the Google / Wikipedia thingy...

Re:Journalism

[pantherace]

Couple of weeks ahead even.

Re:Journalism

[TheGratefulNet]

well, *they* can't.

they stopped making cores in japan years ago. its now all made in china.

Re:Journalism

[MrNemesis]

As soon as seawater and boric acid are pumped into a core, it's junk - it's essentially contaminated with god-knows-what, and you can't be sure how it'll behave if you resume nuclear reactions.

If there's a meltdown, even a partial one, you can no longer be certain of the integrity of the core/containment. If the fuel gets out of secondary containment, then the core is totally junked and would be harder to repair than to replace.

Re:Journalism

[MightyMartian]

My understanding is that as long as the containment units are still intact, which by all accounts they are, there is little likelihood of the kind of catastrophe seen at Chernobyl. These are not late-Soviet pieces of crap, but well-built reactors.

Re:Journalism

[MightyMartian]

I don't mind when someone has an agenda, as long as they put out there exactly what their agenda is and why. Reporting things inaccurately or intentionally misleadingly should be a punishable offense (loss of use of public airwaves at least) IMHO.

There are lies, damned lies, and then there is activism...

The anti-nuke lobby will trumpet this as some sort of sign that nuclear power is bad, although from what I can see, the containment systems are functioning and even if the damaged reactors meltdown, there is very little risk of substantial contamination. I think once this is all finished, it will be a demonstration of how well-built reactors are indeed safe.

Re:Journalism

[tarius8105]

Or was it? Godzilla might have been the real cause of the earthquake...

Re:Journalism

[Kreplock]

Yes, the people crowing about the disaster while citing Pearl Harbor are clueless idiots, but with so many Americans using Facebook it's an unremarkable number. Thanks for posting this on every Japan thread with a judgement leveled at the US as a whole based on this insignificant sample. I'm sure the general public in your nation are curing cancer, sharing their own translations of Beowulf, and achieving other matchless deeds on Facebook.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it two of them were due to be decommissioned in the coming months anyway. That being the case, they probably don't care at this point whether they're salvageable or not, except insofar as it may make decommissioning them cheaper.

Re:Journalism

[vlm]

Only one company makes and sells BWRs, that being GE. You'll never guess but their first model was the BWR-1. The second was the BWR-2. And so on. The newer the reactor the safer the design and the higher the power output. After awhile, like tech companies, they selected cooler names like the ABWR (advanced) and SBWR and friends. The S stood for something else, but everyone calls it the "safe BWR" instead. The "ESBWR" supposedly stands for "economical (whatever) BWR" but I kid you not people call it the "extra safe BWR" instead. Probably because safe cannot be trademarked.

If google and wikipedia are too complicated, go back to CNN and "oh shiny" and "oh scared" coverage.

Re:Journalism

[Rich0]

Dozens of reactors, and one REALLY big dam. Of course, I'm sure they keep a close eye on the quality of their cement, just like they monitor baby formula.

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

There was never any risk of the reactors exploding, the moment the control rods were fully inserted (before the tsunami hit) that risk was eliminated. The risk now is meltdown, which is a very different (and far less dangerous) problem.

Re:Journalism

[realityimpaired]

It is looking more and more like it won't be another Chernobyl, but it is another 3-Mile Island.

Thankfully, they're able to control it relatively well, and yes, I haven't heard anything about damaged containment units. The article I read yesterday said that they were operating under the assumption that they were dealing with a meltdown anyway, because they couldn't see inside the reactor cores to verify it directly.

Re:Journalism

[Slayer]

They were planning to build two new reactors onsite, # 7 and #8. They'll probably end up with new ABWRs to replace the old clunkers. Note that a single ABWR outputs as much power as three BWR-3s or two BWR-4s so yanking three 40 year old dinosaurs does not necessarily mean they need to build three new ABWRs to take their place... My guess is they'll get one.

I admire your optimism and enthusiasm for nuclear power, but I seriously doubt they'll build anything nuclear near Fukushima. Ever. Again. Having experienced two nuclear bombs with six digit casualties the Japanese know exactly what exposure to excessive radiation means. Despite all the claims of the pro nuclear lobby, the plant operators in Fukushima do not have this under control at all.

I'm hardly on their board of directors but most likely instead of adding 2 new ABWRs they'll probably simultaneously build the currently planned two, decon the old units 1 / 2 / 3 and build a nice new ABWR on top of the old site of 1 / 2 / 3.

Call yourself lucky that you are not on their board as the whole disaster unfolds before everybody's eyes. This is a story which started with an earthquake and a tsunami which then turned into a long drawn story of inability and technical failure. I read "backup generators couldn't be connected" and "pressure gauge malfunction" and "level gauge most likely off but nobody knows for sure" and "pumps which were supposed to cool the core failed". Anyone telling me that this is under control must be completely delusional at this point. Let's just hope this gets resolved before anything really nasty happens at the (by now) three molten reactor cores.

Re:Journalism

[Low Ranked Craig]

This is bad news right here: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031403-e.html

Re:Journalism

[Low Ranked Craig]

Old Post. This is a complete status update: http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11031404-e.html

Re:Journalism

[Shotgun]

Just to back you up, MightyMartian, this earthquake MOVED THE WHOLE DAMN COUNTRY!!

Jeesh! I needed to scream that. I apologize, but when a whole country gets yanked to the side by 8ft in an instant, you've got to expect some damage. Being exposed to the ionizing radiation of a dental X-ray, if you happen to be next to the reactor where you weren't supposed to be, is a small price to pay for the reliable power that makes modern city life possible.

Of course we could go back to coal powered plants. Or how about having to trudge through knee-high horse dung when we get rid of all these "dirty cars".

Jeesh!

Re:Journalism

[sjames]

Nuclear plant manager gets paper cut, condition guarded. When will this nuclear holocaust end?

Re:Journalism

[Talderas]

It is doubtful that the earthquake caused and direct damage to the operation of the reactors. The pumps and backup generators were running right after the quake when they initiated the SCRAM and shut down. It wasn't until the tsunami wave that came about an hour later and junked the generators that the problems started arising.

Re:Journalism

[mpe]

Destroying the reactors beyond repair. Turning to seawater cooling means they have given up all hope of salvaging the reactors in a working state, and will settle for just non-exploding.

One of the reactors was due to be shut down for good in a couple of weeks. Most likely the other two damaged reactors are BER.

Re:Journalism

[Serious Callers Only]

Several plants in the US are near a major fault line, an area which could easily suffer from both earthquakes and tsunamis, here's a couple:

The Diablo Canyon plant - on the coast and near population centres
San Onofre plant - on the coast, near the fault line, and near huge population centre of Los Angeles

Both plants are decades old and are designed for a 0.7 quake - that's not enough for this sort of event. Nuclear plants do special challenges during a disaster like this as they require maintenance, electricity and a lengthy safe shutdown procedure, which is difficult in a disaster zone. It is perfectly reasonable to question the safety of plants elsewhere in the light of this 'impossible' event. The eastern sea-board of the US is also due a huge earthquake sometime soon, but no-one knows when, and Japan is arguably more prepared than the US for this situation.

PS I imagine the headline was summarising the situation in Japan - a mounting death *toll* (i.e. confirmed deaths, not actual deaths), and problems at a nuclear plant. It could be misread as implying that the plant problems lead to the deaths I suppose, though I doubt that was the original intention, the semi-colon is probably meant as a separator rather than a lead in, but a full-stop would have been better.

Re:Journalism

[Solandri]

You shoud've seen their link to the story last night:

"Six injured in another nuclear blast"

Re:Journalism

[HiThere]

To *you* it will be it will be a demonstration of how well-built reactors are indeed safe.

Unfortunately, bayesian statistics shows that the conclusions drawn from the available evidence are heavily influenced by prior beliefs. And given some prior beliefs there is no way that one can logically reach conclusions that others will deem mandated by the evidence. (The actual statement is a lot more complicated, but that's the essence.)

Unfortunately, dealing with the world requires an immense number of "priors", because otherwise the reasoning process is too slow to be workable. Whoops!

So this isn't going to influence people in the way that you think it should.

P.S.: Sociologists during the 1980's(?) discovered that the TV show Archie Bunker tended to make conservatives more conservative and liberals more liberal (WRT racial prejudices). This is the same effect. So it's not just theoretical reasoning, it's confirmed by experiment. (Well, actually the experiment preceded the theory, but I don't think the statisticians knew about the experiment.)

Somebody that you think is lying may just have drawn conclusions from the evidence that you believe are totally unwarranted. And you may look just as unreasonable to them. And you both may be applying perfect logic to the evidence, but with different prior beliefs that influence how you interpret it. (OTOH, you could be right. Some people don't care whether they lie or not as long as it's in "a good cause". [And they consider themselves as entitled to judge what constitutes "good".])

Re:Journalism

[spyfrog]

The nucelar lobby here in my country, which sadly dominates the press and almost controls the energy politics, wants it to be classified as a level 7 and claims that Japan lies. How can they know that from the other side of the globe? The journalists doesn't ask since they are all lobbyists for the environmentalists.

Re:Journalism

[Golden_Rider]

America Fail

wtf America fail indeed, that's just ridiculous o.O

Re:Journalism

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

It's way better than last night..

I went to CNN and one of the headlines was, I kid you not...
"Nuclear blast in japan kills 3"
I was like jesus christ wtf

yeah, it was just the top of the building

fuck you cnn, fuck you

Re:Journalism

[BeanThere]

You win "most cheery-eyed optimistic post on Internet" award.

Re:Journalism

[toQDuj]

It is certainly something to learn from, also for the Japanese. I suspect there will be new (or additional) rules and regulations coming soon for the Japanese reactors, and the Americans would be wise to look at them too.

Re:Journalism

[cavebison]

build a nice new ABWR on top of the old site

Isn't that a little insane? I was wondering why they built nuclear plants on the East coast in the first place, knowing that's where earthquakes and tsunamis originate.

Shouldn't they build more inland, toward the West?

Re:Journalism

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they have taken a right step for the moment.Obviously the highest priority was to avoid nuclear explosion.
Next thing to what i think is that they are cooling it off by using seawater + boron as u have metioned both of them together will act as a heavy water material which will subsequently avoid the radiation to much extend.

As you say they are not salvaging the reactor in a working state but i think the are pouring these water through the cooling system and not to nuclear rods.So ultimately the rods are safe and It just that the cooling system can get a bit of erosion because of the salt water even this will be very less erosion as the material of which these cooling systems are made are mostly erosion free and checked under worst circumstances of erosions.

I think they are right with the current situation with top priority to save the common people.

Re:Journalism

[AmiMoJo]

To clarify there is no danger of the nuclear pile exploding. The explosions so far have all been of hydrogen gas. The reactors shut down properly and their design prevents them exploding anyway. The problem is that the fuel rods are still generating heat which can cause the container to melt, but again cannot explode.

Re:Journalism

[sznupi]

In "oh those soviets. what cards." terms, those tests probably top the scale... but you have to remember they weren't unique at all (the article gives some starting point about similar tests by "the good guys")

(then there's the biggest irony of history: how the life expectancy in Soviet Union, in the times of Stalin and some time after, dramatically increased - from the level of very backwards & impoverished country, to one which surpasses US - despite all the victims or WW2)

Re:Journalism

[HungryHobo]

well one way to increase life expectancy is to just kill the unhealthy people .

Sometimes I wonder what kind of crap is going to come out 50 years from now about screwed up tests of weapons on civilians in our own countries.
2062:
"oh hey, it looks like in 2012 the government released a load of nanites in a homeless shelter to see how well they'd spread"

Re:Journalism

[tehcyder]

Someone is trying to blow this story sky-high. Why do they not focus on where the actual deaths are? Fucking media-journalice.

The deaths by natural causes are not as much of a story as the deaths caused by the man-made nuclear power stations, as there stops being anything sensible or new you can say about the natural deaths. Yes, a lot of people died in the earthquake and tsunami, bu there's no real story behind why - it's just what happens if you get a thirty foot wall of water washing at high speed across a country.

Re:Journalism

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm pro nuclear, but some of you folks have your prejudices showing. It was painfully obvious that there were going to be bad problems as soon as the back-up generators failed, and reactors were cooling on battery power. At that point, the only thing that could save the reactors would have been restoration of cooling water. And then only within a fairly small window. Otherwise the present scenario was predictable. And darn scary. If it hasn't already happened, there will be a meltdown.

To blame this on the press is laughable. Did the press decide to build the power plants in a vulnerable location? Did the press come up with a cooling system such as is being used?

Wouldn't it be great if the press were only allowed to report news that was vetted so that it was proper. Maybe you folks could institute a Ministry of Truth or something? Then all the problems of the world will go away.

Re:Journalism

[toQDuj]

What I am asking for is a little fact-checking from the press and perhaps a smidgeon of accountability. There seems to be an insane amount of bullshit being spouted now, making people in Europe unduly worried about our safety here in Japan. In one of the worst examples of what press can do, bad press has caused unjustified refusal of vaccinations causing needless resurgence of nasty diseases (MUMPS/MMR, see f.ex. http://badscience.net/). No accountability at the press, they just find the most sensational snippet and extrapolate from that.

Meltdown? Yes and no. Some parts of the fuel rods will have melted, but the material should be contained within the containment vessel. Annoying to clean, but by no means a scare with a human toll looming that is ANYWHERE NEAR the tsunami toll. Just because it is nuclear does not mean it is scary.

Now that that is off my chest, the most objective news I have seen on the reactor issue comes from the IAEA:

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html

Re:Journalism

[Ol Olsoc]

Ever hear of the fog of war? It's kind of like that with disasters too. Without anything substantial to go on, people will make stuff up. Everyone will, not just the media.

And to top it off, part of the BS we are fed is coming through official channels. I heard read and saw a lot of "not to worry folks" I read reports on how the buildings being blown apart was actually a good thing. It was like the bad news was being spoon fed to us, when the outcome was/is playing out in a fairly predictable manner.

to wit:

"The reactors have scrambled and shut down, just like they were supposed to do - this is good."

"The Generators didn't come up, but we're on battery backup - this is good"

"We're pumping seawater in them now - this is good"

"We're venting gas now - there might be a reaction, but this is good"

"It was good that the buildings blew part" - honestly, I heard that.

Eventually it becomes hard to sugar coat it.

"The rods were partially uncovered" "The rods were totally uncovered." "Pressure in the containment vessel went down to atmospheric."

You call it sensationalistic, I just call it what is going to happen at some point given the way things played out early on.

As for the body count, no, there are not going to be as many casualties from the reactors even in the worst case scenario. Has there been anyone claiming otherwise? The reactors are just some really awful extra drama in a terrible, situation. There is a very good chance that some parcels of land will be made uninhabitable, (I won't give odds here - too much uncertainty) and there will be power generation problems for quite a while.

On a philosophic note, I personally believe that we will be faced with a choice here soon. To rely a lot more on nuc power, or return to the middle ages. The previous paradigm of huge plants running at stressful levels and with easily pointed out failure points, and placed in bad locations is just something that shouldn't happen any more.

Re:Journalism

[bstender]

> that is some nasty reporting from someone who either has an agenda or who doesn't understand fuck-all.

heh, your reply smacks of an agenda and stuff too.

> Someone is trying to blow this story sky-high. Why do they not focus on where the actual deaths are?

what's with the spin-control? the poorly constructed sentence in the article is a laundry list of the recent suckages, not a devious attempt to hack at your precious nuke agenda. And since IF the goop does indeed escape containment and render a large densely populated area a dead-zone for generations to come, this is hence a valid story and as of now (tuesday AM in SF), way past 'alarmist'.

btw, i'm one who realizes that the economics of nuke-power are unstoppable, and that occasionally some will fail catastrophically, and that the costs will be externalized.

Re:Journalism

[toQDuj]

On a philosophic note, I personally believe that we will be faced with a choice here soon. To rely a lot more on nuc power, or return to the middle ages. The previous paradigm of huge plants running at stressful levels and with easily pointed out failure points, and placed in bad locations is just something that shouldn't happen any more.

I agree with your posts, I just do not think the societal damage of the nuclear reactor issues are as bad as portrayed.

As for your philosophic note, I fully agree. I would be the first in line to shut off nuclear power plants, if we also shut off the other power plants. But we have grown up in a world where we expect unlimited power at any time to come from the wall sockets. As soon as we accept that power is not always available and not always the amounts we want, we are free to switch to less polluting turbines and solar energy. Until then, we have to live with the added risks of this power.

Re:Journalism

[toQDuj]

I do have an agenda. I worry about the sanity of the media coverage. If you want dangers and pollution, I have yet to read much about the burning refineries in the north. And as said, more focus on the aftermath of the actual disaster.

As for nuclear power, we want a world with unlimited power 24/7 from a socket. As soon as we can accept living without that certainty, and can thus switch to solar and wind energy, I will be the first in line to switch off all types of fossil fuel (inc. nuclear) power plants. Until then, we have to stop blaming nuclear for all the problems we have gotten ourselves into.

Re:Journalism

[bstender]

Sounds just like how Cheney and his Smirking Chimp used to sum it up; "The American Way of Life is Not Negotiable".

Thousands dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you confusing the tsunami with the nuclear reactor failure?

Re:Thousands dead?

[Issarlk]

He doesn't. Reading the summary it is very clear that the amount of radiation that will be leaked is proportional to the number of deads caused by the Tsunami.
But don't ask me how, I'm no nuclear scientist.

Re:Thousands dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

It says that six people are injured from the blast.

The "thousands already dead" are due to the tsunami.

The word "already" does not imply prognosed future deaths.

Bad summary, as usual

[Anonymous Coward]

TFS seems to suggest that the thousands dead are a result of the problems at the nuke power plants. Either Taco's language skills are atrocious, or he's got some serious bias running...

Re:Bad summary, as usual

[elrous0]

Most summaries are written by the submitter, so I don't think it's fair to blame Taco (though I'm hoping we can find some way to blame it on kdawson).

Re:Bad summary, as usual

[BeanThere]

Taco's job is to 'stimulate lively online discussion', as such accepted submissions are generally those that 'border on inflammatory, but without being total troll'. I wouldn't call it a 'bias' so much as the job description of running an online discussion forum.

correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Is not the third explosion.
  means number 3 which refers to the number 3 reactor in the plant.
Up to present there were 2 explosions in the plant and not 3.

Re:correction

[surveyork]

True. Even Google Translate lets you know it's about the explosion in the_3rd reactor_ .

Re:correction

[snowgirl]

This really needs to be pushed to TFS's title. I was reading it, and I was like "wtf? A _THIRD_ explosion? That's not good, because it hasn't been expected..." Then I click on the Japanese article, and I'm all "wtf? We already know the #3 reactor concrete enclosure structure exploded... am I missing something here?"

Then I find out "nope". And here I had already turned on the news again to figure out what I was missing...

Re:correction

[LoRdTAW]

Originally someone said five.

Re:correction

[breser]

Clearly the editors have a time machine and they knew that the 3rd explosion was going to happen. This also explains the constant dups due to editors becoming confused about the ordering as time as they zip around.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15nuclear.html

what

[Hazel Bergeron]

I would like to understand clearly and concisely why it has not been possible after so many days to maintain levels of coolant. I know the batteries are dead; I know the on-site generators all failed; I know there was some problem with connectivity on the generators shipped in... but why hasn't this problem been solved yet? Is it because, for each reactor, they're waiting until the last possible moment before they do the seawater+boron thing which will kill it forever? Even if that means a bit of venting and risking a hydrogen explosion in the outer building?

But already Japan is facing rolling blackouts, electricity rationing, evacuating the area around the plant, and thousands dead already.

But also many people died of the Plague also. Is this an attempt at nuclear power scaremongery? Hardly any death or injury has to do with the nuclear plant.

Re:what

[Anonymous Coward]

(theorizing, former nuclear control room operator here from a plant of the same style, GE Boiling Water Reactor, as the ones with the problem)

They've at a minimum lost coolant to relief valve operation after they lost cooling due to loss of offsite (and local emergency diesel) power. They possibly also have some pipe breaks within the drywell containment structure. The relief valve operation is a form of "zero power" cooling unto itself, but you need to make up for the lost coolant somehow.

Nearly all emergency procedures that have a chance of keeping the plant intact depend on power being available, without power, you have to resort to destructive methods (sea water pumped in via fire pumps for instance) to keep things cooled off. Note also, that the equipment that would normally reduce or eliminate hydrogen buildup (the apparent cause of the building explosions) also require power.

While the earthquake was the root cause, the seawater being able to reach and apparently shutdown the emergency diesel generators onsite is why the problems got MUCH larger than what could have been.

Re:what

[benjamindees]

I would like to understand clearly and concisely why it has not been possible after so many days to maintain levels of coolant.

Supposedly the pump control room was flooded but yeah after three days that's really not much excuse.

Re:what

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly any death or injury has to do with the nuclear plant.

Don't worry, there is plenty of time for that.

Re:what

[toQDuj]

As far as I understood, the seawater+boric acid solution has been applied to reactors that were scheduled to be scrapped quite soon anyway. For an operational reactor, you do not want to do this until the very last moment. As for why there are no other power sources available to power the pumps... that is a good question.

Re:what

[borrrden]

Hmmmm could it perhaps have something to do with the fact that the entire area lies in god-forsaken ruin?

Re:what

[toQDuj]

no. If the army can airlift in an amount of coolant, they can also airlift in a portable generator or generator container. It is not like all of Japan is washed away. My only guess is that they would not be big enough or be able to provide the right type of electricity.

Re:what

[multipartmixed]

> As for why there are no other power sources available
> to power the pumps... that is a good question.

An earthquake took out the electric grid, and a tsunami washed away the diesel generators and their fuel fuel tanks.

I can't say I'm completely surprised, although maybe they should design future plants with an army of hamsters and hamster wheels in case this happens again.

Re:what

[Lazareth]

Reason for no power for the pumps?
1) No power is being produced by reactors (obvious)
2) All 12 onsite backup power generators has been knocked out by the earthquake (8.9 on the richterscale is NOT a small thing)
3) The 8 hour backup-backup battery has been spent by now.

Re:what

[toQDuj]

All the generators in all of Japan? washed away? I am still here and there are generators around for festivals and the likes, so no. There must be a reason they could not use alternative power sources to power their pumps, and I am curious as to why that is.

Re:what

[toQDuj]

So why not airlift in another set of batteries or generators?

Re:what

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, its simple....they do have portable generators and they are operating, but they had problems with them because the power connections from the generators to the plant powergrid were mismatched. The battery power failed before the portable generators could be spliced in.

Re:what

[borrrden]

It takes a little more power to push water into a high pressure container than to power a hot dog stand......

Re:what

[vlm]

All the generators in all of Japan? washed away? I am still here and there are generators around for festivals and the likes, so no. There must be a reason they could not use alternative power sources to power their pumps, and I am curious as to why that is.

Compare the power level required to flash some light bulbs vs the power level required to inject 50000L/min at a couple hundred PSI...

One requires a portable honda generator, the other requires a large diesel electric locomotive, or a string of them. Even here, it would be a PITA. There, on the coast, where the tsunami washed away the tracks, and they mostly use electric rather than diesel electric locos...

To the best of my knowledge they can't even use ship power because either you need a very long megawatt grade power cord, or the ship coolant water intakes will clog.

Re:what

[Lazareth]

Without having a full overview of the technical situation, I'm guessing problems regarding size of generators, rewiring of cables, access to those cables, etc etc. We're not talking about simply pulling an extension cord and plugging in, we're talking pretty heavy duty power equipment and installation.

Again, that part of it would be speculation on my part, but I can't see it being as straight forward as simply airlifting very massive equipment that they just happen to have the exact right type of on hand. Since the installation was built a long time again, I don't think it is very likely to have any kind of "plug-and-play" action available.

Re:what

[HungryHobo]

I believe they did both but there's some kind of problems getting enough to power the systems fully.

Re:what

[catmistake]

Yeah, a total overreaction, only 2 nuclear power plants are failing, of 6 reactors, only 2 are in partial meltdown; less than 200 people were irradiated, less than 200,000 were evacuated. Why is this even news? Sensational journalism makes me nauseous.

Re:what

[Waffle Iron]

I would like to understand clearly and concisely why it has not been possible after so many days to maintain levels of coolant.

It's because contrary to what all the overconfident pro-nuke techies that infest this site seem to believe: In the real world, shit happens.

Re:what

[ChronoReverse]

Or rather, shit happens and the designs work better than they were engineered for.


The reactors, built 40 years ago, using an old less safe design, engineered for 8.0 earthquakes, survived a 9.0 (it was upgraded) earthquake and a tsunami as well as a hydrogen explosion of the outer building with the all-important containment building still completely intact.


If people were sane and less reactionary, this is actually quite the demonstration of how incredibly resilient it all was.

Re:what

[filthpickle]

Was noted above, they did bring in portable generators...the plugs on the gens didn't match the power grid at the plant. Probably the only snafu in what was an obvious worst case scenario.

Re:what

[Waffle Iron]

Yeah, everything's just peachy. They ought to hang a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the plant right now.

Re:what

[ColdWetDog]

If people were sane and less reactionary, this is actually quite the demonstration of how incredibly resilient it all was.

First off, humans being sane and non reactionary is hardly the default setting. Secondly, if you look at the before and after satellite pictures of the plant, it's apparent that structurally the system performed quite well. However, the little details like generator siting and aspects of defense in depth, not so much. So they may have nine out of ten things right, even with bonus points for being able to do this on such an old reactor system, but they seem uncomfortably close to losing local containment.

That isn't game over / go back to eating twigs and throwing rocks but its a very, very bad outcome in a densely populated area. Japan doesn't have the luxury of just abandoning hundreds, or even tens of square miles for decades to come. We shall see in the next couple of days just exactly how bad it will be. The only thing this conclusively shows so far is how bad assumptions trump good engineering.

Re:what

[BeanThere]

You're kidding right? Would you be saying the same thing if a nuclear plant in the US had two major containment unit explosions, release of radiation into the environment, and the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in a 15-mile radius from a plant? It seems quite reasonable to me that it should be at least a major news story even without the accompanying earthquake, tsunami and other nuclear plant emergencies. "Why is this even news" - puh-lease ... the only thing worse than the mainstream media overreaction is arrogant people who try prove their intellectual superiority to everyone by making the absurd-on-the-face-of-it claim that this incident should not even be in the news.

Re:what

[catmistake]

yes, of course, kidding, It is a highly significant nuclear event. I am reacting to nuclear fanbois that are lamenting what this is going to do to their plans for universal nuclear proliferation and trying to instead make the major issue poor journalism rather than admitting that nuclear power has risks.

Re:what

[toQDuj]

Ah, that makes sense. Custom equipment sometimes has this problem. Thanks for the interesting info though.

Re:what

[BeanThere]

Oh, OK, I honestly thought you were serious.

Third blast?

[Steve Max]

As far as I can tell, TFAs are about the SECOND blast, which happened on reactor 3 of the plant. NHK has nothing about a third blast. Am I missing something? Was there a third explosion, on reactor 2?

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Japanese article in the link is referring to the reactor number 3 of the plant.
There was no 3rd explosion.

