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Robert X Cringely Predicts More Mininuke Plants
LandGator writes "PC pundit Robert X Cringely had a life before writing 'Triumph of the Nerds' for PBS: He covered the atomics industry and reported on Three Mile Island. In this blog post, he analyzes the Fukushima reactor failures, and suggests the end result will be a rapid growth in small, sealed 'package' nuclear reactors such as the Toshiba 4S generator considered for Galena, Alaska. He thinks Japan may have little choice, and with rolling blackouts scheduled, he may be right."
I'd be fine with it. I think it's a way to go.
But nuclear power still has the stigma of Chernobyl. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry is going to scream NO at the top of their lungs and most will probably point at Japan's current situation and say "You see why it's a bad idea".
Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream. Instead of pumping tons of crud into the air I'm fine with some barrels of toxic waste so long as they don't cut costs on the storage.
Now! And anybody else who makes these things
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
I used to think that to, but if his track record is any indicator, it means I'm wrong.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the toshiba 4S is a sodium metal reactor. take that and shove it 30m underground to produce 10MW of power. awesome.
until you factor in the earthquake and tsunami.
water + sodium = BIG BOOM.
and the fact that regulatory approvals take a shitload of time for EACH reactor.
and you need 1200 of them to even come close to meeting demand.
and 1200 x 100s of days of regulatory paperwork is much more than 2-4 conventional plants with 100s of days of paperwork each.
not to mention environmental impact assessments at EACH SITE for EACH of those 1200 reactors.
the toshiba design needs to use lead and be rebuilt. the legal process needs to change which will take longer than it takes to build conventional plants. in short... NO.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
Hey, I know it. But Joe Sixpack is gonna say "But look at their problems now, I don't want that here." Bla bla bla
Just over the hill from the Silly Valley is the beach community of Santa Cruz, I used to live in. It will never happen there. They have a big sign on the roads stating "Nuclear Free Zone". You can get a lot of pot there, however.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
You think no power is going to make stream lining installing a nuke reactor Faster??? do you not realize they are undergoing the 2nd biggest nuclear disaster in their country's history???
Crig's your an idiot
Thousands died from the quake, and all they are writing about is what's happening in those reactors.
Every summer more people die of heat stroke than have died from ALL NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS COMBINED since the nuclear industry began.
With all this melodrama, priorities will be shifted in the public's minds. They will believe that reducing the, so far inexistent, deaths from the Fukushima reactors is more important than reducing the emission of greenhouse effect gases.
This actually doesn't seem to be the case. There are some indications of radioactive cesium and iodine.
Dog is my co-pilot.
The book hasn't been closed on what is unfolding currently in Japan. Currently there are serious concerns regarding the spent fuel pools in reactors 4,5, and 6, which were offline during the earthquake. These spent fuel pools do not have the same level of containment and could be problematic. This is by no means something I think people should use to stop nuclear power. I think we should look at it and determine exactly what plant designs were good, bad, and completely terrible. An incident like this should allow us to get BETTER nuclear power and not throw away a valuable technology.
Agreed... if you looked at the people inside the Fukushima plant, which was swept by the tsunami; verses people outside the Fukushima plant who're also swept by the tsunami - those inside of the nuclear plant are actually MUCH MORE likely to make it out alive. And that's a 40-year-old plant not designed to handle earthquakes and tsunamis at the same time. That's actually quite amazingly robust.
There are some indications of radioactive cesium and iodine.
Yeah, great. "Some indications" is evidence enough to make them want to shutdown nuclear power entirely, while overwhelming evidence for catastrophic global warming is disputed as "unconfirmed" or something like that.
If the same criteria were used for CO2 generation as is used for nuclear power, burning fossil fuels would have been outlawed long ago.
Wow, you have a direct feed from the Crack News Network or something?
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore? Why was there a spike of radioactivity in Tokyo, a couple hundred miles away -- are the winds really traveling 240km per couple minutes? What about the breach in in the containment of reactor two?
More interestingly, what about the torus half full of water under the reactor -- will the building withstand a steam explosion when the core at some thousands of degrees hits that level, breaches the container, and releases the water? That's a big question that the US Atomic Energy Commission first asked in 1972. Cited from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16contain.html
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
An overview opinion here on next generation reactors http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576198421680697248.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
And another thing -- what kind of containment is there for the spent fuel pool? You know, the one that's on fire AGAIN.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
He's right of course, as usual. After the Fukushima Daiichi event, everyone will want one in their neighborhood.
Would you really want to be the President who left his warship close to a nuclear incident and have to explain that to a hostile congress, even if nothing came of it. People don't understand nuclear power. They aren't going to understand that the ship was very safe, therefore it is political madness to leave it there.
And that's a completely appropriate response. When weighing the pros and cons of nuclear energy, it's crucial to ask yourself if you are personally willing to live next to a nuclear dump. Otherwise you're really weighing the pros (for you) against the cons (for someone else), which is like apples and oranges.
These Japanese reactors are old and fairly well understood while Chernobyl was brand new. These Japanese reactors had already been in service for 16 years when Chernobyl melted down. In comparative terms there is no comparison — Chernobyl was vastly worse.
My reading: older, better known reactor designs are safer.
If I were to predict a clear winner in Japan’s new nuclear future it would be Toshiba with its innovative 4S (Super Safe Small and Simple) reactors.
My reading: the solution for Japan is to use a new reactor design.
My mind started to melt down, time for a cold ale to arrest the chain reaction in reaching the level of critical... well... thinking.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Joe Sixpack should also look at the current mess in Libya and Bahrain. Count the number of lives lost there and compare that to the number of lives lost to the reactors in Japan. How many lives have been lost in wars over oil? Tell me again which energy source is a better choice?
At the end of the day, we can learn from what's happening in Japan and build even better reactors. What can be done about the despots ruling oil rich countries?
It went out on its own.
Better luck next time.
Because nothing can go wrong when the reaction is a meltdown to begin with. Thorium is more plentiful than uranium, it is less volatile than uranium, and it can't be used to make nuclear bombs. We need to switch to thorium. All of humanity. Now.
We have a church near where I work that has a prominent nuclear free zone sign on it.
I wonder what they're going to do about the uranium in the granitic rock that some of it is made of.
But, in any case, I'm sure the sign will make a lot of difference. If someone explodes a nuclear weapon, they'll be sure to do it across the street where there isn't any sign.
Yes They survived the earthquake fine. The Tsunami is what caused the problems.
Basically, the only advantage reactors like this have over dry-containment, is that they are cheaper to build at the outset, but probably end up costing as much as dry containment systems.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
FTFA:
That’s where this earthquake will probably change everything, at least in Japan, where the process will be streamlined almost to nothing with a 4S soon stashed under every power substation giving Japan a smart grid in the process.
If folks are having to deal with rolling balck-outs, you can bet your Soba noodles that they'll get these things up and running.
Things would be streamlined even in California if they had to deal with rolling blackouts. Just look at the shit storm that happened when Enron was making the fake ones years ago.
no, but there'll be more anime with earthquakes.
i hope there's no drop in anime levels - that shit puts bread on my table. it's okay so long as you don't watch it, and ever now and then there's a good series.
ask any Victorian about their willingness to live near Hazelwood (note: Moe is near there...)
I sentence you to be perpetually mobbed by annoying talking animal anime sidekicks.
I'd have said the AFLAC duck, but they fired him.
A nuclear dump? Well I wouldn't want piles of crap sitting around in a vacant lot, but if it was miles below ground I wouldn't have a problem with it. And if I was next to a nuke plant instead of a coal plant, I'd get less radiation...
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Because what the world doesn't need is another crappy phpNuke clone/fork/offshoot/derivative.
I think the Fox News headline I saw this morning sums up why nuclear power will never advance in the US: "Despite Nuclear Explosion, Obama Administration Pushes New Nuclear Agenda"
FYI: I read Fox News for comedy purposes.
Most (all?) civilian nuclear power produces plutonium that ends up in nuclear weapons. That's not just something dictatorships get up to.
Nick
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I'm pro-nuclear but i'm sick of this downplaying bullshit. Reactors that require actively powered safety systems ARE flawed.
This entire crises we have had absolute dickheads claiming that the radiation levels are safe at a time when people in the immediate vicinity are being encouraged to evacuate by the authorities. There is a radiation leak. This is a fact. Up to 400mSv/h near the reactor has been confirmed (noticable radiation sickness will happen at 800 and above, but 400 is still very, very dangerous). People need to be acknowledging that fact. Much smaller than Chernobyl but there's no reason to downplay it. There are some heroes right now working in the irradiated zone trying to keep things under control. There are people in the immediate area who should leave for the next few days.
Assholes like the guy who wrote the following "even if you were standing at the top of the cooling tower you would be fine" and "fukushima is currently safe and will stay safe" should be sent to help maintain the reactors without any protective suit. Link: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
Enough with the downplaying. The design WAS flawed. People ARE risking their lives to contain it. We should learn from this.
I know. How stupid that "Joe Sixpack" would not want what's happening at the Japanese reactors to happen here.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the primary...wait for it...containment chambers! in the No 2 Fukushima reactor has been breached. Not because of the earthquake (if I'm reading this correctly) but because of the tsunami which overwhelmed the cooling systems causing the fuel to be exposed to air, causing a hydrogen explosion. That's what caused the mini-mushroom cloud that the Sydney Morning Herald reported earlier. But that couldn't happen here because the corporations that build our nuclear plants would never cut any corners on safety because the "free market" insures that every possible safety measure has been taken.
Personally, I'm going to wait a few months and then eat a bunch of imported Japanese pickles. Maybe I'll get superpowers.
Seriously, I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other about nuclear power. But it bothers me when I hear proponents ridiculing "Joe Sixpack" for being a little alarmed about fuel rods exposed to the atmosphere and breaches in...wait for it...containment chambers!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Experience in France and Germany is that property prices near the reactors actually go *up*, not down. People move into the areas around them because of the cheap supply of hot water - it's a pretty big saving on your yearly energy bills.
Let's not forget things like mercury emission - we only so far managed to pollute most lakes and oceans with coal-sourced mercury. This is actually why governments say to use mercury-containing CFS (compact fluorescent lights), because they will emit less mercury via accidental breakage or dumping of them at landfill, than a regular bulb results in emissions at a coal power plant to supply it.
We are talking tons of mercury vapors emitted every single year. Hell, I remember that most polluted areas of some countries have mercury index for outside air!!! I'd take nuclear with its problems over inability to breathe and guaranteed early death. Cleanest air in Europe is in France for a reason. China, of course, will be building their 160 nuclear power plants, maybe more. 100+ will be passively safe and many orders of magnitude safer than current designs in operation around western world. It is up to the western world if they want safe, secure energy, or rely on the Saudi prince to be kind enough to sell them some.
And of course you are correct w.r.t. CO2 and global meltdown. CO2 is resulting in a meltdown that will affect generations and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. Some of us are just too narrow minded to see it.
Honest question here, I just read about the David-Besse reactor head hole incident in 2002; from my reading of it it looks like the system passed inches aways of a LOC incident with impossibility to insert the control rods, i.e., full meltdown of a running core. Is this correct? What would the consequences have been then?
The pseudonymous one, or Mark Stephens, who absconded with the name from Infoworld? The latter has no credibility.
Michael Swaine, an early Infoworld columnist, was better than any of them.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
What!? Are you telling the that CO2 is radioactive, too? Oh crap, something else for me to worry about...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The President had nothing to do with the carrier moving. If the Reagan's captain feels it is unsafe he/she dictates where the ship goes. The President may set the goal - 'go to Japan and assist' - for example. The execution is left to commanders.
If the President is standing on the bridge of the Regan, he cannot direct the operation of the ship whatsoever.
What!? Are you telling the that CO2 is radioactive, too? Oh crap, something else for me to worry about...
No but the uranium and thorium found in the coal and which gets sent up into the air with the smoke from burning coal is...
You've vastly oversimplified what's going on. First of all, it's pretty clear that the first level of containment (the zirco-alloy cladding on the fuel) has failed. There's been radioactive iodine and cesium detected outside the plant, indicating the fuel rods have at least partially melted.
Those two can get outside the primary containment vessel because their primary cooling system is broken. Normally there are two water loops to keep the core cool. The inner water loop is a closed system which carries heat from the core to a heat exchanger. There the heat gets transferred to an outer water loop (ocean water in this case), which does the actual cooling. The inner loop water never leaves the plant, and thus not even the radioactive tritium which gets formed leaves the plant.
When the electrical systems and backups failed, that cooling system ceased to function. The only way they have to cool the core right now is to directly vent the water surrounding the core. Vent the steam, lower the pressure, cool the core. Best case you're releasing radioactive tritium. But since the rods have melted, the water is now in direct contact with the uranium fuel and fission products. That's where the radioactive iodine and cesium come from. Iodine is gaseous (so escapes along with the venting), and cesium is water soluble.
That's where we were at yesterday. It rated a 5 on the INES nuclear safety scale, which was the same as Three Mile Island. Unfortunately, today has had two very, very bad developments.
First, there's reports that the containment vessel for reactor #2 is damaged. No confirmation and no details. For whatever reason TEPCO and the Japanese government are being tight-lipped about it. Second, apparently some of the debris broke through the wall of building 4 and exposed a huge, huge flaw in the system. They have spent fuel rods and unused fuel rods sitting in storage pools outside of containment. The only thing protecting them is the water in the pool, and the building walls surrounding them. Walls which have blown apart in buildings #1 and #3, and have holes in #2 and #4.
Supposedly some of these spent fuel rods in building #4 caught fire (they're still experiencing nuclear decay, so still generating heat; just at a much, much slower rate than in reactors #1-#3 which were shut down recently). The water in the pool is supposed to keep them cool, but with the electricity gone, they suffered the same cooling failure as in reactors #1-#3. It just took a lot longer for the problem to exhibit itself since the amount of heat they were generating was much lower. Anyway, supposedly some of these rods caught fire, which corresponds to the sharp spike in radiation release yesterday. Those radiation readings dropped back down to "normal" again after the fire was put out.
But if those spent fuel rods have boiled off enough water to expose them to the air, then there is nothing stopping them from heating up. They will melt, possibly catch fire, and worst case they will start fissioning again after melting into a slag at the bottom of the pool. And all of this will happen outside of containment. Basically, the situation right now is only slightly better than what we had in Chernobyl - a hot core exposed to the atmosphere with a fire. That's why the situation was upgraded to a 6 on the INES scale today.
If the rods catch fire, it'll basically be the same as Chernobyl again. Maybe a bit smaller since the fuel isn't as hot as in
I read Fox News this morning and did not see that headline. That is a lie. Nowhere does it say "Nuclear Explosion". "Explosion at Nuclear Plant", yes, which happens to be true.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
I agree, but can we please maybe put all the unemployed NASA folks in charge of nuclear power instead of the corporations? I'm not so much worried about nuclear power as I am about the same energy corporations who have demanded a cap on liability being in charge of it. And none of this "regulators who used to work for the power industry and who will again work for the power industry when they leave government" crap. I want civil engineers, who are paid by taxpayers and are not being pressured by ownership to skip a few steps to save a few bucks on safety measures. It's one of those areas where I'm OK with a little of that horrible "inefficiency of government" doing the job instead of a "lean and mean" multinational.
Energy is too important to leave in the hands of private industry. Like health care. And education. And national defense. And drug safety. And social security. I'm OK with private industry taking a crack at everything else. If they promise to be good, and none of this "liability cap" and "subsidy" nonsense.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You Raff You Ruse!!
Just in case ... what minearl would you want to have in plentiful supply near your new nuclear reactor? How about galena. The raw mineral form of LEAD should absorb a few screaming subatomic particles. I think Galena, Alaska is a terrific place for this project.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
The Toshiba 4S is a reactor with a 10 MW capacity. The peak summer load in New England is 28,130 MW (see link below). So you would need 2,813 of these reactors. Get 50% of New England's power from nukes and thats still 1406.5. Whats the cost to protect them by the way?
Sure, its the next best thing for Galena Alaska. For national energy policy, this is completely irrelevant.
http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/mkt-electric/new-england.asp#gen
A "minor" release (and don't state it like it's a fact just yet) from an earthquake more powerful than design criteria does not make me think "Nuclear Power is Safe" nor even "Nuclear Power is Unsafe." It makes me question the design assumptions. Never mind what was known at the time. With benefit of hindsight, the design assumptions were clearly wrong.
