Slashdot Mirror
Radioactive Water Found In Two Reactor Buildings
RedEaredSlider writes "Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said it detected several kinds of radioactive material in the water on the floor of reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The isotopes found in the water were cobalt-76, technetium-99, silver-108, iodine-131, iodine-134, four isotopes of cesium, barium-140 and lanthanum-140. All have half-lives measured in hours or days, with the exception of cesium-137."
Huh. So you say they dumped water all over the radioactive disaster with helicopters, firetrucks, a big concrete pump truck, and now the basement of the reactor is filled with radioactive water?
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Let's see - they've been pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of seawater into the spent fuel pools for over a week now. I would take a wild guess and predict that, yes, there will be some radioactive water lying around.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
This is extremely bad
Oh my God, the protons in your body have a half-life of over 10^30 years!
You, uh, do realise that the longer the half-life the _less_ radioactive something is? Generally speaking, plutonium is more likely to kill you because it's toxic than because it's radioactive (unless someone makes a bomb out of it).
I'm fine with nuclear power. I'm not fine with nuclear power plants being run by greedy assholes that put the profit margin above the safety margin. We have a few reactors here in the U.S. that are obviously being ran "on the cheap", and frankly those companies should be ran out of town, and taken over by people that put the public safety first.
They said we're all gonna dieeeeee!!!!!
Which is what they said after TMI and Chernobyl and for all I know Windscale as well.
If nuclear power is so damned dangerous where are the piles of dead bodies?
Call me when the number of people in the past thirty years gets up to 0.1% of the number killed by automobiles, or half the number killed by coal power in all its dreadful glory.
Nuclear power has serious economic issues. If it had significant safety issues it would have killed WAY more people by now.
And no, Greenpeace propoganda about us not being able to prove that Chernobyl didn't kill 10,000 people world-wide per year in the past 20 years doesn't count. Every reputable health authority that has looked at the consequence of the Chernobyl disaster has pegged the number in the low thousands at the most. No fun fore those people, but the vastly larger number of people killed by coal and cars aren't having any fun either.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for 20 years, and lets see how good your health is. I support nuclear power, but people like you really don't help at all. You're the opposite side of the Greenpeace coin.
This is all just a minor accident that could have been avoided if it weren't for the hippies who won't let us build completely safe reactors to replace the existing completely safe reactors. Right? RIGHT?
IMHO the people who keep playing this down should go to Japan, get in one of those fancy radiation worker suits and CLEAN UP THIS HICCUP WITH THEIR OWN TWO HANDS, FFS.
Oh nonsense. From day one there has been a minority of pro-nuke people that have insisted this is all perfectly safe, and have been proven wrong over and over and over again. Those types of people do more harm to nuclear power than an army of hippies ever thought about doing. Flippancy isn't the way to deal with this issue, and acting like you're right all the time just makes you look like a jackass.
As someone who has an 8 year old nephew within 100k of the plant I find trace elements of Plutonium disturbing to say the least. This *may* mean that the MOX has been partially burned/vaporized, no? That would be bad. I'm not here to editorialize for or against industrial nuclear power, I actually think nuclear is here to stay for a while, but the shills constantly repeating "What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified." aren't doing your cause any good. TEPCO was warned, did cost/risk analysis, made their call and lost. What is newsworthy is that human error and/or corruption and/or cost cutting can undermine sound engineering. How does that fit into the typical slashdot one handed libertarian wank fest?