Re:Third blast?

[acoustix]

As far as I can tell, TFAs are about the SECOND blast, which happened on reactor 3 of the plant. NHK has nothing about a third blast. Am I missing something? Was there a third explosion, on reactor 2?

Correct. The title is completely wrong. I hope it is updated soon.

Re:Third blast?

[tsj5j]

This is correct.

From my limited understanding of Japanese, the article refers to reactor #3, not explosion #3.
I know Slashdot has limited editors, but shouldn't you at least click and check the links before posting such an important piece of news?

Many local news outlets will pick up and spread this piece of disinformation.

Re:Third blast?

[siddesu]

There is no explosion. There will be one tomorrow though.

About 2 hours ago Tokyo Electric Co reported that they've decided to flood reactor #2 after its cooling died earlier during the day. It is not clear when and why it died. Anyway, since it died, flooding procedure was begun. However, they are so far failing to cover the whole active zone with water. TEPCO's official said that that is suggesting the reactor core has melted to some extent.

Just 10 minutes ago it was confirmed that water is flowing in slowly, and about half of the fuel is covered.

Re:Third blast?

[borrrden]

Yes, this article is about the 2nd explosion at reactor number 3. So far there have been explosions at reactors 1 and 3. Reactor 2's building is still intact.

Re:Third blast?

[fishexe]

Many local news outlets will pick up and spread this piece of disinformation.

You think local news outlets read Slashdot? Really??

Re:Third blast?

[Hazel Bergeron]

Indeed. It would help probably the global set of journalists to just refresh this page every hour or so. It was obvious for quite a while that an explosion outside the third reactor was likely, since it was experiencing exactly the same sequence as the first reactor.

Re:Third blast?

[Chris Mattern]

There is no explosion. There will be one tomorrow though.

Well, of course. There's always boom tomorrow.

Re:Third blast?

[siddesu]

The conditions that are being created in reactor #2 at the moment are exactly the same that caused the explosion in #3 today. There is a hot bare core, probably partially molten, there is water on top of it, there is enough temperature to dissociate it into hydrogen and oxygen. What makes you think there is no risk of explosion tomorrow?

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the submission is wrong. There have been 2 hydrogen explosions, involving reactor #1 (Saturday) and now reactor #3 (today/Monday). From the video, the latter hydrogen explosion was substantially bigger than the first one. Another reactor (#2) has apparently had loss of coolant and exposure of the fuel for some unknown time (i.e. a real potential for a meltdown).

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Have you seen local news in your region lately? Nuff said.

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's circulating on Twitter and then will get picked up elsewhere. Would be nice to update the story before it spreads too much.

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think local news outlets don't use google?

Re:Third blast?

[BitZtream]

Local to the reactor, probably not ... but slashdot regularly makes it to the top of the list on Google News so its fairly likely it will spread to some extent.

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sort of their wayback machine: "what was it we were reporting on three days ago? I'll look at slashdot to see!"

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is sad, but true.

Re:Third blast?

[sternmath]

I suppose people should exercise caution relaying information from newspapers in a language they don't understand. The opening sentence says the events they are reporting on happened on the 14th at about 11 AM. In Eastern Daylight Time that's March 13, 10 PM. This is the same, second, blast which is already being reported in English language US papers.

Re:Third blast?

[Compaqt]

What's strange is that Google News supposedly requires original content as opposed to just linking to others.

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's happened before, to hilarious effect.

Re:Third blast?

[siddesu]

The theory TEPCO is peddling is that the employee who was in charge of the pump that supplied water to the reactor allegedly left the pump while on inspection. During that time, the pump used up its fuel and stopped.

In the same sentence, the Minister of the economy, trade and industry said, that there is a serious chance of a partial meltdown of the active zone.

JUST NOW FROM THE TV (0:00 AM) : Currently, the water has again lowered and the core is again uncovered (and not cooling).

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be true, it says it right there on Slashdot...

Re:Third blast?

[fishexe]

What's strange is that Google News supposedly requires original content as opposed to just linking to others.

Yeah, Google News supposedly requires news too, yet it frequently links to Fox.

Re:Third blast?

[Compaqt]

Basically, if you're big enough, Google will forgive you for not following its webmaster "guidelines".

They penalize websites for cloaking (showing different content to browsers vs. search engines), but the NYTimes gets to do that: they show content to Googlebot, and a register wall to browsers.

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I have several times seen articles lifted from Slashdot in the daily press here in Sweden. Sometimes even with Slashdot referenced, which I find hilarious...

Re:Third blast?

[Ceriel Nosforit]

Awaiting Disaster! Live at Google!

http://www.google.com/search?q=TEPCO+OR+fukushima&hl=en&rlz=1C1GGGE_enFI390FI390&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=off&tbs=mbl%3A1

Fun for the whole of mothers' basement etc...

Re:Third blast?

[HonIsCool]

Seriously? They're blaming an employee now? Fuckers... I pray the situation can be controlled...

Re:Third blast?

[ThatsNotPudding]

You think local news outlets read Slashdot? Really??

Just the bot services they subscribe to.

Re:Third blast?

[TopSpin]

It is not clear when and why it died.

This BBC story says TEPCO is blaming the #2 fuel exposure to several different problems including a fire pump running out of fuel, 4 out of 5 fire pumps being damaged by the #3 explosion and the 'accidental' operation of an 'air flow valve.'

These reactors scrammed over two days ago. At some point the generation of decay heat will be low enough to stop damaging fuel. Meanwhile TEPCO has discovered an easy method of dealing with hydrogen accumulation; they just wait for it to burn and blow up whatever part of the reactor building it accumulates in. This means we'll be spared the post meltdown hydrogen bubble drama experienced at TMI-2.

Re:Third blast?

[idontgno]

Hope is not a strategy. Hope that Slashdot will fix egregious editing errors, even less so.

Re:Third blast?

[fishexe]

Ah, good point.

Re:Third blast?

[russotto]

You think local news outlets read Slashdot? Really??

Read? No. Copy an entirely wrong piece of information they accidentally came across on Slashdot as if it was pure fact? I wouldn't stake my fortune against it. (that's "local" as in "local to me, in the US"... not local to Japan)

Re:Third blast?

[ParanoiaBOTS]

Well, maybe not local, but fox news is almost a certainty.

Re:Third blast?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think local news outlets read Slashdot? Really??

More as once I've seen the nerdy "off time" articles of slashdot being republished in Dutch on belgian newssites. They're content hungry, the content is often cheap and sensationalist.

Re:Third blast?

[siddesu]

Doesn't sound like blaming someone - sounds more like they're desperate. The lack of adequate reaction from the government is absolutely disheartening, though. Most likely, they are desperate, trying shit and failing. Maybe they need a break, too bad they can't afford it.

Re:Third blast?

[BeanThere]

They've got limited staff who have been operating in crisis mode for days of likely working round the clock, are becoming ill from radiation poisoning, expect they may die, many have suffered personal losses recently, and half the country is in turmoil with tens of thousands missing or dead ... I would think it's quite possible that some of them are not at their sharpest right now and may make mistakes. The human element is a real factor in plant operation, especially under extreme situations.

Re:Third blast?

[jafac]

yes. NOW there was a third blast.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_japan_earthquake_nuclear_crisis

Re:Third blast?

[tehcyder]

Was there a third explosion, on reactor 2?

Well, according to the BBC there was a third explosion at reactor 2 on Tuesday morning. But as the story here was posted on Monday lunchtime, that sort of implies that there had been only two up until that point.

Re:Third blast?

[tehcyder]

What's strange is that Google News supposedly requires original content as opposed to just linking to others.

The good news is that sladhdot is now branching out into reporting actual news. The bad news is that it's no more accurate then the secondhand stuff.

Re:Third blast?

[tehcyder]

They've got limited staff who have been operating in crisis mode for days of likely working round the clock, are becoming ill from radiation poisoning, expect they may die, many have suffered personal losses recently, and half the country is in turmoil with tens of thousands missing or dead ... I would think it's quite possible that some of them are not at their sharpest right now and may make mistakes. The human element is a real factor in plant operation, especially under extreme situations.

Isn't that why places like nuclear power stations have systems and stuff, rather than relying on individuals behaving perfectly? And I'd have thought your systems for an emergency should be even more foolproof.

Read this first

[kylegordon]

Before commenting, try and understand the design and facts

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, isn't that all nice and dandy? Who's the author again? At this point, it's unfortunately becoming clear that the situation is worse than what the Tokyo Electric and the government are saying. One can only hope that they aren't covering up events too much...

Re:Read this first

[hipp5]

Before commenting, try and understand the design and facts

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

Mod parent up. That was a really interesting read.

Re:Read this first

[colinhow]

Thank you - that article is fascinating.

Re:Read this first

[rotide]

Not saying the guy isn't smart, but read the disclaimer at the top. He works for MIT, sure, but he's no nuclear physicist. In fact, it's basically stated that his "nuclear credentials" are based on his _father's_ expertise, NOT his. Essentially "my dad was a nuclear physicist so I'll write like I'm an expert too!". Again, he's smart and accomplished, but I'd submit he's sorely under qualified to make _any_ statements about the situation at hand.

Re:Read this first

[Zocalo]

The identity of the original author is somewhat buried in the text, to wit:

Below I reproduce a summary on the situation prepared by Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT, in Boston. He is a PhD Scientist, whose father has extensive experience in Germany’s nuclear industry. This was first posted by Jason Morgan earlier this evening, and he has kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. I think it is very important that this information be widely understood.

So, probably not someone with a vested interest in down-playing the gravity of the situation, and something that tallies quite well with what the Japanese are saying, as far as I can tell, and not at all like what some of the more histrionic media outlets (mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch) are spinning it as. Personally, I'd say that the Japanese government and media are doing an amazing job of keeping the world at large informed of what is going on during what must obviously be a very stressful and deeply emotional time for them all.

Re:Read this first

[lingon]

My take is that he's probably more qualified to make statements than >99% of the people who's make them ...

Re:Read this first

[oji-sama]

And yet it's better than anything reported in news...

Re:Read this first

[borrrden]

It doesn't actually state what he does. It says he is a "research scientist." Maybe he is researching nuclear energy, or perhaps he consulted his father? Those seems like reasonable possibilities.

Re:Read this first

[rotide]

To that I will not disagree, but there are Pro-Nuke shills and Anti's screaming on both sides, this one looks more aligned with the Pro side. The article basically states that nothing bad will happen and no radiation will leak. The gas that was vented has a half-life measured in mere seconds, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, US naval ships 100 miles off the coast are being moved due to detected radiation and people are being admitted to hospitals for exposure.

This article states "nothing to see here, move along" when it's obvious there _is_ something going on.

In short, this is just another fluff article written by a non-expert and people are gobbling it up like it's 100% fact. I mean look how it's being waved like a flag of truth and unbiased information when clearly it's already off the mark.

Note: I'm all for nuclear power and nuclear reactors. This situation is basically unprecedented and it's not surprising they are having serious problems. But I'd still take a nuclear reactor in my back yard over any of the fossil fuel plants _any_ day, anywhere.

Re:Read this first

[rotide]

From a comment in the original posting:

"Dr Josef Oehmen studied Mechanical Engineering at the Technical University Munich and received a PhD, also in Mechanical Engineering, from the ETH Zurich. While working in industry, he obtained an MBA degree. He is currently employed as a Research Scientist at MIT. His major researchinterest lies in risk management along the engineering value chain and the application of lean principles to the product design process. J. Oehmen is a reviewer for several international journals and member of the supervisory board of a start-up in the field of climate protection."

Not a nuclear anything, just a PhD holder writing an article about a field he's not a part of.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any proof at all the author is lying? Any evidence? Any fact? No? then shove it.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

What worries me is that a Swedish former nuclear safety inspector has claimed he believes the situation is much, much worse than the official reports, and that he already puts it up there with Chernobyl and says he is certain workers on the plant have already died or are in the process of dying from radiation exposure. In fact, on Japanese news already on Saturday there were reports of two workers being taken to hospital from radiation poisoning.

Now, it's tempting to dismiss this former inspector as one of those anti-nukers, but, unfortunately, I checked up on him, and he is very pro-nuclear power and has argued that the best for the environment would be to build more nuclear power plants!.

That someone like that would make such a dire analysis worries me...

Re:Read this first

[Securityemo]

I saw that interview. He didn't give any reasons, but he did look and sound very worried.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree one of the most interesting articles I've read in a while.

Re:Read this first

[A beautiful mind]

The choice isn't between nuclear scientist vs random PhD, but between random PhD and sensationalist churnalism. The guy's writeup was a lot better than what I've read anywhere else over the past couple of days and his assertions seem to be supported by the small number of specialist sites that provide reasonable information.

Re:Read this first

[borrrden]

Hmmm because nuclear plants *never* have to worry about something like RISK......I would think that a risk manager would be the one to evaluate the procedures used to contain a crisis, which is what he is describing.

Re:Read this first

[rotide]

If you want to believe that someone with no education in Nuclear Physics would be the person to determine risks at a nuclear power facility, and the "core" in particular, please, be my guest.

Re:Read this first

[navyjeff]

Nuclear engineering is mostly mechanical. Between that and being exposed to his father's work, he might have a clue. The nuclear and mechanical engineering departments are the same at my university and cross-list a lot of their courses.

Re:Read this first

[maxume]

Based on reports about what they did, Tepco evacuates people that have received 100 milliSievert. That's a big dose, but no symptoms are expected below 500 milliSievert.

So the fact that they are evacuating people due to radiation exposure doesn't really give much information about the severity of the exposure.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

Lying? Do you have any proof that I'm lying when I say that all is not A-OK because the invisible pink unicorns that are supposed to be protecting the power plant has run away? Any evidence? Any fact? No? Then shove it!

I have relatives a few kilometers away from that plant! Forgive me if the supremely postivie words of an out-of-his-field scientist fails to calm me down in the face of this situation!

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a solid article, that should be its own parent post, rather than the poorly interpreted, and very late, Japanese news article.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

Would people please stop posting this misleading, uninformed article? It takes about 30 seconds start refuting the most basic "facts", such as:

There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity.
By “significant” I mean a level of radiation of more than what you would receive on – say – a long distance flight, or drinking a glass of beer that comes from certain areas with high levels of natural background radiation.

Sounds reassuring except that numerous, credible sources have already reported significant releases. Some individuals have tested so high that they must be decontaminated.

Re:Read this first

[catmistake]

Quite. Three lowsy hydrogen explosions, merely 2 of 6 reactors in partial meltdown at only 2 plants, hardly 200 irradiated and barely 200,000 evacuated... this is all bullshit, is it not? Slashdot has really turned into the Weekly World News of nerdy fear-mongering sensationalism. Thank God for the pro-nuke commenters that are setting the record straight. Nothing to see here.

Re:Read this first

[Toze]

Also, the PhD's primary work is in risk management, so he has some authority to speak about odds and risks.

Re:Read this first

[Lucidus]

I object to your assumption that credentials are more important than competence. He does not misrepresent his background, and his clear, simple, and dispassionate explanation justifies itself. It's not as if the facts are really in question.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

There haven't been three explosions, thanks for spreading the ignorance. That's exactly the point of calling out "journalists" on their sensationalist bullshit. Now stop your pointless spamming of more or less the same (wrong) post all over this topic.

Re:Read this first

[catmistake]

Nice smack down, but you missed the sarcastic point entirely; the inaccuracy was intended. Rabid nuclear proponents here will dismiss just about anything as being significant (e.g. Three Mile Island). Nuke fanbois are equal to sensationalist journalists. Try not to be so touchy feely about what this might do to the proliferation of nuclear power. We learn from this. These events will, in the end, help nuclear power. Let's see it for what it is, an extraordinarily significant event.

Re:Read this first

[ColdWetDog]

And yet, it's not very good.

Summary of rebuttal - the writer is neither too bright nor careful. Just because his father works in the industry doesn't make him credible.

Re:Read this first

[ColdWetDog]

Also, the PhD's primary work is in risk management, so he has some authority to speak about odds and risks.

But he spends little time talking about risk management, mostly about technical details that he doesn't really understand.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

You see those big "swimming pool" structures on the second floor, outside primary containment but under secondary containment (secondary containment which no longer exists)? Those are the spent fuel storage pools. Which are now exposed to the air. Whatever sensors and pumps and piping there were up there before the explosion aren't there any more. I have trouble believing those pools are being properly cooled now, assuming they're still even intact to begin with.

The reactor core is not the only thing that matters in a nuclear power plant. A core fire plus loss of primary containment gives you a Chernobyl. A runaway reaction in your spent fuel storage gives you a Mayak (the world's second worst nuclear disaster).

Re:Read this first

[BeanThere]

And if all this had happened in the US and not some faraway country where it's all abstract? Still not news? Still all bullshit? You don't have to be "anti-nuke" to admit that yes, this is a serious crisis. I am heavily pro-nuke, but because it's not a religion or a cult to me, I don't close my eyes and blindly pretend this isn't actually, yes, a Pretty Bad Situation. I can admit that. Is it the end of the world, no, of course not, but sticking your fingers in your ears and going "la la la it's just a normal day" just makes the pro-nuke people look like irrational idiots to the anti-nuke crowd, and thus harms our case. You know what makes the anti-nuke crowd scared more than anything? The way rabid pro-nukers like you seem to pretend that nothing can go wrong ever, and they imagine people like you running the plants, and that scares them, because people who pretend that nothing can go wrong ever are precisely one of the major contributing factors to man-made disasters. Stick to the truth and science and only the truth and science. This should be framed in context, and framed in terms of lessons to be learned.

Re:Read this first

[Darinbob]

And who is this Groklaw person who is the world expert? The article was just one insult after another rather than any sort of rebuttal. Maybe the original article has some facts wrong, but it is a far better explanation than anything I've seen.

The problem is that too many can not discuss this without putting in politics. Ie, if you're anti-nuke, then any evaluation will have "omg this is why you should never have nuclear power!" infused into it. If you're pro-nuke then it will be "see, nothing is wrong." The truth is in the middle: it was a major accident, and a lot of things went wrong that should not have gone wrong, but it is not the catastrophe that the hype seems to indicate and the Japanese nuclear engineers are not so inept as it seems from some news articles; there will probably be some radioactive steam venting, some of it dangerous, but it will be manageable.

Re:Read this first

[catmistake]

The plant is now safe and will stay safe

The explanation of the reactor design is nicely dumbed down for us laymen. The author appears to have a grasp of the situation, but is also prone to making obviously false conclusions. We don't know yet if or when the plants will be safe, and he didn't know when he wrote what I quoted. On his statements about the decay of the radioactive plume alone he loses credibility... we already know that the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan received about a month's worth of radiation. If what the author says is true, then it isn't possible... yet it happened. I don't know what that blog post is, but I know it isn't just the facts. From what I can gather from recent stories (within the last hour) we should expect at least one more explosion from hydrogen buildup. I'd hardly call that safe.

Re:Read this first

[catmistake]

FYI ... I was still being facetious. It is ridiculous how this event is being dismissed in these comments... thus my post is ridiculous.

Re:Read this first

[ehiris]

People interested a lot in a subject are in my experience much more informed and informative than the certified "experts". Experts are the ones who built the wrong plugs on the generators.

Re:Read this first

[ehiris]

Credentials are what people need when they lack competence.

Re:Read this first

[scot4875]

And on top of that, there are COMPUTER SYSTEMS that are part of this reactor. That means that, as a CS degree holder and professional, *I* am qualified to write up an article about why this thing is no big deal.

--Jeremy

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

There haven't been three explosions, thanks for spreading the ignorance. That's exactly the point of calling out "journalists" on their sensationalist bullshit. Now stop your pointless spamming of more or less the same (wrong) post all over this topic.

there has now

Re:Read this first

[catmistake]

the author loses credibility on a few points... the radioactive cloud irradiated sailors from the Ronald Reagan... impossible by the author's explaination, yet it happened. Also, his claim the reactor is safe and will stay safe is suspect. There indeed was subsequently a third explosion. I'd say his facts are suspect.

Re:Read this first

[ColdWetDog]

I agree he spent a bit too much time on the ad hominum aspect, but he did offer a significant factual rebuttal. I pointed out that posting since a lot of people had glommed on to the original post which was a bit polyannish (and incorrect). And, unfortunately, I agree that it's difficult to discuss this without the political overlay, especially this early in the game.

Personally, I think they did a great job of dealing with a very bad set of problems but unfortunately with high amounts of long term radiation, you have to have a very, very high bar. A bit more thinking and planning, a bit better luck and this would be a non issue. It does point out the flaws of using poorly thought out statistical models for risk analysis (something the author of the original blog was supposed to be an expert in but didn't address much).

Re:Read this first

[Darinbob]

It seems the original article wasn't meant for mass circulation, but was just something for family to read. It ended up viral somehow. Also I've seen two versions of this with two different author's names...

As far as the problems, the article is essentially correct on important points: radiation is going to be contained. But people focus on the word "nuclear" and panic. A bit of background radiation will be likely, but the health effects will be tiny compared to other health problems the earthquake and tsunami have caused. Ie, collapsed dam, burning petroleum refinery, garbage/trash/toxics strewn all over, etc. When the core cools it will be cleaned up, this won't be a Chernobyl style sarcophagus, it'll be like Three Mile Island. Yes, no one's cleaned up Three Mile Island yet but that's more of a budgetary/political problem than a technical one.

The overall misinformation and misunderstanding out there is amazing. I saw one blog comment that seemed to think the explosions must have initiated inside the cores and thus the government is lying when they say the cores aren't breached. Or another that said because the government is asking for foreign help it means that they're clueless or incompetent (if I just had a major nationwide catastrophe with resources spread thin, I'd certainly want all the outside help I could get).

What do nuclear reactors need to be designed to withstand: massive earthquakes more than you can anticipate, massive tsunamis, enemy attacks, failed safety systems, failed backup safety systems, snafus, and incompetent management. So far this plant seems to be accomplishing a big chunk of this.

What does "withstand" mean: protect the public, not necessarily protect the monetary investment in the plant.

Re:Read this first

[r3x_mundi]

This article is not looking very accurate right now. Hindsight is 20/20, but there has been a lot of inaccurate pro-nuclear reporting and commentary too, especially here, to the point of being partisan and political. Many wont acknowledge it has real dangers and other pitfalls. Despite the best possible planning and design, worst-case-scenarios do happen (you would think anyone in IT knows that), and very sadly, we just saw the result.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

"There was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity."

ahahah what a tool, this pro nuclear bs is getting funnier by the hour !

Re:Read this first

[tehcyder]

Yes, because only nuclear physicists should possibly be allowed to write anything about nuclear physics.

It's irrelevant whether what's actually written is true or not, it's a question of authority.

Re:Read this first

[Anonymous Coward]

don't surf the astroturf!

Unfortunate

[elrous0]

Much like Three Mile Island (which also didn't release any significant radiation), this will set nuclear energy back years. And with the carbon problem and increasing dependence on fossil fuels, we need it now more than every. Solar and wind aren't ready, and so much progress has been made in nuclear plant safety.

Re:Unfortunate

[kurt555gs]

Solar and wind already cost less per KW than nuclear. I'd call that ready.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar and wind already cost less per KW than nuclear.

Does this mean we can end all those solar and wind subsidies, then?

Re:Unfortunate

[kurt555gs]

No, we can transfer all the Nuclear subsidies to solar and wind. How about that?

Re:Unfortunate

[elrous0]

From even the most optimistic sources I've read, solar costs something along the lines of 3-4 times more than nuclear per KwH. Wind power is supposedly cheaper than solar (by about about half), but can't deliver a consistent supply and is *heavily* dependent on location and weather (i.e., it's only cheaper if you're in a pretty consistently windy location with favorable weather). That's what I meant by "not ready."

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar and wind aren't useful to replace base load, which is what nuclear's best at.

Re:Unfortunate

[Andy Dodd]

Neither of which can provide consistent baseload power. Both of which are unavailable in many regions (either not enough wind, or not enough solar flux)

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar and wind already cost less per KW than nuclear. I'd call that ready.

Agreed,

Re:Unfortunate

[lingon]

All energy sources are subsidised. Nuclear is probably the least subsidised one, as the subsidies are mostly governement-backed loans and not direct monetary contributions.

Re:Unfortunate

[jonescb]

Compared to uranium? Perhaps. Compared to thorium? I don't think so.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. It is unfortunate. On the other hand, at the time of the accident at Three Mile Island, the engineers involved scoffed at the idea that a significant amount of the core had actually melted. They found out a decade later during the cleanup that plenty of it had melted and collected in the bottom of the containment vessel like lava. It's pretty hard to evaluate the real damage until long after the accident is over.

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with you, the media reaction has been ridiculous. But this thing isn't under control yet. There is no basis for saying that this accident isn't as bad as (the relatively mild) Three Mile Island when it is still unfolding, especially when 2 hydrogen explosions have already occurred and a third reactor has apparently had the core uncovered by water (i.e. meltdown potential). It may yet get as bad or worse. And the simple reality is: it shouldn't have happened at all.

A reactor backup power system that survives the earthquake but not the tsunami? A tsunami was not an unexpected event here. Major tsunami are expected over a 50-year period of operation. I do not understand why these nuclear power plants were not designed adequately with tsunami risks in mind. This is a big engineering failure.

This is a spectacular engineering failure along the lines of a long history of them: a good reactor design, but a failure of imagination about what could go wrong, and a failure to appreciate the risks from natural events. It reminds me of the Vaiont dam failure in Italy -- the engineering of the dam structure was fine. The understanding of the geological risks at the site was poor, and the response as signs of impending disaster started to become obvious was even worse.

Re:Unfortunate

[Artraze]

Citation needed. I have never heard this, and when I checked a few years ago (as I have the theoretical option to use either) nuclear was significantly cheaper.

Not only is nuclear cheaper (as far as I've ever heard), but it also produces less CO2 for it's lifetime (i.e. including manufacture, etc) than wind or solar. Moreover it doesn't require storage, which adds significant cost and environmental impact to both.

Re:Unfortunate

[elrous0]

reactor backup power system that survives the earthquake but not the tsunami? A tsunami was not an unexpected event here.

That's what really shocked me about these reactors in Japan. Who builds a reactor on the coast and doesn't protect the backup generators from a sea surge? Even excluding a major earthquake and tsunami combo, the same accidents could have happened with a common typhoon. You build on the coast, or even near a river, and it never occurs to you that your generators could get flooded?!?

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

This is only if you - as the nuclear power lobby always does - ignore the question of final storage of nuclear waste. If anyone would take that into the calculation it would be obvious that nuclear power is not a solution at all.

Re:Unfortunate

[Compaqt]

Nuclear Insurance would be a big one, no?

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar appears more expensive because basically today polluting the biosphere is free (as in free beer). Sound policy dictates to take into account externalities when evaluating costs. No need to be Einstein to see that renewables are (now or soon) and more and more (long-term trend) cheaper compared to anything polluting and non renewable.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

We need no nuclear power. Currently the most sought out source is one that can be turned on quickly when needed (like gas and coal) so as to maintain the frequency of the grid. We need sources of power that have much lower risk than nuclear, such as direct solar or wind.