So. Given what we know now, is it a correct assumption to pay the extra required, such that at-risk plants be designed to tolerate common-cause failures devolving from a magnitude 9.0 quake and related tsunami? That's really one for risk analysis economists to decide, but the consequences of failure are so unbelievably expensive, that my knee-jerk assumption suggests that it is not. The big problem is that the consequences are so expensive that they cannot be other than mostly externalized.
Regards, /.er, professional engineer, hobby economist, and ex-employee of the nuclear power industry.
Evilad
5-digit
Add to that the lack of media coverage of the oil refineries exploding into huge balls of fire with a tall column of toxic black smoke. How much toxin was dumped into the environment there? And Japan was lucky that they didn't have oil platforms, oil tanks or oil tankers that could've spilled all their contents and caused an even greater disaster...
Think of the BP spill + Exxon Valdez + exploding refineries and that would be the alternative to nuclear power.
Your sarcasm is well placed. The BWR design with a pressure-supression pool was designed so that a weaker containment system could be built as a, you guessed it, cost cutting measure. This design was been questioned in 1972 by S.H. Hanauer. Of course, because of the weaker design and the requirement for many valves and backup valves (which are notoriously unreliable), Hanauer concluded that costs are probably about the same as the safer dry containment system.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
What I'd been reading about was damage to the buildings that keep the rain off the containment structure, not to the containment structure itself.
Which of course may have changed by now, and the press coverage is execrable.
Has anyone found a news source covering the incidents that even makes sense?
That's either a lie or a weird joke. In France and Germany you do not buy hot water from nuclear plants. Almost everyone heats up their water in their home using central heating that runs on gas.
In all seriousness Joe Six Pack is right.
Wahoo it survived the earthquake! But whats next? Did it survive the tsunami? What about the backup systems? Why isn't the sea water working? etc.
A coal plant may rupture and start a big fire but it wont leak radiation and stay hot after a shutdown. It wont have the same hazards as a nuclear power plant. I know Nuclear power is supported generally on slashdot but these problems are real.
No it is not SAFE as workers would not be risking their lives preventing meltdowns if it were.
The fires right now seem to be started by used rods in a pool where the water is boiling away due to the lack of a cooling system. Nuclear power is simply more dangerous. Yes, great advances in technology has happened but the same was true with deep sea drilling. I was in favor of it and still am with proper regulations. We found out bad management and anything that is more dangerous is still vulnerable as technology does not solve all the problems but rather hides the symptoms and gives a false sense of security.
You can not advert risk by simply creating backup procedures and using technology. You reduce them but they are always still there vs the alternatives
http://saveie6.com/
It's commentators like you will move nuclear forward. The "nothing to worry about" fanbois on the other hand, are the ones who will ensure its death.
Personally, I'm divided. I recognize that coal is terrible and disperses its own radioactive elements, but the whole atmosphere of nuclear power boosters makes me think of over-confident people with a deficit of prudence. I could get behind a system that would shut itself down rather than require active cooling, but there would have to be a whole lot of honesty displayed about the risks from its proponents, otherwise I'm going to be incredibly skeptical.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Are you personally willing to live next to a toxic waste dump from a coal fired plant or a petroleum refinery or even a solar panel manufacturing plant? There's this think about the word "nuclear" that makes people automatically assume the worst.
Your last paragraph raises an interesting issue. The historical safety of an industry is somewhat instructive about the ongoing and achievable safety of an industry, but it is very easy to make improvements in practice that increase safety.
So your calculations should maybe include "nuclear if old plants are kept online" alongside of "nuclear with newer designs that are safer when external power is lost".
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the primary...wait for it...containment chambers! in the No 2 Fukushima reactor has been breached. Not because of the earthquake (if I'm reading this correctly) but because of the tsunami which overwhelmed the cooling systems causing the fuel to be exposed to air, causing a hydrogen explosion.
Negative.
That was the secondary containment chamber that was breached. Lots of hydrogen built up between the primary and secondary chambers, it ignited and exploded.
The primaries is still OK. (Well, maybe not. They lost some pressure in the one of the reactor's primary containment, and they're trying to figure out whether that meant a leak.)
"At the end of the day, we can learn from what's happening in Japan and build even better reactors. What can be done about the despots ruling oil rich countries?"
Without a doubt. The Toshiba reactor is the same or related to one written about in a fairly recent issue of National Geographic (within last 12 months.) There was another type int that article as well, and both had different benefits, wish I could drag up a link or two. Point is, these technologies, old and new, are built to run for a long time. So what happens is, before older reactors fail we have come up with so many better designs. Time marches on, technology improves. But, suppliers of power aren't going to EOL plants prematurely unless there is significant monetary gain, or as in this case, there is no better choice.
I live near 5 nuclear plants (120km radius), of which one (KKW Stade) has been taken off the net a few years back. Now my government is going to shut down two more plants (Krümmel and Brunsbüttel) because of the INES 6 event in Fukushima. And I can tell you that with each reactor shutting down I feel more relieved.
The big irony is that it's going to make no difference to the supply of electric energy in my country. That's all bullshit lies. Germany is going to export a little less electricty to other countries now. Which means the electricity cartel is making a little less money. Crocodile's tears.
Funny, I had seen headlines about this, but now that I see it, it is a memo? 4 pages and ample whitespace? "Pressure containment. Bad Idea, Methinks"
Containment breach does not automatically equal massive catastrophe for miles in all directions. It's a bad deal but it's not the worst thing that has happened due to this earthquake. I know we shouldn't ridicule Joe Sixpack (he may be president someday), but the "general public" has a tendency to assume that any nuclear disaster is just like Chernobyl, and we still have members of the general public who don't see much difference between Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
5 digit slashdot UID is a resume builder now?
Wow are you really an American? You're views seem far too balanced and with a distinct lack of over-simplification. I'd mod you insightful but I don't have any mod points =(
The Reagan moved because some personnel were exposed to radiation. The news I saw said they got about the equivalent of 1 month of 'normal' background exposure.
So they moved because of the exposure, which seems prudent, but it makes sense to move something that can move away from pretty much any increase of radiation, so it doesn't really give much information.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
No kidding. 53 Reactors are hit with something people writing the disaster policy probably didn't even dream of. A handful of them are having issues. The survival rate on the sites was probably a near 100%. A lot of places didn't even fair close to that. I would wait though about arguing how bad the situation is though. The record will be set straight eventually and the situation analyzed in great detail. What the news is doing right now is terrible. They are reporting what ever they can get their hot little hands on and a lot of it is probably unsubstantiated speculation and opinions.
I think it's conceivable that close to nuclear power plants that generate lots of waste heat, they may use that heat for houses, even if they don't do so far away from nuclear power plants. Especially because that is done elsewhere in Europe even with conventional power plants that also generate waste heat.
I just have to thank you for posting this because I was seriously starting to doubt there was anyone with common sense left in the world. I've been the sole person in my social circles calming everyone down and reassuring them that Japan isn't about to fall into a nuclear holocaust that will be picked up by the wind and spread cancer to every corner of the earth. Officials in Europe have been calling it a nuclear APOCALYPSE. Seriously... apocalypses? For fucks sake... anyway, thank you for restoring my faith in the intelligence of man.
Well, that's a first. But thank you anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Those mini reactors sound like a great idea. Bury some of those around here. I'm in.
I'm wondering why they can't pump liquid nitrogen in there to cool it down. Didn't they do that at Chernobyl?
The nuclear reactors in Fukushima are boiling water reactors. It uses water for coolant, which boils as it flows through the reactor chamber, goes through a heat exchanger, and is recirculated. Since the coolant systems are not functioning properly, they are dumping saltwater into the coolant lines, letting it boil off, and vent out into the atmosphere through pressure release valves. This is releasing radiation, however it is a small amount, and containing elements with short half-lives that will decay rapidly and cease to be a danger. This has been happening for several days
This steam release is very energetic. It is so energetic that the water is spontaneously disassociating to hydrogen and oxygen. When you get large volumes of hydrogen and oxygen, along with a high temperature source, you're going to have an explosion. There is no way around that, but it is not an indicator that the containment vessel has breached and the core is exposed.
The reports of a breach in reactor #2 appear to be part of the coolant system. The suppression chamber has developed a crack, which lead to an uncontrolled release of coolant, as the system depressurized to atmospheric. This resulted in a large venting of radiation as it depressurized, but now, the situation is no different than at the controlled steam releases at the other reactors. The containment vessel is still intact. Corium is not flowing out of the containment vessel. There is not currently any risk of it being released and contaminating the ground water.
Of course we are willing to have it next door. Do you really think we are lying when we say we think it's safe, in spite of the abundant evidence rolling in from Japan right now that even ancient relic ford-T reactors are safe in the face of much more forceful attack than designed for including the most serious failure mode possible for these ancient reactors (loss of cooling). Now a coal mine, that you could not get me to live next door to.
That was the housing outside the containment dome. That housing is not a safety feature which is the whole reason that there are not systems in place to prevent build-up of hydrogen gas outside the containment like there is inside the containment. It could have been done, it just wasn't important to do it since an explosion outside the containment is not a hazard to the reactor and it would only occur in situations such as this which exceeds what the reactor is designed to withstand. Obviously it's bad for staff nearby the explosion, though. As far as reactor safety goes, these explosions are non-issues.
Your love means more to me than any mod points, captain_sweatpants.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The tsunami busted the capability to pump cooling.
The fuel exposure is not exposure to the atmosphere, it is when the water inside the core drops below the end of the fuel rods. The water dropped below the fuel rod because they couldn't cool the core so they released the steam into the building which decreased the internal pressure. The released steam has high amounts of hydrogen that blew up when exposed to a spark (or other ignition source). As far as I know, the reactor core itself has not be breached! The press has not been very helpful in reporting what is going on. When they say "radiation" we have no idea what they are talking about. Are they talking about nitrogen isotopes in the steam? If so, this posses little threat to the local population since the isotope is so radioactive that is quickly goes away within seconds. It is hard to say because the news reports just say "the radiation spiked."
Thanks for the info. This is what I just read, ""After explosions at both Units 1 and 3, the primary containment vessels of both Units are reported to be intact. However, the explosion that occurred at 04:25 UTC on 14 March at the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 may have affected the integrity of its primary containment vessel. All three explosions were due to an accumulation of hydrogen gas," the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement today (March 15). "
I guess "may have affected the integrity of it's primary containment vessel" is still more hopeful than if it had reported a full breach.
OK, I can go back to calmly drinking my sizzurp now. Nothing like a little Purple Drank to calm the fears of worldwide catastrophe.
You are welcome on my lawn.
nat geo: small town nukes
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/08/mini-nukes
i have the magazine somewhere, but cant seem to find the article at a glance and dont remember if the print article was any longer.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
"The Dam was designed to survive a 1-in-1,000-year flood (300 mm of rainfall per day). In August 1975, however, a 1-in-2,000 year flood occurred."
"According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province,[5] in the province, approximately 26,000 people died from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected."
This one incident completly overwhelms all nuclear power accidents ever; it's on the scale of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujinuma_Dam
"On March 11, 2011, the dam failed due to the 2011 Sendai earthquake. The resulting flood washed away five houses while damaging others, disabled a bridge and blocked roads with debris. Eight people were missing and four bodies were discovered by the next morning.[1][2][3] Reportedly, some locals had attempted to repair leaks in the dam before it completely failed."
So far, in the current disaster, more people have been killed by dams than reactors. (I do realize that radiation death usually occur several days after exposure, so time will tell.)
In his most recent press conference, Edano said #3 containment may be breached. It is already old news that #2 may also be breached. There's a big steam cloud spewing from #3 as I type this.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
There's a lot of heavy equipment, shipping of yellowcake, and processing of yellow cake before it gets to a nuke plant. I don't think they're as "green" as a lot of other people seem to think.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The truth of there being an explosion at a nuclear plant doesn't make it a good headline. Here, let me try:
"Despite Lindsay Lohan DUI, Liquor Stores Continue Selling Alcohol"
Perfectly good headline, right?
This is what I was going by:
"After explosions at both Units 1 and 3, the primary containment vessels of both Units are reported to be intact. However, the explosion that occurred at 04:25 UTC on 14 March at the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 2 may have affected the integrity of its primary containment vessel. All three explosions were due to an accumulation of hydrogen gas," the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement".
I really don't know anything about this stuff, but if you say it's a non-issue, I'm prepared to believe you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You're talking about the same NASA that built The Space Shuttles? The same NASA that crashed a probe because of a math error?
There is a third possibility: A private company that isn't incompetent, politically connected, and held liable for any damage they do their neighbors. As things are today, no company in the business could come close to that standard. By definition.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
ask any Victorian about their willingness to live near Hazelwood (note: Moe is near there...)
That's Victoria, Australia folks. Home of the meanest belching brown-coal moonscape and Pink-Floyd nightmare of a 1950's power station. And Moe (pronounced "mowie") is a Township, not a Stooge. Or was, anyhow. Just in case you needed more detail. Bad idea to leave your clothes out on the line for any length of time.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I agree 100%. Pebble Bed Reactors are the best we can do now, and should be built. The japanese reactors are 40 or 50 year old BWRs that can fail like this. But it's not as though it will be significant compared to oil refineries exploding and such.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
The fuel rods would have melted in the containment chamber and the plant would have lost a lot of money, but odds are that no seriously harmful radiation would leak.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
They're moving people as a precaution. Not because the people *must* move. There is a big difference. That's not to say the 40 year old reactor design is as good as a modern design, but let's get real here.
All four reactors are now going into full meltdown, all remaining personel have been evacuated.
"Again, I'm all for more nuke plants. It's cleaner' than coal, and going heavily into solar + wind is a pipe dream."
Citation needed on solar and wind?
Counterpoints:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/press_room/C68/2010_datarelease9
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://www.google.com/#q=no+furnace
http://www.nanosolar.com/company/blog/beck-energy-and-nanosolar-complete-solar-power-plant
http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/blog/?p=1037
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
At current levels of exponential growth, renewable energy will supply all our power in twenty years. Why should this exponetial growth stop before then? Short of something way better?
So, citation needed for your point.
However, sure, small modern nukes may be safer, but how risky will the centralized reprocessing plants be in an earthquake?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So yeah I'd be happy to live near one. But I'm also reasonably intelligent, and understand pretty well what sort of dangers there are and how they're addressed by safety features and the design of the facility.
That's the problem right there. You (and myself, who completely agree with your statement) are in the minority. What do you do when the people you have to convince have at most a high school diploma/bachelors degree in a non-technical (non-engineering/science/etc) field?
I think your pronouncement that the situation proves nuclear power is safe may be premature. I can't agree with you until the situation is stabilized. Unit 4 is reported to have sustained more damage than the other units, and there is a remote possibility that containment may have been compromised.
I am well aware that that the ground motion was far beyond the design parameters. At TMI, commercial grade equipment performed tasks far beyond what anyone would have expected too, but to assume that that will happen in the future is simply not prudent. Design assumptions have to be made for each plant and we keep finding unanticipated surprises like 100 year flood plains that flood every 5 years and now Tsunamis. An example of an unanticipated issue, how vulnerable are nuclear plants to EMP? EMP can be generated without a nuclear blast. I know that the plants rely mostly on 50 year old technology that is far less vulnerable than today's solid state electronics but this is a threat that is not part of the design equation of US plants; I am not speculating, I have worked with the equipment qualifications for nuclear plants for 25 years.
Back on topic: A couple of the 4S generators mentioned in the article might have kept the pumps running at Fukushima averting any loss or safety issue. Standby diesel generators, even eliminating being swamped by a big wave, are one the weakest links in the safe shutdown scenarios.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
It may be conceivable but it's not true. I know because I live in Germany, and I know for a fact that "FernwÃrme" is not done with nuclear plants (besides nobody would want it) and it's not done anymore since the 60s. Every home and every building has their own central heating unit here. The only thing that was heated by a nuclear plant besides the rivers in Germany that I know of is an open air bath next to the Neckarwestheim reactors, of which one of the two going to be shut down because of the events in Japan, too by the way.
You do realize that the reactor containers for reactors 2 and 3 are now assumed to have been breached? And that the reactors are boiling off approximately 100 gallons of water per minute, and as they get hotter a cascade effect occurs?
Guess what? These "safe" reactors of yours require external active pumping of water, non-stop. It takes months to shut down the reactors to the point they don't require external cooling. When that cooling isn't available they get hotter. At 2100 degrees C the zirconium cladding of the fuel rods starts oxidizing water (the coolant), producing hydrogen gas. Boom. That's already happened 3 times the past two days. When the reactor reaches 4000 degrees the uranium fuel starts melting then aerosolizing, mixing with the hydrogen gas that goes BOOM and flowing upwards as a heated gas. Oh, and reactor 4 is fueled by a mixture or plutonium and uranium. Aerosolized plutonium is very deadly. One of the most toxic substances known.
