Further Updates On Post-Tsumami Japan

DarkStarZumaBeach points out a frequently updated page from the International Atomic Energy Agency with updates on the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which reports in terse but readable form details of the dangers and progress there. The most recent update says that the plant's Unit 2 has been re-wired for power, and engineers 'plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 reactor building is completed.' Read on for more on the tsunami aftermath. Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."

dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."

Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."

Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."

Comments

Misleading in the extreme

[fridaynightsmoke]

Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."

The linked source does NOT validate that assertion whatsoever. The 'plume' is a forecast of the way a plume would take shape across the pacific, if it were to exist. No-one is saying that there is a radioactive smoke plume of any magnitude, including undetectable. It is a weather forecast, meant for internal consumption by various national nuclear agencies for contingency planning and leaked to the NYT, nothing more.

Re:Misleading in the extreme

[fridaynightsmoke]

Because it is the worst kind of bullshit scaremongering to report "Radioactive plume crossing towards USA" when the story is "Agency draws up probable route potential radioactive plume would take", in the same way it would be to report "Response plan drawn up to potential terrorist bombing" as "Terrorist bombing".

Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish

[gamanimatron]

They've learned that fear can be converted directly into money, by way of voters. Who do you think is going to be selling you that coal?

astroturf in action

[0WaitState]

This link:

Bad Oehmen: Confirmation Bias, Sources & Astroturfing

Describes the curious case of how a reassuring first time web post ("Why I am not worried about Japans nuclear reactors") from a guy working on a liason project at MIT in a non-nuclear engineering or physicist role somehow got reposted 30,000 times in one day.

Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.

Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.

Re:astroturf in action

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Your entire spiel on Banqiao is an elaborate straw man. China has been subject to catastrophic floods for millennia. It has a lot to do with geography, but basically China is flat as a pancake and its major rivers have enormous watersheds. The dam is only part of the problem.

Meanwhile. devastating as the floods were, the waters receeded(Floods do not make regions uninhabitable). The dam was rebuilt and people's homes can also be rebuilt. Chernobyl on the other hand is a write off for up to 100 years. The Fukushima plant disaster now risks making a 30km radius semicircle of land uninhabitable for decades in one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

Only nuclear power can inflict that kind of long term, irrecoverable damage in the event of an accident; Can and has, on more than one occasion.

Would you build one of these plants within 30km of a major city like Tokyo, London or New York? Will you take the risk that the plant will operate smoothly and without incident for 100 years? Will you take the risk with 100-200 such plants near major cities worldwide? Are you prepared to write off one major metropolitan area every thirty years or so?

I'm not.

Nuclear energy lost its gloss for me after this incident. Nuclear engineers and particularly private companies cannot be relied upon to keep hot rods cool in an emergency. When the chips are down, they are too likely to fail, and the potential long term damage is simply too much to risk.

Re:astroturf in action

[Solandri]

Meanwhile. devastating as the floods were, the waters receeded(Floods do not make regions uninhabitable).

Floods don't. Hydroelectric dams do. In fact, quite a few more people are relocated for dams than from Chernobyl.

Would you build one of these plants within 30km of a major city like Tokyo, London or New York?

No. But neither would I build a large hydroelectric dam upriver from them. Nor a coal plant upwind from them. All of these plants are very safe, but there's no sense taking that risk if there's lots of open space in a relatively uninhabited area where you can put the plant.

Are you prepared to write off one major metropolitan area every thirty years or so?

We already do far more than that. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill about 1 million people each year worldwide. Yeah all those deaths are distributed around the world. But 30 million deaths every 30 years would easily exceeds a major metropolitan area.

Your entire spiel on Banqiao is an elaborate straw man. China has been subject to catastrophic floods for millennia. It has a lot to do with geography, but basically China is flat as a pancake and its major rivers have enormous watersheds. The dam is only part of the problem.

I wanted to address this last because you're introducing another variable (a good one) into the comparison. Mainly, the presence of the hydroelectric dams cannot be compared against a vacuum where nobody dies. If the dams were not there, those regions of China would experience more annual flooding. Sure, the Banqiao dam failure resulted in a huge number of deaths that fateful day, but we have to also take into account the number of lives saved by the presence of those dams in other years.

The net effect could be that having the dam actually resulted in a net savings of life. If flooding normally caused 8000 deaths in the region per year, and the dams stopped that for 24 years, then it saved a total of 192,000 lives. 171,000 lives were lost when the Banqiao dam burst. So over those 24 years, there would've actually been a net benefit of 21,000 lives saved.