Re:Unfortunate

[DeltaQH]

You should also include costs for: building new power lines to bring electricity from the far places where the wind is blowing or the sun is sinning, multiply solar/wind farms as necessary to be able to catch as much fine weather (power generating wise) as possible, duplicated power stations (gas/coal/nuclear) as backup when the weather does not comply with demand (power stations will be sitting idle a significant part of the time); supplies, logistics, repair and maintenance cost of a vastly geographically distributed power generating equipment/transformation/and distribution network; IT software and hardware to make the distribution network intelligent enough to manage fluctuating power generation and distribution patterns.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

That is only if you don't include the costs of decomissioning a nuclear power plant. Unfortunately you will be paying the nuclear Kwh you consume now well through the next 100 years...

Re:Unfortunate

[elrous0]

Not if you're like India, building U-233 and Thorium plants:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html

Re:Unfortunate

[Capt James McCarthy]

Solar and wind already cost less per KW than nuclear. I'd call that ready.

It's not the cost per KW that's the problem. It's reliability and volume. And please cite your reference.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like Three Mile Island (which also didn't release any significant radiation), this will set nuclear energy back years. And with the carbon problem and increasing dependence on fossil fuels, we need it now more than every. Solar and wind aren't ready, and so much progress has been made in nuclear plant safety.

Your post is almost entirely false. Three Mile Island killed people. The radiation released wasn't catastrophic, but it was most certainly significant. What happened at Three Mile Island shouldn't be dismissed like it was nothing at all, and this is a major reason (dismissive attitudes) why many nuclear proponents should be dismissed. You, sir, are dismissed.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

> (which also didn't release any significant radiation)

Yeah? Tell that to these people (source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/tmi.html)

        Paula Obercash: acute lymphocytic leukemia
        Gary Villella: chronic myelogenous leukemia
        Leo Beam: chronic myelogenous leukemia
        Joseph Gaughan: thyroid cancer
        Lori Dolan: Hurthle cell carcinoma
        Jolene Peterson: thyroid adenoma
        Ronald Ward: osteogenic sarcoma (right leg)
        Pearl Hickernell: breast cancer
        Ethelda Hilt: adenocarcinoma of the ovaries
        Kenneth Putt: bladder cancer, acoustic neuroma.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially with the incredible calibre of western journalism. I love the last sentence of the summary.

Re:Unfortunate

[data2]

On wikipedia, there are links to studies saying that with an investment of an additional 5% regarding to turbine cost per MW needed, one can upgrade the electrical grid in Europe to provide 70% of the electricity (non-stop) through wind power, without the need to keep shadow power plants. Please don't complain about others not being informed about the possibilities of nuclear power when you clearly have not looked at the potential of alternatives.
Also, wind power has achieved grid parity (is competitively priced) in many countries of the world.

Re:Unfortunate

[Brian Boyko]

> solar costs something along the lines of 3-4 times more than nuclear per KwH. Yeah, but when an earthquake his a solar plant... Don't get me wrong. Nuclear's cheaper than anything cleaner, and cleaner than anything cheaper; but there are significant risks involved.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also making countries re-examine their current reactors. I bet there was a lot of cost cutting and half-assing things in those things over the years.

Re:Unfortunate

[Intrepid imaginaut]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_construction_cost_estimates

Re:Unfortunate

[polar red]

BS
read : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid

and by heavy use of HVDC to shift power from windy areas to non-windy areas

I suggest you look at a wind map and search for the largest area with zero wind.
hey look: areas without wind have wind circling around them !

  what I am basically saying is : there is ALWAYS wind, you only need some power cables to transport the electricity.

Re:Unfortunate

[sjames]

We have coal fired plants here that release the same amount of radiation routinely, but it's longer lived radium rather than short lived iodine.

Meanwhile, the real story here is "unprecedented earthquake and tsunami affect reactor. Safety plans operate as designed. All is well".

Re:Unfortunate

[polar red]

Solar and wind aren't useful to replace base load

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid

by heavy use of HVDC to shift power from windy areas to non-windy areas.

there is ALWAYS wind. no wind is a physical impossibility. (unless you take out the sun and the moon and the rotation of the earth out of the equation)

Re:Unfortunate

[houghi]

It costs more now. That does not mean we mustnâ(TM)t invest in it. And the more we use it, the cheaper it will become.
Also none should be the only solution. Nuclear can exist next to any other sort of energy. Best not to bet on one horse.

Re:Unfortunate

[Solandri]

The only reason the U.S. has a nuclear waste "problem" is because we haven't done anything about it for ~60 years. Imagine 60 years of coal plant emissions, or the waste from 60 years of solar panel construction and dead/obsolete panels. That's the correct comparison. Per year, the U.S. currently generates about 2000 tons of spent fuel ("high level waste" since we refuse to reprocess) per year. That's about enough to fill a single tractor trailer. 20% of our electricity for a year, and it only generates one tractor trailer full of waste. That's a tiny waste problem compared to the alternatives. The reason it costs a lot is because of politics, not engineering. (If it were up to the engineers, they'd say just reprocess the stuff and use it as more fuel.)

Re:Unfortunate

[hicksw]

We must harness the power of the tsunami.

Re:Unfortunate

[MoriaOrc]

Usage
Over the first 43 years of the Price-Anderson Act to 2000, the secondary insurance was not required. A total of $151 million was paid to cover claims (including legal expenses), all from primary insurance, including $71 million for Three Mile Island. Additionally, the Department of Energy paid about $65 million to cover claims under liability for its own nuclear operations in the same period.

The handout is mostly theoretical in the sense that, if something did happen it would become a significant handout, but since the nuclear industry in the US hasn't screwed up in any catastrophic* way since it's inception, the theoretical handout hasn't been required. The actual handout of 151 million dollars over 43 years (about 3.5 million per year) is tiny by government standards.

* Catastrophic in this case meaning like Chernobyl, not TMI. TMI was the biggest single payout under this act, weighing in at almost half the total.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally yes, but the main problem is that it's seen as a government task to deliver energy. Wind energy farms are devastating for wild-life (at least on land). Solar energy, however, is beneficial in some areas (as here in California) but NOT as "farms" but spread out to the individual, minimizing distribution loss and volatility to local disasters.
Nuclear energy is necessary as well as coal and oil, however, as them all, needs to be scrutinized and relentlessly improved - and not built on top of the San Andreas faultline as the one in San Onofre.

Re:Unfortunate

[HiThere]

I don't really think I can believe that. Who pays for fuel disposal? (So far, it appears the answer is nobody. That's left for the next administration.) What about insurance? (The government exempts nuclear plants from insuring. I doubt that you could get even Lloyds to cover them.) And a government backed loan of a massively expensive plant is no minor subsidy just by itself.

I expect that there are subsidies that aren't immediately obvious.

But the real question is "Can they compete with coal?" When they can compete with coal without subsidies, then the removal of subsidies is reasonable. Until then, no. We *NEED* to get rid of coal as a source of power.

P.S.: Competing with coal must include the costs of storing the power to handle times when it can't be generated. Pumping water uphill counts. So does storing molten salt in a vacuum insulated vessel. There are other alternatives. They all add to the expense of the option. So replacing coal without subsidies is aways off. But it's getting closer.

Re:Unfortunate

[BeanThere]

Nuclear doesn't pollute the biosphere. (Except for the occasional bad accident, but the risks of really bad accidents are actually pretty low, and have been decreasing as plant designs improve. We've had a world full of nuclear power for decades now and apart from one spot on the earth where nobody can live for a while, and a small but non-negligible chance of a second such spot appearing in Japan soon, we seem to be doing OK; the apocalyptic scenarios the nuclear naysayers predicted for decades, haven't come to pass. Even if Fukushima goes worst-case, only a tiny handful of people might die.)

Re:Unfortunate

[kurt555gs]

Solar and wind power are fine for base load power. just add batteries -> http://www.ngk.co.jp/english/products/power/nas/index.html

Re:Unfortunate

[Dr. Gamera]

The counterpunch.org page on the other side of that link is fearmongering. Its tone in a microcosm: "[...] there is no safe dose of radiation, and none will ever be found."

Re:Unfortunate

[bstender]

Solar and wind aren't ready
cite...or this you must bite:

(wind)"The average EROI for all studies (operational and conceptual) is 25.2 (n=114; std. dev=22.3). The average EROI for just the operational studies is 19.8 (n=60; std. dev=13.7).

"The EROI for wind turbines compares favorably with other power generation systems (Figure 3). Baseload coal-fired power generation has an EROI between 5 and 10:1. Nuclear power is probably no greater than 5:1, although there is considerable debate regarding how to calculate its EROI. The EROI for hydropower probably exceed 10, but in most places in the world the most favorable sites have been developed."
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy

10,000 dead

[benjamindees]

Yes, this is intentional anti-nuclear scaremongering. Look at the AP and Reuters reports. Every one of them starts out with a headline that says something about nuclear explosion or meltdown and then goes straight into saying that 10,000 people have died and several thousands are missing and cities were "flattened" and on and on about hydrogen (bomb) explosions and just complete utter bullshit.

Re:10,000 dead

[catmistake]

Totally! Why are they even reporting on this? There were hardly any explosions, like 3, big deal! Almost none of the reactors entered partial meltdown, what, like 2 of 6 at only 2 of their 17 power plants. Barely 200 people were treated for radiation and hardly 200,000 people were evacuated. News is just for entertainment, really. Move along, this is all being exaggerated to sell news.

Re:10,000 dead

[benjamindees]

It's not being exaggerated to sell news. Selling news became unprofitable decades ago. It's being exaggerated to sell American coal and Middle Eastern oil and German solar panels that are ALL more dangerous and polluting and environmentally destructive than nuclear power.

Impact of countermeasures - NYT article

[varshar]

NYT has a well-sourced article on possible impact of containment measures being used.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Re:Impact of countermeasures - NYT article

[Pumpkin Tuna]

This isn't particularly comforting. It sounds like they don't have a clear picture of current conditions in the reactors.

"To pump in the water, the Japanese have apparently tried used firefighting equipment — hardly the usual procedure. But forcing the seawater inside the containment vessel has been difficult because the pressure in the vessel has become so great.

One American official likened the process to “trying to pour water into an inflated balloon,” and said that on Sunday it was “not clear how much water they are getting in, or whether they are covering the cores.”

The problem was compounded because gauges in the reactor seemed to have been damaged in the earthquake or tsunami, making it impossible to know just how much water is in the core."

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[Anonymous Coward]

blocking their efforts to convert to nuclear.

It would be a good thing that wind and solar won't be sabotaged anymore. /sarcasm

any risk of a china / usa syndrome?

[Joe The Dragon]

any risk of a china / usa syndrome?

Re:any risk of a china / usa syndrome?

[Magada]

A what? Piss off to ebaumsworld, will ya?

Re:any risk of a china / usa syndrome?

[hcdejong]

No.

Re:any risk of a china / usa syndrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you put a "Keep Straight Ahead" signage in the Earth core.

Re:any risk of a china / usa syndrome?

[trollertron3000]

It depends. If Michael Douglas can get the information to the press in time Hanoi Jane can stop it possibly. We'll see.

Re:any risk of a china / usa syndrome?

[circletimessquare]

it's japan, so we're talking about an argentina syndrome:

http://www.antipodemap.com/

Since I'm sure to be modded down for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.asahi.com/national/gallery_e/view_photo.html?national-pg/0314/TKY201103140242.jpg (from the Japanese article) I'll post this anonymously. I'm not one to look for penises in everything, but this one was hard to ignore.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[fredjh]

It's funny, because last week the republicans were talking up nuclear power, too... and now the media (what I heard this morning, anyway) is firmly planted in trying to show why republicans are idiots for pushing nuclear power when it was part of Obama's agenda, too.

Ahh, to politics and never letting a crisis go to waste, and to never letting facts about Three Mile Island and the current tragedy get in the way of a good story.

Radiation Leak Detected off shore

[Anonymous Coward]

From the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12733393

"...the US said it had moved one of its aircraft carriers from the area after detecting low-level radiation 160km (100 miles) offshore."

Also, regarding "there won't be significant radiation" - if you read the comments in the blog, another physicist is calling the OP a shill for the nuclear industry.

So between the radiation leak and the contrary viewpoint to the industry shill, I'd say there is significant chance of a radiation leak, it's just a matter of degree...

Re:Radiation Leak Detected off shore

[DrXym]

If you're in a large boat capable of propulsion and you're downwind of even minor nuclear fallout, you would be a fool to stay put. I also do not get any sense that this is a coverup or being glossed over. Radiation could be relatively minor but you still don't want a boat full of people breathing it in.

Re:Radiation Leak Detected off shore

[MareLooke]

Would be political suicide to downplay it too, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing aftermath was being downplayed if they'd try that again heads are gonna roll...

RIP nuclear power

[GameboyRMH]

First the Chernobyl clusterfuck turned nuclear power from The Answer To All Our Problems to A Scary Thing, then the non-event of TMI combined with some shitty old movie was enough to scare America off of it forever...now these events might be enough to damage nuclear power's reputation beyond repair with the rest of the international community. And what's left to take its place? All the fossil fuels you could ever want*, including lots of filthy, filthy coal.

The Chinese will probably push forward with their nuclear plans. On one hand, it's good that it will reduce the coal use of one of the planet's biggest energy consumers, on the other hand, China has a reputation for not giving a fuck about the environment or safety (they're in the middle of their Gilded Age after all), and the last thing anybody needs is another Chernobyl, plus any improperly set up Chinese nuclear waste sites won't get a super-funded cleanup any time in the forseeable future. Maybe they'd get some political prisoners to do the cleanup work to save costs on hazmat suits and decontamination gear.

*Until they run out

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Black Parrot]

First the Chernobyl clusterfuck turned nuclear power from The Answer To All Our Problems to A Scary Thing, then the non-event of TMI combined with some shitty old movie was enough to scare America off of it forever

FYI, the TMI event was long before Chernobyl.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[lingon]

FYI, the TMI accident alone was enough to scare a lot of countries away from nuclear power, *then* came Chernobyl.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

The TMI accident occurred in 1979. The Chernobyl disaster took place in 1986.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[GameboyRMH]

D'oh! >_< I had the dates mixed up in my head.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[GameboyRMH]

Yeah I realized I mixed up the dates...(-_-)

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

Or heck, we will start to house their waste to pay back some of our debt to them. Talk about a dystopian future for the US.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

It's my WAG that the Japanese control systems are much better than others in use around the world. If their designs failed, then it calls everyone else's design into serious question. As a followup, it would be a good idea to investigate what would happen to the nuclear plants close to the New Madrid fault. IIRC, I saw a lot of plants in the Ohio valley when flying cross country.

In any future scenarios, the cost of proper earthquake engineering needs to be added to the energy cost. Probably, all future plants will need "state of the art" base isolation to deal with the possibility of large earthquake event. IMO, existing plants should consider retrofit. Of course, green energy (solar/wind/geothermal) can do with "standard" engineering practice because they don't include the risk of sending toxic plumes which can poison the countryside for 10k+ years.

A wise man learns from his own mistakes.
A wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[danlip]

TMI (1979) occurred before Chernobyl (1986). The film (The China Syndrome) was release 12 days before the TMI accident, so it was very timely.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[swb]

Many of the people I know are fashion environmentalists and they are unfortunately a huge source of public opinion (all ignorant) on nuclear power.

I've heard many of them questioning "our investment in nuclear power" in this state (Minnesota, zero earthquakes, tornadoes being the worst "disaster" we face).

I've pushed back aggressively with many of them -- I ask them what they'd replace baseload generation with? Coal?

Do they really want their electric cars?

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

You are mixed up far more than that. I'll never understand why nuclear proponents try to dismiss significant nuclear events. It happened, you know? Why deny it? Why fight the exaggeration with more bullshit? These case studies are important. We learn from mistakes. We don't learn from calling these events insignificant and trying to bury them. Your opinion is what is insignificant. Dismissing the opposition is not the solution... as you become no better than the fear mongerers. Shit happened, so let's not forget, let's not dismiss, and let's remember, innocent people suffered, innocent people died.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Japan have a corresponding movie? Brazil Syndrome anyone??

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

China and India have both announced no major changes in their plans to move forward on extensive nuclear plant construction. This will most likely just cause Western nations to slow or stop expansion of nuclear power for a while.

It is still early to say for certain. When people finally realize that there was no dangerous radiation released from a 30+ year old reactor in a massive quake and accompanying tsunami, they will see that modern reactor designs that are managed well are safe. Safe enough that it will be an accepted risk if and when fossil fuels become too expensive. (coal will be cheap for a long time on a dollar basis, but most people consider the environmental impact to be expensive already)

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.
In all this excitement, people are learning a lot about nuclear reactors and the inherent safety built in. They are learning that the worst case doom-and-gloom scenario really isn't all that bad (unless you are the company running it). I've noticed that as things get worse, the public seems to be, ironically, becoming less worried.
Most fear of nuclear power comes from ignorance. These events are slowly chipping away at that.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

> First the Chernobyl [...] then the non-event of TMI [...]

All of you nuclear apologist, are trying to look smart but don't even know your basic facts. TMI was *way*before* Chernobyl.

Yesterday, apologists were saying that it would be a non event. Today, there are records of radiation 10K times higher than usual 2 kilometers from the plant. There is a very plausible possibility that things are going to get worse and worse, and you, armchair nuclear scientists, are posting wrong fact to /. all day.

Disgusting.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[fireylord]

It's my WAG that the Japanese control systems are much better than others in use around the world. If their designs failed, then it calls everyone else's design into serious question.

These reactors are 40 years old, and designed by Westinghouse, a US company.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Anonymous Coward]

"On one hand, it's good that it will reduce the coal use of one of the planet's biggest energy consumers, "

Don't tell us, you're a 'man-made global warming' shill! Otherwise known as a 'climate change' shill, the new, super-improved 'disaster' that can never be wrong, because the climate is always changing!

You douchebag.

www.climatedepot.com

Re:RIP nuclear power

[Thud457]

Minnesota?
I thought they got all their power from burning teachers.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[tehcyder]

First the Chernobyl clusterfuck turned nuclear power from The Answer To All Our Problems to A Scary Thing,

Bullshit, there has been a lot of quite reasonable misgivings about nuclear power from the time they started building reactors in the UK, at least, not least because of the secrecy and lying of the government and nuclear industry about accidents.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[tehcyder]

So, impressively, GP managed to get the time line exactly beckwards.

Re:RIP nuclear power

[GameboyRMH]

Looks like these events aren't making anyone less ignorant:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/03/15/germany.nuclear.protests/

http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/georgianukes/?akid=360.21834.6IpMej&rd=1&t=1

Achilles Heel

[m0s3m8n]

A while back I was watching World's Toughest Fixes and they would not show the cooling buildings at the nuke plant where the show was filmed. I guess that now makes sense (one can argue it is theater). Why blow up the reactor proper when you can go after a much softer target and achieve basically the same effect. I am all for nuclear power but this needs to be addressed IMHO.

Re:Achilles Heel

[GameboyRMH]

Pebble bed reactors (the same design as the micro-reactor concepts that keep popping up lately) always fail safely by design:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

The downside is the greater volume of waste - it's safer waste, but because of that there isn't much use for the spent fuel.

Re:Achilles Heel

[jo_ham]

I saw the show too, when it was on British TV and it was just a load of jobsworth security theatre nonsense. "You can't film that! It's a security risk!" when the things they "can't film" are gigantic cooling towers that are visible from miles around, and the plant layout which was supposedly the "secret" is easily visible on Google Maps - I went there specifically after watching the show to generate my own mini Streisand Effect.

If they hadn't made such a big fuss about nothing, no one would care. Anyone wanting to attack that plant just needs to drive near it, or fly over it in an aircraft, or go on Google Fucking Maps and switch to photo view. I doubt they'd be drawing up plans based on a few seconds of shots in a Discovery channel show.

The "cooling buildings" on that plant were the two enormous towers - they are an obvious target, but they are only one piece in a very redundant system, and are tertiary systems - it's just "politeness" to cool the river water back down before pumping it back out into the environment. If the towers were destroyed you'd just pump the water from the tertiary loop back out into the river while it was still warm, which would probably kill a lot of fish, but makes absolutely no odds to the power plant itself.

If they didn't want to do that they could just vent steam directly into the atmosphere to control the temperature.

Re:Achilles Heel

[jimicus]

The other downside is that they're still at the research stage - AFAIK there is no such thing as a functioning pebble bed reactor providing grid power anywhere on the planet.

Which is not to say there never will be one, but you can't present it as the solution to all our problems.

Re:Achilles Heel

[danlip]

A good question is why is it still in the research stage? The idea dates back to 1947 and the first working prototype was in 1966.

Re:Achilles Heel

[Slayer]

Because it might have been cheaper to cut some corners with existing equipment than build a new reactor every time some scientist comes along with the next great thing? It might have been more profitable to do things the way they have been done, and when the sh*t hits the fan the nuclear industry can still count on their (highly moderated) forum posters to deny any problem.

This may also be a reason why some folks here don't trust the nuclear industry too much ...

Re:Achilles Heel

[jwhitener]

I took for granted comments about the safety of PBR's, but decided this time to read some criticism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor#Criticisms_of_the_reactor_design

It sure doesn't sound like the best solution to me. Especially considering that only one plant has run for a couple decades (Germany) and it was found to have leaked and is also highly irradiated now. From the wiki article, it sounds like China is going ahead with a bunch of new plants, but only time will tell how that turns out.

I'd rather us stick with BWR/PWR's but just have many more safety layers (like...why weren't the generators inside a strong structure to being with....). At least until PBR's or MSR's have further testing.

Re:Achilles Heel

[rubycodez]

not a concern, the cooling towers make environmentalists happy because less heat gets dumped into rivers and streams. If a plant lost those, the reactor would just trip offline and lose the 6% of running heat via the local water. The real Achilles heel is not mentioned because everyone's mind is programmed by Hollywood movies to think that meltdown is the worst thing. It is not, and the real Achilles heel of a typical nuke plant is the spent fuel pool. In our plants which have been running for decades it contains far more contamination than Chernobyl's 40% of 180 tons of ejected fuel, usually three or more times as much. An uncontrolled spent fuel pool fire, from damage beyond ability to replenish or high radiation making manual replenishment impossible, would release more contamination than a meltdown with failed containment, make Chernobyl look like training drill. That's why all the smooth-talking "experts" saying this Fukushima plant disaster can't be another Chernobyl are full of shit. As long as possibility of uncontrolled spent fuel pool fire (because rad levels to high for workers to replenish the boiling water) exists, a possibility of event that exceeds Chernobyl by factor of two or three or more exists. There are 1800 tons of fuel in six pools at Fukushima, do the math and compare with 72 tons of Chernobyl ejection.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[Lawrence_Bird]

I think the opposite. If Japan manages to get through this with only minor radiation problems (as so far) I think it will be a positive for nuclear energy. I mean, WTF more could you possibly do? A Mag 10 quake right under the reactor core? One thing that will come out of this is that both Japan and the US currently require backup power for the cooling system of only about 12 hours while the Eurolanders require 24-48 hours. There will definitely be a push to try to up this to 72 hours though of course practicalities may get in the way.

Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[edxwelch]

It seems it's a lot worse than initially thought. There is a probablity of a complete meltdown. In the best case, there will be radioactive discharges for months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html?_r=1&hp

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[borrrden]

I have trouble trusting this article at all. For one thing, it says it cannot be confirmed if any of the reactors use MOX fuel. Um....they've been saying that reactor 3 uses MOX fuel for days now. Where has the Times been? Other than that it is generally vague about a timeline or any evidence that it "could last for months."

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[Joehonkie]

Don't forget that they don't ever discuss the levels of radiation released, because then they might have to admit they are minimal.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[jo_ham]

Yes, they could just drain off all the water completely (so no more steam generation and no risk of pressure build up) but it would totally wreck the core since it would melt into its concrete containment system, then you'd have a big, broken mess left over (although with all the radiation contained) that you'd have to clean up.

This way they are hoping the core is not totally wrecked (although it will definitely be damaged and require extensive repairs before being used again, if ever), so that it is easier to clean up and reprocess the fuel, with the problem that because you are pumping water in there (at less than required flow rate) it's boiling off quickly raising the pressure very high and cracking to H2 and O2, which just love to react very exothermically - causing those explosions we have seen when they vent this pressure out into the atmosphere.

The best case is that they keep doing what they're doing, and try to minimise the chance of H2 explosions, so that it will be easy to dismantle the core when it is cold. If they just let it melt there will be no more hydrogen explosions, but they'll have a molten mess of fuel and reactor parts spread out inside the concrete containment shield that will be considerably more annoying to clean up (but still completely safe from an external observer point of view - it;s designed to fail this way in the event of a full meltdown).

I think the problem is that everyone is equating "meltdown" to mean "will explode like Chernobyl", which is not what happened there - the Chernobyl explosion was a catastrophic steam explosion like a pressure cooker exploding. The core didn't melt down until after the explosion happened.

These "little" explosions we are seeing in Japan are because they are releasing the pressure in a controlled manner - if they just left it (and disabled the safety systems) then it could face a similar problem to Chernobyl, with the reactor being destroyed by a steam explosion, with the crucial difference that the core of this reactor is totally shielded (Chernobyl's RBMK reactors were too big to contain without it costing a ridiculous amount, so the building was the secondary containment structure - and it fell apart like tissue paper, as expected).

It's also slightly different in Japan - the reactor is "off" so the uranium fission reaction has stopped, and it's just residual heat and decay product heat to be dealt with, so it's a relatively slow and controllable heating. In Reactor 4 in Chernobyl, the fission reaction was very definitely running - but was poisoned due to neutron absorbing products (the core was running at much too low power), and when these were gone, and with the rods all the way out, the reactor spiked to a massive level which flashed all the water in there to steam almost instantly, which blew the lid off the top - just like throwing an aerosol can onto a fire, or shooting it with an air rifle. They had no time to relieve the pressure.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[borrrden]

I applaud this explanation, though I would like add a slight detail. Another huge complication at Chernobyl was the presence of graphite, which is flammable and sent radioactive smoke into the upper atmosphere. Now, no reactors use graphite as a moderator anymore. It is certainly not present at Fukushima.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[edxwelch]

Those reactors are already destroyed. They will never be operational gain (it says that in the article I linked to).
A complete meltdown will lead to a huge discharge of radioactive waste similiar to Chernobyl. That's what they are trying to avoid at all costs. The fact that the reactor is "off" is irrelevant.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[maxume]

These reactors don't have concrete containment shields.

And the fact that they are pumping salt water into the steel containment vessels pretty much means they are a loss too. I'm not sure exactly what impact the boric acid they are pumping in has on the future usability of the fuel after reprocessing, but I'm pretty sure the whole idea is to foul the core so that it can no longer go critical.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[vlm]

Those reactors are already destroyed. They will never be operational gain (it says that in the article I linked to).