Then there's the "spent" fuel rods sitting in pools of water. Pools of water that also need replenishment to cool the rods for the next few months. Those rods have been boiling off their coolant too (pool temp last measured at 84 degrees C). The parts of the rods exposed to air due to coolant loss have been, you guessed it, oxidizing the water and catching fire. Twice, in the last 24 hours.
This ain't getting better folks, and denial is a river in egypt.
Think about it, nuclear energy can likely be cleaner than the alternatives, but the same culture of shaving the safety margins to increase profitability that brought us BP's Macondo blowout, and PG&E's gas pipeline explosion exists in the nuclear industry. Until we solve the issues of regulatory capture and temporal externalities (take a risk now that won't burn you for likely 10 years, collect bonuses for next 5), it is idiotic to bring online more destroyers of land.
Remain calm! All is well!
But coal powerplants cause up to 13,000 - 30,000 premature deaths per year in the US alone (quick google) and in general emit more radiation over their lifetimes compared to nuclear because of the trace amounts of uranium found in coal.
Even with this accident, Fukushima has killed less people than a coal power plant of equivalent age. Fukushima is 40 years old, things have improved a lot in reactor designs in 40 years. If it was a modern pebble bed based reactor it could not have a meltdown, cannot expose any nuclear fuel as it is physically impossible because of the design. I also find it kinda amusing that Switzerland has put its plan for a new nuclear reactor on hold. A place that was choose as it was stable enough to partly hold the Large Hadron collider, has no coast line so free from Tsunami's, free from almost all common natural disasters (Hurricanes, Cyclones and Tornadoes) but its plans on hold because of a disaster it can never have.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
I agree with you, but I have a better comparison.
Compare the lives lost in the earthquake and tsunami to the number that are killed in the resulting aftermath. I suspect that when the final count is completed (even after estimating the future deaths from the radiation,) that nature will be the bigger killer. And it kills a lot more often than major nuke accidents.
Looking for a job?
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DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
Which level of containment? The material that the rods are encased in? The container that the water and the rods are contained in? Or are we talking about the container that contains the container that contains the water and the rods?
Well since the Ronald Reagan is a nuclear-powered ship itself, I am guessing that the political angle has nothing to do with it. If I am captain of a nuclear powered vessel, chances are I understand the consequences of hanging out downstream of a radioactive plume. 1) there is no reason to expose oneself to any radioactive contamination, no matter how inconsequential. 2) If my ship gets contaminated with radioactive particulates, how do I now distinguish that from contamination that might come about from a mishandling of radioactive material on ship or release of radioactivity from the reactor on board?
I never said you were lying. I said that the NIMBY (not in my backyard) argument shouldn't be dismissed as it is a correct one. If you consider it safe and no big deal, then you are in fact in a position to take advantage of lower house and land prices, unlike those who don't agree with you.
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I don't know -- it wasn't clear. After Edano, some TEPCO people were on, one of whom stated that the breach in #2 is in the pressure-supression unit under the reactor. The pressure-supression unit is the donut underneath the reactor that was built as a cost-cutting measure so that the primary containment structure could be built more weakly.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/greeninc/hanauer.pdf
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You haven't really answered martin-boundary, I think you are saying you would rather live near a modern nuclear plant than a modern coal fired one - is that right?
BM3
The thing to also be alarmed about is the lying and cover-ups that has been going on over there with their nuclear plants.
more explosions and a no fly zone now imposed does not sound like a safe environment.
BM3
Nuclear power generation is never going to be perfectly safe, but it will always be cleaner and safer than coal-fired power generation. Yes, accidents are going to happen. Yes, accidents will, from time to time, occur that you *cannot* plan for. Engineers could've designed the reactors to have seawater gravity feed into the reactors to cool them, and still vent the resulting radioactive steam due to the extremely short half-lifes, No one expected a 9.0 earthquaker and a 20ft sea surge from a tsunami. What next? Nuclear is supposed to plan for Godzilla?
CO2: no.
Coal: yes.
The burning of Coal has released more radioactivity into the atmosphere than all the world's nuclear plants combined. And several million times more than Chernobyl.
Based on the predicted combustion of 2516 million tons of coal in the United States and 12,580 million tons worldwide during the year 2040, cumulative releases for the 100 years of coal combustion following 1937 are predicted to be:
U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons):
Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 357,491 tons
Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons
source
No, it is NOT a completely appropriate response. Using a 45 year old Gen 1 design, that's performed admirably in this situation, is not a legitimate reason to rail against Gen 4 designs. Where's Car Analogy Guy when we need him to work something up comparing the Model T to the Tesla.
No but the uranium and thorium found in the coal and which gets sent up into the air with the smoke from burning coal is...
I hear this a lot, googled it and...
Excerpt: McBride and his co-authors estimated that individuals living near coal-fired installations are exposed to a maximum of 1.9 millirems of fly ash radiation yearly. To put these numbers in perspective, the average person encounters 360 millirems of annual "background radiation" from natural and man-made sources, including substances in Earth's crust, cosmic rays, residue from nuclear tests and smoke detectors. Dana Christensen, associate lab director for energy and engineering at ORNL, says that health risks from radiation in coal by-products are low. "Other risks like being hit by lightning," he adds, "are three or four times greater than radiation-induced health effects from coal plants." And McBride and his co-authors emphasize that other products of coal power, like emissions of acid rain–producing sulfur dioxide and smog-forming nitrous oxide, pose greater health risks than radiation.
The biggest issues with coal fired imo are acid rain, greenhouse gases (not sold on "scrubbers), quantity required to generate the power we need. Preference is definitely to be far away from both - but further from a nuke one.
BM3
I think a prudent measure to be taken would be to look at the cost of having the ability to gravity feed water to cool a core, so in the event a plant goes black and exhausts all available power for cooling, you still have a method to cool the core (although you'll have a bit of radiation release, an acceptable risk considering the half-lives involved).
When do you consider a location to be at risk for a 9.0? Obviously, a location that has had a quake that large would count, but I can count those quakes on my hand. Is Southern California at risk for a 9.0? Is the Eastern US at risk? We don't have enough recorded data to really know what fault lines will some day get extremely active. Then you end up over-designing every plant to withstand a 9.0. This is really besides the point. The reactors current undergoing issues in Japan did withstand the Earthquake. The backup cooling failed afterward. That seems like a much easier problem to solve than building a structure that the Earth can't possible rend in half.
Your mistake is thinking that picking one side of the "it's perfectly safe it's behind six feet of concrete/it's fantastically dangerous so it's behind six feet of concrete" dichotomy is a good idea. Until you grow up you'll never understand why people don't agree with you or what you can do to change their perceptions. I'd argue that people like yourself are a large hindrance to the adoption of widespread nuclear power.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Oddly nuclear wast is something when can deal with easy, it can be reprocessed and used again as fuel. Hell a traveling wave reactor could use depleted uranium as a fuel source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor
The technology is can be safe with proper engineering, and nuclear fuel has ridiculous energy density. And to be honest if we ever plan to any real space exploration in the next few hundred years nuclear power is going to be what going to drive it. So we might has well start getting a handle of the engineering of it now at mass scales.
Good to see Germans are willing to let animal fear rule over human intelligence. And here you Slashdot types almost convinced me Europeans were superior.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
This can only mean one thing... Glenn Beck is posting on Slashdot.
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
It was an earthquake smaller than three others that also occurred on the Pacific rim prior to the plant be designed (Chile, Prince William Sound, Kamchatka.) Multiple reactors then have failures of cooling systems, possibly caused by a tsunami that was in no way a geological anomaly. They have a major emergency on their hands for what should have been an uneventful automatic shutdown, and you call this safe? This is what's supposed to inspire confidence in nuclear power?
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
In this (actually, these) cases, we do. Not damn near enough. Obviously.
I'm not completely opposed to nuclear power, and I don't expect one to be designed to take a direct hit from a meteorite. But using this design failure as an example of why nukes are safe is a sure way to guarantee that another one will never be built.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Grow up? Fabulous argument, but I digress. You can provide facts, evidence, etc. all day long. The general public is full of fools who will side with whatever talking point is on the news that day. It is black and white. Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop. There is no grey area, and you do a disservice not only to the nuclear energy sector, but to science and technology as a whole by allowing morons to debate using emotion instead of fact and scientific fact.
Safe nuclear power is incompatible with Private industry - they must cut corners to maximize shareholder returns. That’s why Congress (foolishly) passed the Price-Anderson Act. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price–Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act" The Navy has never experienced a core melt-down (that we know of) despite operating fleets of nuclear-powered subs and aircraft carriers – they don't have the competitive pressure to maximize profits.
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
Workers evacuated amid fresh nuke threat.
I suggest you might be more comfortable if you remove your foot from your mouth.
BM3
You can't avert risk ever. Every action in life carries risk. The only question is "what is the risk?" Defensive driving techniques do not avert the risk of getting in a fatal collision. The risks are reduced, but they are always still there vs the alternative of not going out of your house. Are you really suggesting people should not leave their houses?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
First off, the fuel pellets in these boiling water reactors are made of uranium dioxide -- a ceramic which has a melting point of 2,865 degrees Celsius and the zircaloy cladding melts somewhere in the range of 1,850 to 1,975 degrees Celsius (depends on which alloy they are using). I could not even find a combustion temperature for either material. That doesn't matter, though, because the temperature of the spent fuel in the pool would be somewhere around 200 degrees Celsius, depending on how long it had been taken out of the reactor.
So it is unreasonable to speculate that the fuel rods have `caught fire`.
Secondly, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said that an oil leak in a cooling water pump at Unit 4 was the cause of the fire the media keeps talking about.
I would strongly suggest anybody interested in following this event watch that web page and/or this one for accurate, knowledgeable, non-scaremongering reporting. I've heard too many news reports totally screw the facts up. (Like when they reported there was a 3rd explosion when really it was the 2nd explosion that happened in the #3 reactor building.)
http://www.wired.com/magazine/tag/thorium/
China also announced last month that they are working on advancing the tech.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/china-thorium-power/
Designing all plants to the same standard is more economical than designing each plant to the site specific criteria. The French have demonstrated this, even going to relatively extreme requirements the savings should be substantial with operating and maintenance procedures identical training and personnel costs would be reduced. In the US each plant is unique in almost all of these areas. The cooling failure is due to the backup diesel generators being swamped if the media reports are correct. It is a problem that could not occur at most US plants, but the small reactors in the article might be a solution to that problem.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Unless under extreme pressure, doesn't a hydrogen reaction with oxygen create an implosion? A large volume of gas reduced to a few drops of water, the change in volume would indeed be violent. It's not any less powerful.
Dude.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
There are competitive reasons to avoid a core meltdown, namely that the reactor would need to be replaced at incredible cost.
I am hearing this more and more about every disaster that occurs, as if the private sector somehow plans that sinking a $2bn drilling rig and polluting the entire gulf, or destroying two reactor buildings, and potentially entire reactors is somehow magically aligned with maximal shareholder returns.
The reality is the risk formula for the private and public sector is essentially the same. That is providing your company isn't too big to fail, and you don't rely on government bailout packages. No one actively plans to run companies face first into the ground, and a serious pantsing on the stock exchange just goes to show what shareholders think of companies who get it wrong.
If you only nitpick at facts you only get one side of the picture. France also has never experience a core meltdown, just like the US Navy. Does this mean they value safe designs equally? Or maybe look beyond just the small aspect of US submarines. The Russian K-19 submarine nearly experienced a meltdown and irradiated the entire crew. Or look beyond nuclear submarines to earlier oil ones, the British K class submarines were a floating disaster with 3 subs sinking just for the hell of it, and few more sank during routine exercises. The public sector's record isn't that clean if you actually look into it.
yeah.
i thought i'd follow the slashdot custom of assuming everyone reading is in the same country i am :)
Horsecrap. Neither the Congress or the people has or had any idea of the exact location of the ship or that it was possibly in the path of the plume. Thus they could not have complained or made it an issue.
J6P doesn't care a whit about the brown people in the Libya and Bahrain. He thinks it's good that bad things happen to them because they are terrorists. He think the Japanese are our baseball pals.
Don't tell J6P what to do. He's bare resisting his usual urge to give you a swirly.
Most probably expense, infrastructure and suitability. Liquid nitrogen is damn expensive. Oceanwater is cheap. Liquid nitrogen needs to somehow be delivered to the core to cool it, and this without fracturing or damaging any of the pipework along the way. In the oil industry using liquid nitrogen to freeze pipes is nearly universally classed as an incredibly high risk activity. Finally for suitability, the way I understand it is that the reactor doesn't need to be cooled to a certain temperature quickly, but rather it needs continuous cooling while the reaction decays down slowly meaning you'll need a LOT of the stuff, and it isn't all that easy to come by.
It is black and white. Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop.
Yes, and the problem is that this has been claimed since the dawn of the industry. What engineers never seem to grasp is that nobody believes you when you say that nothing could possiblie go wrong. Because it will, and at the worst possible time. There used to be posters with quotes to this effect hanging on engineer's walls, but I guess this has gone out of style.
I am entirely pro-nuke, and I am sick as fuck of you industry apologists poisoning the debate. Of course nuclear power isn't safe. There hasn't been a "safe" form of power since the dawn of mankind. What needs to be emphasized, repeatedly, is that the benefits of nuclear power massively outweigh the problems it creates. On environmental, social, and political levels nuclear power provides so many answers to serious problems that its widespread adoption would seem to be a foregone conclusion. However, the debate will never be won when there are people like you on "our" side intent on hand-waving the many problems away.
You are seriously damaging the cause you are attempting to champion.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
The technical problems and finding a source of such a large amount are fair enough. I never considered that. Though I don't think it's fair to be concerned about the expense in a situation like this where the health and lives of thousands and long lasting damage to the environment are more important...
You were spot on with the "spent" rods catching fire. You seem to be brighter than the Oehmen guy (if he was ever real). What I don't get is how you still think contaminating a densely populated landscape is an acceptable way to power our plasma TVs.
Politics is madness especially if the people in charge won't inform themselves or be informed nor listen to reason.
The majority of containment issues with nuclear waste originate with the isotope Cesium 137, which generates substantial amounts of heat. This is also the exact reason why it is such an ideal candidate for recycling in the form of Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Selection_of_isotopes
Obviously, instead of sitting on it as a containment nightmare, we should be extracting it from spent fuel rods and using it as nuclear batteries for military hardware like small submarines.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv-mFSoZOkE
Here's something else that might scare you: breathing oxygen produces CO2 - and what's more, you can die by breathing too much oxygen.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Let the free market rule. If the nuclear power industry can get financing and insurance on the open market then go for it. But combine private profit with public liability and you plant the seeds for disaster.
And lets have no more ludicrous ratios. Only xx people died so compared with the yyy (a vastly greater) number of people who die from say malaria this is a small price. The ratio that counts is the return on investment provided of course the public is not on the hook for the "design flaws" of the reactor owners.
But coal powerplants cause up to 13,000 - 30,000 premature deaths per year in the US alone (quick google) and in general emit more radiation over their lifetimes compared to nuclear because of the trace amounts of uranium found in coal.
Compared to nuclear plants that aren't experiencing a meltdown, maybe. If Fukushima goes up in nuclear smoke, along with the tons of spent fuel rods stored atop each reactor (who the hell approved THAT design?), it'll emit more radioactive material than every coal fired plant in recorded history. And much of it will be far more dangerous than the minuscule amounts of uranium in coal.
(According to this USGS study done during the Clinton administration, coal doesn't typically contain any more uranium than common rocks or dirt: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html)
Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop.
this is the main problem really.
if enough people do it, eventually it wont be done properly.
and if it was done properly and works flawlessly, it'll be left in service for much longer than it's design envisaged.
then an earthquake will hit it.
then a tsunami will hit it.
then multiple massive aftershocks.
then you find that even though you still have many good theoretical options, you simply can't get them to your reactor in time because there's been a freaking earthquake and tsunami and all you have at your disposal is seawater and a shitload of iodine tablets.
now you start to panic.
Yay! :)
It's fine to come up with standards for safe power, as long as you apply them equally to all power generation.
For this one I guess the question is if you would want to live by the exhaust of a coal fired power plant?
I know I would much rather live by the nuclear storage. No other place will be as monitored for radiation, for one thing.
