Slashdot Mirror
Heroism Is Part of a Nuclear Worker's Job
Hugh Pickens writes "In 1988, Michael Friedlander was a newly minted shift technical adviser at a nuclear power plant near the Gulf Coast when Hurricane Gilbert, a Category 5 storm, was bearing down on the plant. They received word that all workers should leave except for critical plant personnel, and there was never a question: 'my team and I would stay, regardless of what happened.' 'The situation facing the 50 workers left at Fukushima is a nuclear operator's worst nightmare,' writes Friedlander. 'But the knowledge that a nuclear crisis could occur, and that we might be the only people standing in the way of a meltdown, defines every aspect of an operator's life.' The field attracts a very particular kind of person, says Friedlander, and the typical employee is more like a cross between a jet pilot and a firefighter: highly trained to keep a technically complex system running, but also prepared to be the first and usually only line of defense in an emergency. 'We will likely hear numerous stories of heroism over the next several days, of plant operators struggling to keep water flowing into the reactors, breathing hard against their respirators under the dim rays of a handheld flashlight in the cold, dark recesses of a critically damaged nuclear plant, knowing that at any moment another hydrogen explosion could occur.'"
The severity rating of the crisis has now been raised from 4 to 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, and Japan's Prime Minister called the situation "very grave."
... for anybody who would put their lives on the line like this. The Japanese are better at this than anyone else on Earth - honor and duty above all else. I take my hat off to everybody within that radius still fighting to protect their countrymen.
I raise my glass to you and thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for keeping those reactors safely running in normal times and safely stopped in abnormal situations. You truly are heroes.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
i mean seriously
That is all.
They said they are rotating out workers once they reach "maximum lifetime exposure" of 100-250 mili-servients. Most workers are only staying for 24 hours before they are "retired" out and a fresh person brought in to replace them.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
bit of a stretch.
The job must be exceptionally boring, since most of the time nothing happens. In my nearby plant, the nuclear engineers were found sleeping on the job during afternoons, and playing board games when awake.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
this is a real, working device. Though, in the case of a nuclear reactor, you want the opposite effect.
Sure.
The people who did and are still risking their lives to try and keep it a stable situation still deserve respect.
I'd like to think i'd do the same if the time came, but i don't know if i could.
If I understood things correctly the Japanese authorities now allow radiation doses up to 250mSv for the workers.
To put this in perspective, natural background radiation is aproximately 1-3 mSv per year , while at 10.000mSv death is to be expected.
Anything above 100mSv is definitively carcinogenic, and above 1000mSv you will see serious bone marrow damage.
250mSv is probably not going to give you acute radiation sickness, but it certainly is not going to be good for you. In particular it will increase your risk for cancer.
Look at the people in line ups for food and supplies; calm and polite. No one shouting, shoving or being impatient.
So when is your flight over to help out?
'But the knowledge that a nuclear crisis could occur, and that we might be the only people standing in the way of a meltdown, defines every aspect of an operator's life'
I wonder why all these feel-good stories regarding nuclear reactors are flooding out media at just this time.
I'd rather we as a nation placed a higher value on nuclear energy and the heroes who safeguard us from the highly unlikely and rare accidents it produces than spending trillions on foreign wars which cost many more lives and are products of our own choice of energy dependency.
If 500 brave souls are lost every 50 years to providing us with energy independence, that's a bean-counter's best-case scenario over tossing 50000 youth into a war zone for decades on end just to guarantee sources of foreign oil.
It's no different in software engineering than in running a dangerous power plant:
Heroism indicates failure.
If you need heroism, someone or something has failed: your design; your management; your organization as a whole usually. I've been a "hero" numerous times and it did feel good -- but it's macho BS to think that this is how it should be. Making hard decisions up front -- managing expectations, avoiding feature creep, understanding your operating environment -- prevents it.
In the case of power plants, it's holding the line on safety despite CONSTANT pressure to disregard it -- such as putting more spent fuel than the design allows in Unit 4's storage pond.
All the claims that what's happening at Fukushima are somehow a vindication of nuclear power betray this love for malfunction. Think about all of the heroes we'll need if storage ponds in the US (Shearon Harris anyone?) go up in flames.
I could be used to fry all the devices connected to the hub, protecting sensitive data in the advent of a sudden danger.
factor 966971: 966971
One that doesn't have a catastrophic failure mode? Maybe we should be putting our money into that rather than war machines and dick pills?
Is there any business operation anywhere on the planet that isn't operated as a giant catastrofuck? I mean seriously, everywhere you look it seems like lying, corner-cutting, and profit-raping. Are there any responsbile operators out there?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The Register? Are you sure? I haven't read this piece yet, but a few days ago they had an article explaining how this disaster proved how safe nuclear technology was. I do enjoy reading The Register occasionally, but it's not exactly an objective and unbiased source of information. Try iaea.org instead.
... if running a nuclear plant requires the same mindset as going into battle or entering a burning building, how is any of this a good idea?
*faceplam*
I'm pretty pro-nuke/anti-hysteria, but this is just irresponsible. If you want the straight-up story, go to the IAEA page or see the analysis by Ars.
