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."

Comments

Have any of the workers developed superpowers?

[elrous0]

You can keep your sieverts. I prefer to measure radiation by the level of socially-isolating, mutated superpowers that it produces. Are any of the plant workers brooding yet, or developing secret identities, or lamenting how society has shunned them, or experiencing montage sequences where they learn how to use their new powers?

Re:Have any of the workers developed superpowers?

[matt_gaia]

I propose a different measurement: How many Godzilla's will this produce?

And not the 1998, Matthew-Broderick-starring Godzilla either, because, let's face it... that Godzilla sucked.

Re:Have any of the workers developed superpowers?

[elrous0]

Unfortunately I think Natalie Portman peaked with it too. Pretty rough to reach the pinnacle of your acting career at age 12. They can give her all the Oscars they like now, but it won't change the fact that her best performance was one from 15 years ago that she wasn't even nominated for.

plutonium was just found outside

[Anonymous Coward]

This does not have a half life in days, but years

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/28/3-types-of-plutonium-detected-at-japans-fukushima-daiichi-plant/

This is extremely bad

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[0123456]

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).

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[0123456]

That rule of thumb fails if said element happens to decay into yet another radioactive isotopes. Like, say, uranium...

Somewhat, though you're not going to get much of that other radioactive isotope if you start with a few grams of something that has a half-life of hundreds of thousands of years.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[HungryHobo]

.... not really no.

it ups it but if your isotope with a 20K year half life decays into something something with a halflife of say (for an example that would be easy on the math)5 seconds then you'll get twice as much radioactivity out of it (assuming the seconds products are as dangerous forms of radiation) with a little variation.

a isotope with a 20K halflife will still be utterly dwarfed in terms of radiation output by something with a halflife of a few decades even if the former has a decay chain 10 isotopes long because it can only add a linear multiplier, not an exponential increase in radiation output.

once you're into halflives in the tens of thousands be more afraid of heavy metal poisoning than radiation poisoning.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[increment1]

From what I read, plutonium is pretty bad if you inhale or ingest it, otherwise not too much of a problem. If it gets into you it can stay in you for years, causing cancer and bone problems (it can get into your bones and bone marrow).

Outside of your skin, the radiation is too weak to cause much concern, but when it is inside you, the radiation is enough to cause reasonably serious harm (or at least the potential therein).

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[Amouth]

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.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[cforciea]

Sort of. You only generate the fast decaying isotopes as quickly as your slower isotope decays, so the radioactivity in cases like that only goes up linearly. An isotope with a 2 million year half-life is still going to emit way less radiation than one with a 2 day halflife, even if it decays into an isotope that decays into an isotope that decays into an isotope each with a half-life of seconds.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[fishbowl]

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.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[Mindcontrolled]

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.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Heavy metal toxicity is mostly *because* it bioaccumulates regardless of toxicity mechanisms. Radioactivity is just icing on the cake. Also it depends on the isotope, some Pu isotopes have quite short half lifes. For example Cassini uses Pu238 RTGs for its power source.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[Anonymous Coward]

irrelevant strawman argument (proton) and wrong to boot (toxicity) http://www.ccnr.org/plute_tox.html

The chemical toxicity of plutonium used in these contexts is much smaller than its radioactive toxicity
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/plutonium.html

  The point is that plutonium sticks around for a long time and when inhaled into the lungs in fine particle for the lethal dose is about 1/4 mg. T

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[KonoWatakushi]

Plutonium in perspective.

As far as widespread release of Plutonium into our environment is concerned, consider this:

The most important effects of plutonium toxicity by far are those due to nuclear bombs exploded in the atmosphere. Only about 20% of the plutonium in a bomb is consumed, while the rest is vaporized and floats around in the Earth's atmosphere as a fine dust. Over 10,000 pounds of plutonium has been released in that fashion by bomb tests to date, enough to cause about 4,000 deaths worldwide. Note that the quantity already dispersed by bomb tests is more than 10 million times larger than the annual releases allowed by EPA regulations from an all breeder reactor electric power industry.

Plutonium is not good for you, but the sky has yet to fall, and seems unlikely to in the future.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[Rising Ape]

Its radiotoxicity is very significant, more so than its chemical toxicist. Ingested alpha emitters are nasty - Thorotrast was highly carcinogenic despite Thorium having a 14 billion year long half life and so being only weakly radioactive.

Of course, Thorotrast was ingested in huge quantities, which won't happen for this plutonium.

Re:plutonium was just found outside

[HungryHobo]

not to put too fine a point on it but there's no shortage of completely non-radioactive substances which will diddle with your DNA, get something planar which can bind between bases and you get a nasty little insertion mutation.

lead and it's friends bioaccumulate pretty badly as well.
Not to put too fine a point on it but radiation isn't very special.

plutonium leaking into groundwater is serious but so would be lead or arsenic getting into food or groundwater.

you don't say!

[AdamThor]

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?

Re:you don't say!