I was wrong - there has been more explosions after I read up on it. Apparently the explosions DO cause a hazard due to spent fuel being stored on-site close enough to the reactor housing that these events can light them on fire even if the explosions do not impact the reactor itself. That seems like a particularly idiotic design to me - now I'm very interested to know if more modern reactors also store spent fuel so close to the reactor that they are at risk of catching on fire in case of an accident. I don't know what to think about the suggestion that containment could be breached by a hydrogen explosion - I think they must be referring to one of the weaker barriers and not the main barrier that should ultimately contain the radioactivity in a worst-case scenario. At three mile island a hydrogen explosion occurred inside the containment and it still held up well.
Of course Joe Sixpack would have a total snitfit if he knew the sun was radioactive, and that he's exposed to radiation his entire life, especially when outside during the day at high altitudes.
The big question is how much radiation of what type your exposed to in what amount of time. From what I hear, the radiation from the Fukushima plant is essentially no big deal unless you're dancing in the material release. The rate at which intensity reduces with distance is huge! (There's math for it, but the only thing most people care about is that it goes down really really fast with distance.)
As to the explosions, that's just the hydrogen and oxygen released from the water breaking down because of the extreme heat of the core. It has nothing to do with radiation.
I bet you've gotten more radiation from that old watch with the glowing dial you, your dad, or your grandfather had and let you wear. Those old watches glowed because of Radium paint. Yep, radioactive.
And as to all the Chernobyl references/fears. Don't. Chernobyl was a completely different situation with a plant that wasn't designed to be massively disaster survivable. A friend of mine years got leukemia from that disaster. When I knew him about half the people on the same crew that day were already dead. He was on 100% disability at the time. And no, a nuclear power plant can't explode like a nuclear bomb, that's just Hollywood silliness. Although to anyone close enough for the radiation to knock out radio communication, it looks like a nuke detonation to the radiation sensors.
I really wish people would stop trying to hype things and make people afraid. There are real issues and dangers here, but when you whip the crowds up into a mindless frenzy like headless chickens with rhetoric and hype they ignore what needs to actually dealt with as they go off on their misguided quixotic crusades against the wrong things.
No, the high temperature of the water means that the H O reaction results in steam at a very high temperature. The resulting steam does cool relatively quickly, but it does not condense into "a few drops of water". Rather, it becomes vapor.
There are competitive reasons to avoid a core meltdown, namely that the reactor would need to be replaced at incredible cost.
And how is that a problem for the senior executives and the shareholders who built and profited from a reactor 5, 10 or 40 years ago and have since cashed out?
Geeks seem to have the quaint notion that corporations will somehow protect themselves from exposure to massive liabilities in order to preserve themselves. But - in spite of the recent United States Supreme Court ruling to the contrary - corporations are not people. Corporations - especially the really big ones - are a vehicle which really rich and powerful people use to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Think of them as big Saturn V rockets - they burn up all of their fuel and discard most of their structure and mass in the process of delivering their real payload into financial orbit; the rich goons and wealthy investors running the operation.
There are plenty of billionaire psychopaths who are more than willing and able to destroy their "own" corporation if it can make them an extra few million dollars, provided they can skip away without being held responsible for any of the mess they leave behind. It's perfectly rational behavior, if you're a psychopath.
Mozillo over at Countrywide made $500 million dollars in a single year while shoveling fraudulent mortgages out the door like they were McDonalds hamburgers. He still has the billion plus dollars he made during his tenure running Countrywide, and he's protected by an army of lawyers and bought-and-paid-for representatives in government. He doesn't care that Countrywide was destroyed, as it served his purpose - it made him rich. The taxpayers and the customers of and investors in Countrywide have been left on the hook to clean up the mess.
You wanna trust these guys with nuclear power plants and - worse - tons of nuclear waste? Good luck with that!
> We should learn from this.
Maybe the lesson to be learned is don't build nuclear power plants right smack on top of major fault lines?!?!?!? Not trying to be a smartass here, but... isn't that an idea?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The theory of nuke power may be ok, but the reality is much different:
http://www.gregpalast.com/no-bs-info-on-japan-nuclearobama-invites-tokyo-electric-to-build-us-nukes-with-taxpayer-funds/
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
Fukushima workers withdraw after radiation spikes
"A part of the containment vessel is broken and it seems like the vapour is coming out from there. So... [it] appears to be that vapour is coming out from the broken part."
Your faith in the containment chambers seems misplaced.
Nuclear power MAY be ok but cost-wise and risk-wise (in the event of an unforseen incident), proliferation-wise, I personally have serious reservations.
BM3
If the rods catch fire, it'll basically be the same as Chernobyl again.
If all of the spent fuel pools boil dry and the rods catch fire and melt, it'll be a lot worse than Chernobyl. I've read there are 1,700 tons of spent fuel parked in the pools atop those reactors, plus 100 tons in each of the three operating reactors, and I'm assuming another 100 tons of spent fuel in each of the three reactors they had offline at the time of the quake. So that's 2,300 tons of highly-radioactive crap that could conceivably melt into a pool of 5,000 degree radioactive crap (2,500 degrees hotter than lava).
There's an additional fuel storage pool between two of the reactors. I have no idea how much spent fuel is in there. Almost certainly more than there is atop any single reactor. Perhaps as much as there is atop all of them.
Assuming it all melts down, it'll make Chernobyl look like a particularly malodorous Taco Bell fart.
I've mentioned this many times before but it never get modded up.
Robert X Cringely is a nom de plume for many individuals!
In the OP it's at least partially qualified.
Do you have any clue at all? ... rofl. ...
Save contained in containment chambers
Do you even know what a core melt down is? Obviously not and some idiotic moderators modded you +5.
Unbelieveable.
For a start, I would suggest you read up the news about the plant and try to understand what was going on.
1 million people in japan on the run form the radioactive fallout and the possible trouble if the situation gets worse and you call it: "a small amount of radioactive noble gases". You clearly lack the basic knowledge about nuclear power plants and the severity of the situation in Japan.
What comes next? An earth quake in California and then the plants there are going mad
Oh my god, get a damn clue.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm wondering why they can't pump liquid nitrogen in there to cool it down. Didn't they do that at Chernobyl?
Not clear on whether this was done before, however one reason to not do it is that it's not needed. IF you can get water to the problem, water would be good enough to have the needed cooling effect. Keyword being IF. Apparently this is not exactly working out.
LN2 would have a lot more cooling power but in this case it would be more than would be needed, plus there's no logistics solution for supplying LN2 in quantity. It takes tanker trucks or rail cars to transport mass quantities of LN2 and in this case it would take a LOT of them. Roads and rails may or may not be damaged. I'd tend toward wrecked based on pictures.
For sea water, it's as simple as "run some hoses out to the ocean, or tap the existing ocean water lines" which is what was done. All the water you can use, for free.
Perhaps the only saving grace is that the Fukushima #1 plant was built on the ocean so they do have all that water to use. However, water is also what killed them.
Sig for hire.
I wonder where this myth comes from. /. regularly. Most of the world uses gas cleaning facilities to remove everything from the coal plants exhaust. I can't believe the USA are so backyard that they don't do the same. In other words: there simply can't be any radioactivity in a coal plants exhaust. (Not even to mention the question from where it should come in the first place)
Coal plants don't emit any radiation or pollution at all (except CO2) since the late 1970s.
If you once burned radioactive contaminated coal in the USA then that is your fault, not the rest of the worlds. No where else it ever was mentioned that coal could contain some radioactive pollutant. I only read this myth on
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
> Much smaller than Chernobyl but there's no reason to downplay it.
There are many reasons to downplay it. It should not be downplayed to the people in the area who have to get out, or to the emergency workers who have to get them out. But though the world has many reasonably intelligent people in it, the dialogue is often driven by the least common denominator and simplest idea. I recently asked for a relevant Senator's position on nuclear power from one of their aides. The response was that the senator was a very practical man. Meaning, without saying, that nuclear power would be good, but is politically untenable in many circumstances.
The danger should be downplayed if downplaying the danger results in a net good for humanity. That is a complex question with many variables. I think people are afraid of nuclear power, and it is probably better to "downplay" the danger.
Oh, and I just found out - Reactor #4 apparently wasn't fueled at the time of the accident (so subtract 100 tons from the amount of fuel sitting in the reactors). That's because its fuel rods were sitting in its cooling pool, as they were conducting maintenance on the reactor. That's right, instead of having 1,700 tons of waste fuel sitting on top of the reactors, we have 1,600 tons of waste fuel and 100 tons of live nuclear fuel, sitting out in the open, with no containment.
And which building had the fire up above the reactor, from all of the hydrogen spewing out of its cooling pool?
Reactor #4.
This is not good.
Citation? I had the same question and I had not heard that the spent fuel pool fires were no longer an issue. I'd really appreciate a link to an authoritative source.
The CB App. What's your 20?
It might scare you if I correct your. It is not the breathing of oxygen per se that produces CO2. In fact it is the burning of "C" in your body, that in combination with O2, produces CO2. The "C" comes from sugar BTW ... so we could argue that sugar not only makes you fat but also makes you produce CO2.
However, plants are using that exact CO2 you produce to create exactly the amount of sugar you eat. So no worries ....
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm not actually sure what "a nuclear dump" is. With regard to nuclear power, it's the power plant itself, since that's where all the world's spent fuel is currently being stored, under water. Water is a very very effective barrier to radiation ... a few feet and you're good. Heavy water is only slightly more effective than regular water, so it's not even necessary to use heavy water ... a lot of plants don't bother with heavy water at all.
Now, if you're talking about medical nuclear waste, that's probably at your town dump right now. So, they're all "nuclear dumps".
I really thought he was referring to the subjects of Queen Victoria.
The ash from coal plants is radioactive. Coal has low concentrations of radioactive elements in it. When you burn the coal the radioactive elements are among the ash and are at a higher concentration of the ash than they are of the source coal.
http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/coalandcoalash.html
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
A lot of the commentary about radioactivity and coal plants come from this Scientific American article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Many people read the headline of that article and didn't really bother to read the article. The argument that Scientific American makes is that a coal plant puts more radiation into the surrounding environment than a nuclear plant. The nuclear waste is still obviously more radioactive than the ash. However, the nuclear plant carefully controls their waste and materials.
In both cases the radiation released is low and not a health risk.
Sorry to tell you this, but coal ash in Europe contains uranium, too—about 80-135 ppm, in fact. And similar levels can be found in Australian coal. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most coal deposits that are readily accessible are probably contaminated with a fair amount of uranium....
Also, the uranium problems from burning coal aren't just about smoke. If a plant does not use scrubbers, the uranium goes up into the atmosphere. However, if it does have scrubbers, the uranium still ends up in the fly ash. They dump that ash into giant ash pits that leach those heavy metals into the water supply, into rivers, etc.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
1) this was a *SPIKE* of 400 mSv, not a continuous 400 mSv/h. case in point soon afterward it descended to 12 mSv/h and now is at 0.6 mSv/h. This is what happens when you get your news from CNN. Citate : "Japanese authorities told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that radiation levels at the plant site between units 3 and 4 reached a peak of some 400 millisieverts per hour. "This is a high dose-level value," said the body, "but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time." Later readings were 11.9 millisieverts per hour, followed six hours later by 0.6 millisieverts, which the IAEA said "indicate the level of radioactivity has been decreasing." "
2) Japan *automatically* evacuate people as a precaution, not as a need ! Just like tsunami drill this is something Japan implemented to be on the SAFE side.
3) radioactivity , a doubling of the normal background rate of Tokyo was measured. Big Fucking Deal. if an inhabitant from tokyo was moving to my region it would take *FIVE* time the background radioactivity they get now per year : about 10 millisievert. And if they were moving to those naturally radioactive hot spring in iran they would get about 80 times the dose.
While i agree that downplaying the problem is not so good, UPPLAYING it as you made is adding to the fucking media circus fear mongering.
It is a bad situation at the moment, but not a catastrophal one. The likely scenario at the moment, is that the fuel goes into containment, a bit of radioactivity might escape, but basically the plant will have to be written off, and the REAKL environmental catastrophe will be all the chemical from chem plants washed inshore over crop field by the tsunami, the destroyed towns, and the dead people. The reactor at the moment isn't even a BLIP compared to that.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think the incident in Japan may actually help nuclear power. Now, instead of crazy fantasy scenarios, we'll have actual failures to point at. Now we can show the failure modes and how they are addressed on newer designs (passive convection cooling). Now we can point out the massive destruction (none) and death toll (one ?) from a catastrophic failure.
And now we need electric power, and there's no other way to generate it. Will greens let us burn coal more coal? No. Will they let us run power lines hundreds on miles out to the desert for solar power? No. They're trying to stop fracking for natural gas. They're trying to stop new pipelines from being built. They've stopped the importation of liquid natural gas by blocking offloading terminals. And windmills generate an almost insignificant amount of power.
Meanwhile, we're all supposed to buy electric cars. Where is the electricity supposed to come from? Nuclear is the only option left.
It's a typo... That's what you get when the slashdot editors go visit Yoda instead of proofreading people's comments ;-)
Sorry to break it to you, but the 2nd explosion in the #3 building (Unit-3) is actually not what they're referring to. They're referring to the 3rd explosion in the 2nd unit. Way to destroy your own credibility with the last line.
Join the Clean Energy Project and use the idle time of your computer(s) to get us off oil (and so the Middle East) and avoid the need for nuclear plants in your backyard.
Watch the tutorial...is easy.
Remember: The best defense is a good offense. Spread the word - save the world.
(This opportunity to save the human race valid for any sentient being on this planet and all others.)
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Unless i missed something we are not yet at this point. There hasn#t been an death by radiation, the core/containment seems still good enough that only limited radiation was released, and no large quantity. The only one contesting that are the finish and french guy, and really, they are not the best palced to say that.
Level 5: Accident with wider consequences
Impact on People and Environment
Limited release of radioactive Âmaterial likely to require iÂmplementation of some planned countermeasures.
Several deaths from Âradiation.
Impact on Radiological Barriers and Control
Severe damage to reactor core.
Release of large quantities of radioactive material within an installation with a high probability of significant public exposure. This could arise from a major criticality accident or fire.
And I think we willfully blind ourselves to many of the collateral problems of nuclear power. It's like offshore oil drilling.
Can you be sure a nuclear plant will always be operated safely? What if a bunch of incompetent. thieving, corrupt cronies are put in charge?
Even if grossly criminal behavior can be kept at a safe distance, there's still unwarranted optimism, group think, and other human failings that can lead to disaster. They said the Titanic was unsinkable. When it sank, it was seen that we engaged in a number of foolish actions. The unsinkability was revealed as a bunch of hype and marketing propaganda. But the ship's operators were mesmerized, befuddled, and pressured, and so they took a number of risks and skimped on tests they wouldn't have otherwise. Twice have Space Shuttles failed, and we are at last retiring them. Yet risky though the shuttles are, the consequences are insignificant next to a nuclear disaster. Can we be sure we won't ever make such mistakes with nuclear power? That we won't be fooled by vested interests deliberately misleading us with biased and cooked evaluations and "scientific" results and reports, PR campaigns, and the like?
What if terrorists bomb it? Or steal some radioactive waste, in order to make a dirty bomb?
Which brings up the waste storage problem. How severe is that?
Or what if a nation such as Iran uses them to create weapons grade material? How do you like North Korea continually blackmailing us with nukes? What could we see in the future? Threats to dump nuclear waste in the ocean, unless we buy them off?
Perhaps nuclear power is better than coal. But is that really a good reason to use it? There are so many other things that are better than coal. I very much disagree with the assertion that alternative energy is impractical.
And of course, as we are seeing right now in Japan, natural disasters can still overcome safety measures. You can argue that the containment structures are holding, that the radioactive releases are minor, but the fact is, they happened! And this isn't over with yet. The plant could still experience catastrophic failure.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Nuclear power is safe when done properly; full stop.
Therein lies part of the problem I think - yes it is safe, but people read that as saying its *perfectly* safe which of course is not the case - nothing is %100 safe. Trouble is, people seem to demand that of nuclear.
Pebble bed reactors aren't safe either. The germans built one for research and it caused them quite a bit of trouble. The Juelich reactor it was. Pebbles get stuck and break, because granular media have odd ways. And the mess to clean up at the end is as incredible as with other tech.
Nuke is just too unsafe.
Yeah, but that's life. It's pretty much the entire purpose of government and of law. If everybody got along and we only did things that benefited all parties involved, there wouldn't be a need for any kind of debate or any system to resolve dispute.