Careful, reactors 1 / 2 / 3 were online hot and currently self destructing due to decay heat. On the other hand, 4 / 5 / 6 were off for maintenance and as far as I know are cold shutdown. They will be restarted in the future assuming they didn't take too much tsunami damage and/or explosion damage from 1/2/3 popping. You will not be too surprised to learn that 1 / 2 / 3 are the oldest reactors, some 40 year old clunkers. The newer design 4 and 5 are not too bad and 6 is actually pretty decent. And they're planning on building some new ABWRs 7 and 8 onsite. One new ABWR generates almost as much power as 1, 2, and 3 put together.

So the idea is to minimize contamination and damage to reactors 4 / 5 / 6. Remember only one of Chernobyls reactors melted down, the other continued generating power for a decade or something like that.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[jo_ham]

Those reactors are already destroyed. They will never be operational gain (it says that in the article I linked to).
A complete meltdown will lead to a huge discharge of radioactive waste similiar to Chernobyl. That's what they are trying to avoid at all costs. The fact that the reactor is "off" is irrelevant.

No it won't - if these cores completely melt down they will be safely contained within the enclosing concrete containment (which is inside the building), and completely encloses the reactor.

If they melt down there will just be a puddle of fuel and melted reactor in the bottom of this structure, which is designed like a dish to spread it out thinly so it cools quickly, but it will all still be totally sealed inside.

There is no way it will be spread over hundreds of miles (or even just outside the plant itself in the local area), since it was designed to fail this way,

Think of it like a bar of chocolate inside sealed tin can. If you left it in the sun without pouring cold water over it, the chocolate would melt, but it would not escape from the can.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[vlm]

These reactors don't have concrete containment shields.

Not so, not even close. BWR model 3 (example is unit 1 at this site) had a mark1 concrete containment system and BWR model 4 (examples are units 2 and 3 at this site) could have been built with mark1 or mark2 containment systems.

A gross simplification is mark1 is a big concrete building with a little concrete building inside it and a steel shield inside that little building. In all the pics you can see the big building popped pretty much as designed and the little building inside it is still claimed to be undamaged. Mark1 designs look a lot like really tough office buildings; they look like a telco central office or a modern data center, sorta.

Mark2 is about the same but for a variety of boring engineering reasons looks like some really giant soda cans (or like a grain elevator). I don't see anything like that on site. I'm guessing either I haven't seen the right pic, or the ancient BWR-4s onsite have a mark1 containment system.

The newer stuff like the Mark3 look a lot like a swimming pool. I don't know if the undamaged reactor #6 is new enough to have a Mark3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Water_Reactor_Safety_Systems#Containment_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_water_reactor#First_series_of_production_BWRs_.28BWR.2F1.E2.80.93BWR.2F6.29

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[AHuxley]

For the MOX in Unit 3 comment http://www.allgov.com/Top_Stories/ViewNews/Meltdown_at_Japanese_Nuclear_Power_Plant__A_Disaster_Waiting_to_Happen_110313
Not much MOX news in google.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576199884191526312.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8379134/Nuclear-meltdown-threat-Japan-preparing-for-a-worst-case-scenario.html
and for the "minimal" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366055/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-Navy-crew-months-radiation-1-HOUR.html
The USS Ronald Reagan was around 100 miles (160km) offshore.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[jo_ham]

The core is already subcritical, adding boric acid just acts as a neutron sponge to capture thermalised neutrons (that are being moderated by the water they're pumping in). The source of these neutrons is the short lives radionuclides that form as part of the normal operating reaction, ie, not the uranium.

With adequate cooling you don;t have to worry about them - there aren't all that many, relative to the normal running of the reactor and normal cooling is enough to deal with the heat produced as these products decay, but cooling is an issue, hence anything they can do to limit heat sources is being done - and thermalised neutrons are an indirect source of heat (since they bang into things and cause fission events).

These reactors don't have concrete containment shields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BWR_Mark_I_Containment,_cutaway.jpg

" Cutaway drawing of a typical Boiling water reactor (BWR) Mark I Concrete Containment with Steel Torus (suppression pool), as used in the BWR/1, BWR/2, BWR/3 and some BWR/4 model reactors."

(Reactor 1 is a BWR3, Reactor 3 is a BWR4)

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[MrNemesis]

Chernobyl's RBMK reactors were too big to contain without it costing a ridiculous amount, so the building was the secondary containment structure - and it fell apart like tissue paper, as expected

IIRC it's not that the RBMK reactors themselves were too big, but that they were designed to have their fuel replaced whilst the reactor was running and keeping all the loading gear inside containment was space prohibitive. There's an awesome cutaway model here http://neutron.kth.se/gallery/power_reactors/Ignalina_model.JPG that shows the colossal crane/gantry above the core, along with what basically amounts to a shed roof covering the reactor core. Not pictured is the cooling pond, which sits parallel to the core (and takes up more space) that the spent fuel rods are dropped into.

Fitting all that folderol inside decent containment would be very expensive, because you now need at least twice the height and width of the reactor to fit everything in. So why bother? Allowing refuelling whilst the reactor is running meant a) you wouldn't need to close the reactor down to refuel it and b) you could make lots of weapons-grade plutonium very quickly. Weapons grade stuff requires very short fuel runs on a low burnup (exactly what you don't want in a reactor for power generation), whereas extracting P239 from all the other plutonium isotopes in "regular" nuclear wastes is exceptionally difficult. Since these reactors are expensive, lots of countries decided to cheap out and build dual purposed reactors which, after enough warheads had been made, could then be converted to civilian fuel loads. Hence you had a bunch of suboptimal design decisions taking place, such as the lack of containment on RBMK and other reactors. Yay for the cold war.

Not meant as a nitpick BTW, just thought people might find it interesting.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[jbengt]

. . . they don't ever discuss the levels of radiation released, because then they might have to admit they are minimal.

from TFA:

. . . the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[fireylord]

Those reactors are already destroyed. They will never be operational gain (it says that in the article I linked to).

They're not so much destroyed as rendered unusable. The evocative word 'destroy' is, i suspect, being used by you here to spread mental images of the reactors being in little bits spread over several kilometers. Handily they were starting to be decommissioned anyway since they're 40 years old and definitely past their projected lifespan, so the cost of the loss of energy production was already being planned for.

A complete meltdown will lead to a huge discharge of radioactive waste similiar to Chernobyl. That's what they are trying to avoid at all costs. The fact that the reactor is "off" is irrelevant.

No, it would not. These reactors are designed so that they have a catching mechanism below the reactor _within_the_containment_structure_ that spreads any debris from the reactor core above and thusly reducing any reaction, plus there is boron underneath too, which poisons the fuel by absorbing neutrons so that they cannot cause reaction. Bottom line there is not any real issue from a meltdown!

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[failedlogic]

Of what magnitude are these "explosions"?

I ask because anytime you blow something up, it blows up whatever is around it. Is there any chance the force of this explosion could damage the core and the cracks/damage would cause it to leak into the containment area.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[jo_ham]

Unlikely - the core is surrounded by a massive block of rebar-reinforced concrete, and then a large steel pressure vessel that is designed to withstand serious pressure just during normal operating conditions.

The explosions we've been seeing are outside of this concrete block (actually above it, in the building), and the bulk of the pressure has been blasting the building apart - not great, but it's cosmetic/structural damage as far as the reactor containment measures are concerned (well, the primary and secondary measures - the third is the building itself, which is not compromised, but it was never designed to withstand this sort of explosion).

The explosions thus far have been able to relieve their force out into the atmosphere - which is better than the building containing it and thus increasing the blast wave on the reactor shield. Even then, it's a pretty tough cookie - it survived a 9.1 magnitude earthquake without any damage, for example.

Yes, the explosions are not good - ideally they wanted the venting to happen without the hydrogen gas igniting, but in the grand scale of things, it is not going to seriously threaten to expose the core.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[failedlogic]

Thanks for the reply. This clarifies a lot for me. :)

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[linuxrocks123]

Actually, Chernobyl was online until 2000 or so. Yeah, I was surprised, too ... but they really needed the power, so they kept them going. They did modify the design somewhat, but they were still graphite-based.

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe these reactors have a core catcher or they are not trusted. If it was possible to just let them melt and sit safely contained, why would they continue to pump in seawater that forces them to continue to vent radioactive material outside of the containment?

Re:Radioactive releases Could Last Months

[jo_ham]

Because it is *much* easier to decommission the reactor if it's not a melted puddle of crap in the bottom of the shield. If it stays intact, but damaged, it will be cheaper and easier to dismantle when the core is cold.

Oh god, the ignorance circle jerk begins

[Anonymous Coward]

Even Demand Progress is in on the circle jerk.

WTF.
http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/georgianukes/?akid=360.21834.6IpMej&rd=1&t=1

This is dumb. Why do we still have to burn coal everywhere, even in disaster-safe Georgia?

Time for passive cooling systems

[DeltaQH]

The active cooling system seems to be the Achilles heel of a nuclear reactor.

Time to design and build nuclear reactors with passive cooling systems that do not need external resources to be operational.

Re:Time for passive cooling systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Cooling systems is not just "cooling". It's an integral part of the generation system.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/PressurizedWaterReactor.gif

See? The red loop. That's the cooling system. Without it there's no steam to move the turbines.

Re:Time for passive cooling systems

[Malc]

Don't Candu or pebble bed reactors feature better passive safety?

Re:Time for passive cooling systems

[Magada]

No. Not really.

If you drain a CANDU, the rods melt, the pool of molten uranium or MOX goes critical all over again and you're still fucked, as the containment simply ignites/melts at those temps.

The pebbles in a pebble bed reactor are ceramic-covered graphite - if you somehow lose the helium (some proposed designs have no containment vessel) and the graphite ignites, you get Chernobyl all over again. Dust from all those pebbles rubbing together is an issue, cracking of the ceramic outer layer under thermal stress is an issue. Lack of experience in operating such reactors is an even greater issue.

Re:Time for passive cooling systems

[Sabriel]

What about something like the EBR-II design? Does it have a catastrophic failure mode? (or some other economy/engineering reason we never built them commercially?)

Re:Time for passive cooling systems

[Magada]

"Experimental" should tell you a lot about how safe that is. Molten sodium is absolutely scary stuff to work with - it eats through steel or concrete, goes boom when exposed to water...

Any reactor design that requires active cooling is unsafe. Otoh, I am not convinced by the experiments in "shutting down" (i.e. stopping the fission in) these reactors and allowing convection cooling to take over for a while. What if a secondary coolant pipe ruptures?

My bet for the near future is on the Russian lead-bismuth design. Not very efficient (thermally) but with a lot fewer reliability problems due to lower temps involved and chemically-safe primary coolant.

Both, unfortunately, have a positive void coefficient. Scary, in itself, but a bit less scary for lead-bismuth.

Thousands dead from quake+tsunami, not reactor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Could the OP please amend the text so that it doesn't read like the reactor problems have already resulted in thousands of deaths? I'm worried that the reactor may indeed cause many deaths in the future, but I'd prefer not to have the article prematurely (and I hope inadvertently) villainizing nuclear power.

NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[melstav]

All of those people who died were killed by the tsunami or the quake. Okay, technically, there have been a VERY SMALL (like on the order of a few dozen) number of injuries and a few fatalities directly related to the reactors. But those were all among people who were actually *working in* the power plants.

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[Synn]

Well, actually I'd put any death's caused by lack of power related to the plants being down as deaths "caused" by the reactor. Solar installs on roof tops wouldn't have this issue, most likely. Though with them you'd have quite a few deaths from the solar installation itself.

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except there haven't been any fatalities related to the reactors. At all. Injuries, yes.

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[slim]

I thought I read that a worker had been crushed to death by a crane, while working on the nuclear plant damage.

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[loshwomp]

Well, actually I'd put any death's caused by lack of power related to the plants being down as deaths "caused" by the reactor. Solar installs on roof tops wouldn't have this issue, most likely.

Please don't misread me--I'm a big fan of rooftop solar--but it would most definitely shut down, just as designed, when the grid goes down. Distributed rooftop solar is great for the grid, but it's not backup power.

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[quacking duck]

Deaths by hypothermia resulting from lack of power is not "caused" by the dam or coal generator system going offline. If the dam burst and flooded a town, or the coal plant exploded and chunks of plant crushed people, *that* is caused by the dam or coal system.

In the same vein you can say hypothermia deaths may have been caused by the reactor shutdown leaving people without power and heat, but implying (by omission) that the reactor itself caused these deaths is irresponsible sensationalism.

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[Anonymous Coward]

a worker crushed to death by [a shoplifter], while working on [my order].

So, am I a murderer now?

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[fireylord]

Well, actually I'd put any death's caused by lack of power related to the plants being down as deaths "caused" by the reactor.

As opposed to putting them down to the fact that the Tsunami washed away the power lines to/from the reactor connecting it to the grid that the consumers would be linked to? :)

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[marcosdumay]

And that is the main reason why all that is interesting. Those reactors are quite old and unsafe (by today standards), they were hit by one of the biggest quakes ever measured, and submerged after that. Yet, just a few died from an hydrogen explosion, and the radiation level looks quite workeable. It seems that safe reactors should be quite safe indeed.

Ok, but I'm still waiting for the truthfull assessment of the situation after everybody calms down.

Re:NOBODY has died because of the reactor!

[tehcyder]

Ok, but I'm still waiting for the truthfull assessment of the situation after everybody calms down.

Look, if it ends up that there's an insignificant release of radiation and no one even gets a bit sick from it, great. But this is a continuing story, you can't pretend that it's just all hunky dory apart from the media making a fuss about it.

NOT third explosion?

[unwesen]

Google translate suggests that this is not, in fact, a third explosion, but an explosion at the third reactor core. Which I've seen on the news a few hours ago. So it's the second explosion. Could anyone with better understanding of Japanese confirm?

Re:NOT third explosion?

[unwesen]

Ah, right, people already caught that :D

Re:NOT third explosion?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Japanese, the word "san ban" can be translated either as "third" or "number three". The proximity of the term "san ban" to the word for reactor clarifies that it is "reactor number three" and not a "third reactor explosion".

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[A beautiful mind]

As far as I understand it, there are three things to fix:

- Use a modern design, not one from the 1970s, so that a meltdown is avoided by physics and not engineering

- Build bigger tsunami barriers, to cope with the once in a hundred years of flooding.

- Do not place backup generators on low ground.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[DrXym]

Nuclear needs to be promoted but it has to be with a plan for sustainable energy too. Every energy source has it's pros & cons (Japan demonstrates the major con of nuclear), but renewables aren't the solution by themselves either.

What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[seyyah]

I frankly know little about nuclear power so I am not for or against it. Of course the knee-jerk reactions both in the media -- and on Slashdot -- is not much of a surprise.

What I take out of the whole thing is that nuclear power is quite safe, and yet look at the problems that are being encountered. To a lot of people, it is going to look like you just can trust the people entrusted with maintaining nuclear power plants to a certain code of safety. Questions like 'why were the generators not better protected again the same disaster which would shutdown the reactors?' are legitimate.

Additionally, it seems that they were fortunate in that half of the plant was actually not operational. How much would the cooling efforts have been hampered if they would have had to concentrate on working on all six reactors rather than just three?

Let's face it the concern over anything nuclear stems from the relatively recent (less than 70 years) arrival of the technology in the public's mind. And for most of that time it has been associated with its destructive effects in the form of nuclear bombs. Coal, dams and the like obviously look benign in comparison.

Throw in the mismanagement at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and people are afraid. It's too easy to say that 'nowadays nuclear power is safer' when it is still human error and poor planning which can lead to accidents.

Re:What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[Compaqt]

I think the reason people (including those who were beginning to lean in favor of nuclear) are trepidatious of nuclear is because of what could happen in a worst case scenario. This doesn't even come close to a worst-case scenario for for solar (broken PV panels?, leaked salt?), or even a coal plant.

Re:What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[loshwomp]

This doesn't even come close to a worst-case scenario for for solar (broken PV panels?, leaked salt?), or even a coal plant.

The worst case for a coal plant is pretty much the same as the average case: They spew radioactive material (and mercury, and of course CO2) into the air 24x7x365.

And of course you know this, but solar is not presently anywhere near a viable replacement for base load generation, so the comparison isn't a useful one.

Re:What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[Compaqt]

True on the radioactive release for coal: but it's sort of like the reason people prefer small payments vs. one big upfront payment. A bit of radioactivity (from coal, the ground, space) seems better than one huge possible (though improbable) disaster.

Solar- yeah, it's not there yet for replacing traditional methods. Hopefully it will be. That huge nuclear power plant in the middle of the solar system seems such a waste.

Re:What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[Solandri]

This doesn't even come close to a worst-case scenario for for solar (broken PV panels?, leaked salt?), or even a coal plant.

The problem is, the worst-case scenario doesn't define the statistical average. By definition it's an outlier. The long-term statistical averages for the other technologies are much, much worse than nuclear. Solar is about 10x deadlier than nuclear in comparison. Roofing is one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S, with over 100 roofers per year killed from simply falling off. If rooftop solar panels become commonplace, you're probably looking at 100 additional roofer deaths per year from installation and maintenance deaths.

Coal is an absolute carnage in comparison to nucleear. Pollution from coal plants is estimated to kill 30,000 Americans each year. The WHO estimated Chernobyl will cause 4000 long-term cancer deaths, so we have 7.5 Chernobyls happening every year in our country due to our coal plants. But this bothers no one, and instead everyone is all worried about commercial nuclear power (which has never killed anyone in the U.S.).

This is just like planes are safer than cars, yet people fear plane crashes. Or white collar crime causes more economic damage than bank robbery, but sentences for bank robbers are harsher. The concentrated damage gets extra scrutiny, while the distributed damage gets overlooked. It's people's poor risk assessment and management which is killing nuclear.

Re:What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[Darinbob]

If you look at it though, this nuclear power plant has performed better than expected. No one expected this level of quake, and yet it survived that quake intact. The real problems started with the tsunami which was also much more massive than anyone expected. Even then there are backup plans, and backups to the backup plans, and they're being implemented. Assuming the reactor is built correctly and the safety standards are as expected, which so far no evidence shows to the contrary.

Consider the worst possible scenario. No power or backup power or cooling water. Core melts but is contained and public is safe. What the engineers are trying to do now is to not have this worst case scenario. The explosions were not from the core, but from venting the steam to reduce pressure and that venting was probably not done in the best way. Unfortunately the explosions send the wrong signals to the public, it makes them put "explosion" and "nuclear" in the same sentence and get an inaccurate impression, and it makes them think that the engineers have lost control of the situation.

This disaster will have less health effects on the public overall than a coal powered plant will have.

Re:What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one expected this kind of level of quake? Really? This is Japan we are talking about! This is the east-coast of Japan we are talking about! This is where a huge fault line runs! This is were an 8.4M earthquake hit before! And no one was expecting a big quake? Really? Well, now I'm relieved! These are the same people working to prevent a disaster? The same people who designed the emergency equipment which fails to work under an emergency?

For some reason, this kind of thinking reminds me of the Challenger disaster, where some manager rated a component that had been broken 1/3 of the way through as having a safety-factor of 3...

But really, the problem with the nuclear plant is not even with the quake itself but with the (surely to follow) tsunami, which somehow managed to wreck all cooling equipment, including the emergency units!

Your worst-case scenario is simpy anything but worst-case! If the cores really melt (which is a real risk, at least at reactor 2 which has only one pump (more like a firehose) out of five working and where the core has already been bereft of cooling for several hours), it will be bloody fortunate if the containment will hold! Experts (other people than the non-expert author of the widely cited article) have pretty bleak outlook on the possibility of the containing a full meltdown...

I mean seriously, people are dying at the plant (by the explosions and other things) trying to prevent a meltdown, why risk their lives if the worst that could happen is a containment? In fact, why vent out radioactive gas? Not only is it not healthy but the hydrogen explosions are surely not good for the containment (or the spent-fuel). In fact, the explosion at reactor #3 is what's said to have damaged the pumps at reactor #2...
The plant is in bad shape and the situation is serious, mostly due to mucked up design, and especially in the back-up systems

Re:What if all six reactors had been functioning?

[Anonymous Coward]

solar panels are not just grown in green fields of pure joy. PV panels are created through traditional semiconductor production processes which are not all that clean and fun.

This headline and summary are completely wrong!

[onlysolution]

I live in Japan and have been following this news all day. The info in the headline and summary about the the reactors is complete incorrect. As to what has actually been happening:

First, the linked article is from 7 hours ago and is referring to the second explosion at Fukushima Daiichi of Reactor #3. The current situation as of 8PM Japan time was that the cooling system of Reactor #2 finally died and they just recently started filling it with seawater like the other reactors. This reactor is likely to cause another hydrogen explosion like the other two failed reactors before it. Also like the other reactors, this one may have suffered from some partial melting of its fuel rods.

Secondly, the article implies that thousands have died as a result of the problems at the Fukushima reactors. THIS IS NOT THE CASE! There have been reports of non-serious injuries and VERY mild radiation contamination but nothing that warrants any kind of panic yet.

Slashdot editors, please rewrite or delete this article, it is just spreading misinformation!

Re:This headline and summary are completely wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot editors, please rewrite or delete this article, it is just spreading misinformation!

Yeah right!

Re:This headline and summary are completely wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

All this communication and information technology, especially with a "connected" Japan. And we're still arguing about the accuracy of it [the news] on /. (a high tech website).

IMO, the Internet has helped in connecting people, but has failed on providing the basic facts and *reporting* we can all agree on (and trust).

Re:This headline and summary are completely wrong!

[Darinbob]

Since when have slashdot editors cared about accuracy or truth or anything nerdy like that?

Enough already?

[Hartree]

So, let's see. So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.

And thus far no significant release of radioactivity.

And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?

What do you want? The North Koreans hitting it with bunker busters? A meteor strike?

Godzilla and the smog monster duking it out on the grounds?

Re:Enough already?

[slim]

So, let's see. So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.

One thing you can take from that is, whatever scale of disaster you plan for, nature (or potentially mankind) can go one better. Build your nuclear plants to withstand a 7.9 and along comes an 8.9 accompanied by massive flooding. Build a bomb proof pair of skyscrapers, and lo, someone flies passenger airliners into them. I can't predict any better than you what the next surprise will be.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 most awesome comment ever.

Re:Enough already?

[MrLogic17]

MOD PARENT UP.

Put a 9.0 quake & tsunami under *any* coal, solar, wind, or magic unicorn power plant, and see how well it performs.

All in all, I'd say this shows just how safe 40 year old nuke plants are.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Build for a 7.9 when the nation gets 8.5s approximately once a decade.

That's a screw-up waiting to happen, and I'd be interested to see how the design event was decided upon.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Build a bomb proof pair of skyscrapers, and lo, someone flies passenger airliners into them."

But this is opposite of his point. His point is that the towers *didn't* fall... In other words, the reactors survived an 8.9 earthquake, beyond what they were built for, and still haven't released dangerous levels of radiation (haven't failed catastrophically).

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, those 5000 hulls were not enough to keep the dark matter oil inside. Why didn't they build it with 5001 hulls?

Re:Enough already?

[thePig]

If it is over water, it will make a big splash.
If it is over land, it will make a crumbling sound.
It might completely fail - but it will not cause radioactive contamination of the surrounding area for the next year or more.
It will not cause cancer in the surrounding cities (including tokyo) just because wind blew wrong.

I was a neutral on the nuclear energy till two days back - now, I am having a rethink - it is far too dangerous for the advantages it offers.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Under these conditions wind power can be dangerous too... Godzilla might use them as throwing stars while battling Mothra.

On a serious side I have to agree though, it's remarkable these plants have survived as well as they have. You can't plan in advance for the day your continent cracks in half.

Re:Enough already?

[slim]

Or, knowing the dangers, wouldn't it have been wiser to stop pissing about with dark matter in the first place?

(I didn't know dark matter was so dangerous; I've got some in my cellar; should I get rid of it?)

Re:Enough already?

[dr_tube]

Except in this case (despite the fact that the plants endured the quake rather well, considering) "design for 7.9" seems pretty non-conservative. Seems like a textbook example of a Fat Tail risk-assessment fallacy.

Re:Enough already?

[slim]

Sure, I didn't intend just say "me too". We should definitely congratulate the designers on building in tolerances greater than they were asked to.

But I'm not to clear to what extent we got lucky. The screw up with the backup power connectivity shows that everything wasn't perfect. How would the plant have coped with a 9.5 magnitude quake? Way beyond what you'd expect, perhaps, but so was the 8.9. The plant seems to need a lot of human attention. What if there were some complication that precluded people from going there (some kind of chemical/bacteriological threat) ?

Re:Enough already?

[TheDarkMaster]

The best comment I read on this article.

Re:Enough already?

[tist]

So, let's see: 8.9 Richter earthquake, 23 foot tsunami, cooling system failures, and massive hydrogen explosions are hard to deny. Radiation leaks or releases on the other hand... I'll wait and see just what gets reported in the coming months.

Re:Enough already?

[nedlohs]

So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.),

The richter is base-10 logarithmic, but it is measuring amplitude. However, the destructive power of an earthquake is related to the energy released more than the amplitude, and the energy released is a function of the 3/2 power of the amplitude.

Hence a 1 point increase is actually 10^3/2 or about 32 times as powerful.

Re:Enough already?

[charon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash#Environmental_problems

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Maybe we should just shut everything off and go hide in caves forever.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they endured an earthquake "10 times what they are designed for". Win! But over a 50-year operational period, what are the odds of experiencing an earthquake of 8.9? Depressingly high, even though these events are very rare. The question is why weren't they designed to handle an 8.9?

Secondly, these are reactors located along one of the most tsunami-prone parts of the world, and where the word "tsunami" originated. Why the hell weren't the backup generators and switchyard located in such a way that they would be highly unlikely to be taken out by a tsunami, or at the least that they would be robust enough to be promptly repaired and reconnected after? Why wasn't there a stock of compatible diesel generators waiting up on the hill to be moved into position, just in case?

There are positive and negative ways to look at the design accomplishments of this reactor system. You're right -- I'd rate the engineering of the reactors themselves as "A" given what they've endured with minimal radiation release. I would rate the engineering assessment of the natural hazards that these reactors could realistically experience over an ~50-year lifespan at this location and the backup system design as "F". Overall mark: "B".

Given that the event isn't over with yet (meltdown still possible at reactor #2), that could drop to a "C" or "F".

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, let's see. So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.

And thus far no significant release of radioactivity. **

And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?

What do you want? The North Koreans hitting it with bunker busters? A meteor strike?

Godzilla and the smog monster duking it out on the grounds?

** Can you please cite the source of your information? Preferablly an independent 3rd party. Not that I'm suggesting the nuclear scientists, or even the government would lie, or anything like that. You know? I'm just saying.

Re:Enough already?

[loshwomp]

So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9.

The Richter scale is pretty much obsolete, and you have the base wrong; a 1.0 difference in magnitude is more like a ~32x difference in energy.

Re:Enough already?

[loshwomp]

It will not cause cancer in the surrounding cities (including tokyo) just because wind blew wrong.