No, I want the opposite device.
I want the "off" button to be as easy to press as possible.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
From your article:
"The Japanese people, rightly, are hailing the personnel at the site as heroes. Not the least impressive aspect of their performance is the way they appear to be tackling the situation with such professionalism as not to carelessly risk their own well-being."
So, nothing in OP's point really changes.
That said, I'll agree with your article that the media hypes. . Everything. . to the nth degree, and that this practice severely detracts from its credibility, but in this case there is I think legitimate cause for concern. The Japanese nuclear industry does not exactly have a sterling record for safety or transparency.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/652169.stm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,992195-1,00.html
Note that both of those articles were written over a decade before this incident, and by well-respected news agencies. Japan has a long and, frankly, sordid history of poor safety practices in the nuclear industry. Whether this incident will be a major disaster or a minor incident as your source predicts remains to be seen, but that people are worried is hardly surprising.
After all, if you're face to face with a cobra, you're probably going to be nervous even if one guy claims that its poison glands have been removed.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Hei folks, ever since this whole clusterfuck broke out I'm having a really hard time getting around the attitude of most online techie communities.
/. have started patting themselves on the back about this being a "job well done", bashing "media hysteria" and calling names against "tree huggers" and "anti-nukes activists". It's wrong, it's biased, it's annoying as hell. Besides, the amount of manipulation and spin is frankly unacceptable from these sources that one would hope they knew better.
...
Since the very first hours YC, Ars, TheReg and
Listen all : it's mission accomplished when the crew back on deck - Apollo 13 style - not when the PR wish it was - Iraq invasion style.
Let's not loose our cool, scientific, matter-of-fact and "it ain't finished yet" attitude; have we turned ourselves in our own version of FOX?!
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
... Recent financial crises and the need for improved benefits and pay structures to retain "key management and directorial personnel" pay and benefits must be reduced for the most critical workers in nuclear power plants.
(Yeah, it's all well and good to recognize how important they are when there is a crisis, but how well are they recognized when there isn't?)
Never mind that this reactor is pushing 40 years old...
It was going to be decommissioned in a few years anyway, from what I understand.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Modern nuclear reactor designs do not experience meltdown. They are designed to be passively safe.
Why don't we use them? Politics, mainly.
simply statistically speaking, for the possibly mortal, probably life shortening sacrifices these nuclear workers are making, less people will die of cancer in the coming decades. i'm on the east coast of the usa, so it is highly unlikely to be me they are saving, but if you could somehow draw up a list of dots of future cancer sufferers due to this accident, those dots would be concentrated in japan, but there would be a smattering of dots elsewhere on the globe as well
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It was scheduled to be taken offline this month.
Gee, you could try supporting, say, offshore wind power. Here in MA, we've got a company that's been trying for the last 12 years to build a wind farm near cape cod. It's safe, clean energy.
Nah, that would block the view from the Kennedy vacation home. Better to whip up a frenzy of pseudo-science bullshit with your leftist buddies to save your royal family from having to actually see a windmill that to actually help solve the problem.
During all of this, I've noticed the slashdot community seems to lean in favor of nuclear power. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get highest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a total unmitigated disaster. One person held it up as a case in FAVOR of nuclear power, basically saying - look, even with the natural disasters they only released a little radioactive steam. That's just plain ignorant. The building have exploded, 3 reactors are thought have had partial meltdowns (one of them breached), the simple cooling ponds are in trouble (if they were full of water, someone could just walk in there and confirm it - the fact nobody has says the radiation levels are too high to go in because something is wrong), radiation is more than 10 times background 30km away. And regardless of weather you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to prevent it getting worse and there is no solid plan. I did read they're importing 150 tons of boron to dump on it - because well, you need to do that when there is a little steam leak I suppose...
Someone explain how the current nuclear reactors produce power with uranium and the explain how the move to thorium will be much safer. Thorium is the future of reactors.
I completely agree, that people who risk their lives to save others are nothing else but heroes.
What I am confused about is what made such an act of heroism nessesary. With all the reports about Fukushima like http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/2011/03/17/wikileaks-cables-reveal-worry-over-japan-s-nuclear-plants-115875-22994842/ or http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8384966/Japan-nuclear-plant-disaster-engineer-retired-35-years-ago-over-Fukushima-safety-concerns.html I can not shake off the feeling that it was exactly calculated, that this plant will likely cost lives someday.
So now these workers (maybe) giving up their health or more, because someone wanted to make some more money. And what if things go completely fubar? There isn't even a way to punish a corporation for such a behaviour, because the damage is almost always higher than anyone can pay for.
"in the cold, dark recesses of a critically damaged nuclear plant"
I'm pretty sure it's getting quite hot in there right about now.
One that doesn't have a catastrophic failure mode? Maybe we should be putting our money into that rather than war machines and dick pills?
Is there any business operation anywhere on the planet that isn't operated as a giant catastrofuck? I mean seriously, everywhere you look it seems like lying, corner-cutting, and profit-raping. Are there any responsbile operators out there?