Nobody should want to live next to a nuclear dump. Even if it's ultimately safe, why should anybody want to do so? Nobody should want to live next to a coal power plant either, and nobody should want wind turbines in their back yards. That leaves what, hydro? There's probably a reason not to want to live near those either, but in any event as long as we continue to like having abundant electricity it's not enough.
At its heart, it's about utilitarianism: The greatest good for the greatest number. That's not always easy to define, but it should be the goal. It's not about whether a person wants to live next to a nuclear dump; it's about whether that's the best solution available to meet our needs as a society. If somebody comes up with a completely clean, safe, affordable, abundant supply of power -- WOOHOO! Until then it will always be about one person's pros versus another person's cons. By all means, put yourself in other peoples' shoes to help you get some perspective -- but don't pretend there's a perfect solution. If there was, we'd be using it.
Fantasy from the masses: "I want base load power that is completely safe, 100% reliable, and low carbon, while not providing money to middle eastern dictators!"
Reality: We don't have a huge amount of choices when it comes to reliable, clean base load power, concessions will need to be made with the understanding that you can't plan for every disaster that could go wrong.
If I recall correctly, there was a funny find in the UK regarding nuclear power.
They found that the best place to store nuclear waste was right underneath the house of parliament :-). You couldn't make it up ..
Insert
And how is that a problem for the senior executives and the shareholders who built and profited from a reactor 5, 10 or 40 years ago and have since cashed out?
>
This idea of "cashed out" is ludicrous. What you have with your 10 or 40 year old reactor is a paid of asset generating income. There's still an incredible incentive not to burn it to the ground and spend another billion or so rebuilding it. If there wasn't money to be made there wouldn't be shareholders and investors. Since there are still shareholders and investors the incentive for profit maximising (and thus disaster avoidance) is still very much there.
Also your comparing a director of an industry which exists for the soul purpose of moving money around and scraping cuts off the top, to an industry which has an actual product. The financial institutions managed to very well fraudulently cash in while destroying the world economy. This is not something that is as easy to do when delivering an actual money making resource.
I guess that explains the complete lack of damage to any buildings or structure in the rest of Japan as well.
Water has a specific heat of 4.187 kJ/kgK and a heat of vaporization of 2,270 kJ/kg.
Liquid nitrogen has a specific heat of 2.042 kJ/kgK and a heat of vaporization of 199.1 kJ/kgK, and a specific heat of 1.04 kJ/kgK when gas.
So putting in 1 kg of water at 20 C and extracting it as steam at 100 C removes (4.187)*80 + 2270 = 2605 kJ of heat energy from the reactor.
Putting in 1 kg of liquid nitrogen at -200 C and extracting it at 100 C removes (2.042)*4 + 199.1 + (1.04)*296 = 515 kJ of heat energy from the reactor.
Per kg, water removes over 5x more heat energy than liquid nitrogen. The only reason to use liquid nitrogen is if you wanted to drop the temperature below the boiling point of water. AFAIK radioactive decay is not influenced by temperature, so there would be no benefit to doing that here.
If I had to guess, the Soviets had to encase an active pile in-situ with concrete. Concrete tends to be very temperature-sensitive when curing - too hot and it'll crack. So they probably used liquid nitrogen to drop the temperature to where the concrete which initially contacted the pile could cure without cracking.
Oh ok. thanks for clearing that up. I wish I had some mod points left...
I had it wrong anyway, I just looked it up. They did use liquid nitrogen at Chernobyl but they used it to try and freeze the earth below it so that it couldn't reach the water table and cause a steam explosion, but they gave up on that and filled the basement with concrete instead. Well, that's my limited understanding of it anyway...
I just wonder where these "Nuclear-Free Zones" get their protons and neutrons from.
Oh, and the Phosphorus-40 and Carbon-12 that's, um, part of your body...
Solar power, or wind generated power does not scale like Nuclear. All these nuke haters need to offer up a *viable* alternative to nuclear power or shut the hell up.
If they aren't educated enough to tell us what we *can* use then they aren't educated enough to tell us what we *can't* use.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Firstly, apples and oranges contain almost identical quantities of the same atoms. They are the same. Science wins.
Secondly, what nuclear dump are the Japanese living next to? The reactor containment vessels are still sealed; Even if there was a meltdown (which there won't be, the coolant system is full of seawater and boric acid now), it would still remain sealed. No long-lived radiation sources would leak. Chernobyl reactor 5 blew its top because of operator failure, not because of any engineering problem. It was sound until the people in charge screwed it up!
Anyway, if we shift over to fast breeder reactors, there won't be any nuclear waste dumps; The spent fuel is mixed with fresh stuff and put straight back into the reactor.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I do not know how people think in the US, but in many European countries the idea of nuclear plants even small ones or special sealed ones has not many friends. We have a dense population structure and therefor such things would be even closer to populated areas.With more of these things more can fail and even if their impact is smaller than that of failing reactors, they still can fail. If there is a worst case scenario with a broken containment which does harm to the environment we do not want it. As it has been shown that those things happen.
As population in many European states does not like nuclear power, nuclear power will not be used for more than 50 years.
Because I know how to compare a distributed risk with a concentrated risk. Renewables like wind and solar aren't able to provide base load yet. Maybe in the future they will be able to, but right now they can't. So replacing this nuclear plant with a renewable is not a viable option.
Instead, it would most likely be replaced by a coal plant (importing gas is difficult). The problem with that is: the pollution those put out is hundreds of times more harmful than nuclear. Coal emissions worldwide are estimated to kill 1 million people every year. That's the equivalent of 250 Chernobyls every year. The U.S. has some of the cleanest coal plants in the world, but it's still estimated that coal emissions kill 30,000 Americans each year. That's more than 7 Chernobyls every year. But because the contamination from that pollution is distributed, there are no evacuations, no land closures, no keep out signs, no media coverage, no hysteria over those deaths.
No thank you. I will take 1 Chernobyl worldwide every ~25 years with the contamination concentrated in a small area everyone can avoid, over 250 Chernobyls every year where the contamination is distributed and unavoidable.
I am strongly against more nuclear plants. And as we have save renewable energy technology we should use that.
There are a few 'off site' nuclear waste storage facilities in the USA. I have seen the one near Morris, Illinois. It's like a huge swimming pool in a steel sided barn. It's quite deep and constantly glows with a blue light. The building has no other heat source and is warm all winter.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
Sorry, but I think you naively think that nuclear power is run by altruistic scientists.
They're not. They're run by corporations who want to privatize profits and socialize risks. Far, far from any kind of free market. And within those corps are the same kind of MBA/marketing types that geeks detest otherwise. These are the same kinds of people who spread light and goodness in the financial markets.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
This is a myth too. Between wind with storage and thermal solar with storage there's plenty to start from.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
What do you mean 'scale'? It's not a database or load server. Maybe you need some educating too?
Wind and solar are perfectly viable if there's a will to commit to them. Similar to the arguments surrounding new generation reactors, wind and solar today is not the same as wind and solar of 40 years ago. Geeks are obsessed with nuclear to the point of blindness - it's embarrassing.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Geothermal is a good answer for Japan. It's clean, it's cheap, and it'll never run out. It costs a little more up front than nuclear, but if you ask the people in Tokyo today if they would prefer it they might buy in.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thing is, at every stage of this thing the Japanese authorities, nuclear industry experts, and the resident Slashdot advocates have been saying "move along, nothing to see here", and at every stage, there has been another development proving them wrong. I would have thought there would have been some rethinking, but apparently not.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The thing is, physics said that the titanic could sink. Physics says that a nuclear plant can't critically melt down a-la Chernobyl. A terrorist's bomb, similarly, is going to have a hard time being stronger than an earthquake of magnitude 8.9, which left every single reactor undamaged - and, somewhat ironically, if they'd simply kept operating there would have been no issue because they could power their own cooling, but of course there was no way to predict that, so shutting down was the right thing. I think that what we need to take from this is that no matter how much we plan, and how much we try to minimize the worst case scenarios, they'll still happen, and we need more than 8 hours of battery backup for the cooling systems. Still, coal will run out relatively soon, as will every non-renewable source (Soon in generational terms, rather than traditionally soon), and as our power requirements grow (Which they will), taking huge amounts of energy out of the earth could start to have serious concequences. You can't create new energy, so however we do it we're taking power from somewhere - I'd rather it was a controlled nuclear fission reaction, rather than the thing that keeps us alive. Of course, it's a moot point anyway, because we're really just waiting for sustainable fusion, then we can stop these silly discussions and start on the important things like warp travel.
Uh, no, you don't. Seawater and boric acid has always been a last ditch plan, and has always been on the table. The plants themselves were totally unharmed, unfortunately this design of plant relies on active cooling in order to completely stop the reaction (Because even without fuel there's enough residual energy there to keep going for a while. Not self-sustaining by any means, but not an instant cutoff), and active cooling is difficult when you don't have any electricity. That's what the earthquake and tsunami did, knocked out offsite power, and backup generators. The plants themselves got through it just fine. Of course, without active cooling there's not much you can do, hydrogen will start to build up as a byproduct of the reaction, so you'd better vent that (The 'radiation leaks', despite being an absolutely tiny dose), but you can try. You could flood the reactor with seawater and boric acid, the seawater will cool the reaction very quickly and the boron will absorb any residual radiation - but there's a reason they don't use seawater normally. It's corrosive enough to damage the reactor beyond repair. That's why they don't want to do it, not because it might not work, but because it'll break their reactors. Oh, and if you're still worried about the previous leaks, I suggest you never eat another banana. They're radioactive too, and on the same sort of scale.
All throughout this thread, posters have been making fun of "Joe Sixpack", so forgive me if I balance things out:
There are certain kinds of visceral things that normal people get, but which geeks struggle with. However, just because geeks don't understand a particular argument doesn't make it any less valid.
I think the infatuation with nuclear power is, in part, motivated by the amazing power of the atom, the nuclear forces, and the importance of nuclear research for the advancement of science and technology.
Oh, and preferring the certainty of having a year or so lopped off your life (coal) vs. the improbable chance of a nuclear disaster is entirely rational. That's the reason why farmers use futures, and other risk-reduction measures which also entail a fixed cost.
By the way, the latest headline: Japanese authorities drop plans to dump water by helicopter (called a "desperate attempt" by NHK) was called off because of the risk.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Wind can generate power yes, so can solar - but it is very important to know that wind and solar CANNOT generate power ALL the time, not only that they also sometimes do not generate power at the same time - and inconveniently at the time of peak requirement.
Nuclear power can generate all the time (as can gas and coal and oil etc).
People use power ALL THE TIME, this means that you cannot rely on solar and wind power without massive storage systems, and of course many times more generating capacity than you actually need - as significant energy is lost in each conversion.
Take the UK, mid winter records show that the entire country has been becalmed for up to 2 weeks at a time (no wind power - and of course minimal solar power) - what this means is that if the UK converted to pure wind and solar we would require 2 weeks of peak energy storage (you use more energy in the winter with lighting and heating), and the ability to keep it charged (or of course accept that there may be no power during the coldest time of the year). The problem with this is that the battery technology does not exist, pumped hydro storage is pitiful compared to the UK load. If you want to have power during these times then you need to store the energy from the bright and windy times. This applies to absolutely every country world-wide, but I know that limit of the UK wind.
If you want to live off grid it's completely possible, I mean firstly don't worry about a fridge / freezer etc as they use a lot of power, so use dried foodstuffs that don't need to be chilled. Then don't worry about cooking with electricity - you don't have enough for that. Then also don't worry about heating your house with electricity, you don't have enough for that. Don't worry about using a TV, computer, you don't have the electricity for that - you have enough for light, and a couple of small devices. Granted you could use a laptop as a TV / computer some of the time, but it's unlikely you'd be able to keep it charged for continuous use.
If you live off grid you heat your house with oil, coal, gas or wood, same with cooking etc, the energy you gather from your wind and solar isn't enough to run these devices.
Is this a world you want? To not have the power to run anything? To drop back into victorian times? To have a massive change in lifestyle enforced on you? Oh and forget actually having an electric car - if you can't power all your home devices how can you power an order of magnitude higher electricity use car?
Some people will say that the technology is there, that magical X will solve all the storage problems, and to them I'd ask a simple question - what is the range of an electrical car compared to a fossil fuel powered one? And that's cutting edge, incredibly expensive and polluting battery tech.
The ideal of completely renewable energy is great - the reality isn't workable, and for all you think wind and solar are cheap, you're actually paying higher bills because of them - the subsidies for wind and solar to make them competitive basically get added to the cost of electricity generated through other mechanisms. The belief that if you only just try and put it all in place it'll work ignores reality, if you can come up with a plan on paper that matches the requirements and keeps our quality of life I'll leap on it (heck, just get it in the rough same ball-park of quality of life and I'll be happy), until then saying it'll just work is pointless.
The point about nuclear is that it works, all the time, day, night, windy or not it means you have heat, light and even possibly electric cars - wind and solar cannot do this. It's not an obsession, it's reality and reality doesn't care if you have the 'will to commit to them' it only has what will happen if you do.
Z.
I own a very big building with many floors, and over 100 apartments on it, and I think a small nuclear plant is just what I need. I will place it just below the roof of the building, on the highest floor. It gets flooded every now and then because I sincerely don't have enough time to repair it, but I think this nuke should stand this and much more. I will just place it there, plug it in and just forget that I have it. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
The problem with that is nuke plants generate huge amounts of waste heat. And oceans are great for dissipating heat. And many faultlines are near coasts.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
>Yes, accidents will, from time to time, occur that you *cannot* plan for.
Well, that's actually the point antis are trying to make. What'll happen if a bomb detonates at a solar thermal plant? A big mess, but not much more. Compare to nuclear.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
You are aware that it the first explosion was in a storage of high nuclear waste?
The earthquake was 8.9 on the Richter magnitude scale. The nuclear power plant was built to withstand a quake of magnitude 8.2. The energy of a quake grows as 10^(1.5*x). Thus the quake was 10^(1.5*(8.9-8.2)) = 11 times more destructive than the plant's design specification.
Would you rather lose a few years off your old age (after having retired from a career and seen and played with your grandkids), or face a very small chance of dying soon after a devastating nuclear disaster?
Joe Schmoe has chosen the former, and it's entirely logical. Known risk vs. small chance of catastrophe.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Solar baseload power can generate power all the time, and weather patterns are predictable over the long-term that plants can be dispersed to complement each other's low points in generating capacity.
A rather comprehensive study by the University of Melbourne centered around this type of technology.
There's an important distinction to be made between an appropriate response and an understandable one. The NIMBY reaction is an understandable response, and it's the analogue of the one you describe: it's saying that potential cons for you outweigh actual pros for everyone else (including you).
Look again. The fuel stored on the roof of reactor 4 is not "spent". It's the active fuel taken out of the reactor last November when it was taken offline for maintenance.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Only now there really are three explosions - those at #1 and #3 which were hydrogen explosions and an undetermined (but containment-breaching) third explosion at #2.
Oh, and uranium dioxide does oxidate further (i.e. it can burn).
The "containment breach" discussed here is an escapement of steam from the core to the atmosphere. Through the steel core. Through the concrete core. And into the air around the plant. The steam contains radioactive materials, but at the moment that's the least of their problems. Given time and enough pumping of boric acid laced seawater, they can get cores 1-3 to cold shutdown. The problem is they may not have the time if the "spent fuel" pond on top of reactor 4, which contains not spent fuel but active fuel removed for maintenance reaches criticality. Given the lag in reportage, this may have already happened, or will happen soon. In that event all bets are off.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem is the public and politicians have absolutely no sense of scale on these types of things. Anti-nuclear activists have probably done plenty to contribute to the current problems at Fukushima, since there's no "ok we're going to do the safe thing even if it costs more" setting there's only "SHUT IT DOWN. CLOSE THEM ALL DOWN NOW!!!!".
Hell, the situation with the spent rods on top of the containment buildings I suspect can be traced back to the company being unable to buy any land to put them on because of "radiation concerns".
The complete stupidity about nuclear power is playing an active role in making it more dangerous by creating exactly the wrong type of environment to encourage transparency and accountability. The extended runtime of these particular model reactors is likely the same issue - if you shut them down, you need to get electricity from somewhere, but if political opinion is against new reactors then nothing happens and we end up with "well we'll extend the lifespan".