no more than i would lead.. but that is because of the same reasons.. it is more toxic to the body than it's radiation is.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
what happened at fukushima might not be as horrible as the media portrays. however, you have to understand, when the general public sees this kind of accident and some techie starts scoffing and arrogantly laughing and proclaiming how insignicant this accident is THEY STOP LISTENING TO YOU
there is an educated person on a given subject matter, and an uneducated person. what does it take to turn the uneducated person educated? well, not the attitude you see on display in the post above
when the educated person acts like an arrogant ass, the uneducated people doesn't learn anything except that you have an ego problem. they immediately tune you out, and most importantly, they decide, without your input, that nuclear power is too dangerous and insist to their politicians that we don't use it. because no one educated them. they just scoffed at them
do you want nuclear power to be widely adopted? then impassionately and concisely summarize why things might not be as bas they seem to be to the average person. when they ask a stupid question, or display colossal ignorance on a subject matter, smile and educate them simply and succinctly. or laugh at them. and see nuclear power get mothballed everywhere
frankly, ego problems like on display in the comment board above are more irresponsible than an uneducated public. because they show that the educated are more interested in proclaiming their "superiority" (eg, their ego problems) than actually informing people
congratulations jackass: your attitude helps kill nuclear power
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wish I had mod points, but I'm tired of getting into arguments about it.
I would be far more concerned about the health and environmental effects of the big refinery fire that we didn't hear much about, than the Fukushima reactor so far.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The problem is, apart from the heavy metal toxicity, that it has a biological half time of decades. It bioaccumulates. So it's gonna stay around with you - ample time for that 5 MeV alphas to hit your DNA. You don't need a high activity when you carry it around in your liver for the rest of your life.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
We're missing the real problem here. If these test results are correct, (and there's some question about that) then there is still a critical reaction going on intermittently. The reactors's scrammed nearly two weeks ago and therefore couldn't be putting out something with a half life of days or hours unless fission had restarted. That would be a Very Bad Thing.
They're almost as annoying pro-air-travel people who insist that air travel is safer than going by car.
I mean only a little while ago there was all that news about a plane crash and they *still* insisted that air travel is "safer".
while all sensible people know that the only safe way to get anywhere is by driving there or cycling.
i pointed out people with ego problems more interested at scoffing at the uneducated than educating them, and this yahoo replies by being exactly the sort of archetypical arrogant jackass i am talking about:
"The unwashed masses stop listening because they want to be scared."
oh, really? congratulations, you have an ego problem
being uneducated on nuclear power is not uncommon, it is normal. being ready and interested in being educated is not uncommon, it is normal. unfortunately, techies with ego problems, more interested in ridiculing and denigrating the common man, is also not uncommon, and i guess, "normal"
congratulations, you are a bigger part of the problem than the uneducated. because your attitude is caustic, wrong, and serves your stunted ego more than it serves the common good
i see someone with an attitude like yours, and i think less of you than i think of a scared uneducated person
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
what happened at fukushima might not be as horrible as the media portrays. however, you have to understand, when the general public sees this kind of accident and some techie starts scoffing and arrogantly laughing and proclaiming how insignicant this accident is THEY STOP LISTENING TO YOU
THEY WEREN'T LISTENING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Sometimes you only can get people to listen to you by disagreeing "arrogantly".
if you understand something about the psychology of people's attentions, then you can and should begin to understand how it is permanent, intractable, and just an unchanging facet of human nature. now what? laugh at it? scoff at it? get depressed? use it to tell yourself how superior you are?
analogy: car rides are far more dangerous than airplane flights. but the average person perceives the opposite. the psychological reason is the aspect of control, or the illusion of it. in an airplane, you are handing control of your life over to a pilot. a dedicated trained seasoned pilot with many safety and security protocols, but you are handing over control nonetheless. in a car, you have your hands on the steering wheel: you are in control. but this is an illusion, because you are on a road with hundreds of other people also driving, and texting, and applying makeup, and drunk, and they have power over your life by their actions behind the steering wheel. it doesn't matter how good a driver you are if one of the hundreds of assholes around you crosses over the yellow line
psychologically, it is about what you can perceive as finite and concrete (a tsunami) versus what you cannot perceive as limitless and never-ending (nuclear decay and radiation). perception, and control: more important to human psychology than other risk factors
so if you emphasize to someone what they can perceive, and what they can control, about nuclear radiation, you demystify it, you make it concrete, you make it within their grasp. and thus you reduce the fear and panic and hysteria
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it