Sure there are, because of that, you don't hear about them.
profit. Replacing old reactors too 'early' reduces profits. The same way that improving
security is more expensive than hoping for heroes when you need them.
I admire these guys especially since I suspect that they may well be aware that some of
there sacrifices were only made necessary by the bastards in management.
Just like the Tokaimura incident a few years back and some 100km to the south which
was clearly the managements fault (workers were not told that it may be less than ideal
to transport radioactive liquids in buckets).
Cost. Cost and politics are not the same thing. If you threw out every piece of engineering as soon as a new design came along, you'd never have a running system in the first place. Reactor cores last longer than most engineer's careers. They are also integral to the design. No reactor is completely fail safe.
I don't think it really matters how old the nuclear plant was or that a 9.0 earthquake hit. It should be impossible for any of this to occur. You plan for these things... it's called a worst case senerio. All running reactors should be able to be shut down within minutes. In fact it should all be automatic, especially in the case of large earthquakes.
In fact I would go so far as to say that if it can melt down then they need to have a plan for what to do when it does. Retrofit the reactors. At the least have all the reactor rods retract and have robots that can transport the rods to a containment tank. Be able to pull the dam fuel! Have a gods dam meltdown plan in place!
Believing that they can depend on the loyalty of their underlings, allows management to get away with reducing staff and spending less on emergency preparedness. This is also true in other fields like ambulance crews, fire fighters, cops, and even down to the technical support staff. I worked for a city government agency that supported radio communications for public safety. When we did drills for the "Big One" it was just assumed that the support staff would work 24 hours a day until they dropped dead. They were not amused when I pointed out that when the big quake comes, I will care far less about a point to point microwave links than I will care about my family. At the beginning of the "drill" I explained that I'd be back after I checked on my wife and kid..... see you tomorrow.
...and in many places. I noticed that many slashdotters failed to understand the point of the article: Here is no requirement that an employee in a dangerous job being a "hero". But the act of for him to stay and say "no, if I leave people may die" even when he may even lose your life with this, this is a hero... And those who risk their lives to defend the lives of others that deserve recognition for all of us, ever.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
The sad fact is that this kind of heroism simply wouldn't have been necessary had the Japanese government/TEPCO taken safety more seriously instead of covering up problems and doing things on the cheap.
Damn the cost, Japan is one of the world's richest and most capable economies. If they can build high quality bullet trains, they can make sure their nuclear plants within range of major population centres (basically all of them) are safe given their location. Passive cooling for plants, and/or ability for backup systems to operate underwater.
After the dust (radioactive or otherwise) settles on this, the Japanese need to have a serious safety review of all their nuke plants and nuclear safety policy in general. I say this because I want nuclear power to succeed... it won't if many more of these happen.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Modern nuclear reactor designs do not experience meltdown. They are designed to be passively safe.
So what? The bigger risk has generally been (and in this case still is) keeping stored spent fuel from igniting after an emergency or attack.
Well. I wonder. If the levels are that low as the guy thinks, why did the jp gov have to raise the allowed limit to 250mSv. I am sure the workers wear individual Dosimeters.
Disclaimer for below: I am a physicist, but did not think about nuclear reaction for a long time and am no expert on them; If somebody could do the caclulations properly, and dismiss the below as completly improper, i am glad to hear:
The cool down pond contains a MMol of radioactive substance, which should, depending on the composition (time of use) between 10^17 and 10^20 decays per second (i am no expert on this, therefore the large interval), which corresponds to kW to MW of emitted radiation (if the fuel pool evaporated 2000m^3 water in 1 week, the lower end may the right order of magnitude, corresponding to no active reaction going on), corresponding to emitted radiation in the oder of kW to 10s of kW. if we assume that .1% of this fuel is distributed in a 1000m^3 (e.g. the building), you have watts per second, and milliwatts and m^3. Assuming the worst part may be the inhaled alpha and beta radiators, and that you lung keeps 5liter, you end up with 5muW, corresponding roughly to 10mGray, or hundred mSv per hour (alpha and beta radiators), and you may want to add something for the gamma rays. If this would be thinned by a factor of 10, then you end up with the values reported close to the plants. So the problem would arise iff the fuel ponds catch fire and a significant amount if released into the atmosphere, you could end up with polluting 10^7-10^8m^3 into an unhealthy radiation level. That is .1(km)^3. So if the fuel storage evaporates over a week and the airflow is 1m/second you may emit a quite unhealthy smoke (that would be Tchernobyl). Lets hopefully assume that the burning would be slower and that the air stream would be thinned in a way that corresponds to size of the last plume when it arrived over tokyo, (100km^3 = 10^11m^3?), yielding 10^4W/10^11m^2, which is .1muW/second and m^3, corresonding to .3mW/m^3 and hour, so the order of magnitude will be .1-10mSv/Day if the fuel pool goes into fire. So the dosage over a week could definitely get into the harmful range, even at 300km away (you can check that estimation also vs. the measured radiation data at the reactor and lets say yokohama, which is roughly a ratio of 1/10000, meaning that if it would be 1Sv at the reactor we would reach the level calculated) if the wind conditions are awful and a lot of fuel burns/evaporates.