Madness? That would be remaining in your burning house too consumed with political argument to save yourself and your family.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And lots of people are still using the Ford T to drive their kids to school and to work
You're completely wrong on this one. It's been 40 years. The people who built it, the people who hired them, the engineers who signed the plans, the executives that organized and paid for it - all have retired by now. Unless they live in Tokyo, they are not affected. They got theirs and got away clean.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I choose changing climate over the next 10.000 years humans can adapt to over myself dying of radiation poisoning every time, thank you very much.
And nobody would accept if the government wanted to create earthquakes and tsunamis to generate electricity either.
geo thermal. Look it up.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Seriously, stop comparing the number of deaths caused. Every single death is one too many.
You sound like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and cancer.
Stop ignoring the dangers in case large amounts of radioactive particles leak and spread. One time is too many.
We're not underwriting insurance policies. We're driving our kids to school in the minivan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Oh, yeah. They're doing GREAT. Except for the whole emitting toxic radiation that could kill you in one hour thing, And the whole completely having lost control of six nuclear power plants full of fissibles thing. Other than that, good job.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Exactly.
The earthquake did minimal damage in japan, except some dropped down lamps here and there.
However the coastline got hit very devastating by the tsunami. To ordinary buildings that did not do that much damage either, but lots of buildings made from wood got completely destroyed.
Most of the damage in the hinterland was caused by floating debris.
If you look at any youtube video of the tsunami you see the wave hits completely unharmed buildings.
However there was damage due to the earthquake ... in some areas power lines where disrupted.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm pretty sure they did something incorrectly, and that's just another smaller problem to solve. The nice thing about the pebble bed reactors is that they cannot explode, and even the problem that happened with the German plant was just a problem for the plant, no public danger.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
I'm not actually sure what "a nuclear dump" is.
That's what happens a few hours after you eat at Taco Bell :P
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yes, I know all about geothermal. It's my favorite renewable, and long-term I see it as being the predominant one, beating out wind, solar, and hydro. Unfortunately, it has run into the same problem as nuclear - people unable to properly assess the risk of a small chance of a big disaster. In nuclear's case it's a nuclear accident. In geothermal's case, it's earthquakes.
nobody should want wind turbines in their back yards.
I do, I'd like to build one some day. There are plenty of people putting DIY wind turbines in their back yards, and solar-thermal collectors seem to be gaining popularity as well.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Using the same logic, we should probably consider making everything safe from a magnitude 10.0 quake, related tsunami, tornado, airplane full of nuclear weapons crashing into the reactor building, and asteroid falling onto it.
All at the same time.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Rossi is going to finish his 1MW cold fusion plant in October this year. Hopefully it will mark end of fossil fuels era:
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3108242.ece
http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3091266.ece
It causes ZERO pollution of any kind. No ash, CO2 or radioactive waste.
Are you saying that nuclear power is as tricky as a manned space program?
If so, then we really shouldn't be thinking about using nuclear energy.
NASA's been doing stuff that private industry can't for fifty years. I'll trust them to do what private industry shouldn't.
Private companies will always put profits first. Pardon my complete disregard of the farkakte objectivist principles, but "profit-first" is not a good thing when you're talking about the public's well-being. And before anyone asks, yes, I'm saying that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Hey sounds good. I only like nuclear because it's better than coal. My order of preference is:
wind/solar/tidal > geothermal > biofuel > nuclear/hydro > natural gas > any fossil fuel other than natural gas or coal > coal
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Correction:
the epicenter is/was only roughly 100 miles east (slightly north) of Fukushima. You can enter the coordinates into http://maps.google.com/ (38.322 142.369). They are found on this site http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php ... I mixed that up.
So it is ofc plausible that the earthquake indeed also hit the reactor area.
The epicenter is roughly 400 miles north east of Tokyo
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You're taking the long view. When private businesses needs to make this quarter's targets - corners will be cut. Core clean-ups and oil-spill disasters are far-off - after management has collected their bonuses and retired. Too big to fail is too big to exist. France may just have been lucky so far - time will tell. My point is that when there's a profit motive, safety often takes a back-seat to expediency. That's not saying the Navy won't ever have an accident (they do have to perform more dangerous opertations) - just that it's less likely without the pressure to make a profit.
That still didn't break.
2011. The year Gnome decided Linux will never be on the desktop.
Seriously, stop comparing the number of deaths caused. Every single death is one too many. You sound like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and cancer. Stop ignoring the dangers in case large amounts of radioactive particles leak and spread. One time is too many.
Every single death is one too many? Whilst that's a nice ideal, it's entirely impractical because life is inherently risky. You also make it sound like contamination is solely a nuclear issue. Couple of events for you to ponder:
By your logic we should also ban coal mining and oil drilling, a hell of a lot people die from accidents whilst extracting these and they contaminate the landscape with carcinogens galore. Frankly we have to manage the risk, because nobody wants to give up their car or central heating quite yet.
"chemical from chem plants washed inshore over crop field by the tsunami"
I am glad you brought this up. If toxic chemicals are released into the enviroment, how long are they toxic for? Forever. On the other hand, the release of nuclear materials into the environment will eventually decay into products no more radioactive than background radition. What's even better is those things that are highly radioactive have very short half-lifes, meaning their danger is reduced much quicker. Thus radioactive materials maybe thought of as 'self cleaning'.
ParetoJ
If Fukushima goes up in nuclear smoke, along with the tons of spent fuel rods stored atop each reactor (who the hell approved THAT design?)
From what I've been reading, the storage pond on top of the reactors isn't a spent fuel storage area, it's where still-usable fuel that was in the reactor core is temporarily stored when it's removed for maintenance. So it's like taking your gas tank out of your car to work on it (say it's a Lotus or something) and putting it on the car's roof, and then having it damaged by a nearby car explosion. Not really a bad idea, just really bad luck.
(According to this USGS study done during the Clinton administration, coal doesn't typically contain any more uranium than common rocks or dirt: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html [usgs.gov])
Yeah but we don't burn rocks or dirt by the metric fuckton and release the exhaust through the top of a smokestack.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Its easy to say wind and solar are pipe dreams while the USA spends 557 billion a year in tax payer subsidies for fossil fuels. Japan could get all its energy from off shore windmills with floating solar panels around them, not to mention tidal energy harnessing solutions. Its not a pipe dream. End the subsidies on oil and coal and nuclear and you will see that renewables are the way forward.
Everyone cashes out over time.
My dad "profited" from many socially and environmentally exploitive systems -- for at least a decade he drove monster V8 cars that burned leaded gas, grew up in the segregated South, benefiting from discriminatory labor practices, heated a poorly insulated old house with heating oil and then natural gas, still drives a motor home that gets 7 MPG.
But he's 78 years old, and he's never going to pay for the benefits he got exploiting the environment or for the social and economic benefits he got from living in a segregated social environment. He's gonna CASH OUT.
I cashed out from my last job -- 13 years, multiple system upgrades, zero capital investment from management the last 4, email server died 3 weeks after I quit, all mail a total loss. I cashed out, in a manner of speaking -- all the benefits of systems that worked well, none of the penalty for whatever negligence or cynicism I had.
We ALL "cash out" eventually, in large ways or small.
The kicker:
This was a 40 year old nuke plant too that has withstood a series of catastrophes that the designers would never dream of.
Imagine what a modern facility would be like when it came to safety, with 40 years more advanced material technology, manufacturing skills, and so on.
Can we tell those stupid 'downplaying' people to shut the fuck up now that the situation has gotten worse. What happened to all the "they're fear mongering people, the situation is only gonna get better.
Better yet we should send all those people over there to help with the cleanup, "you first" if you think you know it all.
The situation is worse and is getting worse.
For what its worth, it now appears one of the containment vessels has been ruptured. Initial reports is that radioactive sea water is likely leaving the vessel by means other than scheduled stream releases.
But yes, you're point is completely valid. Its very important to remember these reactors were designed in the 1960s and the plant came online in the early 1970s. Its been providing safe power for over forty years despite numerous earth quakes.
Furthermore, modern designs use convective cooling. The cooling system is entirely passive. The heat of the reactor literally powers the cooling process. So as long as the reactor continues to generate heat, the reactor continues to be automatically cooled by that same heat without any need for batteries or generators.
Heck, in just the last thirty years alone, considerable advances in nuclear safety technology has been created and this is with an almost completely stagnant nuclear market (most new designs in production were created in the 1970s and went online in the 1980s).
The sad truth is, the anti-nukers literally make nuclear power needlessly more dangerous (by slowing design, development, and adoption of newer, safer technology) and needlessly far more expensive. Anti-nukers literally are everyone's worst enemy.
Sir, I'm not an industry apologist. I'm a scientific realist. There is a stark difference, and you better fucking learn it. I don't believe in useless things like religion, but these are days that I'm glad you're some shmuck on Slashdot and intelligent, reasonable people like Steven Chu are in charge of our energy policy.
I am entirely pro-nuke, and I am sick as fuck of you industry apologists poisoning the debate. Of course nuclear power isn't safe. There hasn't been a "safe" form of power since the dawn of mankind.
That is part of the problem. Its well documented coal is far, far more dangerous than nuclear power. Period. But the sad truth is, anti-nukers are making the world more dangerous for everyone. Anti-nukers have scared the general public so badly, the word nuclear is now, officially, a scary word, having extremely negative connotations. Its so bad, MNRI was renamed to MRI. Guess what the N stood for. They had to do that because people refused to receive diagnostic treatment.
Anti-nukers also prevent the rapid adoption of safer nuclear technologies. They increase the cost everyone pays for energy. They are literally the reason why many reactors are run past their certified lifetime rather than being decommissioned and replaced with modern, safer, varieties.
Literally, the world would be a better place if all anti-nukers dropped dead tomorrow.
But ignoring all that, part of the problem is you're speaking of things in absolutes. Most people, when they say, "safe", they are speaking in relative terms. The problem is, most people don't realize there is a difference. In relative terms, nuclear power is one of the safest, if not the safest, form or power we have. It is by far safer and cleaner than coal. But in absolute terms, you are of course correct, no form of power generation is safe or clean. None. And that's where the rhetoric comes in. Anti-nukers lie and tell people nuclear is dangerous and everything else is safe. Meaning they speak of the dangers of non-nuclear power in relative terms and they go out of their way to speak of nuclear power in absolutes.
This is the problem.
I don't have an issue with nuclear power from a scientific or engineering standpoint.
But, in the real world, the bean-counters and politicians get involved. Corners get cut, procedures get "streamlined" and awkward truths are swept under the rug.
We can build reasonably safe nuclear power plants. We just don't want to invest the money to do so.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Solar baseload power can generate power all the time, and weather patterns are predictable over the long-term that plants can be dispersed to complement each other's low points in generating capacity.
A rather comprehensive study by the University of Melbourne centered around this type of technology.
What, the sun never sets? predicting the weather means we can still generate power? Are you going to move the solar arrays around the clouds? Plants can be dispersed? That last is really ridiculous, when entire Nations ( Like America recently ) have been 80% under cloud cover. You are pointing to one study in the face of decades of research and wisdom.
Lets just call the whole wind and solar debacle "Green Theater".
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Sure, as long as you're willing to use eminent domain to seize about 5,000 acres of land for each power plant.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
You know, you pro-nuke people are starting to creep me out.
No matter what the discussion, anywhere on the web, if radiation is mentioned even in passing, one of you will pop up and trot out the same half a dozen platitudes. It's like Microsoft's Win7 "Have you tried it?" astroturf campaign, but infinitely more ghoulish.
I'd have to say the single biggest reason most of us would oppose nuclear power is just how little we can trust opinions of the people promoting it. It's like this horrible OCD/tourettes thing where all social sensitivity or sense of occasion vanishes and they just have to uncontrollably blurt out this banal and repetitive little spiel. Does anybody else have a vision of the whole world, blackened and burnt, glowing radioactive. With his dying gasp, the last man on earth struggles to sit up, and in a raspy death-rattle croaks "This is an anomaly! Nuclear power is safer than coal - do you know how may people have died as a result of air pollution?"
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Then we have to worry about "peak nickel".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That only works when you are posting from the US, as this is a US web site.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Coal will not run out relatively soon, by some estimates there is a domestic supply that would be adequate for as much as 800 years with coal providing almost all our electrical power, even if we shift to mostly electric powered transportation.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The thing is, physics said that the titanic could sink.
No. Physics said the Titanic could said. Marketing said it couldn't.
Physics says that a nuclear plant can't critically melt down a-la Chernobyl.
Nope. That's you saying that. That's why most nuclear reactors have containment buildings. Chernobyl didn't have one.
I think that what we need to take from this is that no matter how much we plan, and how much we try to minimize the worst case scenarios, they'll still happen, and we need more than 8 hours of battery backup for the cooling systems.
Its important to quantify your comments with the understand that these reactor's designs are fifty years old. Nuclear technology has considerably improved since then despite an extremely stagnant nuclear market. Those exact reasons are why modern reactors use a completely passively cooled system. They do not require motors, batteries, or generators to continue to cool once the reactor is shutdown. In fact, the residual heat powers the cooling. So the more heat the reactor generators, the more cooling it powers.
Ultimately, anti-nukers are literally the reason why most of these old reactors are still running and why they've not been replaced with newer, improved, safer, and more efficient reactors. Its rather ironic that anti-nukers are in fact, the single largest reason why the world is at a higher risk from nuclear reactors than reasonable need be.
Its important to understand, in most cases, anti-nukers are literally at fault. Anti-nukers prevent many of these old reactors from being replaced - at least here in the US and most of the world. I can't say authoritatively if that's the case in Japan or not. But given they are over forty years old, chances are, anti-nukers are at fault here.
Opps. I didn't read closely enough. I transposed the M and the N. That should read NMRI and not MNRI.
Maybe because you are making yourself out to be pretty dumb. 500 miles from the epicenter of the quake is still pretty damn close. The power went out, and the backup power failed, possibly because the backup generators were damaged by the quake or tsunami? Then eventually the batteries that are the backup to the backup ran out of juice, and the pumps shutdown. A modern design say from France, or elsewhere would have then immediately SCRAMed, unfortunately, these old designs don't do that. It is a poor design, that has been retired, and even in the worst case, the nuclear release is small and quickly decays.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Just because the Model T didn't include airbags, antilock brakes, crumple zones, etc, doesn't mean that modern cars are just as likely to kill you in a massive accident.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It's in the "spent fuel storage pond" that there was a fire according to the IAEA, I take it from that that spent fuel is stored on-site in a vulnerable position. That pond may also have stored usable fuel, though that's not much of a difference since there is plenty of uranium left in spent fuel and burning spent fuel is no more of a good thing than burning usable fuel. Spent fuel is still very much active.
Assholes like the guy who wrote the following "even if you were standing at the top of the cooling tower you would be fine" and "fukushima is currently safe and will stay safe" should be sent to help maintain the reactors without any protective suit. Link: http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/
He wrote that 3 days ago, before the primary containment was breached (or before we knew that it was). All that was happening was steam release at the time.
That isn't a great comparison though. Compare that to a coal or gas plant. *boom*
Terrorists won't bomb a solar plant.
They'll dump radioactive material into the water supply instead.
Hey, I know it. But Joe Sixpack is gonna say "But look at their problems now, I don't want that here." Bla bla bla
No, Joe Sixpack is not going to be that clear in his thinking or expression, he's going to paraphrase what his neighbor said about what he heard on CNN and Fox. Which will mostly come down to OMG, WTF?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Google it...its safe and effective...
Use the appropriate technology...failsafe
Next door? Depends where. If you want to build one slightly west of hear, in a designated area of outstanding natural beauty, I'd probably object. On the other hand, if you wanted to replace the steel works a few miles east with a nuclear plant then I'd be very happy.
Here's a thought experiment: how many people do you think would object to a nuclear plant near them if it meant that they got 50% off electricity? What about if it were a combined heat-and-electricity plant, and they also got free home heating?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Can you be sure a nuclear plant will always be operated safely? What if a bunch of incompetent. thieving, corrupt cronies are put in charge?
And if that happens to a coal plant, they could produce co clouds and let them float freely. Anyone near such a cloud will die in minutes, and they won't dissipate anywhere near as fast as these radiation clouds. The same could be done by an engineer with any fossil fuel plant.
And if that happens to an oil plant, can you say "oil tsunami" ? Just pump the whole oil supply into the sea or a lake or just into the street.
And if that happens to a gas plant, have you ever seen a big natural gas explosion ? Or they could pretty much set anything, even big things, alight.
And if that happens to ...
Sorry to go with a cliche, but "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". Your security measures should be directed against the terrorists, not against their victims (ie. power plants, airplanes, and general the people using and living near them). And frankly, we all know how one could eliminate 99+% of all terrorism. It's just not very PC.