You do know that coal plants emit more radioactive material into the air than nuclear plants ever will, right? They do this 24x7x365. Please don't fall prey to the monsters under the bed--nuclear is astoundingly safe by almost any rational measure.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Godzilla and the smog monster duking it out on the grounds?

Don't be absurd. Godzilla appears as a RESULT of nuclear disasters, it is not the cause.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

thought they were designed for 8.3?

Re:Enough already?

[danlip]

The largest earthquake ever recorded was 9.5 in 1960 in Chile. The Japan quake was only the 5th largest. Any nuke plant built after 1960 should have been designed to withstand at least a 9.5, especially in a place like Japan. Designing for 7.9 is accepting an inevitable disaster.

Re:Enough already?

[gman003]

I can't predict any better than you what the next surprise will be.

Oh, but it's fun to make wild-ass predictions. I'd put my money on volcanoes, but that's an obvious bet right now. And I'd bet on some nice armed revolutions in first-world countries, but that wouldn't really be a "disaster". All-in-all, I'm going to bet on a massive solar flare that takes out most power/comm lines, along the lines of the Carrington Event. It would be somewhat unexpected (solar activity is abnormally low lately), but "a calm before the storm" is rather common in natural disasters, so there's some vague logic to it.

Re:Enough already?

[gman003]

You don't design for the largest possible, you design for the largest likely. An average nuke plant has a designed lifespan of ~50 years; designing it to withstand a thousand-year event is overkill.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zoidberg: "All 6000 hulls have been breached!"

Fry: "Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6000 and one hulls! When will they learn?!?

Re:Enough already?

[The End Of Days]

You should either a) base your rethink on facts or b) call it something else, like a fantasy fear injection.

Re:Enough already?

[Hartree]

From the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703555404576195700301455480.html

"Tepco's last safety test of nuclear power plant Number 1--one that is currently in danger of meltdown--was done at a seismic magnitude the company considered the highest possible, but in fact turned out to be lower than Friday's quake. The information comes from the company's "Fukushima No. 1 and No. 2 Updated Safety Measures" documents written in Japanese in 2010 and 2009. The documents were reviewed by Dow Jones. The company said in the documents that 7.9 was the highest magnitude for which they tested the safety for their No. 1 and No. 2 nuclear power plants in Fukushima".

I agree that Tepco isn't a third party, but this was their own filing on a safety issue before this happened. If they were distorting, you'd expect them to say it would take a greater quake, not lesser.

WSJ is just one source that mentions several of the things I said including mentioning the RCIC. The failures of the power and RCIC backup cooling systems have been in mutiple places in the news as well as Tepco's own reporting on their (highly slashdotted) site.

The height of the tsunami was from memory of CNN reporting a couple of days ago. That might be criticized as not being accurate, but if you look at the before and after pics of the plant waterfront area it went over some pretty high seawalls regardless.

Godzilla and the Smog Monster: Toho Film Company, 1972. ;)

Re:Enough already?

[Hartree]

Mea Culpa on the magnitude, but the error is in a direction that underscores the point I was making.

For more accurate comparison you'd need the ground shake data from where the plant is. That would allow for the distance and the vagaries of the geology the waves went through.

Richter scale is what's still largely reported via news and what most people have a grasp on.

Re:Enough already?

[danlip]

Except quakes > 7.9 are not 1000 year events. There have been dozens in the last 50 years. At any given highly active location (like Japan) the chance of one in 50 years is pretty high.

Re:Enough already?

[jbengt]

So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.
. . .
And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?

What do you want?

Switchgear not located in the basement.
And, preferably, emergency generators and switchgear located well above the height of the worst-case tsunami of the past.
(by the way, an 8.9 on the Richter scale is about 32 times as powerful as a 7.9 - and also more destructive the longer it lasts - since the amplitude is 10 times greater and the power is approximately proportional to the 1.5 power of the amplitude.)

Re:Enough already?

[data2]

One small correction: While the Richter scale is logarithmic with the base 10, this is just for the amplitude. The energy released is somewhat over 30 times more for each +1 on the Richter scale.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Build your nuclear plants to withstand a 7.9 and along comes an 8.9 accompanied by massive flooding.

And thus far no significant release of radioactivity.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, both nuclear plants survived the earthquake just fine, automatically shutting down as they were supposed to. No leakage. No buildings falling down, no stuck control rods, no nothing. It was the big tsunami that screwed things up, taking out backup infrastructure.

The hydrogen explosion in reactor 1 was related to an aftershock during a delicate operation (One big enough to be called an earthquake anywhere else in the world)

Now, you might make a point that they should've designed for a tsunami too, given their coastal location, but that's just hindsight talking.

Re:Enough already?

[Slayer]

So, let's see. So far these plants have endured an earthquake 10 times what they were designed for (8.9 Richter earthquake. Design was for 7.9. Modulo distance/ground transmission from epicenter.), a 23 foot tsunami that took out backup generators and the switchyard taking out all but battery power, failures of the RCIC backup cooling system, and 2 massive hydrogen explosions that took out the buildings around the containments.

And thus far no significant release of radioactivity.

How many people do you need to suffer from radiation exposure before YOU call it significant?

And we've got people saying the plants are fragile and unsafe?

Look at the whole story. It started with earthquake and tsunami, but now it's just a series of technical defects and human inability. All kinds of valves and gauges have been reported failing to the point where they have seemingly no idea whether block 2 was flooded or not. Spare generators were brought but couldn't be hooked up. While 5 out of 6 backup coolant pumps were shut down, the sixth ran out of fuel. Sea water reservoirs ran dry.

Folks, this is the nuclear industry working for you in front of everyone and I don't like what I see here one bit.

Re:Enough already?

[Talderas]

The earthquake didn't cause the problems. The backup generators and coolant pump systems were functioning perfectly fine after the quake hit. I say that's rather robust. It wasn't until the tsunami came along and took out the backup generators that the shit started to hit the fan.

And to pre-empt any argument that they should have planned for such a large earthquake causing a tsunami. Tsunami size and earthquake magnitude are not directly linked. A smaller magnitude quake could have caused just as bad a tsunami and the same magnitude quake could cause a lesser tsunami.

This incident is a combination of two disasters.

Re:Enough already?

[GodfatherofSoul]

No significant leaks??? Keep following the news my friend. We're getting press releases, not facts. The circumstantial evidence can't hide the truth of the situation:

"Seventeen U.S. military personnel involved in helicopter relief missions were found to have been exposed to low levels of radiation upon returning to the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier about 100 miles (160 kilometers) offshore.

U.S. officials said the exposure level was roughly equal to one month's normal exposure to natural background radiation in the environment, and after scrubbing with soap and water, the 17 were declared contamination-free."

Re:Enough already?

[owlstead]

Yeah, it's just one of those odd one in a billion events that unfortunately happened within 70 years since the first reactor was build.

Re:Enough already?

[Hartree]

And what do you have to show it's a major release other than hearsay, innuendo and supposition?

Certainly what you cited wasn't a significant exposure. Reread what you just wrote. 1 month's normal exposure. Guess you never get any x-rays or fly long distances. And it wasn't 100 miles out, but an aircraft that flew close and they just barely picked it up on their monitors. And that's in a Navy that takes the slightest exposure incredibly seriously.

Re:Enough already?

[Serious Callers Only]

As an example, the two most vulnerable fission plants in the US are built for 7.0.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/14/earlyshow/main20042815.shtml

They're also near a large fault, and potentially subject to larger quakes.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it can happen doesn't mean it will happen. Everything is designed for probability, typically 1 in 10 years or 1 in 100 years. To assume that it happened once and will therefore happen always is foolish, and to design for such is a waste of money. Look at it this way, if you were correct, every structure would be designed to survive a flood lasting 40 days, because and all zoos would be required to have emergency arks.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Designing for 7.9 isn't accepting an inevitable disaster, considering that earthquakes that strong are quite rare. You have to balance between economy of design and construction and the likelihood of an event. And remember, the remaining reactors, 4-6 haven't had the problems currently being faced. If anything, you should be impressed at the engineering quality, that reactors designed for an earthquake a tenth as strong as what was encountered held up as well as they have. You simply cannot design anything to be indestructible.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you want?

Godzilla and the smog monster duking it out on the grounds?

Well yeah, actually, I would kind of like to see that.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

The largest earthquake ever recorded was 9.5 in 1960 in Chile. The Japan quake was only the 5th largest. Any nuke plant built after 1960 should have been designed to withstand at least a 9.5, especially in a place like Japan. Designing for 7.9 is accepting an inevitable disaster.

Engineers and governments have to make cost decisions on what they want to protect their infrastructure for. For instance, let's just say for argument that protecting this power plant for an 8.9 Richter earthquake would cost them twice what it would cost to protect against an 8.2 Richter earthquake like it was designed for -- and 8.9 is SEVEN times bigger than 8.2 since the Richter scale is logarithmic. Now imagine that this event never happened, yet you the taxpayer have to pay just DOUBLE the mount that the power plant would have cost if it were designed for an 8.2 earthquake. Now imagine that you're given actuary tables of the probability of an earthquake of 8.9 Richter and you find out just how rare an event this is.

Wouldn't you whine at the cost? Wouldn't you hate having to pay double the mount for the power you got from it? And that's just assuming that this is going to cost 2 times as much to protect against an earthquake 7 times as big.

What you've done here is stake the worst possible event in Chile and made it an expectation for Japan. The truth of the matter is that we can't assume that every location is going to have the very worst that any other place has ever had. What's the chance of a 9.5 Richter earthquake in the middle of Texas? I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do.

But hey -- with most of the world (including Japan) being in massive debt and trying to cut corners every place they can, best of luck with your plan to mandate 9.5 Richter earthquake proof building structures. Let me know how that works out for ya.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

But a Richter 8.9 earthquake in Japan isn't really a "surprise", it's a freaking geological inevitability. A tsunami along the east coast of Japan due to such an earthquake also isn't a surprise, it's a natural consequence. The only thing that is a "surprise" here is the exact date that such an event would occur -- i.e. *when* not *if* it would occur. Look, any geologist working with earthquakes will tell you that they can't predict when an 8.9 earthquake will occur, but in terms of telling you where they could occur and how frequently based on historical patterns, they'll have good data. That's why this isn't a surprise in terms of the magnitude or location of the event. This event happened deep beneath Japan along a subduction zone that's been active for eons and that has affected Japan for all of recorded history. It's not a "surprise".

It's kind of like being "surprised" to learn that when two cars collided in opposite directions along a fast highway, they were crushed. No, that's not a surprise, that's basic physics and a feature of cars driving on a highway at high speeds in opposite directions without a barrier between them. That a *particular* accident occurred at a particular moment, yes, that detail of timing and precise location is a surprise, but the engineers that design cars certainly manufacture them to help people survive a rare event like that, because they know it will happen eventually to someone.

Nuclear engineering isn't supposed to be a game of cards where you can hope that over the ~50-year lifetime of the plant that "the big one" in a seismically-active area won't happen to occur. You're supposed to engineer for the worst expected conditions that could realistically occur to some statistically very unlikely limit. I find it hard to believe that over 50 years the odds of a >8 magnitude event on the east coast of Japan wasn't statistically likely enough to engineer for it, and it's even harder to understand why there is no indication they planned for the effects of a tsunami. It's perplexing.

You're right that you can't engineer for everything, but this isn't some kind of "out of the blue" freak event. It's Japan, where major earthquakes are part of its history and where the word "tsunami" originated. This is an engineering failure, because the engineers did not realistically assess the natural risks in the environment where they were going to be operating.

All I can say is: thank goodness for the safety factors that are so far maintaining containment.

Re:Enough already?

[lazy genes]

If any one of these reactors blow it will be equal to releasing 100 Godzilla.

Re:Enough already?

[Darinbob]

As mentioned in the other article, you come up with the worst case scenario you can think of, and then design for something that will be worse. And these seems to have been done in this case. There were probably some non-engineers out there at the time who thought this plant was over-engineered.

This plant survived the earthquake intact! This idea that it was built only to withstand 7.9 is silly. It was probably built to withstand that without any damage and keep operating later. But it was also designed to mitigate and contain far worse disasters, and to be prepared for something unplanned and unpredictable. And it is indeed managing this; we do not have a meltdown and we do not have large leaks of radiation.

Re:Enough already?

[Darinbob]

If this plant completely fails, it will not cause radioactive contamination of the surrounding area. It has already failed, the nuclear fuel has been cooling since the first minute of the earthquake and is entirely contained. There will be far less effects on health from this disaster than a perfectly working coal fired plant will cause.

And I'm not pro-nuke, I'm still somewhat neutral on it.

Re:Enough already?

[Darinbob]

And still after all this, the worst that happens is that the plant is shut down sooner than was expected (it's already unrecoverable). We have worse disasters and worse health effects from gas and coal plants.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

inevitability implies infinite time

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

More Slashdot idiocy. "Build a bomb proof pair of skyscrapers, and lo, someone flies passenger airliners into them."

I think you'll find that WTC 1 and 2 were specifically designed to be able to survive the impact of an airliner crashing into them...

It's just that some of the architects have now re-negged on that and are pretending that they never said it, all those years ago... even though it's been well documented.

Try watching www.thepentacon.com

Re:Enough already?

[Hartree]

In 1998 they released Godzilla in thousands of locations. Save for maybe a heart attack or two in the theater there weren't any fatalities.

Blow? They already had a massive explosion around two of them and no release.

More seriously, I just don't see it. Chernobyl was about as bad as it gets from a nuke plant and this type of plant won't release nearly that much mobile contamination as it doesn't have a flammable moderator like that one did.

Sure, you can make suppositions that lead to Armageddon in a soup can just waiting for a can opener, but they are pretty tenuous.

These have taken all of the worst case scenarios that we were assured would cause complete failure and they haven't done so yet.

Those opposed to nuke power want those in favor to question their assumptions in the light of new data. When do they revisit their own assumptions that predicted far worse than actually happened?

Standard = double.

Re:Enough already?

[Hartree]

All those human failures and goofs you see and it STILL didn't leak? (See, I can use caps too.)

As to significant, I'd call it that when we have amounts that have had health effects that show up in actual statistics rather than the linear no threshold model that keeps being used as the gold standard when it's known to be flawed.

We've had a fair bit of actual exposure to radiation that doesn't show the dire consequences of the linear no threshold model, but it doesn't make any difference to the critics. A wonderful example of theory trumping experiment. Popper must be turning in his grave.

Radiation can be dangerous. Exposure can cause cancer long down the road. And too much will kill you dead. But that can be said of a lot of exposures.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, the system was fine with the 9.0 earthquake. The problem they are having if you bothered to pay attention is with the WATER that got into the generators.

Re:Enough already?

[Burning1]

No. You would not have to design the reactor to survive, or even be repairable after a 9.5. You would simply have to design the reactor so that it would not leak massive amounts of radiation after such a quake. There's always a cost vs. reward balance that must be met. If the cost of building the reactor to withstand such a great quake is greater than simply cleaning up and rebuilding the reactor, hardening it to that point really doesn't make sense.

Obviously, loss of life and PR concerns have a huge influence on the cost/benefit ratio, but in terms of physical impact, what's happening in Fukushima is in the league of a 3 mile island event, rather than a Chernobyl event.

Obligatory car reference:

We could design a car to survive and be drivable after hitting a tree at 100 miles per hour, however such a car would not be practical for day to day use. That's fine, because 100 mile per hour accidents are not a typical accident scenario for a passenger car. So long as the car doesn't kill everyone in the vicinity in such a crash*, we're okay.

* Which is more or less what killed the Ford Nucleon...

Re:Enough already?

[danlip]

I'm really saying the same thing. By "withstand" I merely meant "not leak massive amount of radiation". And I agree that the Japanese reactors haven't done that yet ... but just barely, and only because of a herculean effort and a bit of luck, and it is still too soon to tell that they won't. It does not seem the design was sufficient to avoid meltdown in the face of this disaster.

Re:Enough already?

[danlip]

They may not be directly linked, but both are common in Japan - common meaning if you build a bunch of reactors all over Japan you would expect at least one of them to get hit by each of these phenomenon in 50 year lifespan - so they should be designed to not meltdown when it happens.

Re:Enough already?

[Burning1]

IMO, a meltdown is an acceptable outcome in this kind of disaster. A meltdown does not imply a massive radiation leak.

Personally, I take events like this as a sign of the inherent safety of these systems. The only real problem here is the fact that people are scared of nuclear power, apparently far more so than they are scared of earthquakes and tsunamis...

Re:Enough already?

[danlip]

Can a meltdown be contained? TMI was a partial meltdown. The only full meltdown I know of was Chernobyl. It seems that critical molten uranium is eventually going to burn through the floor and eventually hit groundwater.

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

what happens to a solar power station during an earthquake and tsunami?

worst case. . .

Re:Enough already?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I am trying to be a dick, but perhaps I should restate my point.

I don't think there is a quick answer to how good/bad the situation is, and I think it will take six months to a year for that determination to be made. Even the magnitude of the earthquake that started all of this could not be immediately assessed with any great degree of accuracy; we saw how the original estimates were low on the scale.

Not only do we have to consider how forthright Japanese officials are, but we also have to consider how over-reactionary the U.S. is. Past history has demonstrated cover-up attempts. It seems we should err on the side of caution.

The truth will eventually come out.

Here we go again.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Cue irrational fear of nuclear reactors from the general public.

What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

Tree hugging hippies?

No.

Hysterical, science illiterate journalism?

No.

The greatest enemy of nuclear power is 1960s era nuclear plant technology. It is an active safety model, rather than a passive safety model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Safety

The future of nuclear power, if there is any, is something like a pebble bed reactor, which is passively safe: all of the support equipment, all of the nuclear plant personnel: it can all fail and they can all leave, and nothing bad will happen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

The DESIGN PHILOSOPHY of 1960s era nuclear power is what is killing nuclear power as a viable alternative in this world. Yes, people react in fear and panic and hysteria. So? Did you honestly expect any other reaction possible amongst the general populace, ever? Panic and hysteria is a CONSTANT of humanity. Their impression of nuclear power has been, uh, contaminated, and that's just simple human psychology, there's no getting around that.

So I blame one group here: 1960s, 1950s era nuclear engineers. It is their fault why nuclear power is becoming politically unacceptable. They designed plants that needed to be actively safe. THAT is the real reason we are having problems in Japan now, why we had problems at 3 mile island, why we had problems at Chernobyl: someone has to be there, certain equipment has to work, or there will be trouble. BAD DESIGN. It's just a matter of time before operator error or a geological/ meteorological event causes the active safety system to fail. Nuclear engineers of the '50s and '60s honestly should have foreseen that. Nuclear plants, from the beginning, should have been designed that should something bad happen, the system just naturally gravitates to a harmless state. But in the 1960s, they put in plants that naturally gravitate to a harmful state, and require constant effort to keep safe. Really, really bad design.

Nuclear engineers from a half century ago genuinely failed us. They genuinely fucked up, and we are paying for their shoddy design. And so is the future of nuclear power. Because we have passively safe nuclear designs like pebble bed reactors now. But we may never see them in full use, ever, because public opinion has been poisoned, maybe irreparably. You can't blame the common man for that. He cannot shrug and forget being irradiated. But nuclear engineers, they should have known, they should designed better systems. It is their fault.
 

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[DeltaQH]

You forget CANDU

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

that I did, an oversight. CANDU is also passively safe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

as an aside, both CANDU and pebble beds still have potential problems and weaknesses. nuclear power is inherently dangerous. so what i call upon the nuclear engineers of the world is to improve on CANDU and pebble bed designs: make nuclear reactor design as passively safe as possible.wWe can't afford for you not to. we can't afford radiation leaks and melt downs. As a simple matter of not polluting the world and because these events really turn the public off on the idea of nuclear power. we need nuclear power, we can't rely completely yon other means (until we get fusion off the ground)

nuclear engineers of the world, step up: design a nuclear power plant as passively safe as possible

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to overlook the fact that engineers don't set the requirements or fund construction. At this point, we have much better designs already, as you've mentioned. Do you want the engineers to pay for construction of the new designs as well?

You might want to point that passion somewhere else.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

The tree hugging hippies and hysterical, science illiterate journalism is what's preventing these outdated reactors from being replaced by more modern reactors.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[KiloByte]

Shoddy design? You mean, like those poor excuses for engineers who didn't equip 1904 cars with basic safety necessities like airbags and crumple zones? How could they be so careless!

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

And your comment, sir, is as lame as it gets. For three reasons:

1) Nuclear reactors may be made safer and safer in design, but their worthwhileness is still negative, because of the waste they generate. It cannot be remediated. All chemical waste can be degraded - biologically or chemically. So even if sometimes expensive, all chemical pollution can be remediated. Nuclear pollution is irreversible. You canNOT make something non-radioactive, at least with existing technology. And the body cannot recover from ingestion of nuclear substances, no matter what the quality of medical attention.

2) No matter how safely they are built, nuclear reactors will have to be protected. Yes, if that wasn't obvious. From people, from sabotage. Any possible security lapses can be a disaster. Milligrams are enough to wipe out entire populations. And yes, unfortunately, it seems possible to smuggle radioactive substances safely (to the smuggler) and undetected. Read the wikipedia article on Alexander Litvinenko. Quoting from the article as of today: "... polonium, carried in a vial in water, can be carried in a pocket through airport screening devices without setting off any alarms", and, "once administered, the polonium creates symptoms that don't suggest poison for days, allowing time for the perpetrator to make a getaway."

3) Blaming scientists of two generations ago for doing what was then state of the art, is not just completely pointless/useless, it is inappropriate.

Humanity does not need nuclear power on earth. Period. Solar power, solar-thermal power, wind power, and any other sustainable power source is the long term solution. And for the short term, even coal and natural gas plants are safer and more worthy. And the sooner nuclear proponents pull their heads out of their butts, the better for everyone.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[slimjim8094]

Perhaps, but as you've noted there have been rather significant improvements in reactor technology. But damned if we can *build* them, or fund their research.

If you build bridges, and you've developed a really nice new bridge design (based on stone arches instead of people holding ropes at each end) - but the public blocks all bridges because the "actively safe bridge design of the bridge engineers" had the wrong design philosophy - well how are you ever going to change the perception, or get funding to improve?

You're right - the new reactors are much better and safer than the old ones. Wouldn't it be nice if we could *use* them? And the complaint is about the (relative) unsafety of the previous design, not the new design!

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

you talk as if nuclear engineers are just hired draftsmen in the employ of the pinheads who make the real mistake. completely lame, false conception of the problem on your part

when i say "nuclear engineers are to blame" i am pointing my finger at yes, that draftsman, and also the guy sitting in the CEO chair: the whole design/ engineering organization

"You might want to point that passion somewhere else."

excuse me? do you know what integrity means?

there is no such thing as political pressure that can convince a genuine engineer or construction head or plant operator with the slightest shred of personal integrity to design something deficient and put his name on that design. what cowardice. if you are a man of integrity and of your word, and your employ is in the field of engineering and design or construction and operation of something critical, and you participate in a large scale project: a bridge, a building, a computer program that runs a critical component, a nuclear power plant, etc: you are going to make damn sure that design is sound. or you're an irresponsible asshole who is in the wrong field of endeavor

if a design isn't sound, and your name is attached to it, and you play your lame ass redirect blame game, "not my fault", then you are a slug who no one should ever employ for any engineering job, ever. what you do is you stand up and say "i will not sign my name to this, this design is deficient." and if the guys in the executive suite doesn't listen to you, you stand up, you leave, and you blow a whistle. because the guy who goes "oh well, that's shoddy design, but not my problem": you are a coward and a blockhead and you are a man of zero integrity. you should be tried for a white collar crime. am i pointing my passion somewhere wrong asshole? are we not talking about critical systems whose failure might result in human death or injury or the loss of millions? your attitude, you have no business designing or engineering any critical system, ever

do you know what that passion is called asshole? it's called having a simple human conscience. so why don't you try pointing your ignorance somewhere else

you stand behind your work, like a man with pride and integrity in his work. or you get a bottle of alcohol, you quit your job, and you go home and sit in front of a tv all day. because that's all you sound like you are fit for. with your scumbag attitude you have no business in the design, construction, or operation of any device, structure, or program that might impact human lives

quit now. pick another field. before you kill someone, asshole

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

those hippies and hysterical uneducated types would like nothing more than to see existing reactors shut down. and i agree with them, in the name of preserving a future for nuclear power

get rid of the old shoddy decrepit badly designed systems, before another tsunami/ chernobyl/ 3 mile island. and isn't shutting down the liabilities the first step in replacing them with nuclear power that we can rest comfortable with? give the hippies and the science illiterates what they want: by them time the old plants are ripped down, gas will be $8/ gallon, and then everyone will be screaming for energy relief. bring in the CANDU and pebble beds

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

how fast did 1904 cars go?

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

The common man can do the 15 minutes of research it takes to understand the difference between the old style reactors and newer ones, or shut the fuck up and stop having an opinion. That's what we should expect from the common man. Everyone has an opinion on nuclear reactors but only a tiny percentage have even the most basic understanding of them. The reason these plants still exist is because the massive amount of paranoia and ignorance from the public who can't be bothered to understand something so they fear it. If it weren't for that ignorance, we would not have stopped building new reactors ( and instead relying on massive quantities of coal and oil, which actually does kill people in it's mining, production and resultant pollution) and these old reactors would have been phased out in favor of newer, safer, more efficient designs a long time ago. The most dangerous design, in the most dangerous conditions, with the worst possible response, caused fewer deaths then die in automobile accidents every year. The common man is also scared of boogeymen, aliens, and monsters, I dont see why we should pay any more attention to his fear of radiation.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

the common man also doesn't want to pay $8/ gallon gasoline, which is where we are headed. so when push comes to shove, he'll look at nuclear again. when he does that, it would be nice not to have any fresh nuclear accidents on his mind. so tear down the dinosaurs. by the time you are done with that, we will be at $8/ gallon, and the common man will be getting "i love pebble beds" tattooed on his derrier

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the problem is not 50/60s nuclear engineers. They didn't know better.