When i heard the amount of fuel stored in their plant under the open air, and that the radiation prevented them from working, i decided to take the plane to okinawa from tokyo. If they manage to cool the fuel pool in reactor 4 reliably (which contains the more active rods), then i will fly back (about the rest, even about a meltdown in the containment i am less worried), but i am definitely not a fan of getting the yearly radiation dose for a nuclear plant worker within a week.
So, no, no need to panic, but on the other hand if this would be too long over Tokyo, we can get new reliable Data on cancer caused byt radiation (in a 35Mio population, you can pick up change in rates on the order of a percent easily).
As i said: i am no expert on this, and i lack the most important information (specific composition of the fuel rods). But since i lack it, i may be pessimistic.
Go read the link in this comment:
The earthquake and the follow-on tsunami caused serious problems with several reactors. The problems built up over hours and days, requiring a lot of effort to mitigate them.. They are going to be expensive to fix, and to date have killed tens of people.
The earthquake also caused a dam to collapse, destroying 1800 houses in an essentially unstoppable catastrophe. Right now, nobody knows how many people were in those homes - if 1% of them were occupied, that dam has killed more people than all the reactors.
People on slashdot favor nuclear power because a lot of them have an engineering mindset - everything we do has tradeoffs, and nuclear in general has the best ones for big sources of electricity.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Lowering Deaths per Terawatt Hour for Civilization
Anybody know where plant and company management is during all this heroism? I'm guessing it's a good distance away from it.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
I was surprised to see that nobody had made the connection to Heinlein's wonderful short story, "The Long Watch".
The main parallel would be the willingness to submit oneself to dangerous or even fatal radiation levels in order to prevent a disaster.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
...especially, to the nuclear power promoters, industry shills, sycophants and other pro-nuke hacks whose tireless solicitations on behalf of plants that are "safer than everything" put these workers there to begin with.
Lunching in Washington, submitting op-ed pieces, cashing checks, cozy at home posting on reddit and slashdot, they're the real heroes.
Let's hear it for them!
- js.
These guys are "us" (probably less me, more you).
These are the guys that understand the system; probably complain like hell to management about what's *really* going on; are always too busy to go to the Friday drinks or that all-hands meetings to celebrate one of the managers finishing his org chart or whatnot. These are the guys that always seem to miss their son's bedtime; or are too tired to eat when they come home.
And now they have the added benefit that in 5 years time they'll get a phone call from their doctor telling them that something turned up in an X-ray and he needs to talk to them about it.
To those that support nuclear power - thank you. To those that buy into the media hype - let me says this, the media is blowing ignorance and BS up your backside.
As someone with 14 yrs. of experience in building and running plants, it's a great environment to work in. And, as you see in Japan, those who work there love it. I'd go back tomorrow if the US got off it's ignorant backside / stopped listening to the NIMBY-ites, and start building more. Another point not discussed here is the impact of the different types of "radiation" nor the level of impact on an individuals age. SirVirtual
Actually it's economics. Nuclear power is among the most expensive forms of power even after you factor in the massive subsidies that the world's governments give it (such as insuring nuclear power plants against catastrophic risks like what's going on in Japan right now). Then you factor in that the construction of nuclear power plants is almost always over-budget and late. Then you have to factor in that nuclear power plants have massive upfront costs which requires sinking capital into them for decades before profits are realized. There's a reason why most nuclear projects were cancelled in the U.S. before Three Mile Island and France achieved its 80% nuclear power stats via state-owned companies.
With a storm coming the brave and heroic thing to do would be to leave the plant and help others get to shelter.
How likely is it that an offshore wind farm (or wave action power generator) would survive a 10 meter tsunami dragging boats and buildings and cars through it?
These guys are NOT firefighters. Fire fighters get in called AFTER shit has happened over which they had no control and take control and safe peoples lives.
Fire INSPECTORS are supposed to go in BEFORE shit happens and prevent it from ever happening.
I do not want a heroic nuclear engineer, I want one who is an abject coward and so takes every safety precaution before so that when the first real test of the safety comes along it doesn't fail so compeltly and utterly.
All the guys at Fukushima FAILED at their job. Their job was NOT to put the fire out but prevent it from ever happening. If your bus driver drives your bus into the river, do you then hail him as a hero for trying to swim to shore?
Yes, this goes against what people want to hear but it is common sense, do you want your airline pilot to make a heroic landing without fuel after he forgot to fuel up? Yes, yes you do but you would ALSO want him fired for making the mistake in the first place.
There has been renewed effort to get nuclear power accepted with claims it is safe. Yes so safe that they put backup generators where they are affected by fire and put reactors so close that a fire in one affects the others.
That is not the kind of thing you want to see in a nuclear reactor. If these guys had been heroes they would have fought not nuclear radition but politicians and have build safe reactors with reliable safety mechanisms, not ones that are destroyed in an earth quake in an earth quake zone.
Heroism is overcoming the odds, not causing them. Someone who climbs a mountain is not a hero. Someone who goes after them and gets them off is a hero.