The Soviets used powdered bismuth on that reactor to kill it. Bismuth does not turn radioactive and is also a decent coolant as it transitions from solid to liquid to gas. Liquid to gas alone is ~750kJ/kg. It also has one of a the lowest thermal coefficients among metals. I can't find anything about it slowing down nuclear reactions but at worst it is neutral. I think the concrete went over the bismuth and that more or less killed the thing.
You don't seem to get the obvious. The purpose of most political parties is not to solve problems, it is to create them. But once one lets go of realism, like the greens have done so long ago, there are 2 types of policy one might pursue :
a) you can try to genuinly solve problems with effective solutions
But best hope you never actually solve problems, or else hope that there always will be new problems. Working yourself into these new problems is also a big job, and you'll never work with the same people for long.
b) try to solve imagined problems with well-sounding but counterproductive "solutions"
Now you have a single problem that you can focus on your entire career. The problem will grow, of course, every time you book the slightest little bit of success, and as a result the need for solutions will become ever greater. And you can always point to your own long experience in "getting policy passed" in relation to the problem.
Now, given that you're a leftist politician, not all that young, and you couldn't care less about technology. Only power is of intrest (otherwise you shouldn't -and wouldn't- be a politician). Which one do you choose ?
Perhaps this applies somewhat less to "entrenched" political parties. The ones who know they'll have power, regardless of actual problems. But the younger a political party, the more it depends on creating problems for everyone else.
And already people are trying to plan their new energy infrastructure, and nuclear power opponents are using this tragedy to push their agenda's. This is part of the real shame, these people need food, water, shelter and medical aid now...they're not ready to plan new infrastructure or fend off environmental activists.
The problem for the US is rather simple - transmission lines. It may be that in other countries the government-owned electric company can simply have great swaths of land condemmed so that transmission lines can be put up, but it doesn't work that way in the US. Instead we have years-long processes whereby a route is proposed, the environmental impact is studied and then the people that would be displaced get to complain. Loudly.
Nobody wants to be near a transmission line, partly because it is common knowledge amoung uneducated people that electricity is dangerous. They watched little Timmy stick a screwdriver in an outlet when he was five and never got over the reaction that little Timmy had. So they know electricity is dangerous. Also, with a transmission line you can hear the electricity flowing through it - that is a clear indication of what sorts of stuff is going on there. There have also been "studies" that show electric transmission lines cause cancer, retardation, autism, impotence and just about every other sort of malady you can imagine.
Recently a company proposed running a transmission line through a lake (underwater) so that nobody would see it and complain. Because the middle of the lake probably doesn't belong to anyone there would be no need to negotiate access, thus eliminating most of the problems. I think it was abandoned because of cost, but it shows how much of a problem this is. Nobody is going to rewire the US with a "smart grid" and add the sort of capacity that would be required to efficiently transfer electric power across the country.
The ecological impact of running new transmission lines would be incredible - it would disrupt game trails, migrations and all sorts of things like that. The end result of all of this is that it simply isn't going to happen.
So I'll take it you have no idea what solar baseload power is.
The point of solar base-load power is that you can store thermal energy with 80% efficiency or so. A baseload power station concentrates energy onto salt (sodium chloride) and stores the molten salt in reservoir tanks. This allows the plant to continue running through the night by tanking energy it collects during the day. It also means it can run through cloudy periods, depending on reservoir sizing.
As to dispersal: weather is predictable over the long-term. We can know cloud distribution patterns even if we can't accurately determine what any given day will be. This means you can disperse plants geographically to ensure that on any given day, most will be in sufficient sunlight to provide X% of their rated output, whatever number that needs to be.
I mean, if you're arguing this is an impossible thing, then why are we worried about climate change at all since clearly those computer models aren't worth a damn thing.
The US *is not* under 80% cloud cover for months at a time.
There are other countries?
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
Speak, when you know something about power distribution. It's more complex than you believe.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
800 years is relatively soon when you're talking civilisation building. Better to switch now to a more efficient source.
I realise new-generation plants are significantly safer, but it's a very general point. Any outside source you rely on can completely fail, however unlikely, so keep everything you need on site. I'm not sure where "Physics said titanic could sink" | "No, physics said titanic could sink", so I'm going to assume you misread and gloss over it. Physics also says that, while nuclear plants aren't infallible, something like Chernobyl can't happen, there's nothing to burn and meltdown is near impossible, and even if it does happen secondary containment is practically impenetrable without outside interference (And as the recent events in Japan have shown, "Outside Interference" would need to be quite potent)
There's more to it than just ambient radiation levels. Inhalation or consumption of radioactive isotopes greatly increases the risk for cancer and thyroid disease, particularly the isotope cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, and a biological half-life of 70 days. The reason it's particularly dangerous is that the body treats it like potassium, an essential mineral, rather than a toxin, and so retains it for an extended period of time. Granted, cesium is heavier than air, so it's not going to migrate on its own, but particles can become airborne through explosions or fire and enter humans either directly or through the food chain. And it's entirely possible (and plausible) for ambient radiation levels to be perfectly safe while harmful particles are floating around in the air or sitting in contaminated food supplies.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Depends on the type of coal. Most coal plants are running on lignite coal, which is the dirtiest and most impure type.
End result: Highly toxic heavy metals, as well as radioactive isotopes polluting everywhere downwind of the plant on a large scale.
If one had to live downwind of a nuke plant or a coal plant, the nuke plant would be a better bet. At least the radioactive hydrogen in an emergency gets vented and floats up to the upper atmosphere to be dispersed, as opposed to heavy metals in the smoke raining down on the countryside.
Maybe you should consider that you responded to a post from yesterday, when perhaps at the time what he said was the most recent information.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Allow me to complete some of your sentences for you:
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore
"...because the only reason an aircraft carrier would move in this situation is if the radiation posed an immediate deadly risk, and not as any sort of precautionary measure."
Why was there a spike of radioactivity in Tokyo, a couple hundred miles away -- are the winds really traveling 240km per couple minutes...
"...because sensors for detecting radiation only detect deadly levels, and there's no way this signal means that the levels detected might be harmless."
What about the breach in in the containment of reactor two?
"...because everyone knows that when you put 'breach' and 'containment' in the same sentence, that means Chernobyl!"
And since you're having this discussion in the context of safety of nuclear power generation, have you stopped to look at what's happened with Japan's non-nuclear power generation facilities? How do you think the US's coal power system would fare? Have you looked at newer nuclear power technologies (e.g. Thorium)?
I hope you are tortured to death as an exmaple of what should happen to stupid people.
I wonder if the Hoover Dam could have gotten insurance.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What do you do when the people you have to convince have at most a high school diploma/bachelors degree in a non-technical (non-engineering/science/etc) field?
Sit outside the pharmacy and snicker at the Californians stocking up on iodine?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
There's always pressure regardless of whose payroll you're on. The trick isn't so much who writes the check so much as who's receiving it. If someone has high integrity, then they'll do what's right regardless. Likewise, someone with low integrity will bend to any pressure or sell out for any potential personal benefit, like a comfy job in the private sector after they retire from public service.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
So, how much did that BP rep, or the guy advertising "clean coal" pay you to shill for them?
I live 51.4 miles away from the Byron Nuclear Generating Station
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron_Nuclear_Generating_Station.
I don't worry like I would if a coal plant was nearby, and if they were to offer hot water in addition to power, I'd buy both from them if I could get a piece of property close enough.
And how many lives will be lost in future wars over uranium?
Just sayin'...
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The problem here is that they thought it was going to be ok. All those very respected and smart engineers built something that could not fail. But it failed! You just cannot trust the judgement of engineers if safety has to be absolutely 100%.
They can explode. The graphite can become overheated. The hull can breach, and oxigen can enter the system, and at that point it also explodes. You have been lied to.
What has been proven wrong?
It has been continually stated that the safety systems have worked as designed, despite a record setting earthquake AND a tsunami.
It has been stated that the radiation that has been released is inconsequential.
Do you have evidence of people dying from radiation or even a case of radiation sickness?
And no, neither an overabundance of safety measures on the part of the plant officials, squawking heads on MSNBC, or dopes in California making a run on iodine supplies are evidence of anything other than stupid mass hysteria.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Fact 1: Problems with radioactivity come from exposure, and there is a safe amount you can get every year. Exceed that amount, and you get a break from serving on a nuclear powered ship.
Fact 2: Ships are mobile. They have these cute little engine thingies that allow them to scoot all over the ocean.
Puzzle me this, if there was just an insignificant amount of radiation emitted, why would the captain expose his crew to the additional amount when he could just fire up the engine and scoot over a few more miles? Sure, it might mean that the helicopter convoys have to fly a few more miles, a small price to pay to not have to explain why your entire crew has to be replaced 6months later.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
people in the immediate vicinity are being encouraged to evacuate by the authorities.
The authorities have eliminated most playground equipment, and encourage everyone to stay indoors when it rains. "Encouragement from authorities" is usually overly cautious bullshit for idiots.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Wrong. Japanese Gov't officials are saying there is likely a breach in #2 and #3, and if Japanese officials are anything like our own, they won't be admitting such things till there's a neon sign for all to see pointing it out.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You're wrong.
It may be true that zirconium *melts* at a high temperature, but the real problem is that zirconium is a
pyrophoric metal (like magnesium) and can burn at room temperature. Granted, to have a fire at room
temperature the metal usually has to be in form of shavings. In fact, GE had at least one zirconium fire
at their fuel fabrication facility.
This is actually where the hydrogen is coming from. If hydrogen is being produced from the core, it is because
the temperature is high enough for the water to react with zirconium and release hydrogen. If you have hydrogen,
there has already been fuel damage. Granted, the uranium oxide may not have melted yet, but the fuel pins
have slumped over and you may have lost the geometry necessary for coolant to flow.
P.s. I am a nuclear engineer
Maybe you should consider that you responded to a post from yesterday, when perhaps at the time what he said was the most recent information.
The way you phrased your post led me to believe you were certain the containment chambers would "contain" any possible risks. I suspect we are in agreement that nuclear power plants CAN be safe, where we might disagree is I do not trust governments and businesses to put people before profit - that plant should have been retired this year but they somehow got a 10 year extension despite failures and deception over maintenance.The IAEA are quite comfortable with extending lifespans of reactors too.
BM3
Look, the nuke industry needs to come forward and say YES, we have issues with the old stuff. However, we are now working on new stuff that has passive safety. Likewise, when somebody offers up criticism, then they should respond to it, not try to hide. For example, a number of engineers fought for, and then quit, over the issue that the cover over spent fuel was not good enough. GE said otherwise. So, where is all of the radiation coming from right now? From the fact that GE did not build a solid cover over the spent fuel. Had they spent just a little bit more money, then we would have ZERO issues.
Hell, TMI was caused because of 3 reasons:
Yet, they are about to produce their mPower. If they learned hard lessons from before, they will learn that they do not have ALL answers, and will right now, produce a new harden cover for the new mPower system.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Judging by your hysterical post you should have a cup of camomille tea and relax.
If you would like to know what has failed, there is at least one containment chamber that has been breached, a blessing at the moment is that winds are blowing the contaminants to sea but they are expecting the wind direction to change.
Several of the plants are overheating and if they cannot get them under control, the likely outcome is meltdowns in multiple plants.
The US, UK and France have asked all nationals to evacuate Tokyo (which has registered increased levels of radiation - small increase apparently but increased none the less) which is about 250 km away. How many people have died as a result of radiation exposure? I think 4 (workers at the plant but the company and government aren't forthcoming as to what happened to them) it is still too early to know if people have been exposed or will be exposed but please be aware that it is a definite possibility as radiation is leaking out already so being concerned by it is not blind panic (if I were living in the 30 km zone, I would be leaving ASAP as a precaution).
There is a real likelyhood that three reactors will melt down. I believe this is a troubling thing and does not show that nuclear power is safe. I also believe that modern nuclear power plants would be safer but that is mitigated by my lack of trust and repect of governments and big business (acquired from years of lies and deception by them - not all of them though, hence only a lack of trust and respect).
BM3
Calling 3 blown reactors, the quite noticeable release of radioactive material and burning fuel rods in the spent fuel pools a demonstration of nuclear safety is quite an interesting point of view. If this is the regular amount of safety to be expected from a nuclear power plant, I really do not want any of them around.
The news outlet of a pro nuclear association seems like an excellent source of unbiased information.
From recent news, not quite so safe anyway. However that is an ancient reactor at the end of its planned life pressed beyond what it was designed for. I'd still be happy to live next door to a modern plant.
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
Errm.. part of the concern is that the containment domes were damaged by the explosions. The fact that they are leaking means containment isn't working. It's still better than nothing, but the stuff's NOT contained.
Your post has several other serious flaws. First, the radiation released appears to be far more than "radioactive noble gases". Second, the issue wasn't whether the cores shutdown... the other reactors (Daichi #4, 5, and 6) had already been deactivated for maintenance. They were offline when the quake hit. The problem is that each reactor also houses a pool with spent fuel rods in it. These fuel rods have to cooled and are encased in zirconium... which oxidizes and breaks down when exposed to the atmosphere. This seems to have caused the H2 buildup and explosion. Problem? These aren't housed in the primary containment dome, and the explosion blew holes in the rest. Third, if these keep going, it'll be worse than a partial meltdown inside a contained reactor because they are NOT contained. Fourth, reactors 5 & 6 at Daichi could face the same fate if they don't find a way to get cooling in there, and this may be impossible due to radiation coming out of #4.
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
I'm a pretty big proponent of nuclear power, but that's bull and you know it. An incredible amount of engineering goes into making nuclear safer than it used to be. It is not, by any definition, safe. I'm sure coal has killed more people, but let's not go misleading people here. Even with modern designs and safeguards, well trained operators, and routine inspections, nuclear accidents can and do happen.
Disclaimer: IANANP. Also, information about what's going on inside some of those reactors isn't 100% at this point. Last I checked, they couldn't even get cameras into them, so not even the IAEA or Japan know exactly what is going on or what the water levels are in the spent fuel pools.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
From the way you tell it, the way to be perfectly safe from a Tsunami is to sit on the ceiling of a brick house. Very helpfully, the preceding earthquake will warn you of the impending Tsunami if it is close (so the human warning systems don't get to you in time). I wonder why anyone would die to a Tsunami, then, especially in Japan where everyone knows exactly what Tsunamis are all about because they get them frequently?
Also, the first wave was not the most damaging one - the second one was. Also, Tsunamis don't just do damage by crashing into things or by picking up heavy things and crashing those heavy things into other things, they also do damage when they recede before the next wave comes in and carry even large objects out to sea (and colliding them with structures) or drag them along the land or even just remove the ground from under structures. This happens repeatedly as the following waves come in. Also, the impact of the Tsunami differs from area to area. So the video you have seen of the initial impact of the first wave at some specific place isn't necessarily very informative about what a Tsunami can do. The Wikipedia article on the matter is interesting, even though it doesn't go into much detail on exactly how much or little damage there can be from a Tsunami.
The way this Tsunami impacted the plants were by taking out the support infrastructure outside the reactors - the reactors themselves suffered no initial damage from the earthquake or Tsunami, as far as I know. Modern reactor designs do not need power, active cooling or outside infrastructure to stay safe, and this event shows why that is.
Indeed, but in this case the expense is quite possibly insurmountable. Nitrogen isn't cheap and evaporates very quickly. The last time we performed a pipe freeze it was on a 6" pipe. The freezing process took 3 hours of continuously pumping liquid nitrogen through a jacket around the pipe and we used about 2300L of the stuff, just to freeze a still condensate line. In terms of cooling down a nuclear reactor not only would it be prohibitively expensive even in the realm of "do it at every possible expense" but also I don't think you could actually procure enough nitrogen even with unlimited money.
You're criticizing an old reactor as a reason why new reactor designs, designed with these faults in mind, should not be allowed? Wow.
What next, SUVs suck gas, so Priuses obviously should never be considered and be illegal?
You're basically denying the very process of improvement, which results in us continuing using bad and ever older and more likely to fail reactors.
For example, Gen3 reactors are passively cooled on shut down. Even most of the reactor designs that are flawed now could have been solved with massive emergency generators to restore power after a complete catastrophic electrical failure such as caused by the tsunami and earthquake. Even stirling engines would be sufficient in drawing off massive heat as well as producing electricity for the pumps.