The problem is that the nuclear industry failed to replace the old reactors regardless of their design problems, because they were already paid for and made money. As mostly publicly traded companies they will always try to maximize profits by taking every shortcut allowed. And that is why they would also manage to screw up a pebble bed reactor (which also has a number of problems!!!) and can't be trusted.

bye, Paul.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[KiloByte]

Enough for laws being passed to limit speeding, and to install speed bumps.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Third generation plants (the kind who's design is currently being held up in congress by idiocrats) use a passive emergency cooling system that circulates cooling water using natural convection, and it does not require electric pumps to function.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

right, and if there was a problem, someone got killed. or maybe 2 or 3 people. you cleaned up the wreckage, you buried the bodies, you moved on

but i'll tell you what: if ford made nuclear powered cars, ford better have designed them from the get go with passive safety philosophy. because there is no "oops, my bad, move on" with nuclear power. you fuck up with nuclear power, you're stuck with uninhabited areas of countryside for generations: you don't "just move on". there is no moving on. you fuck up, you're stuck with it for a long long time

so no, i'm sorry, nuclear power engineering is not like early cars, or a computer program, or a bridge, or the hindenberg... or any number of technologies where you screw up, you kill a bunch of people, you clean up the mess you move on. you don't MOVE ON with nuclear power mistakes

if you don't get that key philosophical understanding about why nuclear power is so different, stop delivering opinions on it

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

mod parent up

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[loshwomp]

right, and if there was a problem, someone got killed. or maybe 2 or 3 people. you cleaned up the wreckage, you buried the bodies, you moved on

I know this will be an affront to your gut sense of proportion, but cars kill more people than nuclear power plants ever will. We could have a Chernobyl-scale catastrophe once a year and cars would still handily claim more casualties.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

But then it gets expensive. And we don't like expensive. So we don't like safe nuclear reactors. So we don't want nuclear power.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

cars kill more people than terrorism. cars kill more people than cancer. cars kill more people than pedophiles...

blah blah blah

zzz

this refrain is the sturdiest indicator for me that i am in a conversation with an idiot. someone with no sense of proportion, compare and contrast, context... look, morons: there are dozens of other variables in play: preventability, intent, cost acceptability, trade offs, risk factors, potential size of costs, ease of pinning accountability, personal versus public decisions, financial loss versus human loss... on and on and on the other factors go. those other factors are what the fucking discussion is about, morons. yet whenever someone tries to discuss an accident, a category of cause of death, anything about human morality, some dimwitted asshole has to try to collapse the entire fucking discussion with a "yeah but cars kill more people than..."

god, i want to strangle someone whenever i hear this brain dead puerile stupidity

to me, it's right up there with "yeah but correlation is not causation..." and other really just plain low iq comments you constantly find in internet forums. completely predictable brain failure

completely predictable, hmmm... ok, here goes:

as a matter of public record here on slashdot, in case anyone else claims this recurrent phenomenon as their own old faithful source of brain fail, i'm going to now go out and claim the puerile thought process "yeah but cars kill more..."as my own godwin's law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

  "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

circletimessquare law:

"As an online discussion about causes of death grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving motor vehicle accidents, for the purpose of trying to say the cause of death is not worth examining, approaches 1."

and just in case, circletimessquare second law:

  "As an online discussion about a new scientific observation grows longer, especially involving the soft sciences, the probability of someone mentioning correlation not being causation approaches 1."

ok, there you go: i, circletimessquare, claimed these forms of logical coherence failure, right here, on pi day 2011, in a comment thread on slashdot. so you future wikipedia contributors better fucking google first before you make proper attribution. thanks

i'm seriously going to reach out through my keyboard across the internet and through the asshole's monitor and strangle the next fucking retard who responds to a comment of mine with "correlation is not causation" or "yeah but cars kill more people than..."

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

those hippies and hysterical uneducated types would like nothing more than to see existing reactors shut down.

Yes, but without the part where new ones will be built to replace them.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[loshwomp]

cars kill more people than terrorism. cars kill more people than cancer. cars kill more people than pedophiles...

True, true, and true--but offtopic. Cars vs. nuclear? You brought that up, and unless I misunderstood, you were trying to claim that cars were safer. Sure, a car accident might kill 2 or 3 people, but you forgot to mention that, on average, it happens EVERY HOUR in the US alone.

C'mon, you don't have to be rude. You made dramatic statements about the gravity of nuclear engineering and how it's "so different". I'm just saying that here in the real world, what makes it so different is that it's safer (by orders of magnitude) than the things to which you're comparing it.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

that is true if you are dealing with someone in a longterm relationship who understands integrity and accountability

but you are dealing with a herd, a hysterical uneducated mob. therefore, there is no need to worry about what they want long term. long term, they don't exist as a cohesive entity. when gas goes to $8/ gallon, you watch how quickly Joe Q. Public changes his mind on pebble bed reactors. so tear down the dinosaurs. by the time you are done tearing down the dinosaurs, the public will be begging for relief on energy costs, and new passively safe nuclear will sound just fine

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[data2]

This might have been said in one of the many other replies to this comment, but the German pebble bed reactor was one massive fuck-up. The pebbles did not move as planned, temperatures were way higher than thought (and this was only discovered about 10 years _after_ shutting it down), and there were cracks in the foundations where pebbles got stuck due to this, all of this without being noticed. Also, some radiating leaked due to this. So inherently safe is not necessarily true, one can still screw thinks up royally.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

my paean is for passively safe reactor design. if pebble beds are not a good example of that, don't use them. they are just one example of many designs, like CANDU, of a design philosophy that must be adhered to and is missing from the 1960s era dinosaurs

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[data2]

You may certainly be right with this, and I agree with the gist of your post, although I personally favor a fully regenerative version of electricity generation with lots and lots of smaller "plants".

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read about your highly praised pebble bed reactor here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

The AVR reactor (German: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor) was a prototype pebble bed reactor at Jülich Research Centre in West Germany. Construction began in 1960, first grid connection was in 1967 and operation ceased in 1988.

It was 15MWe, 46 MWt, and was used to develop and test a wide variety of fuels and machinery over its lifetime. Its Helium outlet temperature was 950C, but fuel temperature instabilities occurred during operation with locally far to high temperatures. As a consequence the whole reactor vessel became heavily contaminated by Cs-137 and Sr-90 [1]. Concerning beta-contamination AVR is the highest contaminated nuclear installation worldwide as AVR management confirmed 2001 [2]. Some contamination was also found in soil/groundwater under the reactor, as the German government confirmed in January, 2010. Thus the reactor vessel was filled in 2008 with light concrete in order to fix the radioactive dust and in 2012 the reactor vessel of 2100 metric tons will be transported about 200 meters by air-cushion sled and seven cranes to an intermediate storage. There exists currently no dismantling method for the AVR vessel, but it is planned to develop some procedure during the next 60 years and to start with vessel dismantling at the end of the century. In the meantime, after transport of the AVR vessel into the intermediate storage, the reactor buildings will be dismantled and soil and groundwater will be decontaminated. Fuel removal out of AVR was difficult and lasted 4 years. During this procedure it became obvious that the AVR bottom reflector was broken; in its crack about 200 fuel pebbles remain captured. AVR dismantling costs will exceed its construction costs by far. AVR was the basis of the technology licensed to China to build HTR-10.

This was a test reactor for the technology in Germany. It is so heavily contaminated it is not even legally possible to store the remains within Europe or export them.

This will never work. Atomic power was a wrong way and waste of money to begin with. Divest now!

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

that makes sense, but not for cities

and i think you mean alternative forms of energy production when you mention smaller plants, but if you mean lots of small nuclear plants, this destroys nuclear security. it would become trivial for a terrorist or an idiot to contaminate an area

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

then candu

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor

the point i am making is about design philosophy: passive rather than active safety. if pebble beds don't work passively safe, then there are other examples of the design philosophy i am trying to get at

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Thank you Captain Hindsight!

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[sjames]

Don't blame the engineers. We were just figuring out what constituted a good plant design at that time. Considering the lack of experience, it seems they've done a damned good job of it too. For all of the fearmongering headlines, no plant of this design has ever lost containment or even suffered a complete meltdown (which, contrary to the brightest engineers in hollywood, does not lead to loss of containment, much less a ball of nuclear waste destroying the earth's core and such).

There certainly are better designs available now, and if the fearmongering could take a year or two off, some of the old plants would be replaced by such designs already. Oh, and we wouldn't be nearly so worried about global warming or unrest in the Middle East. We might have even been able to avoid the BP gulf disaster.

You should note that if the active cooling system fails utterly and nobody does anything at all about it, the core will melt down, fall through the bottom of the pressure vessel and into the pit at the bottom of the containment. There it will divide up into several sub-critical masses where it will slowly cool. While that isn't good, the only disaster there is financial.

The new designs are good enough that even after a SCRAM with a blackout and active system shutdown, the reactor will return to normal condition as soon as power is restored.

You can't blame the common man for that. He cannot shrug and forget being irradiated.

No common man has ever been irradiated by one of these reactors. The Soviet RMBK design is the only one that has ever irradiated a common man. Now that is a truly terrible design that would never be allowed to operate anywhere in the west. It still took an outrageously irresponsible and undertrained crew ignoring ALL of the safety precautions to make it a problem.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[owlstead]

Nuclear waste? Have you solved that already? Oh, thought so.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids these days... design philosophy of nuclear plants is "make bomb fuel". All that stuff you're whining about is only a problem if you use them to make lictricity instead. Next you'll tell us it's engineers' fault that square pegs don't fit perfectly in round holes.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tree hugging hippies?

No.

Yes, people react in fear and panic and hysteria. So? Did you honestly expect any other reaction possible amongst the general populace, ever? Panic and hysteria is a CONSTANT of humanity. Their impression of nuclear power has been, uh, contaminated, and that's just simple human psychology, there's no getting around that.

From what I've seen of the media coming out of Japan, as opposed to the media coming out of Japan being interpreted by Western media, the people aren't panicking or in hysterics.

Also, it's hard to fault people for unforeseen situations. PBR's might not have the same potential failures, but they are still present, such as the graphite layer burning if the silicon carbide shell is cracked. With further research, engineering, and construction, I'm sure we'll learn about more ways they can fail. No activity is without risk, there is nothing that cannot break.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[neonfrog]

Done.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

One only needs to read about pebble bed reactors to know that they are no panacea of safety. From my reading, the few pebble bed reactors that have run commercially suffered from accidents that released radioactivity to the outside world - while accidents involving light water reactors are extremely rare. They come with their own further problems like a larger amount of radioactive waste (that's larger physical amount, though the contamination of that waste is to a smaller extent than light water reactor waste). Nonetheless, storage of waste is a large problem due to the larger amount of waste. I suppose one must decide which dangers to accept...but to consider pebble bed reactors "safe" is far from the truth.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know how first experimental nuclear reaktor was built? enrico fermi and his team during the manhattan project built it in a unused tennis hall at chicago. the reactor consisted of wooden structure supporting blocks of uranium and carbon. the control rods were hanging from the roof with pulleys and were operated by rope. accorning to the legend reactor s.c.r.a.m stands for safety control rod axe man, that is at that reactor one man was up near the ropes with an fireman's axe and he was supposed to cut the ropes should feces hit the fan.

another story from the manhattan project is about how plutonium bomb core criticality was measured. one scientist was especially experienced at performing the experiment. to measure the point that core achieves criticality two halves of beryllium spheres were operated around the core(manually as in not even with rubber gloves). if the sphere halves had closed completely around the core the the neutron reflections would have forced the core to criticality and the experimenter and everything around him would have evapourated shortly. so the spheres would have to be kept open just about enough to measure the exact point that core starts to go critical, this was achieved using an flat screwdriver. one fateful day the screwdriver slipped and there was criticality accident, physicist quick reactions of pulling the sphere apart was enough to save them from pulverisation but the experimenter died 9 days later of radiation sickness

so i'd say we have come a long way...
also to note that onagawa nuclear station that was much closer to epicenter but has newest reactors in japan does not have significant problems
the reactors in fukushima I on the other hand are the oldest ones in japan, they are from the 70es and at the end of their lifetime. ironically reactor 1 was planned for final shutdown this month

right now the nuclear safety standard are at a point that any natural catastrophe capable of getting the reaktor to melt down would on its own be way more of a problem than the meltdown itself. this is actually the case now with thousands dead, tens on thousands missing and billions of dollars worth of property and critical infrastructure destroyed or damaged.
also to note - even passive safety design does not count for all possible eventualities
boiling water reactors by the way are passively safe against criticality accidents

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh..

Forget pebble bed reactors, I'd be happy with AP1000s (like the chinese are building). They are certified with the NRC, relatively cheap to build (and are being built) and more to the point they are PASSIVELY SAFE.

Now, it looks like south asian countries are going to be the only ones actually building them.

Ed

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

You make a good point but PWRs (which constitute the majority of eg US reactors) are passively safe. Redundantly so, in fact.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow -- not only is that a well-written, thoughtful, and interesting little essay, but you seem to have learned how to use the shift key on your keyboard! I'm impressed.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

that's what i'm TALKING ABOUT

thank you

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

thank you

i love reading about that sort of lore

a toast to a far safer future of nuclear energy

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[circletimessquare]

i'm sorry. i have to consciously stop using the shift key while posting on slashdot. i apologize for the slip up, i won't use the shift key again

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Sabriel]

Ironically, the first and only EBR-II was built in 1964. It ran until 1994, successfully completing a 30 year mission to explore passively safe reactor design (amongst other tasks).

Then congress canned its successor.

Engineers: "we can build a passively safe reactor for X and get Y."
Politicians: "can we have one for >Y?"
Engineers: "well, yes, but it won't be safe, there's a risk of meltdown and radiation poisoning."
Politicians: "not my problem, I don't live there, we'll build those."

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Sabriel]

Oops, slashdot's "plain old text" ate "can we have one for <>Y?"

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

Well, that doesn't seem to be fool-proof either. From the article:

[...] A 15 MWe demonstration reactor, Arbeitsgemeinschaft Versuchsreaktor (AVR translates to experimental reactor consortium), was built at the Jülich Research Centre in Jülich, West Germany. [...] During this examination it became also obvious that the AVR is the most heavily beta-contaminated (Strontium) nuclear installation worldwide and that this contamination is present in the worst form, as dust. [...] A re-examination of this accident, which is supposed to be much more severe than known, was announced by the local government in July, 2010. [...]

But hey, only the most heavily strontium-contaminated site worldwide! Who cares! Let's hear it for good old german engineering... (I am german, so I'm allowed to be pissed)
All the best, rob

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame the engineers.

Blame the asshole ethically challenged corporate accountants who refuse to replace inherently unsafe designs because risking the lives of 10,000 people who live in the vicinity of the plant, doesn't compare with the few extra percentage points of operating margin.

Will 10,000 people die? Probably not. But how much Sr-90 would you want released into your neighborhood? That shit has a half life of 30 years. When it gets into your body, it bonds with your skeleton, in place of calcium. And it may or may not cause bone cancer, or leukemia, or any one of dozens of other maladies. Or you could come out just fine, 30, 40, 50 years down the road.

Is that risk *really* worth it?

So the upper-management of GE can make a few hundred million more dollars?

I'm all for going pebble-bed. But recall also. . . that we have a hell of an issue with ongoing waste disposal, and mining, and proliferation. (recall, the bogus justification for the war in Iraq was WMD, a fake nuclear weapons program, some of which was civilian program-sourced materials - which turned out to be lies, but still, would they have been as credible if nobody ever dug it up out of the ground in the first place?).

The problem is far more than public opinion. The operators of the plants have not been very cooperative at all in pushing in new technologies, or working with regulators. They've covered shit up, and lied, and generally done everything they could to prove that they don't want to be responsible stewards of this technology. All engineering is a trade-off. Maybe if the engineers had been given more reasonable budgets, they could have designed something better in the first place. I blame short-sightedness of non-engineers.

So there.

I stroked intellectual egos. So where's my karma?

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[tchdab1]

The greatest threat to nuclear power is a paid industry quick to proclaim that everything is perfectly safe, that new technologies or designs would never allow for the degree of catastrophe we see today, that we should continue to subsidize the use for profit of toxic, corrosive, and unstable materials as the best alternative energy source.
 

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[colinnwn]

I'm ardently pro-nuclear, and I'll concede your point. Western nuclear engineers could have made safer designs. I'm not familiar with all the considerations and compromises based on current technology they had to make back then

But I don't think Chernobyl belongs in here. The people who were there (the operators) caused the accident by operating an unsafely designed (at the time) reactor outside of its design limits, then embarking on an unapproved test to see if a new procedure would reduce the risk of one of its design flaws. It probably wouldn't have been near as serious if the "operators" just walked away from the reactor.

Re:What is the greatest enemy of nuclear power?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see your point, but honestly can't stop from wondering if you're a pebble bed reactor salesperson.

Too big to fail, again

[Framboise]

These nuclear accidents illustrate clearly why nuclear energy is a plain wrong option. The companies running them, even when big, are unable to be insured to the level allowing full potential damage compensation. Like large banks they are too big to fail, but do fail eventually. Nuclear power has just a too high risk (probability of accident times damage cost) (even if rare) that any insurance consortium is willing to accept covering the full cost.

At the time these plants were built it was common to evaluate the risks with classical statistics, assuming normal (Gaussian) distribution of accidents. A normal distribution has well defined first and second moments, which allows to evaluate the accident cost expectation, and typical fluctuations to the norm. But later thinking (for example by Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals) made more realistic statistics more popular. It turns out that many natural phenomena like earthquakes have often long tails, which means their distribution is NOT normal. This changes completely the evaluation of the distribution moments. Typically these moments diverge (are formally infinite!), which means that no sane insurance should accept such risks. Thus no responsible politician should accept that the country becomes the gratis insurance of a private company.

Re:Too big to fail, again

[karuna]

I see that Fukushima proves that nuclear energy is safe. Basically all what happened is that they have to decommission two old reactors due to earthquake. Now they can build better and safer reactors that will withstand even greater earthquakes and tsunami.

Re:Too big to fail, again

[vlm]

Nuclear power has just a too high risk (probability of accident times damage cost) (even if rare) that any insurance consortium is willing to accept covering the full cost.

The problem is, what to replace it with? Coal has an even higher death and pollution rate, the worlds running out of natgas so forget that. That leaves, uh, going all "Pol Pot" on the population, I guess? Maybe some feel-good measures?

Sort of like a political ad, their side's crooks are terrible, we should replace their side's crooks with our side's crooks, to make it all better?

Re:Too big to fail, again

[slim]

I see that Fukushima proves that nuclear energy is safe. Basically all what happened is that they have to decommission two old reactors due to earthquake. Now they can build better and safer reactors that will withstand even greater earthquakes and tsunami.

It's fortunate for them that the earthquake happened after the break-even point -- assuming that it did, taking into account the cost of the cleanup?
What if the earthquake had happened earlier? Vast costs. It seems to me that the chances of this happening were even; the "big one" could have hit at any moment.

Re:Too big to fail, again

[slim]

The problem is, what to replace it with? Coal has an even higher death and pollution rate, the worlds running out of natgas so forget that. That leaves, uh, going all "Pol Pot" on the population, I guess?

If we assume the market-driven-economists got it right, we should ensure that investors in nuclear power (and all the others) are held liable for the long term cleanup costs, and any emergency costs associated with their activities. The cost will rise; the cost of coal/oil/gas will rise. Alternatives will arise from the innovation of entrepreneurs.

Fingers crossed...

Re:Too big to fail, again

[karuna]

"What if" situations about past are irrelevant. But there are still many nuclear power stations of the old design that have risks. They should be decommissioned too but it will not be done before new reactors are built. In other words, to avoid risks of nuclear disaster, we should build more nuclear plants right now.

Re:Too big to fail, again

[Darinbob]

"Vast costs" are not disasters, except for insurance companies. After all an earthquake could completely destroy a wind farm or coal fired plant days after it's switched on too, leading to vast costs.

Slashdot news?

[Anonymous Coward]

The german www.spiegel.de tends to pick up "news" from slashdot without any additional fact checking. I don't know if they make it into the magazine (has a million readers), but I would not be surprised.

Poor Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Victims of unwanted nuclear explosions since 1945. The only country on the planet to suffer such a fate so far.

Re:Poor Japan

[Framboise]

Starting a war against a powerful country is rarely not going without unexpected outcomes.

Think it is a false alarm...

[NeverVotedBush]

Hey all - I think this is a false alarm. If you translate the original article, this is what you get... (albeit a painful translation...)

It is hydrogen explosion indoor shunting appeal with unit No. the first Fukushima nuclear power generation 3

A big explosion got up with unit No. 3 of the first Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant of Tokyo Electric damaged by East Japan great earthquake disaster (Fukushima Okuma-cho) at about 11:00 a.m. on 14th. According to Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, I confirmed that a hydrogen explosion happened. The ex-Emperor preservation considers the possibility damaged both of a storage container made by steel covering up pressure vessel, it which a nuclear reactor is in to be low. The ex-Emperor preservation requested the inhabitants whom there was within the range of 20 kilos to take refuge in a building. According to Tokyo Electric, it is said that at least 11 get injured. This explosion is thought to be an explosion and the same kind that was blown off by unit No. 1 on 12th. The Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano spoke the big change with [the possibility that radioactive material is scattered in large quantities is low] for the data of neighboring radiation doses after having assumed it [it seems that the soundness of the storage container is maintained] at a press conference from 0:40 on the afternoon of 14th without being confirmed.

The emergency core cooling system that the unit No. 3 cools a nuclear reactor after an earthquake 1 running by departure from same source is a stop. With the unit No. 3, the state that pressure and water level in the furnace are unstable in continues, and the hydrogen which a fuel rod is exposed at one time and does it, and is easy to explode is considered to have occurred. From the afternoon of 13th, I injected seawater in a furnace and tried cooling, but the explosion happened in the middle. By the explosion that happened with unit No. 1 on 12th, the destruction remains in , and the abnormality isn't confirmed to a storage container and a pressure vessel. The ex-Emperor preservation considers that this explosion is confined to . According to the House of preservation, I considered that there were at least about 600 inhabitants in 20 kilos zone and called for refuge to the indoor. According to Tokyo Electric, it is said that I confirm pressure vessel, that I am not broken with the storage container either. It is assumed that the neutron flight isn't confirmed at the outskirts. The nuclear reactor is protected from the inside in pressure vessel, storage container, [a wall] of . But I become the serious accident equal to Chernobyl accident when a pressure vessel and a storage container are broken.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[_0xd0ad]

I think what you're saying is that it isn't a nuclear bomb, which is correct. It's hydrogen gas from the reactor core which is building up to explosive levels and detonating. Still, it's an explosion, and the primary risk is that the reactor's containment might be breached and radioactivity be released into the surrounding areas, such as occurred in the Chernobyl or Three Mile Island nuclear accidents. It's hardly reason to call it a "false alarm" - the cause for alarm is well-founded.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[Technician]

I have not understood why the Hydrogen wasn't burned off in a flare instead of being confined to explosive levels. I presume the oxygen was used in making heavy water H2O2 and the hydrogen is a by product.

We probably need to rethink disaster recovery a little differently in the future to prevent hydrogen explosions.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[Low Ranked Craig]

Yeah, the way I read this is that there was an explosion at the third unit, meaning unit number three, not a third explosion. Honestly I'm not too concerned about this, it seems like they are pumping water to keep the cores cool, and will likely achieve cold shutdown. The news media is making hay with this for ratings, but really, it seems like things are progressing well, all things considered. Not that things couldn't go wrong, but I think not.

Also, just because there is hydrogen in there doesn't mean that the core is exposed (although it probably was until they replaced the evaporated water by releasing steam and pumping in seawater). Some of the components of the reactor core contain zinc alloys, thus 2Zn + 2H2O 2ZnO + 2H2. Anyway, based on all the reports I've read (a lot of them) It seems to me that they explosion happend due to the release of steam to reduce pressure, which also contains copious amounts of H2 at that point. What blew up is essentially the "attic" over the containment structure and the light weight roof. All reports (real reports from people who know what they are talking about) indicate that the containment structure around the reactor is still intact.

The way the media is handling this is appalling, although we shouldn't be surprised. I know more than most of the "experts" they have on the air, and I am far from an expert. I actually heard one guy on CNN and Fox say "there is a term that professionals use, scram. I haven't heard this term used so we don't know if it happend" then goes on to describe what the term means (correctly to my surprise). Really? We don't know if the control rods were inserted back into the reactor core? What exactly does this "expert" think would be happening if the reactor were producing it's normal operating heat right about now?

I'm not highly concerned about a full meltdown. What I am primarily concerned with are the douche bags who will use this a reason to not build more reactors. Stupid motherfuckers.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[NeverVotedBush]

That's not what I am saying at all. It's never been considered a nuclear bomb type of explosion.

What I am saying is that a 3rd reactor building did not blow up and provided a Babelfish translation of the Japanese news story where they discuss unit #3 - not a third explosion.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[_0xd0ad]

Yes, but it was still an explosion. It was the 2nd explosion, not the 3rd. I still wouldn't call it a false alarm.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[riverat1]

H2O2 is hydrogen peroxide, not heavy water. Heavy water is H2O made with a high proportion of deuterium atoms.

Nuclear plants don't have any built in equipment to flare off hydrogen. Maybe they should but hydrogen is not produced by a nuclear reactor in normal operations. It only gets produced when the core gets hot enough to dissociate the water that's cooling it producing a perfectly explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. All it takes it the spark to set it off. I imagine once the dissociation gets started it can run at such a prodigious rate that it might be difficult to build something that could handle it.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[spun]

Yes, they do have equipment to flare off hydrogen built up during an emergency shutdown (the only time it would build up) due to ultra high temperature, high pressure steam reacting with the exposed, nearly melting fuel rods. This is a well known problem with emergency venting. Obviously, things did not go according to plan.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[spun]

In light of further developments and news, things are obviously not going as well as the rosy picture painted by some nuclear proponents here. However, they couldn't possibly go as poorly as detractors are hoping for. Yeah, I said it. They are "hoping for the best" in the same way one "hopes for the best" when a rich relative one never liked becomes terminally ill. Still, proponents should back the hell off until we have the full story, when you downplay things that are later shown to be far more dangerous than you made out, you are only adding fuel to the fire. This was, in fact, the third explosion. The US Navy is moving ships away from the fallout. Things have gone wrong, in spite of what you thought. Perhaps if you hadn't thought anything until you knew more, the anti nuke crowd couldn't point at you as an example of lies and misinformation from the pro-nuke lobby.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[Teancum]

The scary thing about the hydrogen gas is that it is being formed from the water hitting the core at such extreme temperatures that it produces not just steam but rather ionized hydrogen and oxygen in a disassociated state.... plus a few extra goodies along the way that get dislodged from the core with these gasses. If you think about it, that is some pretty extreme temperatures we are talking about, and the Japanese officials are citing that at least a partial melt-down has happened in these plants.

The temperature required to do that is in the thousands of degrees (F, C, or K doesn't matter except to a purists at these temperatures) and is most certainly not a normal condition for these reactors.

This is much more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl, but it is still real bad, and Three Mile Island didn't have the outer containment building blow up in an explosive fashion.

Chernobyl, on the other hand, did expose the raw core to the outside environment in one huge explosive plume. While not a nuclear bomb, it certainly produced enough atmospheric radioactive material that it might as well have been a nuke blowing up. All that was missing was the heat and the larger destructive behavior of a nuclear bomb.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[Teancum]

The hydrogen is being produced in an abnormal condition, due to the extreme temperatures in the core when it was produced. What is happening here is that as the water is hitting the core, rather than being turned into steam it is turning into hydrogen + oxygen gasses directly as it is cracking the water upon impact with the core. The Oxygen is also oxidizing the core at the same time (and causing its own problems), but that luckily is also absorbing a huge amount of heat energy in the process still.

As the hydrogen is being produced, it goes into the pipes normally intended for steam generation... but at much higher pressures and temperatures than they were intended. This hydrogen gas also contains bits of the core as well because its formation is rather violent on a physical level. As the core cools, eventually the water "merely" turns into steam and the production of hydrogen stops, but then the problem is what to do with all of the hydrogen gas that has been produced and is full of other radioactive elements. A simple flare in the overall environment isn't going to be sufficient here.

