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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.
Poorly constructed sentence that last one, insinuating the deaths are related to the nuclear plant.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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/
Before commenting, try and understand the design and facts
http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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
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.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
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.
No.
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
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
Conservative, mod down for violating
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.
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
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.
It depends. If Michael Douglas can get the information to the press in time Hanoi Jane can stop it possibly. We'll see.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
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.
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...
Sig?
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.
Emotions! In your brain!
I hope it is like Three Mile Island - no fatalities.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
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.
According to the writeup, fatalities are impossible - unless you where standing on the thin roof when it collapsed from the hydrogen gas explosion.
Emotions! In your brain!
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.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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?
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
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.
it's japan, so we're talking about an argentina syndrome:
http://www.antipodemap.com/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
Cue irrational fear of nuclear reactors from the general public.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
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,
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.
Emotions! In your brain!
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."
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.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Emotions! In your brain!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deleted
Thank you for this link.
you recon Godzilla is 'not detectable'?
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.
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.
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.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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?
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.
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
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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
(# dead & injured by radiation) / (# dead & injured by (earthquake + tsunami)) = ?
yeah, I thought so...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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
I think BP's damage to the Gulf of Mexico will still be more in comparison.
I recognize nuclear has many advantages over wind / solar, but the aftermath of a disaster is most definitely not one of its benefits.
"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.
Three Mile Island was nothing compared to decades of open air nuclear weapons testing.
http://www.aaronrogier.net
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.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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).
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
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.
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.
You need power to run your TV, coffemaker and etcetera.
Great examples. We *need* those alright ;)
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.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
that is why this issue and Three Mile Island are vastly different that what happened in Russia.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Until Godzilla shows up... :)
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
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.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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.
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.'
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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...
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.
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...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ye-es. Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying, actually.
Emotions! In your brain!
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Emotions! In your brain!
All reactors have such problems.
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.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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.
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.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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).
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!
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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.
"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.
There is no danger to people living around the reactor from a *nuclear* standpoint. The usual dangers apply for the hydrogen explosions, though.
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.
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?
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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?
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?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
"Thousands Dead" did not die from radiation or the nuclear plant.
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.
Regards;
MOD PARENT UP!!!
Regards;
It would pretty effectively poison the local area for a long, long time.
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.
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.
Ocean very big... radioactive materials very small...
But American penis SO BIG!
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Wind power is unreliable
source ?
solar power do not have enougth scale
source ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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
As the Richter scale is logarithmic, they withstood a quake seven times their maximum.
10^.7 = 5, not 7.
I'm seeing a ton of uninformed bullshit from both sides...
Welcome to /.! [notes user id] Oh, wait...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
...explosions per se are not anything to be particularly concerned about...
o.O
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
... there's always a boom tomorrow.
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...
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Maybe we''ll finally get our sharks with lasers.
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?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
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 ?!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Solar and wind already cost less per KW than nuclear. I'd call that ready.
bullshit detected!
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?
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
maybe you should check out a wind map. sure, wind in 1 spot is not constant. but over large areas, it IS constant.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
FYI: bravenewclimate written by pro-nuke advocate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Brook_(scientist) Be aware of his bias.
A Creole is a complete and not simple language. You're thinking of a Pigin.
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.
Ivanova is God.
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.
see: http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/03/78001.html
Starting a war against a powerful country is rarely not going without unexpected outcomes.
"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 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?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If someone is attacking the USS Enterprise, we care less about the environmental damage and more about killing the aggressor.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
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".
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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].
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.
*cough*Hindenburg*cough* :)
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.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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
Seems like you fall in the overly-confident underly-prudent category.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
You can't take the sky from me...
Still think everything is peachy?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
which means it totally is gonna blow. oh wait
look sig is kool
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.
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.
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.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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).
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