Oh, and get this--the real big problem "reactor," well, IT WAS NOT RUNNING. The danger is from the freaking pool. You know, those pools that are OVER CAPACITY because the anti-nuke crowd (nuclear power is bad, Chernobyl!) stopped any and all reprocessing and long-term disposal. Yet another example at extreme environmentalism by ignorant asshats creating the problem, then they doing the "I told you so" routine.
And to speculate to pretend to answer your question--if the reactor is that god damn hot to melt through, suddenly crack, or otherwise breach a steel container to get to and eat through/melt through the steel, the water will have been already converted mostly to steam and vented prior. It will not be half full. It'll be dry or near dry. So while there may be a massive steam release, the containers should not come anywhere close to failing.
It's not like we have to store it for long, but instead get it back into the fuel cycle when we start rolling out the Gen4 reactors that feed on nuclear waste. We've already mined enough nuclear fuel in 'waste' rods to power the whole world for at least 500 years, and Greenpeace have the gall to call it 'waste'! Nuclear waste isn't the problem, it's the SOLUTION!
Nice work carry on . ..
I'm pro-nuclear but i'm sick of this downplaying bullshit. Reactors that require actively powered safety systems ARE flawed.
I've generally been biased against nuclear power, but in the last year or so, I had been noticing that people whose opinion I respect, including veteran environmental activists, were suggesting that nuclear power was the best available option for meeting power needs without generating greenhouse gases. I had been meaning to read up on the subject; the little I had read suggested to me that there was good reason to believe that modern nuclear plants were significantly safer, and that modern techniques of fuel reprocessing much reduce the problems of fuel and waste. And I have to wonder how much of the fear of nuclear power is due the dramatic crises, which stand out more than the death by inches from pollution from coal-burning plants.
Two things worry me about the situation in Japan. First, that while there may be significantly safer designs for nuclear power plants, I have to wonder about the number of older, unsafe designs that are already in operation. Second, I have to worry that people (whom I generally think of as political allies) will overreact with opposition to nuclear power, making a rational debate more difficult -- and the obnoxious tendency of some to describe even detectable radiation leaks as harmless only makes this situation worse.
So you're talking about solar-thermal plants that store heat.
It certainly does reduce the need for direct electrical storage, but it's still not a good numbers game.
Firstly, there is a maximum amount of energy you can store, then there's the issue of diminishing returns on thermal storage (both leakage and pushing more energy into the store is a function of the difference in temperature).
80% efficiency of conversion of thermal to electrical energy is impressive but I have to admit I really doubt it would be attainable in real life, the maximum theoretical efficiency of a a heat engine is the difference in temperature between hot and cold divided by the absolute temperature of the hot side. This means that as you extract more and more heat out of the molten salt you're constantly reducing efficiency (not to mention that as the molten salt heats up it absorbs less and less of the heat from the sun) - also I'm under the impression that these are steam plants too, which gives a point below which they cannot extract any more heat (boiling point of water) to turn to electricity.
Weather is relatively predictable over the long term (approximately) but you're falling into the trap of the generic versus the specific, averaging all of the plants over the US for example, and over years you can work out what is necessary to keep power running. However what you can't do is keep any specific plant generating 24x7, then of course come the transmission losses, the storage losses, meaning that the size of the plants and their storage have to be increased again and again. The more you store, the more you lose to thermal leakage, the more you transmit from one side of the country to another the more you lose, each requires more storage and generation capacity to offset. Anyway, back to my point, saying that X amount of generation and Y amount of storage will cover the US (or any country) for their power requirements over the next 5 years will actually give you localised brown and blackouts (there are always events outside of the bell-curve that the system cannot adapt to) - it will mean a change in lifestyle from that of certain power to that of uncertain power.
Since the solar plants can't ramp up (or they run out during the night, or the next cloudy day), and the wind can't be certain to blow when you need more than the baseload (which is all the time, the baseload is just the average lowest usage) this isn't a replacement technology, sure you can replace some plants with this, but personally I'd replace the fossil fuel plants before I replaced the nuclear plants with these.
As to the US being under 80% cloud cover for a month or two? It's possible, likely, no, possible yes. If you're happy being without power for a week or so then all is good, but most people don't have the capability to cope for a week or two without power, I mean no heating, light, refrigeration or cooking (obviously everyone will have gone electric for everything as fossil fuels shouldn't be used) is quite difficult to do without.
To be honest, I really wish I could believe, or that the numbers supported a fully renewable future - but unfortunately they don't. It's personally possible to be completely on renewable energy (with enough land) but much harder for millions of people to do the same.
Z.
You are clearly, delusional.
You are not in possession of all the facts.
Evidently, not enough.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You should head on over there and help out. You'd be fine, there is no danger. You could do some good.
Oh, but it has abundant stigma. Theres Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, The graceful Lake Karachay and now Fukushima!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Maybe you should contribute something about power distribution rather then trying to smugly declare your superiority?
And since you're having this discussion in the context of safety of nuclear power generation, have you stopped to look at what's happened with Japan's non-nuclear power generation facilities? How do you think the US's coal power system would fare?
the difference is that a coal power plant puts out LESS radioactive pollution when it's washed away by a tsunami...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Two things worry me about the situation in Japan. First, that while there may be significantly safer designs for nuclear power plants, I have to wonder about the number of older, unsafe designs that are already in operation. Second, I have to worry that people (whom I generally think of as political allies) will overreact with opposition to nuclear power, making a rational debate more difficult -- and the obnoxious tendency of some to describe even detectable radiation leaks as harmless only makes this situation worse.
Detectable doesn't mean harmful. Other than that, you're 100%. At least one of the reactors in Japan which is causing problems now was slated to be decomissioned what, ten months ago?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
80% is the heat storage efficiency.
It's a heat engine process so it can't be more then about 70% efficient as an absolute maximum, and in practice is 30% efficient at heat-to-electricity conversion (comparable to a coal-fired powerplant).
We're also talking about 1200 degrees C temperatures here - the boiling of water isn't really a concern with those sort of temperatures.
There's no argument that you'd need a degree of overbuild to account for reliability and transmission issues, but you can easily build solar thermal plants anywhere there's decent sun - no one will complain. You can't do the same with nuclear reactors nearly as readily.
Obviously, this isn't the be all and end all: the future obviously requires smart grid and load-leveling technologies to work, but solar thermal can work for anywhere with decent sun, and work with hydro and geothermal to provide baseload power.
In a practical sense I think we'll end up with nuclear generators in there as well, but it's not as if building those is cheap and easy.
I'm not too worried about what's going to happen 10,000 years from now.
Ahh ok..
I hadn't actually looked up the temps the molten salt plants work at, but that effectively gives them about a max of 1200 DegC thermal difference, giving a maximum theoretical efficiency of 81% at maximum temperature (assuming 0 degrees outside) down to 28% right before it stops boiling. Obviously the outside is not likely to be at zero, so the max efficiency drops even further, but that's actually not too bad you could probably get an average of 30% - possibly more with supercritical steam turbines . It also depends on how the energy is extracted - there's a big difference between a coal fired plant at a (fairly) constant source temperature to a solar plant that has to extract as much power as possible from the heat store, it has to run across all the temperature differentials.
The boiling point of the water was when you stopped being able to extract heat energy in a regular steam turbine - I checked the melting point of an existing molten-salt solar reactor (sodium nitrate/potassium-nitrate in 60/40) and it melts at about 232C the 'cold' temp is about 287C and the 'hot' temp is 565C (http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/salt.htm). I'm sure different mixes of salt can have different temperature ranges, and the design there simplified the thermal issue with a separate hot and cold tank. A quick calculation shows that you need storage of about 10 cubic metres for 1MW for an hour. The US uses about 10,034 MWH/day so a single days storage would be around 100k cubic metres - which actually doesn't sound like too much.. Hmm maybe it is doable to store that much, you'd need several times it as there could be fairly bad days / weeks (although the more you store in a single place the better the insulation is - volume vs surface area) and I have no idea how much space it would take up to gather that much heat... but...
You've got a very good point though, many more people will be happy with a molten salt plant than a nuclear plant, and yeah there's much less to go wrong - but I wouldn't say nobody would complain. People complain about wind turbines enough and for no real reason - I think they tend to look pretty decent but a lot of people really get up in arms when new ones are sited.
I still suspect it'll be much harder than most proponents suggest, but mebbe it's not the complete nightmare I'd thought it would be. I wonder if you could shrink the technology for rooftop / backyard operation, the necessary storage space isn't very much, and I quite like the independence of localised power.
As for the nukes, yeah I think they'll be around, they are much denser than solar power (and not everywhere has the same amount of land per person as the US does), although I'd personally prefer the molten salt thorium reactors to current pressurised reactors.
I'm not exactly a convert ;) but I suspect you're not as insane as you first sounded.
Z.
It would be my pleasure. However while I know the problem is much more complex than the other correspondent has waved his/her hands to make us believe, my own knowledge lacks the refinement to be able to convey that understanding adequately. Even if I were the other poster has already demonstrated an inability to accept any engineering possibility other than the one he's adopted in his head.
In short, it doesn't matter how correct anyone else is, if it's contrary to his wind-solar religion he will ignore it.
Judging by your handle though, you know something about power distribution?
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I had to look it up to figure out what side of the debate you were on- this is a pro-nuclear response considering the soot that a 1950s brown coal plant gives off.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I don't consider it an appropriate response at all. Fujushima after the quake isn't exactly The Hanford Reservation. And it's a reactor design that has been considered too unsafe to install *anywhere* since 1977. Modern nuclear power plants have even more shielding and are operating at such low temperatures that meltdowns become impossible.
Even Fujushima was due to be decommissioned in a few years.
Myself- if I was rich- I'd want one of these new reactors for a yacht I'm designing.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Can you be sure a nuclear plant will always be operated safely? What if a bunch of incompetent. thieving, corrupt cronies are put in charge?"
With a modern sealed plant design, the absolute worst that will happen is that in 10 years it will stop generating power, because the thieving corrupt cronies have bought themselves yachts with the money they were supposed to use to refuel the reactor.
"Can we be sure we won't ever make such mistakes with nuclear power? "
Actually, we can be sure that the mistakes have already been made and taken into account.
"That we won't be fooled by vested interests deliberately misleading us with biased and cooked evaluations and "scientific" results and reports, PR campaigns, and the like?"
Actually we can be sure of that occurring and take it into account in our design phase by making the reactor sealed- as in you fill it full of graphite concrete and bury it when you're done and NOBODY ever gets radiation poisoning off it, and you also make sure that if some idiot monkeys with your design before it is built, the whole reactor simply won't work.
"What if terrorists bomb it? Or steal some radioactive waste, in order to make a dirty bomb?"
Both taken into account in a modern triple layer containment vessel.
"Which brings up the waste storage problem. How severe is that?"
Not very when you're talking a pebble bed reactor- in 1600 years or so there MIGHT be a little lead left. Until then, the fuel and waste are encased together inside the reactor- and probably for many thousands of years after that, given the modern containment designs.
"Or what if a nation such as Iran uses them to create weapons grade material? How do you like North Korea continually blackmailing us with nukes? What could we see in the future? Threats to dump nuclear waste in the ocean, unless we buy them off?"
Hard to make weapons grade material when the fuel to begin with isn't uranium or plutonium. Even harder when you simply can't get to the fuel to begin with because the reactor has been designed to NEVER be opened. If you can't get at the waste, dropping the reactor in the ocean isn't going to do any harm- and might do some good as coral grows a reef around it.
"Perhaps nuclear power is better than coal. But is that really a good reason to use it? There are so many other things that are better than coal. I very much disagree with the assertion that alternative energy is impractical."
Me too, I'm personally for wave energy and ambient distributed energy production. But the fact remains, there are places on this planet which don't get the wind, don't get the sun, don't get the waves, are several thousand miles from the nearest beach or large body of water. For such a location, nuclear is the best option.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And I'd also point out that coal is renewable- land slides in Southern Oregon show a coal seam is what happens 300 years after a forest fire.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
But it's not relatively soon when you're talking about peat coal, which is a renewable resource with only a 300 year generation.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"then an earthquake will hit it.
then a tsunami will hit it.
then multiple massive aftershocks.
then you find that even though you still have many good theoretical options, you simply can't get them to your reactor in time because there's been a freaking earthquake and tsunami and all you have at your disposal is seawater and a shitload of iodine tablets."
Which is still an option. Which is *safe*. Which is why there is no need to panic.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
'some indications' could also be Panic-control. This meltdown is far from done. I'm thinking there's still a 50% chance that a 100km radius will be a dead-zone for generations to come.
you're right that the well-distributed toxic deaths that fossil-fuel plants have been causing are far greater. it's just like automobile deaths exceed airplane crash deaths by orders of magnitude but it's not 'news'. at some point the bad news becomes 'life'. you throw up your hands and say "you gotta die soemhow" rather than question the whole program. It's the old Sam Kinison joke; "hey, i don't want to drink and drive....but how else am i sposed to get my fucking CAR HOME???"...we're in that exact addiction-logic, Bush famously proclaimed that the "American lifestyle is not negotiable", at a climate summit! and the predictable results of such logic are coming to pass.
i love the smell of napalm in the morning.
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Nuclear power doesn't have a 'stigma', it has an intrinsic property of extreme toxicity to living things. nuclear power plants, large or small will _definitely_ fail occasionally. anyone who claims "the new designs are extra-super-safe" or related vomit are either youngsters, on the payroll, or both.
and the joke is that the EROEI is also mediocre---not a solution to the little problem of sustaining the 'non-negotiable American Lifestyle". Nukes are a boondoggle.
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Nuclear Power is SAFE!
protip: using all CAPS doesnt make bullshit TRUE.
translates to: "nuclear power is safe enough for my purposes"
tragedy of the commons writ large.
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Tell me again which energy source is a better choice?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
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People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
I fail to realize why the diesels, which are supposed to keep the pumps running after earthquake shutdown, were engineered close to waterline for the tsunami, generated by such an earthquake, to take them out. The site has a hill right behind it, so the diesels could have been installed above the power station.
We have a choice to make soon. Either build new and more Nuc plants, or go back to the middle ages, at which time the earth will probably not be able to support as many humans. It's that important.
But seriously evacuating people for miles around the place, multiple buildings catching fire, hydrogen explosions, containment ruptures, spent fuel rods exposed. And we're not done yet, cuz the news gets a tad worse every day.
So give it a break, because with all the above, you don't sound particularly intelligent. You sound like a zealot.
The world has seen enough damage and enough excuses for why each disaster is anomalous.
But how do we deal with the P.R. Damage done to the industry?
Thing one is admit that most of the reactors are unsafe.
Too many people think that you can't tell people bad news. Too many think that just calling something safe means it is safe. That old paradigm of huge reactors is just too dangerous. It would be a lot safer with modern designs, but there is a much better way.
This small reactor idea is exactly the way to go. Even in the rare cases where there might be a problem, it will inherently be much smaller. The only thing we can do is admit the old school reactors have problems, and to work to educate people just what is as stake, and how the new designs will be much safer. Tough job for sure, but important.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If you can't explain something to an intelligent person with a High school diploma, it's you that failed. I work daily with all levels of education, and education is not well correlated with intelligence or rational decisions.
It's a little surprising an argument to make anyhow. I take it that you would be perfectly happy to live near the failed reactors? Then you didn't do your homework. It's an old and not so good design, and someone somewhere thought it was pretty smart to locate the thing on the shore of an ocean in a seismically active area prone to Tsunami. Yet I'll bet those people had a high level of education in highly technical fields.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
MOX (Mixed OXide) is also used by TEPCO at Fukushima-3. Mixed, as in Uranium+Plutonium, the latter being much more toxic. http://www.japantoday.com/category/technology/view/mox-fuel-loaded-into-tokyo-electrics-old-fukushima-reactor http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=28211 At least the MITNSE http://mitnse.com/ folks have buried the paper from that risk-management twit at MIT with the Pollyanna paper which declared Uranium the only fuel at Fukushima, although that lie will take a while to put paid to.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
> the difference is that a coal power plant puts out LESS radioactive pollution when it's washed away by a tsunami...
yeah. it only puts out MORE radioactive pollution each and every day it operates, by design. Many factors more radioactive pollution have been put out by operating coal plants than *ever* was put out by chernobyl.
Wow, you have a direct feed from the Crack News Network or something?
Puzzle me this, if only radioactive noble gasses were emitted, why did the Ronald Reagan have to move even though it is miles off shore?
The Ronnie had to move off-shore so they could continue to monitor the ship for radioactivity from her own reactors. No health or safety issue to the crew.