Keep in mind that the temperatures in the core here are hot enough to melt and/or vaporize just about any known substance.... which is why it has been said that these reactors are in a partial melt-down. That is also why the technicians are being desperate and simply pouring sea water into the core... knowing full well that by doing so they are performing an emergency measure that destroys the potential of ever using that reactor again for anything productive. None of these reactors is ever expected to go on-line again for electricity production.

The bone-headed move by the engineers who built these reactors is that they put the back-up generators (which use Diesel fuel) in a location that could be wiped out by the tsunami. In other words, it wasn't the earthquake but rather the tsunami which killed these reactors. When the earthquake happened, the reactors were cut off from the main power grid in the country, and then the tsunami killed the back-up power that was supposed to keep the reactor core cool. With the coolant pumps turned off, the core was allowed to heat up to these extreme temperatures that thus created the Hydrogen gas.... while the core was also melting apart. That is where the engineering mistake was made, not to mention that perhaps some other way to cool down the core ought to have been thought up first in an emergency situation.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[riverat1]

Thanks for the information. I didn't realize they equipment for flaring the hydrogen. I'm still thinking though that maybe the hydrogen was being produced at rate that overwhelmed the equipment.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[NeverVotedBush]

Uh, thanks for that clarification. It is what I was saying all along - so far there have only been TWO explosions. The three that was discussed was only with respect to unit three.

I did not mean there are no problems at Daiichi. Did I say that? No. What I said was the article was discussing the second explosion - out of two total to date - that was in unit number three.

What I was saying was a false alarm was that there has not been a third explosion. That was the false alarm. The title of this news piece is "Third Blast at Japan's Fukujima Nuclear Plant". Just to be clear for the people with reading and comprehension difficulties - the third blast was a false alarm. Not that there are not big problems, or that radiation is being spread, or any of that.

All I said was a false alarm was that there was no third blast - at least to the time I wrote it and it still seems to be the case. Let's hope it stays that way.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[BitZtream]

What exactly does this "expert" think would be happening if the reactor were producing it's normal operating heat right about now?

The plant wouldn't be having problems because it would still have power to run the cooling pumps?

For that matter, pardon the ignorance. but why can't this excessive energy be used to operate the turbines in order to power the pumps to keep things marginally sane?

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[treeves]

Actually a little hydrogen is present in water-cooled reactors due to the dissociation of water by the neutrons but it is little enough that it stays in solution, and in any case remains held within the intact reactor vessel and coolant piping systems. In fact, a little extra hydrogen may be put in intentionally to push the reversible reaction so as to minimize the amount of free oxygen in the system to minimize corrosion. It is never an explosion hazard normally though.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[riverat1]

Yes, as I was writing that I thought there probably is a little hydrogen produced by all those neutrons flying around but I figured it wasn't enough to be that notable and I wanted to keep the post short so I didn't include that.

Re:Think it is a false alarm...

[anagama]

All you have to do is wait three hours. Now it's 3 explosions and 1 fire.

Only years?

[Colin Smith]

I think for living memory, many decades, is more likely.

The greens are going to be playing those videos on a continuous loop every time the word "nuclear" is used. It's pretty much irrelevant how safe the current designs are.

The global nuclear industry is effectively dead as of now.
 

Re:Only years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is sad. As long as nothing continues to go terribly awful wrong, shouldn't this be points in the pronuclear camp? 40yro reactors 40mi from the epicenter of a 9mag earthquake then hit with a huge tsunami, then hit by at least 275 aftershocks 4mag or great (some insignificant amount being 7mag)

Re:Only years?

[Anonymous Coward]

not really, only thing you really need to do is utter "rolling blackouts" and suddenly all the greens will feel renewed love for their electricity

Re:Only years?

[TopSpin]

The global nuclear industry is effectively dead as of now.

The global nuclear industry will be fine. China is building about 10 reactors a year. They have already stated that their plans will continue apace despite Fukushima. They are even working on a pebble bed research reactor. China is not ruled by hysterical malcontents. Neither is Turkey. Brazil is building plants as well.

As the 'first world' embraces its self induced energy poverty, emerging economies are building plentiful energy supplies. Walmart's 'low-low' price supply chain is assured.

Fukushima Dai-ichi No.1, the reactor inside the building that blew up March 12, was part of the power supply that made Japan what it is today. It has been generating power for 40 years and essentially every Japanese car you see on the road today has some Fukushima Dai-ichi No.1 in it. For the same reason there hasn't been any looting or riots in Japan since the quake/tsunami, I suspect Japan may also fail to abandon nuclear power as the pundits universally prescribe for the rest of the first world. If so then Japan will provide at least one instance of a liberal democracy that is also not ruled by hysteria.

Think it is a false alarm...

[NeverVotedBush]

Hey all - I think this is a false alarm. If you translate the original article, this is what you get... (albeit a painful translation...)

Posting again in case the one I put at the top isn't visible because the parent has been voted down...

It is hydrogen explosion indoor shunting appeal with unit No. the first Fukushima nuclear power generation 3

A big explosion got up with unit No. 3 of the first Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant of Tokyo Electric damaged by East Japan great earthquake disaster (Fukushima Okuma-cho) at about 11:00 a.m. on 14th. According to Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, I confirmed that a hydrogen explosion happened. The ex-Emperor preservation considers the possibility damaged both of a storage container made by steel covering up pressure vessel, it which a nuclear reactor is in to be low. The ex-Emperor preservation requested the inhabitants whom there was within the range of 20 kilos to take refuge in a building. According to Tokyo Electric, it is said that at least 11 get injured. This explosion is thought to be an explosion and the same kind that was blown off by unit No. 1 on 12th. The Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano spoke the big change with [the possibility that radioactive material is scattered in large quantities is low] for the data of neighboring radiation doses after having assumed it [it seems that the soundness of the storage container is maintained] at a press conference from 0:40 on the afternoon of 14th without being confirmed.

The emergency core cooling system that the unit No. 3 cools a nuclear reactor after an earthquake 1 running by departure from same source is a stop. With the unit No. 3, the state that pressure and water level in the furnace are unstable in continues, and the hydrogen which a fuel rod is exposed at one time and does it, and is easy to explode is considered to have occurred. From the afternoon of 13th, I injected seawater in a furnace and tried cooling, but the explosion happened in the middle. By the explosion that happened with unit No. 1 on 12th, the destruction remains in , and the abnormality isn't confirmed to a storage container and a pressure vessel. The ex-Emperor preservation considers that this explosion is confined to . According to the House of preservation, I considered that there were at least about 600 inhabitants in 20 kilos zone and called for refuge to the indoor. According to Tokyo Electric, it is said that I confirm pressure vessel, that I am not broken with the storage container either. It is assumed that the neutron flight isn't confirmed at the outskirts. The nuclear reactor is protected from the inside in pressure vessel, storage container, [a wall] of . But I become the serious accident equal to Chernobyl accident when a pressure vessel and a storage container are broken.

ESBWR

[chipperdog]

Time to replace existing BWRs in Japan with ESBWR reactors, with their PASSIVE safety systems, requiring no mechanical operation - loss of off-site and backup power would have much less impact.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[nschubach]

Major con? Power outages? Building a new plant?

What would have happened if they had wind power? Would the towers sustain under 9.0+ earthquake? Support the rushing waters? What about solar? Would the panels/mirrors hold against a wave of crushing water?

I'm not quite sure what sustainable power you are suggesting and what better outcome you are alluding to.

Is there a core catcher?

[djlemma]

I've seen a lot of people linking the "Simple and accurate explanation" article.. and it claims that this reactor design had a "Core Catcher" as another layer of containment in case the core melts through the primary reactor vessel.. but in the comments, people say that reactor 1 didn't have a core catcher. So, anybody with inside knowledge happen to know the reality? What about reactor 3?

Re:Is there a core catcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very good point.
We already know about the plutonium fuel loads in reactor 3, what other operating differences are not being publicised?

And what exactly is happening with the "raw seawater cooling"?
Is this being recirculated, or is the primary coolant loop flow being discharged directly back into the sea?

Flooding hot radionuclides from the ruptured core into the coastal ecosystem might not be in the best interests of the seafood industry.

Re:Is there a core catcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flooding hot radionuclides from the ruptured core into the coastal ecosystem might not be in the best interests of the seafood industry.

No, but Mothra likes a good hot bath now and then.

Re:Is there a core catcher?

[ColdWetDog]

I've seen a lot of people linking the "Simple and accurate explanation" article.. and it claims that this reactor design had a "Core Catcher" as another layer of containment in case the core melts through the primary reactor vessel.. but in the comments, people say that reactor 1 didn't have a core catcher. So, anybody with inside knowledge happen to know the reality? What about reactor 3?

Read this

Re:Is there a core catcher?

[djlemma]

Thanks for posting the groklaw article.

I think that's a pretty good dissection of the article everyone's been linking.. and also a good reminder that there's a lot of misinformation flowing around, and even the fairly knowledgeable folks make mistakes... because, well, nuclear physics is complicated, and there's a lot of different reactor designs out there.

Fallout

[Dcnjoe60]

The real fallout that Japan needs to worry about is that they have permanently lost a substantial part of their capacity to generate electricity and won't be able to replace it anytime soon. The US and other countries with these high power nuclear plants should learn a lesson. It is better to build several smaller plants instead of a few megaplants. That way, if one of them is out of commission, it is not a total loss to the power grid.

The lack of power in Japan will be a significant issue as the country tries to react to the quake and tsunami and will hamper long term recovery efforts, too.

Re:Fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many reasons the plants, like these, are consolidated to a single plant "site". Costs being one significant issue, as part of the application for a power plant involves massive site studies, environmental impact studies, etc which would have to be performed for each site you intend to use. Second, the more sites you establish, the more infrastructure you need to construct to link them all. Third, there are many shared resources that would now have to be replicated at each site you wish to establish, including personnel. As it relates to nuclear, you have the further overhead of having to design and implement security at several sites instead of one complex. Some day it may become cost effective to implement smaller, more localized plants for towns and communities (I believe toshiba has some designs for small, non-serviceable reactors that are built into the ground for towns of like 10,000 people, but I can't remember the details). But for now, our baseload supply will be coming from "megaplants" as you call them.

Re:Fallout

[turtledawn]

The three other reactors - all of which have higher generating capacity than these that are going down- on site were shut down and scheduled to be restarted sometime soon, especially since the three affected were scheduled to be decommissioned and replaced _next_year_. There's no good time for this to happen, but this could really be far worse than it is. The replacement is already planned, budgeted, scheduled, part paid for, and ready to go. Probably the containment vessels - the complicated part that takes longest - is already in manufacture. They'll be at reduced capacity for two years or so while the infrastructure is rebuilt.

Re:Fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

Fukushima was a smaller plant. They DID have a massive earthquake and tsunami, this is not the only reason they are in bad shape.

Re:Fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't really accurate.

Japan has the power generating capacity - the plants on the West of the island are all intact and have enough spare capacity to power the East. The problem is that the power generation on the West side runs at a different voltage and frequency to the plants on the east - and the links between the two can't convert enough of it to cover the shortfall in the east.

Basically, the problem is a lack of standardisation.

Re:Fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

These are the several smaller plants...

Re:Fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

No one wants a nuclear plant near them, so building more plants is a lot harder to support than building less plants. This also means that they are very expensive to build because they inevitably end up being tucked away in some obscure corner at the end of a small and underused road.

The result is that building seven small quakeproof plants is significantly more expensive, both politically and financially, than building two giant quakeproof plants.

Re:Fallout

[NoSig]

Smaller plants would be less well protected against the Tsunami and so if you had lots of smaller plants you might find that ALL of them would have been taken out. If these reactors had been modern they would not have been affected by the Tsunami anyway, and indeed other reactors in Japan were also hit and are not damaged. Small distributed power generation has the same kinds of cost problems as would be the case if the only way to get a car was to build one in one's own back yard. The tiny distances in Japan make small plants even less sensible since they would not even help much with transmission losses.

Re:Fallout

[fireylord]

The real fallout that Japan needs to worry about is that they have permanently lost a substantial part of their capacity to generate electricity and won't be able to replace it anytime soon. The US and other countries with these high power nuclear plants should learn a lesson. It is better to build several smaller plants instead of a few megaplants. That way, if one of them is out of commission, it is not a total loss to the power grid.

The lack of power in Japan will be a significant issue as the country tries to react to the quake and tsunami and will hamper long term recovery efforts, too.

Russia has diverted 6000 MW of power Japan's way, that should help them a bit.

Re:Fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, people on this forum really love Nuclear Power. How about we spend all of the money that we invest in Nuclear Power and put it into efficient conservation systems?

And why does Private Industry not insure the Nuclear Power plants? Instead there are government subsidies to cover this insurance.

Nuclear Power is cool and fun technology for scientists. And is very lucrative for the companies building the plants. That's it.

Re:Fallout

[NoSig]

There is a moderator on crack here. -1 troll? really?

We want people to not create these risks at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

What do we want? We want people to stop spending billions of dollars in government-subsidized money to take relatively safe minerals out of the ground, concentrate them into horrifically dangerous compounds, concentrate tons of these compounds in big chunks, usually right near cities, and then intentionally heat them up for decades at a time, all before abandoning the now eternally damned building complex and then handing over thousands of tons of radioactive and grotesquely poisonous waste for the government to have to pay to clean up, store, and guard forever and ever and ever and ever. All, mind you, controlled by far from transparent corporations with documented decades-long histories of manipulation, fraud, and concentration of wealth, and all so as to further enrich the kinds of executives who end up working for and controlling companies like this. And, oh, by the way, create massively increased risk of nuclear weapons and conventional dirty bombs being built by people we can't even track, let alone control.

All to accomplish a result that can be done just as well, if not better, with common materials used in straightforward ways using equipment and fuels that can be bloody well exploded into shards and cause no problems at all that anybody three blocks away would even notice.

A nuclear power plant is, by its very nature, all about taking dispersed and relatively harmless things and turning them into concentrations of extremely dangerous ones. Al, supposedly, to generate electricity. Which we can do half a hundred other ways, none of which create anything like the risks.

We aren't impressed that having made huge stores of poison, you haven't killed that many people YET. We want you to stop making huge stores of poison, period.

And yet—

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Nature did one better, even two better arguably.

And yet— no significant release of long lived radioisotopes and no expectation that any such release is likely to occur.

"Enormous earth quakes and tsunami hit something industrial in japan, expensive cleanup expected but already planned for and covered by previously existing insurance." Just doesn't make headlines.

hey anti-nuclear hysterics:

[Thud457]

(# dead & injured by radiation) / (# dead & injured by (earthquake + tsunami)) = ?
yeah, I thought so...

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[tomhudson]

As far as I understand it, there are three things to fix:

- Use a modern design, not one from the 1970s, so that a meltdown is avoided by physics and not engineering

You mean like the CANDU reactor? A design from the 1950s

If a fuel assembly were to overheat and deform within its fuel channel, the resulting change of geometry permits high heat transfer to the cool moderator, thus preventing the breach of the fuel channel, and the possibility of a meltdown. Furthermore, because of the use of natural uranium as fuel, this reactor cannot sustain a chain reaction if its original fuel channel geometry is altered in any significant manner.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[DrXym]

Major con as in horrifically expensive to build & run with potentially catastrophic consequences in the event of failure / human error. Even if the Japanese do get the situation under control, the Fukushima plant is an expensive, radioactive writeoff and will take years to clean up or rebuild. If a solar / wind farm got hit by an earthquake you'd be looking at some ruined equipment and downed towers, possibly some fires if there were battery / capacitor arrays. Nothing anywhere close in terms of risk or expense.

I recognize nuclear has many advantages over wind / solar, but the aftermath of a disaster is most definitely not one of its benefits.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[Hartree]

"We aren't impressed that having made huge stores of poison, you haven't killed that many people YET. We want you to stop making huge stores of poison, period."

Darn me for doing that. I just get up in the morning and release the demons from the earth and set them on the peasantry. It just seems like the thing to do before I've had my coffee. ;)

Uh... You seem a bit breathless.

The coast of Japan is smashed, tens of thousands are missing with many of them dead, and you're more concerned about a potential radiological release?

Get a sense of proportion.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[TheDarkMaster]

You need power to run your TV, coffemaker and etcetera. Wind power is unreliable, solar power do not have enougth scale (we need gigawatts, not kilowatts). Hidroeletric power is actually the best option, but you have limited locations to put one hidroeletric plant, and geothermal have the same problem (is difficult to find a usefull "hotspot" on a usable place).
In short, we need nuclear power, so we have to keep trying to constantly improve the efficiency and safety of nuclear plants.
And not forgetting of course attempting to simultaneously improve all other possible options, never put all your eggs in only one basket.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[fredjh]

I tend to agree that, in the case of Japan - a relatively small earthquake prone island, that Nuclear may not be the greatest option. Trying to tie that somehow to nuclear power use elsewhere, though, is pretty disingenuous (as it was when they tried the same thing with Chernobyl and, sadly, overstated the impact of Three Mile Island which exposed residents of the area to less radiation than they would get in background radiation from being in, for example, the UN building).

editorial standards

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the last article I will ever read at this website. Absolutely ZERO editorial standards.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Japan has no significant reserves of coal, oil, or natural gas. Wind and solar plants do not provide stable base load power and frankly even if they did, they wouldn't fit in the tiny amount of land Japan has. Where do you want them to get electricity from? Electrical power is modern civilization.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[DigiShaman]

For the most part, the American media is the mouth-piece of the Democrat party. Anyone who doesn't already know this obviously doesn't watch the media. As for Fox News, they're an exception to the rule. Why you ask? Because there was a vacuum in the market place. A void if you will that would have eventually been filled. But again, that's an exception to the rule.

And please, none of you give me that clap-trap about reality having a liberal bias. We are talking about an allegiance with a "political" party. That supersedes liberal ideology as far as I'm concerned. The former is much more dangerous.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[slim]

The coast of Japan is smashed, tens of thousands are missing with many of them dead, and you're more concerned about a potential radiological release?

Get a sense of proportion.

It seems reasonable to say that a lot of those deaths, injuries and property damage were unavoidable though. It's simply not practical -- possible even -- to convince people not to build homes, roads or workplaces on low coastal land, especially if that includes 10 miles inland.

However, it seems fairly practical to avoid building things with potentially hugely dangerous failure modes, when there are alternatives. In know the alternatives seem unpalatable to some people, but the sour flavour of this alternative is harder to ignore today.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[slim]

You need power to run your TV, coffemaker and etcetera.

Great examples. We *need* those alright ;)

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

You mean like the CANDU reactor? [wikipedia.org] A design from the 1950s
No, heavy water reactors(the D in CANDU is for deuterium) have all sorts of problems for weapons proliferation, as such a bad idea.

Well Chernobyl didn't have containment either

[Shivetya]

that is why this issue and Three Mile Island are vastly different that what happened in Russia.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[MrNemesis]

Everything you said in your first paragraph applies to fossil fuels as well. Wind and solar can't provide base load because they're too unreliable, so I'm assuming you're advocating either burning more coal and gas (until we run out) or stopping people using electricity.

If the incident with the reactors in Japan has proved anything, it's that people have absolutely no sense of perspective. Miniscule amounts of radiation equivalent to a couple of transatlantic flights released? OMG THEY'RE ALL GONNA DIE. Billions of tons of water moving inland at 60mph killing thousands of people? Meh, they're already dead, who gives a shit, making hyperbolic statements about nuclear power gets me higher in the ratings.

Ya, blame the pioneers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ofcause the newer designs are better than the older designs, that is progress. It is also true that since it cost a great deal to build these plants, you don't just take them down and build a new one, whenever someone thinks up a new design. And taking a look at what these "ancient" structures have endured and not given up in their basic functionality (protecting the outside from the inside) I don't see this as a failure (yet!) but a testament to great design. This plant have taken a hit much greater than it design was spec'ed for. Survived a tsunami that it was not designed for, and all that have happened is hydrogen explosions after buildups in the outer shells... Would have been like WTC1 and 2 still standing with some burned out offices and alot of smoke damage.

So, when they have finished cleaning up, and going to build a new plant to deliver power, sure, go for the newest available that follows the security std. needed... And in 20-30years when something bad might happen again, blame these engineers for not being forefront enough...

And sure, media fear mongering is always a great catalyst for change... Just not always for the good. Many of the countries in Europe (I living in one) that have banned nuclear power due to protests in the 1960'ies and 1970'ies burn huge amounts of coal to produce power. A complete loss and stupid, but "we won!"

Re:Ya, blame the pioneers

[circletimessquare]

we are talking about NUCLEAR POWER. not a cheese factory or a blimp. you poison some people with bad cheese, you crash the hindenburg: ok, lesson learned, some people died, move on. nuclear power, you have to understand, involves the possibility for mistakes that results in vast areas of land uninhabitable for decades or centuries. that's not funny. therefore, you overdesign nuclear plants with safeguards in mind for the most unlikely of events. the fukushima plant? they put the 2 backup diesel generators in the basement. which were flooded by tsunami. because the seawall was never going to fail

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html

(facepalm)

guess what: the walls failed, the generators flooded. all you had to do was put the diesel generators on the roof! or one on the roof and one in the basement

but no. now you have cooling problem. honest mistake? there are no honest mistakes when you are dealing with nuclear power. this is not like you dropped your coffee mug on your pants in the morning. oh well, my bad, move on. there is NO MOVING ON with a nuclear accident. this is a technology where if you make a mistake, you fuck up vast areas of the countryside for generations. you make a mistake, you are stuck with it for a long, long time

so overdesign. then you overdesign some more. then you go back to the drawing board, and you overdesign for the most obscure problem or threat. why? because it's NUCLEAR POWER. if you don't understand why that is so dangerous and so different, stop delivering opinions on it

people better wrap their heads around this idea that you have to be obscenely paranoid about possible problems when designing, building, and operating nuclear plants. there is never an "oops, my bad, carry on" with nuclear power. fi you don't see that, stop talking about nuclear power, you don't understand why it is different from designing a car, a bridge, a computer program

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[slim]

Electrical power is modern civilization.

Truly, we either need to evolve civilisation so that this is less true. Yes, there are renewable sources to explore, but at the same time, we should be looking at ways to reduce our energy needs. It's compatible with our basic desire to save money anyway.

As for stable power bases -- I don't know why there aren't more hydroelectric schemes (not generating power from a river-filled reservoir, but pumping water uphill when the sun's out or the wind turbines are spinning, and running it downhill through turbines when they're not). They use up a lot of land, it's true, but so do nuclear plants and fossil fuel burners -- and reservoirs are a lot more pleasant to hike around.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[Hartree]

Ok, how about this? We need power to support the infrastructure needed to provide food to the existing populations.

Like it or not that situation exists. The only way to remedy it is to reduce the population drastically and return to lower carrying rate methods on farming and only local travel/shipping.

There was a time like that. It was called the middle ages.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[tomhudson]

All reactors have such problems.

Slashdot is a senasationalist tabloid, not news

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you realize that distinction, it becomes easier to read. Slashdot doesn't care about facts or fairness, they care about emotion, which drives page impressions. For that, ignorance is vital.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[slim]

Ok, how about this? We need power to support the infrastructure needed to provide food to the existing populations.

I recognise that, and could have said it explicitly -- but it would have detracted from the pithiness of the post :) The point remains that the OP picked some particularly frivolous uses of electricity, when there are more important ones. Indeed, get rid of all the coffee makers, and I'd hope it wouldn't affect our ability to put food in mouths.

Like it or not that situation exists. The only way to remedy it is to reduce the population drastically and return to lower carrying rate methods on farming and only local travel/shipping.

There was a time like that. It was called the middle ages.

Partly true. I don't think we're anywhere near the efficiency levels we could achieve when it comes to electrical energy efficiency, and use of renewables. There are badly insulated buildings, inefficient appliances, appliances left switched on needlessly, etc. We already have wind and solar, which have issues of variable output, but we could learn to deal with variable output in various ways.

Remove this article

[JamesRing]

Slashdot, you need to remove this article. The summary is incorrect, poorly written and does nothing but spread fear and confusion. It shouldn't pass even the most basic editorial checks. I find it pretty awful that it hasn't already been taken down given how many other people have pointed this out.

Pebble bed not the answer

[Animats]

The future of nuclear power, if there is any, is something like a pebble bed reactor...

The trouble with pebble bed reactors is that the pebble removal system wears and jams. In most reactors, there are no moving parts inside the reactor vessel other than the control rods. Pebble bed reactors are continuously adding and removing billiard-ball sized "pebbles", making for a much more complex mechanical system within the hot, corrosive and radioactive environment inside the reactor core. The German AVR reactor failed for this reason.

The good thing about pressurized-water reactors is that what's inside the reactor is mechanically simple and uses non-volatile materials. There's no extremely flammable liquid sodium (as in sodium cooled reactors), no liquid fluorine (as in thorium reactors), and no flammable graphite (as at Chernoybl).

Re:Pebble bed not the answer

[circletimessquare]

yes

CANDU is a good candidate too

Re:Pebble bed not the answer

[KonoWatakushi]

The dangers from Sodium and Fluorine are minimal today, and will be almost nonexistent in the future. The primary cause for concern is interaction with water, especially with the high pressure steam loops. However, this should be eliminated soon enough by Brayton cycle turbines using Supercritical CO2. Not only will they be 50% more efficient, but 30x smaller, and correspondingly cheaper. It may even allow the Sodium cooled reactors to eliminate the extra sodium loop, which was the main source of added cost.

For a PWR, the pressure vessel and containment have to be enormous to deal with the intense pressures, which also add significant cost. Refueling and fuel manufacture are also not cheap or easy. It is a lot easier when the contents are at atmospheric pressure in an IFR or MSR type reactor, and the fuel cycles are vastly more attractive as well.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[MrNemesis]

I'd love to agree with you, but I can't. I know a bit about nuclear power and a fair amount about geology and have been following the whole thing very closely indeed (and I've nothing but admiration for the way Japan has handled the aftermath of the quake), but a lot of my friends here have swallowed the kool-aid and are fixated on the nuclear angle.

I had an argument with my gf yesterday about nuclear power, and it's mirrored other "discussions" I've had with friends about it. You say "meltdown", they think explosion. You say "40 year old reactor not designed with safety in mind" they think explosion. You say "defence in depth", "multiple backup systems", "containment vessel" and they just can't get their mind off a nuclear bomb going kaboom. Unfortunately this is just human nature; it's the same flawed logic that makes people think it's safer to drive than to take a plane.

People who know a little about how inadequate the design of this reactor is, and how well Japan has handled the emergency (wrong plugs on the generators notwithstanding), will see it as a positive win for nuclear energy. Everyone else will just see it as more zany mad scientists fooling around with things that weren't meant for the human mind, designing things that blow up at the drop of a hat because all scientists are immature kids at heart - they were bullied at school for being too smart, and nuclear reactors is their way of getting their own back on a world they hate. We'll show them smartasses, won't we voters! Here, scientists, gimme your lunc... I mean, funding money or I'll stick your plans down the toilet!