But if you do that for hydro, you also have to do it for nuclear. You can't compare nuclear power to a vacuum where nobody dies. If nuclear power plants didn't exist, the need for the power they generate would still be there. Something else would have to provide that power. The most likely candidate is coal plants. Both are the constantly on type of power generation referred to as base load (oil, gas, and hydro plants are usually used to adjust for variability in demand, solar and wind provide a negligible contribution to power generation). So if our currently existing nuclear plants had never been built, we'd most likely be using coal plants in their place.

Statistically, coal plants cause about 161 deaths per TWh of power generated. Worldwide, nuclear power generates about 2500 TWh per year. Its average fatality rate has bee 0.04 deaths per TWh. So if all our nuclear plants had never been built, and were coal plants instead, we'd be looking at (161-0.04)*2500 = 402,400 more deaths per year from the additional coal mining and pollution.

In other words, if we analyze safety the way you're proposing, nuclear power saves 400,000 lives each year.

Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish

[Dan667]

people have short memories, BP just got through destroying much of the Gulf of Mexico with IMHO a much worse Oil Disaster.

Re:Don't be too proud

[hawguy]

I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.

If only you were there 40 years ago when this reactor was installed to warn them of the dangers... maybe you could have told them to use a more modern design that doesn't require active cooling to remain safe. Maybe you already have a map showing them exactly where to site the reactors? Or do you have a viable alternative to nuclear in your back pocket?

Lots of people can use hindsight to show exactly what went wrong in *this* particular incident, but who can tell where the next natural disaster will strike and how it will manifest itself? Did you already tell California to shut down its two coastal nukes? And it's not like nukes are the only power generating hazard out there - TVA was lucky that the billions of gallons of fly ash discharge didn't kill anyone.

USA officials seem to have a lot of criticism for the Japanese and how they handled this incident, but truth be told, this reactor survived a quake 30 times larger than it was designed for and so far hasn't spun out of control into a large scale disaster. If they hadn't lost power it's likely that this would have been a very minor incident. If the USA wants to criticize, then they need look no further than their own backyard. In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years. Oh, and at one of them, they installed the seismic reinforcements backwards and at the other, the entire reactor was installed backwards. Oops.

Spent fuel stored on site?

[d3xt3r]

A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?

In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility. Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.

Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish

[Pumpkin Tuna]

Yes, MIT, which brought us the widely quoted "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors" blog post early on. What's that? You can't find "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors?" Oh, it seems mitnse.com has taken that highly rosy, bright and shiny optimistic tract down. Probably because the disaster that it dismissed has slowly happened. You can read that original post with a little googling. Pay close attention to the "worst-case-scenario" at the end.
Forgive me if I don't automatically accept the rosy outlook of people who are going to college to build and run nuclear plants.

Has there been breathless overreaction? Absolutely! I still hear crap on the news that makes me facepalm. But at the same time, TEPCO has consistently downplayed the real situation. other actual experts are considerably more worried about the ability of TEPCO to get a handle on this.

Re:Not sure what their priorities are.

[compro01]

Fly it in using what exactly? A pumper truck weighs in at 20+ tonnes. There's no helicopter that will lift that much. Not the Tarhe (9T), not the Chinook (12.7T), not even the Super Stallion (14.5T).

Re:Not sure what their priorities are.

[stjobe]

They tried it at Chernobyl, the radioactivity fries the electronics very fast, making it impractical at best and impossible at worst to use robots.

Port Royal Jamaica Analogs?

[tetrahedrassface]

Port Royal, Jamaica had a huge earthquake in 1692 pretty much dropping a fair portion of that city under the ocean. It is still there, flooded and under water. Protected as a historical site, divers frequently dive on it. In some places entire buildings are still there, intact as if they were built under the water.. The reason I'm asking is, has the land that is flooded in Japan actually subsided to below sea level due to the earthquake, or is it simply still flooded? It looks to me as if most of the land in Japan that was affected is still at the same height above sea level as pre-quake, however there may be areas that are now below the ocean... in any event Port Royal was pretty much destroyed again in 1909, and has been hit and hit hard by Hurricanes and probably is due for another temblor in 200 odd years.... I sure hope they don't build a nuke plant there, and I hope that Japan and every other country planning a new nuclear plant try their hardest to site them in areas that

(A): Don't have a history of earthquakes.

and

(B) don't have a history of storm surges from Hurricanes/Cyclones/Tsunami's...