Firefighters are heroes. Fire inspectors who fail to prevent fires are NOT even if they help in the putting out of the fire.
Critical thinking it is so essential in today's world.
As for honor and duty above all else, you are talking about nation that mass raped children in WW2 and slaughtered as many if not more then the nazi's.
Now mod me down for choosing not to live in lala-land.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I believe they tried that at Chernobyl already. The problem is that the radiation is ionizing and has energy in it in general.
So the air will be full of ions which will mess with radio, and the radiation will also cause any onboard electronics to misbehave or outright malfunction.
If someone built robots using the radiation-hardened electronics space probes use then that might work. But knowing how seldom we have significant problems with nuclear power I doubt there is anything like it.
The best bet would probably be to repurpose something from someone's nuclear weapons programme. But that's probably not happening for many different reasons.
Are there any responsbile [sic] operators out there?
Yes, you just don't hear about them because the news, "Power Plant that Has Operated Safely for More than a Decade Continues to Do So," isn't really news at all, and it certainly isn't sensationalistic enough to bait most folk into reading about it.
Though I will say, I've often found local newspapers to be great sources of stories like that, "Local Shipping Company's Great Safety Track Record is Nothing to Scoff At," and other such things. The big national news corps. very rarely seem to pick up stories like that though.
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What are the figures for wind farms versus nuclear power plants (even those at the end of their usable life like the ones in Japan)? How reliable are they and how much surface area coverage is required to guarantee the same output as just one nuclear plant? Wind is a useful resource but something tells me pinning all our hopes on it would be incredibly foolish at this point. Nuclear is much more scalable and modern reactors are orders of magnitude safer than old style reactors and massively cleaner than other resources (coal, oil). If it wasn't for the fact that ill informed people like yourself had spent the last thirty years jumping up and down and making a noise about the dangers of nuclear, I can't help feeling reactors today would be even safer, cleaner and more efficient. Instead we're hobbled, tied to fossil fuels because the only realistic alternative right now has been painted in a poor light by the media.
One that doesn't have a catastrophic failure mode?
I am not convinced that there is such a beast.
If production is remotely sited, you have to protect the distribution network. The solar mirrors or panels are in the desert southwest - but the power is being fed to the coastal cities of California.
How much attention is being paid to secondary modes of failure?
It surprised the hell out of me that spent fuel rods would be stored in pools on top of a reactor. That enormously complcates the problem if there is any structural damage to the building.
Damage to water lines. Pumps and generators. Fuel tanks.
The latest news from the Japanese government regarding the workers is that Tepco must not give up the 6 reactors even if they wished to.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I want the "off" button to be as easy to press as possible.
In the case of the reactors, the 'off' button was so easy that the earthquake tripped it, no human intervention necessary. It was designed that way. I like the lid lift button press - you don't want accidental pushes for some thing as important as a nuclear reactor, but it only takes a second more and seconds don't normally count. Where they do, they have automatic processes, not human hands, doing the shutdown.
I don't read AC A human right
During all of this, I've noticed the reactionary community seems to lean in favor of fearmongering. Not individuals, but the community as a whole - based on the comments that get the lowest moderation. This is in spite of the fact that the situation there is a complex result of a very large natural disaster. One person held it up as a case in OPPOSITION to nuclear power, basically saying - look, EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE OF RADIATION POISONING WHEN THE REACTORS GO SUPERCRITICAL AND EXPLODE OMGWTFBBQ!! That's just plain ignorant. The walls and roofs of the buildings surrounding the concrete containment structure have been destroyed in a series of explosions that released radioactive steam that would have been lethal to breathe, but workers were sheltered in the control structures. There is a low possibility that the concrete containment structure for reactor 2 lost integrity, but so far it appears that the reactor vessels themselves are intact. The complex cooling ponds are in trouble but are being refilled. The level of radiation escaping from the Fukushima complex has been dropping for the last day or two. And regardless of whether you buy all those facts, it is requiring a HUGE effort of man power to spread FUD and there is no solid understanding of the situation. I did read they're importing 150 tons of idiots to dump comments on blogs and news sites - because well, you need to do that when you have absolutely no understanding of science...
Ironically, its the lack of a true "off right now" button with a fission pile that is the problem here. Sure you can stop the chain reaction fast, but the delayed neutrons and other fission product decays add a lot of heat to the system for hours and to a lesser extent days.
However it is still hard to make a dooms day device with a nuke plant. Chernobyl was a real good effort however.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
My guess is the Japanese government simply forgot to update the INSI rating of the accident for some days, and now they are increasing it slowly.
Other nations have rated the incident on Level 6 already.
Considering that the INES scale describes 6 as "Significant release of radioactive material likely to require implementation of planned countermeasures." and that the Japanese countermeasure are not exactly planned, this is already more of a level 7 emergency: "Major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures".
If anything goes even more wrong - I have some hope left that this will not be the case though - they will have to make up a new level 8 on the INES scale for "multiple catastrophic failure of nuclear plants with continuous release of nuclear material".
No idea btw. why my posts show up with extra à characters in between, I guess slashdot must be hosted in Tokyo...