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[Hartree]

And I'm very much in favor of those things. We don't use passive solar in building. We have a lot of old technology out there.

Mea culpa on that one. I've done HVAC work and yet I still have a pair of 40+ year old furnaces heating my house.

But much of that's in the consumer realm, and that's hard to change quickly.

In industry, there's a lot less than a couple decades ago. Much better motor control technology and materials increased the efficiency a lot. A lot of the low hanging fruit from efficiency has already been taken.

The variable output/storage is a big problem, as is the inability to effectively use electricity rather than fuel for ships and long haul trucking. If we can figure that one out, it'd help a lot. New tech batteries are getting a lot better, but they aren't quite there yet.

Please start from the beginning

[ThatsNotPudding]

Why didn't either the operators or the system instantly drop in every control rod possible the second the earthquake hit? Or did the earthquake itself prevent this from happening? Or were they hoping to ride it out with a wait and see attitude, given that a re-start is no doubt long and arduous?

Re:Please start from the beginning

[Appolonius of Perge]

The way I understand it, they did immediately lower all of the control rods, but there is still enough energy released internal to the fuel rods to produce power at about 6% of capacity, which then drops off over the course of a few days, even when the control rods are lowered, which stops rod to rod reactions. Ordinarily, it is simple to cool away this much heat, but with the coolant pumps dead, they have these problems.

Re:Please start from the beginning

[Low Ranked Craig]

They did. This problem is caused by decay heat, which can be up to 7% of operating heat. Even if you drop all rods it still takes days to achieve cold shutdown, and you still need cooling pumps to keep things from overheating...

Re:Please start from the beginning

[DamnStupidElf]

It seems like they should have heat engines built into the cooling system to drive it in case all electrical power fails. There's obviously a temperature delta between the core and whatever heat sink they are using so a sterling engine or just a geothermal pump should be able to run the cooling pumps in an emergency.

Re:Please start from the beginning

[Appolonius of Perge]

Perhaps, but remember that the first reactors at this site came online over 40 years ago, so it's possible they just didn't have the foresight. Everything costs something, and, frankly, this is a pretty reasonable failure mode for what amounts to a nearly direct hit by both one of the strongest earthquakes ever _and_ a tsunami.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[TheDarkMaster]

I see that you are unable to understand what you read. I used "coffemaker" in an ironic way to poke the nonsense of the comment from Anonymous, but since you apparently can only understand the most obvious examples and in a straight way, then how about I say we need energy for most of the our industrial production, while between these activities to produce food, clothing and many other essential items, and we need that energy in large volumes and in a consistent and reliable way? Better now?

i have to be rude

[circletimessquare]

because the point you bring up is stupid

if you don't want to be treated rudely, don't be stupid. i'm not your father. it is not my job to lovingly hold your hand and guide you through the world. if you say something stupid, i'm calling you stupid. got it?

Re:i have to be rude

[Anonymous Coward]

because the point you bring up is stupid

if you don't want to be treated rudely, don't be stupid. i'm not your father. it is not my job to lovingly hold your hand and guide you through the world. if you say something stupid, i'm calling you stupid. got it?

I have a policy of modding down every person how incessantly replies to replies of their posts. People who are belligerent assholes while doing so get modded to oblivion.

Re:i have to be rude

[circletimessquare]

go ahead, mod me down. you wish to use force to have me "behave." i don't respond to that. if someone says something incredibly stupid to me, i am calling them a moron. if your policy is to mod me down for that, so be it. we shall do this dance forever. because i am not swayed. i am incapable of holding my tongue when confronted ignorance. if this is a personal fault, so be it, it will be my fault to my deathbed. i am simply unable to hold back on judging someone's intelligence when they say something ignorant and/ or low iq

i don't understand the theoretical virtue of silence or kindness in the face of stupidity

Re:i have to be rude

[loshwomp]

because the point you bring up is stupid

Except that you brought it up. You're trying to persuade people that nuclear engineering is different, because the worst case boom is bigger than that of two cars colliding. I don't think that's a very thorough analysis.

I can't force you to discuss the subject like an adult, but shouting "stupid stupid stupid" isn't a very effective debate technique.

Re:i have to be rude

[circletimessquare]

you tell me

you tell me what to do when the stupidest moronic statement is encountered, yet again. "yeah but cars kill more..."

don't you think there is a level of tolerance that is eventually reached?

Re:i have to be rude

[loshwomp]

you tell me what to do when the stupidest moronic statement is encountered, yet again. "yeah but cars kill more..."

For starters, you could explain why it's more moronic than your own claim, which I believe was (paraphrasing) "nukes could kill more..." I don't see why inverting the logic and expressing it as a potential makes it any more intellectual.

I think we're done, here, so for the record I agree entirely with your original premise (now many levels up) that poor designs in the 50s and 60s are largely to blame for nuclear's bad image today. Unfortunately (and ironically) public hysteria is the only reason we're still stuck with those designs, when instead we could have moved on to better designs decades ago.

Re:i have to be rude

[ColdWetDog]

Chill dude. Take an iodine pill.

The situation is not equivalent.

[DerekLyons]

The real fallout that Japan needs to worry about is that they have permanently lost a substantial part of their capacity to generate electricity and won't be able to replace it anytime soon. The US and other countries with these high power nuclear plants should learn a lesson. It is better to build several smaller plants instead of a few megaplants.

That's not a function of them having built megaplants - that's a function of them being a small country where a small number of plants in a compact geographic area represent a large fraction of their electrical generation capacity. They have such a small number of geographically concentrated plants because, unlike the US, they don't have the area to widely distribute the plants.
 
To take out an equivalent percentage of the US's generating capacity and create an equivalent national problem would require a disaster on nearly a continental scale.

Re:The situation is not equivalent.

[Dcnjoe60]

Even in the US, where the failure of a large mega plant puts too much strain on the system. Missouri has a single plant (wanting to add more reactors on the same site). If that plant fails, St. Louis and Southern Illinois is without power, at least until the coal plants in the midwest up their capacity. Sure, power can be shifted from other areas of the country, but that usually only works for the short term (remember the rolling blackouts in California a few years back). While the US does have a national system, it is not really designed so that if New York is out of power for whatever reason, California can pick it up and vice versa. If this quake and tsunami hit the west coast of the US, then California, Washington, etc. would be experiencing the same problems that Japan is. What the US has is actually a regional power grid. It's not truly designed, at least for the long term, to provide power from one coast to another, but relies on regional shifts of power.

Canada is set up similarly (large geographic area divided into regional power districts). There solution, however, has been to build multiple lower powered nuclear plants per region instead of a one or two really big ones. That way, if one goes out, the region can still produce the majority of it's power needs.

Re:The situation is not equivalent.

[DerekLyons]

Even in the US, where the failure of a large mega plant puts too much strain on the system.

Ok, which pretty much has nothing to do with your original post, or my reply.
 

Missouri has a single plant (wanting to add more reactors on the same site). If that plant fails, St. Louis and Southern Illinois is without power

Which failure doesn't produce a national level problem, *exactly* as I stated.
 

Sure, power can be shifted from other areas of the country, but that usually only works for the short term (remember the rolling blackouts in California a few years back).

When you understand the blackouts had nothing to do with generating capacity and everything to do with the regulatory environment - get back to me.
 

If this quake and tsunami hit the west coast of the US, then California, Washington, etc. would be experiencing the same problems that Japan is.

But the rest of the US would not be, completely unlike Japan.
 
Or in short, you not only don't comprehend the issues or my reply - you don't even comprehend your own posting. You're just a parrot repeating "smaller plants! smaller plants!".

Re:The situation is not equivalent.

[Dcnjoe60]

You do not think that if what is going on in Japan hit the west coast that it would not create a national emergency? Particularly if the West Coast was out of power? What would happen if California, alone, lost the Diablo Canyon and the two San Onofre plants? It would seem to be difficult to reopen all of those shipping ports without power. It would seem to be difficult how to rebuild the road and rail infrastructure to transport goods and services without power. It doesn't take the entire country to be in the line of fire for it to be a national problem. Sure, ships could divert around to the east coast, but a) that takes time and b) the east coast ports aren't in a position to handle the capacity of the west coast.

The fact is that in the US, the majority of electrical power is generated by an ever decreasing number of mega power plants (not all nuclear). This is cheaper for the companies that produce power, because of the regulatory cost in building a plant, but creates significant points of failure if one of these plants go down. On the otherhand, multiple small plants increases the points of failure, but the actual failure has less of an impact. The entire grid, antiquated as it is, is based on the notion of their being many small producers that can be switched in and out if needed to other areas. That is not the environment we have today, however, where there are fewer power stations, each creating more power. In addition, the power needs in the areas with the mega plants, use significantly more power so there is less to dump on the grid in a national emergency (again, a national emergency does not mean the entire country is out of power). If somehow, the North East could directly divert it's power production to the West Coast, how much excess capacity is there in the NE production? Not enough to handle the power consumption of the west coast if something like what is going on in Japan happened on the west coast. Likewise, the west coast does not have enough capacity for it's own use and the east coast.

If the quake and tsunami that took out Japan had occurred of of the California coast, it would impact the entire country. And, just like Japan, the rest of the country would be faced with power rationing just to get needed power for emergency services to the victims. Also, like Japan, there would not be any permanent short term fix to the system.

Face it, in a time when everybody wants lower taxes and lower prices, nobody is willing to spend more to build redundancy into a fragile power grid/network. Luckily for the US, this disaster was on the other side of the Pacific and not here. But, I guarantee that civil planners are working on contingency plans in the US given the two systems were very similar. The economic danger from relying on mega plants is far worse than the radiation danger.

misplaced dead

[edibobb]

"Thousands Dead" did not die from radiation or the nuclear plant.

Wrong design for that

[Hasai]

It is very unlikely to be "another Chernobyl" in Red China, for two reasons:
1) Comparing Chernobyl's hideously obsolete design (literally, "squash court" obsolete!) to what the PRC is aiming for (pebble-bed) is like comparing a 1850s-vintage steam boiler to a gas turbine, and
2) The PRC has everyone else's experience to draw upon, and I'd like to think they're not as arrogantly stupid as the Soviets were.

Re:Wrong design for that

[jez9999]

Comparing Chernobyl's hideously obsolete design (literally, "squash court" obsolete!)

Care to explain what you mean by that?

YES!

[Hasai]

MOD PARENT UP!!!

No, but...

[sean.peters]

It would pretty effectively poison the local area for a long, long time.

The whole bloody reactor is sitting in a containment vessel designed precisely to prevent large scale radiation leaks.

It was also designed not to overheat, require venting of the steam/hydrogen mix, and have the roof blow off the outer structure. So maybe people can be forgiven for being concerned. Sure, it's important not to overstate the risks here - the containment vessel is almost certainly going to work. But we also shouldn't pretend that people are silly for recognizing the fact that there's SOME risk.

They did

[sean.peters]

The reactors in question are fitted with earthquake sensors, so as soon as they detect a certain level of ground acceleration, the rods automatically drop in. The trouble is that the reactor is 1) still quite hot, and 2) continues to generate a low level of heat even with the rods fully inserted. Cooling is required for at least a couple of days following a shutdown to get the reactor to a safe state. They were not able to do that because both primary and secondary (diesel generator) power to the cooling pumps failed.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[polar red]

Wind power is unreliable

source ?

solar power do not have enougth scale

source ?

Thorium anyone?

[steeleyeball]

They could move away from Urainum which has longer lived radioactive byproducts and takes effort to prevent an explosive meltdown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk

Greg Palast on nuclear situation in Japan

[GodfatherofSoul]

http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/#more-4497

He's a bit of a fire brand, but he cut his teeth as a utilities industry reporter (I think regulator at one point). Another situation where corporate profits trump public safety.

I'd like to point out that I'm not anti-nuclear power. I just don't think we should ever entrust these facilities to organizations that consistently prove they're willing to risk total failure to save money.

Retarded journalists spreading misinformation

[Anonymous Coward]

They are actually spreading much worse misinformation. Some are panic buying iodine pills in Finland. In Philippines there are rumors that massive radioactive cloud is heading towards them. I mean, come on!!! These "journalists" should be shot for spreading misinformation. They are blatantly making shit up.

An example is, some Japanese official reports that evacuations for population near the reactor are made as if a nuclear meltdown has occurred, as a precaution. WTF do I see on BBC? "Official: Meltdown occurred".

So what will happen to people spreading misinformation for their own gain (ratings, stock market manipulation, fraud, etc.). My guess is nothing... sadly.

No boom today. Boom tomorrow.

[sabt-pestnu]

... there's always a boom tomorrow.

yes, i have

[circletimessquare]

it's called a breeder reactor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

it takes nuclear waste and makes it 1/10th the quantity. and the composition of that nuclear waste has a half life around a hundred years, rather than 10,000 years. and of a type that is not nearly so dangerous a form of radiation. oh, and you get a lot more power out of the arrangement too

it also means we don't have to worry about peak uranium, because then we just switch to thorium, which there's lots of

any other questions?

Re:yes, i have

[owlstead]

1) How do you reprocess the fuel to extract the plutonium without creating nuclear waste?
2) Do we really want to have that much plutonium stored in reactors over the world?

Re:yes, i have

[owlstead]

And what about this article?

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_2779_138/ai_n53905175/

Re:yes, i have

[Hartree]

1) Pyroprocess it so that it the actinides are kept inside the plant and it never is in a form useful for bombs. Then you also have a much smaller amount of waste that is higher level and decays much more quickly.

But, in the early Clinton administration the testbed for it (Integral Fast Reactor at Argonne Natl. Labs) was cancelled. He mentioned it in his state of the union speech. Reason given? We would never need it. Actual reason? It made the waste problem less of a problem. Opposition to nuclear energy is not just technical, it's philosophical. Witness Ed Markey calling for the APS 1000 to have a moratorium on licensing in the light of Japan. The APS-1000 is designed to avoid these problems of overheating without outside cooling. Markey does not want a more effective reactor. He wants no reactors at all. A better reactor is a hindrance to what he wants. If he can't stop the nuclear industry he'll try to cripple it. He was a leader in stopping the IFR.

2) Plutonium from power reactors is quite difficult to turn into an effective bomb as it has high levels of Pu 240 and higher mass isotopes that spontaneously fission too much. The US did one test (That apparently fizzled. The DOE refused to release what yield if any they got.) with it in 1962. And that was with the combined efforts of the US and Britain.

The rationale for limiting reprocessing to limit proliferation is that the same chemical means (PUREX) that is used to process reactor fuel is used to process bomb fuel (but with properly prepared plutonium from a reactor made for that purpose). If you have a chemical reprocessing facility, you might be making plutonium bomb fuel. If you don't have one, you probably aren't.

Pyroprocessing keeps the fuel in the reactor building and it also doesn't separate the plutonium from other heavy elements thus making it hard to use for bomb fuel.

who's on first?

[Thud457]

Okay, so aside from the THREE massive hydrogen gas explosions, the crane accident, and the dozens of injuries, this is all perfectly safe. Gotcha.

Wait, there was a third explosion, aside from the one caused by bablefish ?!

Re:who's on first?

[spun]

Ah, nope, you're right, that was a bad translation, everyone seems to have gotten the update now, only two explosions, not three. Major concern now seems to be, what's happening with the spent and new fuel pools at those reactors? Apparently, they are now exposed to the environment, but now one knows how bad things are because they can't get anywhere near them. Are they still holding water? No one knows. This, at least, was never a problem at TMI.

Still, two explosions, the US Navy running scared from the nuclear fallout, fuel pools shattered and exposed, gantry cranes knocked down, this is not a definition of "safe" I was previously aware of.

Re:who's on first?

[spun]

Looks like I was just prescient. The spent fuel rod fire is more concerning, though.

HAHAHAHAHA

[fireylord]

Solar and wind already cost less per KW than nuclear. I'd call that ready.

bullshit detected!

CVN-65 USS Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

So sticking these reactors in warships is a good idea how?

Re:CVN-65 USS Enterprise

[BitZtream]

If someone is attacking the USS Enterprise, we care less about the environmental damage and more about killing the aggressor.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[TheDarkMaster]

Slashdot now is... Wikipedia? GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH RUN FOR THE MOUNTAINS!!!! OMGWEALLGONNADIE!!!
Jokes apart, for wind power you need, of course, wind. But wind is not constant and predicable, you may have a constant wind on summer and no wind or a hurricane on winter.
And for the solar idea, is a nice idea but is difficult - if not too expensive in money and physical space - to build a 1200MW-class solar plant. And with a obvious problem: works only with daylight. You got the problem?

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[polar red]

maybe you should check out a wind map. sure, wind in 1 spot is not constant. but over large areas, it IS constant.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[Hartree]

There are any of a number of ways to address our energy needs. The problem is, there's no one way that is sufficiently good that it trumps the others in public opinion/policy making.

No one has enough political capital to push their own pet method through fully, but each side seems to have enough to prevent the other alternatives or at least make them unpalatable.

What I fear is most likely is that we'll get down to a make or break right now crisis, we won't build up the new infrastructure and alternatives over decades. We'll have to make a quick fix decision in a panic and set ourselves up for trouble that way.

Personally, I'm pro-nuclear but admit it has problems. Some of them technical, many of them political.

So do all of the other sources.

Wind, solar and geothermal have questions of availability and steadiness in many areas and all address one side of energy, just like nuclear. Electricity.

Coal and other fossil sources have obvious emissions problems and limited supply. Many of the current sources of oil require geopolitical compromises (often seriously bad ones).

Nuclear needs a more advanced fuel cycle before it doesn't have a supply limit problem.

Fusion doesn't exist in usable form yet and shows no sign of getting there soon.

Etc, etc. We can all fill in the blanks on the downsides.

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[Hartree]

Sure. But if you want to make use of that, you have to build highly interconnected transmission systems that can respond reliably on the time scale of wind variation.

We do already to some extent to compensate for power plants failing/going offline, but it's sure not that level of reliability. Witness that big outage in the Northeast or the California power shortage some years back, etc.

But, there's a much bigger problem. Transmission systems are harder to get built than any power plant.

Why? Because a plant only has one location that you have to fight over (and with NIMBY, fight they do). Transmission lines go through large numbers of landowners/jurisdictions and each one has a good chance of being litigated.

That's why you see utilities re-conductoring their existing lines to increase capacity rather than getting new right of way. There are limits to that.

FYI: bravenewclimate written by pro-nuke advocate

[wonderingwandering]

FYI: bravenewclimate written by pro-nuke advocate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Brook_(scientist) Be aware of his bias.

Pump power

[ehiris]

Why can't the reactor power its own pump? It seems weird that there were so many other sources of power but the latent reactor heat.

Re:No boom today. Boom tomorrow.

[Hartree]

Ivanova is God.

Dr Josef Oehmen, expert in risk management....

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT

Upon some simple google search: "The main research interest of Dr. Josef Oehmen is risk management in the value chain, with a special focus on lean product development."

    I would cast some doubt on the story link provided

http://lean.mit.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=845&Itemid=816

NOW 3rd blast announced (1st in reactor 2) 6:14AM

[Anonymous Coward]

March 15 @6:14 AM Japan time: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20110315/t10014678161000.html (Livestream English at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv )

NOW 3rd blast (1st reactor 2) 6:14AM, 15 March JST

[wonderingwandering]

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20110315/t10014678161000.html [English live stream http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-world-tv ] [Note: The original slashdot headline above was wrong because *that* news was older -- re: the 2nd blast at the plant, occuring near reactor #3, at 11:15 PM JST, 14 March 2011.] *** But I'm writing to report to you that, just now, on NHK, it was announced that the 3rd blast had recently occured, and it was the first blast for reactor #2, at 6:14AM JST, 15 March 2011.

UPDATE 3rd blast (reactor 2) 6:14AM, 15 March JST

[wonderingwandering]

see: http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78001.html

Re:We want people to not create these risks at all

[Framboise]

"Everything you said in your first paragraph applies to fossil fuels as well. Wind and solar can't provide base load because they're too unreliable, so I'm assuming you're advocating either burning more coal and gas (until we run out) or stopping people using electricity."

Not necessarily. By now there are several ways to store energy produced by intermittent solar or wind energy. One interesting possibility is hydrogen. For example McPhy (mcphy.com) makes such storage tanks with efficient conversion of energy to hydrogen and vice versa. Seeing how fast such solutions arrive these recent years in the area of sustainable energy production and storage, it looks as if within a decade solar energy might become cheaper than coal or nuclear energy.

 

Why can't they power the turbines?

[BitZtream]

Why can't they power the turbines using the heat which is built up and causing problems?

I understand the reactors were shut down, but clearly they are generating enough heat to cause problems from the by products of normal operation, so why can't that heat be used as if the reactors were operating until it dissipates to the point that it no longer generates steam and is no longer a problem?

If theres enough steam to cause a pressure issue, surely they have enough steam to power the generators to some extent since the pressure which would cause problems would clearly be higher than that of normal operations.

I admit I'm ignorant of the answer, so could someone educate me as to why they turbines can't use this excess heat to provider power to the plant itself?

Why can't they run the turbines/generators for themselves until the heat is dissipated?

Re:Why can't they power the turbines?

[Palpatine_li]

surely you have a point here. But remember these reactors were designed like 40 years ago, and all the conversion you suggested requires extra structure that needs to be designed into the reactor.

Re:(1)Bad for nuclear (2)I'm sure Japan will be OK

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who doesn't already know this obviously doesn't watch the media.

False dichotomies are lies.

Design vs reality

[DragonHawk]

"contrary to what all the overconfident pro-nuke techies that infest this site seem to believe: In the real world, shit happens."

"Or rather, shit happens and the designs work better than they were engineered for."

There's the disconnect between many engineers and many non-engineers right there.

Many engineers look at this and say, "See! This quake was way bigger than it was designed for, and it's holding up kinda-okay. Success!"

Many non-engineers look at this and say, "Oh, fuck! Buildings are exploding!"

It's not enough to meet design criteria. People want it to be safe at all times, in all possible situations. Unfortunately, that's impossible. But then some engineers sell a design as full-proof, knowing that's impossible. At least the unwashed masses have the excuse that they don't know any better.

Crow tastes lovely:

[Hartree]

Well, you asked. They've detected 400 millisieverts between 2 and 3 after the fire in rector 4 and another explosion at 2. That's significant.

Space travel FTW

[Thing 1]

I'm thinking of the movie 2012. The crust just moved, causing the earthquake and the tsunami. I didn't realize that the flipping of the magnetic core was going to be this disruptive, but I suppose it coincides... What if there's a pocket of something way under the Earth's crust that collapses into a smaller form, perhaps from being moved by the new magnetic direction, where two (or more) things combine in a reaction releasing energy and making them smaller? And imagine that pocket being very large, it's certainly possible to have the same sort of "towns falling into the Earth and lava everywhere[1]" scenario from the movie. ([1] -- the lava being pushed up from the energy released, of course.)

Which is why I think we should as a world (not just a nation) start significantly funding our getting-off-the-planet-permanently plans to the same level we're funding our military plans. We've got a year and a half or so, if some calculations are correct.

Re:Space travel FTW

[Thing 1]

I suppose Zeppelins might come into fancy again as well; they can likely stay airborne for a long time, and we could make them city-sized.

We should launch a bunch of hard drives (and CDs, DVDs, hardened flash, etc) containing the Earth's history, in satellites so any disaster on Earth won't get them (the nova/supernova will though).

There's a disaster coming, we need to think about ways to survive it. (Not to be melodramatic :)

lame parent comment

[Anonymous Coward]

How did this lame parent comment get modded insightful?

This story has 666 Comments

[bstender]

which means it totally is gonna blow. oh wait

Lotsa reasons:

[Hartree]

It could be done in principle if it had been designed in, but they were set up to use other backups, and they also had reasons to want to shutdown and block off the main generation system.

When they scram (shutdown suddenly) the reactor and isolate the core, they shut down the normal steam production system as that is an additional way for coolant or contamination to get out.

You may not know immediately what malfunction happened, and for some of them leaving the main steam system running would be real trouble.

A breach in the heat exchanger from the primary to secondary cooling loop for example. You'd be sending radioactive (at least potentially) coolant of whatever sort out through the part of the plant not designed to handle radioactive material. In this case, it's water in both loops. In some reactors it's very different materials like molten sodium and you can get very destructive chemical reactions happening.

You could also have debris dislodged in the malfunction make it out to the turbines. When they fail from that, it's usually pretty catastrophic.

The heat energy immediately shutdown is only a few percent of the heat generated when the pile is running normally and the heat production drops rapidly.

I don't know enough to know if or how long that can continue to spin the large turbo-generators that are normally running.

The electricity generated would also have to go to transformers in the switchyard that was flooded and damaged by the tsunami to be changed to a voltage and phasing needed for the plant's internal power system. The destruction of that was one of the reasons they couldn't try to restore power from outside the plant. And, of course, the water took out the backup generators at the same time.

They do power backup cooling at least as far as water injectors.

But, you're right in a way. The normal steam production system is a massively more effective heat management system than the backup cooling.

Utter crud:

[Hartree]

Unlike what it initially looks like, it is not from the newspaper USA Today.

USA Today (Society For Advancement of Education), note the extended title, is a monthly put out largely by one Wayne M. Barrett. It appears to be mostly his personal opinions and those of people he agrees with.

I call shenanigans.

Re:Utter crud:

[owlstead]

Utter crud. Right. But if I look at Wikipedia then I find that there were quite a lot of breeder reactors designed, and *none* of them could ever be used to capacity, and *all* of them are out of the running.

What's utter crud is saying that you've (hah) solved the problem by proposing a breeder reactor, while the breeder reactors have been researched quite well and failed. There are also many articles on how the use of sodium is - seemingly - too high a risk to take.

I'm all for further research, but you cannot say that the waste problem is solved by just mentioning breeder reactors (and even then there is the 10 to 40% waste that you still have to process somehow - currently it seems to be in "temporary storage" until a solution is found.

Re:Utter crud:

[Hartree]

It wasn't just a proposal. The IFR was a project that had already been running for some time and was in the later stages. It was quite different from Clinch River. Sodium cooled fast reactors have been running for quite some time and even producing power in the FSU. Pyroprocessing was directed at helping both the waste and proliferation problems.

But all this doesn't really matter, does it? As I said in the other post, much of the antinuclear lobby has no desire to see any improvement in nuclear power. It is a priori something to never be used or contemplated, thus a better system is just an impediment to that end.

Sand?

[kitsunewarlock]

I am not a physicist. But I've read somewhere that sand can work better than water since it would seal in the radiation when it turns to glass...again this is probably just science fiction being spread through the tubes and anyone who reads this should know I only got the idea from another news site...but is there any legitimacy to this claim?

(Also: Water, on a coastal plant, is considerably easier to get and transport than sand).

Satellite views of fukushima reactors

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just huge! Here they got exclusive high quality satellite pictures from the fukushima nuclear power plant: http://www.fukushima-nuclear.com/fukushima-nuclear-reactor-explosion-satellite-views/
we can see the buildings and roofs blown away by the explosion. We also see the radioactive cloud dispersed by wind. It's really scary!