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Much of the article seemed reasonable, but I agree with you - the author lost a LOT of credibility when downplaying Chernobyl that significantly.
I do believe that it is valid to point out, regarding Chernobyl, that most of the estimates of the total number of long-term deaths it caused put things around 4000 or so. This is less than even the initial estimates of immediate short-term life loss from the quake and tsunami.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Why is this marked as Troll? Everywhere I look, I see people screaming OMG Nuclear Apocalypse!!!11!!111eleventy!1!
It is a fact that media has been whipping people into a frenzy by playing on their fears and ignorance about nooklear power. There have been NO deaths because of radiation. No radiation sickness either. Just a few people who have recieved enough radiation that it MIGHT make a statistical change in the likelihood in them getting cancer 20 years from now.
Meanwhile the death count has now climbed past 10k because of everything ELSE that has happened.
All the poster is doing is trying to bring sanity to a bad situation.
I was a reactor operator for 6 years with the USN. Nukes have responsibility and dedication drilled into them with long days of hard work and training. Your first thought in everything you do is protecting the general population. The thought, "If I don't sacrifice myself, it may result in my family dying" is likely going through all of the operators minds.
All that said 250 msv is high for a nuke worker to attain in a short time but we were always trained that the very first signs of radiation sickness don't start till about 1-2 Sv. So as far as health of the personell this really isn't that bad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_poisoning really breaks it down for everyone not trained in it.
Anyone who works around oil rigs or oil refineries are subject to much higher risks than those who work at these nuclear plants. The only thing that can ruin a nuclear plant today is an earthquake. Once the leak is out the job is very risky but until that time there is 0 risk. Where as the guys who work at the refineries and rigs always wear gas detectors to monitor deadly gases such as H2S that can wipe out a lot of people, not to mention the constant risks of explosions due to outdated equipment. Heroes? Maybe when nuclear tech was underdeveloped, but today hardly.
Well. I wonder. If the levels are that low as the guy thinks, why did the jp gov have to raise the allowed limit to 250mSv. I am sure the workers wear individual Dosimeters.
The international limit for radiation exposure for nuclear workers is 20 mSv per year, averaged over five years, with a limit of 50 mSv in any one year, however for workers performing emergency services EPA guidance on dose limits is 100 mSv when "protecting valuable property" and 250 mSv when the activity is "life saving or protection of large populations."
So really the Japanese government didn't raise the limit at all. They just said that what the workers at the plant is doing is "life saving or protection of large populations" and then the internationally agreed limit of exposure is 250 mSv.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
You mean nuclear power plant workers are not like Homer, Lenny, and Carl?
A few years ago, some people asserted that widespread looting was a natural consequence of disasters when civic services couldn't immediately save them.
Hm, I guess not?
I guess humans DON'T have to behave like animals, if they choose not to?
-Styopa
One of those reactors is a worse design than the ones at Fukushima. BOTH of them are well past their maximum design lifecycle. They are sitting on a critically important water resource.
The business plan is to operate them until catastrophic failure. They are licensed to 2034, which will probably be significantly longer than they will actually last.
They will fail, and they will permanently damage the watershed, and humans will suffer, because THAT IS THE PLAN. Run them UNTIL THEY DIE.
Unit I was originally scheduled to be decommissioned this month, but it had its service life extended 10 years.
The anti-nuclear lobby has kind of shot themselves in the foot. By fighting new plants tooth and nail, they have caused outdated plants to remain in service longer than planned. Even if you overhaul the system completely, design improvements in new reactors can't be added.
As to catastrophic modes of failure... The problem is we don't have any better viable options.
Coal - Many would consider this a catastrophic mode of operation. Coal is notorious for spewing carcinogens into the air. Between living 5 miles from a first-gen nuke plant and a coal plant - I'll take the nuke plant. With the nuke plant there's a tiny chance I might get exposed to something toxic. With the coal plant it's guaranteed.
Gas - Similarly, "catastrophic mode of operation" - Gas burns clean, but the methods we use to obtain it are anything but. Five or so years of hydrofracturing operations as part of gas drilling have sickened and injured far more people than the entire history of nuclear in the United States. Probably more than the entire history of nuclear excluding Chernobyl. (Being a dangerous experiment gone wrong and not really an acccident, I consider Chernobyl independently from other nuclear incidents.)
Wind/Solar - Not suitable for baseload generation, unpredictable and inconsistent, requires building MORE coal or gas (more likely gas since gas plants can change output faster) to fill in the holes. We need to invest more in these, but they are not suitable as our only baseload electrical source until we make vast improvements in energy storage.
Hydro - Catastrophic failure mode present, has to date killed FAR more people than nuclear (even including Chernobyl), we're also basically tapped out as far as places to put new hydro plants
Nuclear (By building new plants with improved safety - the ESBWR design has passive safety measures that would have resulted in the current situation being a non-issue) is our most viable option. However, the current approach of extending the service life of old plants is NOT a safe approach.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You are quoting a bunch of distortions and panic reporting from irresponsible journalists.
Read this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/18/fukushima_friday/
This isn't their fault. They're going in an putting their lives at risk after the fact. I completely disagree that it was the fault of "All the guys at Fukushima" this isnt the job of 99% of them. It certainly wasn't something obvious that a fuel tech should have been able to see immediately. These guys were running a nuclear reactor properly, doing what they were supposed to do.
Being a hero is about facing danger when you don't have to for the good of others. Putting out a fire with a hose at a distance isn't heroic, but going into the burning building is, even if you were the idiot whose fault it is in the first place. Repairing a damaged nuclear reactor when you could run away qualifies as heroic in my book.
Yes in perfect 20/20 hindsite, the plant should have been rated for a 9.5 quake plus tsunami. That is bloody expensive- and hard to justify in advance. I'm impressed that it held this well. We live in a world of compromises, even if you make wise decisions your going to get bit from time to time. I don't have the background to know if this was actually a bad decision, or a decent decision with bad circumstance. It doesn't seem on the face of it to be a negligent decision, or serious mismanagement
As far as Japans past, we all have dirty laundry in our history, it's how we act in the here and now that define us. The people of Japan are acting in a far more civilized manner than the mess we had with Katrina. Their behavior is commendable.
Where is the profit in cheep energy? All that will do is empower the people!
And designed for a 25 year lifespan.
Sleep: A completely inadequate substitution for Caffeine.
In my nearby plant, the nuclear engineers were found sleeping on the job during afternoons, and playing board games when awake.
I'm reminded of millwrights at auto manufacturing plants. If they're not spending 3/4 of their time playing Euchre you don't have enough of 'em for when something breaks or it's time to do maintenance or model changeover.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
....how much does a hero get paid?
And first generation nuclear reactors produced electricity too cheap to meter, right?
Maybe longer than this nuclear plant if a similar amount of money had gone into protecting the wind mills?
I highly reccomend this documentary.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-chernobyl/
It details the struggle to get the reactor under control, which cost (to date) thousands of lives.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It surprised the hell out of me that spent fuel rods would be stored in pools on top of a reactor. That enormously complcates the problem if there is any structural damage to the building.
Think about it:
If they were to be stored anywhere else you'd have the problem of moving them there - when they're "spent", which is when they're about the most radioactive they've ever been before or will be later and have the greatest load of volatile short-lived radioactive material (like radioiodine). They're also producing a LOT of heat and will melt themselves if taken out of the cooling water for even a few minutes. (AND the reactor is out of service until you've gotten them replaced and everything buttoned up.)
Take them out of the outer containment and ship them across the lawn to storage? Not if I'm designing the plant. Ideally they'd stay underwater the whole time they're being moved and if they must leave one water vessel they should go into the next one in as few seconds as possible.
That puts the storage pool right next to the reactor, inside the same shielded room, and with the water level about the same height as the access port at the top of the reactor vessel.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The bravery of anyone staying behind in a bad situation facing a possibly horrible death from radiation poisoning or cancer a few years down the road is incredibly admirable and has to be praised. When I was younger that to me was the ultimate example of being both a real man and the best of humanity. It still is and in the same situation I believe I'd still strive to be that example myself, but as I have gotten older and wiser I hate to admit how the world really works.
The sad fact is that those 50 or so workers may simply be, in the end, disposable components whose main purpose is to foolishly give their lives so that their bosses bosses can continue to get filthy rich without having to endanger themselves in any way. I definitely don't mind people being rich. I view free market capitalism as by far the best economic system. But I do find it morally objectionable to people enriching themselves at the cost of other people's lives by trapping people into a believe that it is their "duty" to put their lives in danger for peanuts while the work they do insures that higher ups get filthy rich. That's not capitalism -- that's using an ingrained sense of duty to take advantage of people.
Those 50 or so workers should be getting paid millions to endanger their lives. They should demand millions before staying behind. But they won't because of a sense of duty which their higher ups secretly view as the instincts of disposable fools. After all is said and done if those 50 or so workers avert a catastrophy at the cost of their lives they'll recieve next to nothing, but they'll save their company and the higher ups billions which will go right into the pockets of those higher ups.
The best example of this was Howard Hughes. He became the richest man in the world selling airplanes to the US government during World War II. His workers were everyday people who were told they had to sacrifice by working every day for low wages to build those planes to defeat facism. Yet, he sold those same planes to the US Government for a ridiculously huge markup. How do I know he did that? Because he became the richest man in the world from it. Had he "sacrificed" like his workers did and like those fighting overseas did he wouldn't have even made the top 100,000 richest people in the world. I am confident that in his very private conversations he viewed himself as a genius for getting rich off of other people who "sacrificed due to a sense of duty" while at the same time holding those same people in contempt for being foolish enough to make him filthy rich.
That's just how the world really works. The truth is, you really shouldn't put your life in danger unless you're being paid huge amounts of money for doing it because otherwise you're just dead, you're family is penniless, and you only succeeded in helping your boss enrich himself at your expense.
To me heroism is bravery + positive results.
1. Running into a burning building, but dying and not saving anyone is brave, but not heroic.
2. Running into a burning building and saving someone, but dying, is semi-heroic, but leans to neutral if the death-to-save ratio is only 1:1.
3. Running into a burning building, saving someone, and living, is heroic.
Also, no respect should ever be given solely because of occupation, rank in a hierarchy, etc.
Maybe, accidents do happen and so do natural disasters.
But I think clearly the track record of these people speak differently, who have been managing these plants.
You have to be a idiot, not a hero to abide by the decisions of these people running things.
Personally I would go to the CEO of the corporation and tell _him_ to hold the fire hose on the melting, burning spent nuke fuel rod pile that exploded.
After all, he made the decisions not to spend any money to correct a lot of common sense and obvious faults in the plant over its past 10 year operating history which has led to this disaster.
That is what this is too, it is a disaster.
I also would like to point out this tabloid media and the US government officials telling people the radiation that reached the west coast was minimal is nothing but a propaganda campaign.
Folks, you on the West Coast are just getting the low doses that blew out today on the first day they had problems. The REAL stuff is yet to come and it will arrive by plane, by Wind and in your food, the fish you eat over the next 400 years.
The real stuff won't come for another 4-5 days as it was that long before they had major explosions releasing particles that are _lethal_ and would be eventually fatal if you where exposed to them for longer than 1 second.
I guess what is nice about this is there are plenty of independent non governmental sources for rad levels that will be relayed to people who actually want to know what the real deal is.
Lets see how long the idiots at Fox News, CNN and the Democrats and Republican controlled media can spin it.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
We do have other ways of making electricity than nuclear fission, and, depending on what you care about, those might actually be called better.
For example, the Wikipedia article Cost of electricity by source lists various ways of generating electricity that are considered cheaper than nuclear fission.
On the other hand, there are several reasons why nuclear fission may be with us for a while.
For one thing, many of the other ways we know for generating electricity aren't exactly harmless, either. What is worse, having a low probability of negatively impacting the lives of thousands of people quickly in a nuclear accident, or slowly negatively affecting millions of people through airborne toxins, radioactive particles, and greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels?
Secondly, with global electricity demand rising, we may need to use all known means to be able to meet that demand. Fossil fuels and clean sources and fission and even fusion when we get it.
Thirdly, none of the other means of generating electricity is as effective at producing fissile plutonium as is nuclear fission.
Still, I think it would be interesting to see how much money and effort is being poured into the various ways of generating electricity. Energy is an important issue, that could kill every one of us, but there is surprisingly little indication that we, as a species, are willing to put serious effort in realizing good solutions.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
we don't build nuclear reactors to showcase heroism. There are other spheres of society to do that. Just give me clean and safe energy and get the hell out of putting countless lives in danger. Thanks.
The most catastrophic failure of a power generation facility in history was a hydroelectric dam failure. An estimated 171,000 people died (c.f. est. 4000 for Chernobyl).
So you think we should phase out our hydroelectric plants first?
It is now much more widely known that a light artillery attack can drain a water tank that will cause the reactor to be better than any "dirty bomb" you could make.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Maybe they should build their wind farm somewhere that's not in view of $12 million real estate, then use the huge piles of money they make from their windmills to buy Cape Cod, problem solved.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Not likely at all. On the other hand, how likely is it that the destruction of a windmill will make its location uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Direct alpha and beta are pretty much harmless as they can be stoped by almost anything. Gamma will sod up your DNA unless you have metres of sheilding. (Gamma depends on the intensity though).
Radioactive particulate matter is different. If you breath it in or swallow it Alpha, Beta and Gamma are being emited inside youre body and the only thing to absorb them is your body. Many of these materials are taken into your tissues. Many are quite toxic on thier own (without radiation issues). Techincaly Gamma radiation is not cumulative if you don't get DNA mess ups and you do spend enough time away from them to recover. Getting toxic and radioactive materials into your body is a very bad idea as you end up with (generally) a very low dose for a very long time .
matfud
Saw this guy on CNN a few days ago when he was "former senior plant operator".
I guess that title did not have the prerequisite gravitas, so a few days later he became "former plant crisis manager" (a full time job to be sure).
Now he's "shift technical adviser" (guess the other operators are not sufficiently technical).
He's nothing if not a moving target.
You know he's got the cajones for the job though, he broadcast directly from the heart of the crisis....somewhere is big bad Hong Kong.
I'm and I have been the first to call bullshit on the various liars from the nuclear industry, but when you make a claim like that you need to provide some evidence. Please could you provide links that we can put into Google translate or whatever.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
4000 or so. This is less than even the initial estimates of immediate short-term life loss from the quake and tsunami.
It is very cute when the definition of "safe" is "causes less deaths than the worst ever earthquake in the history of man".
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
A hazmat suit won't block much radiation, but it will keep the wearer from accumulating condensation or dust in their lungs and on their skin. Their long-term exposure to the radiation is reduced dramatically by wearing a suit, removing the suit safely (not touching the outside) and taking a thorough shower before and after getting out of the suit.
On top of that, while a heavy suit of lead would be impractical, even reducing the radiation exposure by a smaller fraction with a thin layer of shielding is worthwhile as it gives the body more room to repair the damage as it's happening, reducing the peak damage done.