[kimvette]

Yes, and in related breaking news, it has been discovered that water is indeed wet!

I am soo tired of the sensationalized stories surrounding Japan's "nuclear crisis." I'm interested in hearing objective news grounded in science, and that there are "trace amounts" of plutonium found on the grounds surrounding the reactor is only barely newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified. That is impressive and only underscores just how safe nuclear power is.

The lesson for the future is to include redundant diesel generators, and always, always keep more diesel on hand for those generators even when the reactors are scheduled for decomission in the immediate future, because you never know when something like, Oh, I don't know, maybe a 9.0 earthquake might occur? :)

Re:you don't say!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested in hearing objective news

No, you're interested in news reinforcing your subjective opinion; just like everybody else.

Re:you don't say!

[siddesu]

No, what is being said is that this most likely indicates holes in the reactor containers. Those same containers that TEPCO has been saying are safe since the week when we had daily explosions. In another week, they'll finally come around to say, one by one, that they've had meltdowns in 1, 2 and 3, and that there is significant leakage from the spent fuel in 4.

Then, maybe, we can start learning the truth of what really is happening in Fukushima.

Re:you don't say!

[mbkennel]

The "trace amounts" are newsworthy because they indicate that the inner steel containment has been cracked and so have a few of the fuel pellets.

In particular, these isotopes are fission products, which are supposed to stay solid and encased in their cladding.

Previous radioactive materials were probably a consequence of neutron activation and had short half-lives, but weren't long term cause for concern.

Re:you don't say!

[Mindcontrolled]

Yeah. Of course. The containment withstood the quake. That's why it is still CONTAINING that plutonium. And I, Cs, Tc and whatnot. That is why we see dose rates of 1 Sv/h in water OUTSIDE the containment. But hey - no matter. Radiation is healthy and ingesting Pu is like chewing on an iron nail, as read further up this thread. You guys are getting somewhat embarrassing by now.

Re:you don't say!

[Solandri]

Several of the radioactive elements they're finding have half lives of a few hours (I-134 and Ag-108 are less than an hour). For those decay products to be found in significant quantities 2 weeks after shutdown indicates the source of the water has a large concentration of these decay products. This would suggest a leak in the reactor's containment, rather than residual run-off from the water dumping/spraying operations. Reactor 2 sustained a hydrogen explosion inside containment, probably within the torus/suppression pool. So this isn't really a surprise.

Reactor 3 had no reports of a similar explosion, but they are inferring that containment is breached based on higher than expected radiation measurements. That is the more worrisome one, since it's using a MOX fuel rather than plain uranium. However, they are reporting that reactor 3 isn't losing pressure, so maybe there isn't a leak.

If you check my post history, you'll see I'm adamantly for nuclear power. But we shouldn't downplay what these reports are telling us.

Re:you don't say!

[gilleain]

I'm interested in hearing objective news

No, you're interested in news reinforcing your subjective opinion; just like everybody else.

I'm interested in hearing news that reinforces my opinion that I don't like reinforcing my opinions. It's hard to find, though.

Re:you don't say!

[GooberToo]

The lesson for the future is to include redundant diesel generators

And more importantly, don't place your backups at or below sea level; and especially not so when on the coast. And especially, especially not so when tsunamis are prevalent in your region. The absolutely obvious stupidity is jaw dropping.

I would seriously like to know why the IAEC didn't have something to say about that long before this happened. Even moreso, I'd like to know why they didn't have generators in standby for such emergencies; as is commonly done in the US. I actually thought this was an international standard. And even moreso, I'd like to know why generators were not immediately made available within the first 12-hours by the military after an emergency had been declared. Had any of this been done, there would have never been an initial emergency declared, let alone an ever growing escalation.

Everything about this smacks of massive human incompetent by the Japanese government and the utility company, which seemingly, has unyielding authority which seems to usurp that of the people and even the government.

The final word in analysis, once its actually penned, is likely to be a scathing review of incompetence at almost every level of governance and corporatism.

They had helicopters functioning. Its not like all of Japanese society ceased to function. It literally would have been trivial to have a generator, or a series of generators delivered within the first twelve hours. Hell, contrary to the popular spin, their inability to deliver the most basic of emergency services by their military strongly suggests that they were in fact, completely unprepared for any and all emergencies they are likely to face.

Re:you don't say!

[Anonymous Coward]

afaik, previous inspections and reviews did mention that the fukushima I plant was below standards in terms of disaster preparedness, but apparently TEPCO decided not to act on those concerns. Wether this was because of sheer penny-pinching irresponsibility or plans for imminent decomissioning (which most reactors have for at the very least 10 years of their life, enduring because of extension after extension, because the power is simply needed), i dont know.

why they didnt just airlift a bunch of diesel generators to the scene, i can only guess, i would think TEPCO initially tried to downplay the entire situation as much as possible, to see if they could keep it all contained without needing outside help (the soviets did the same with chernobyl, denying everything up untill the point were no-one would believe the denials anymore), moreover, the japanase government might have been more concerned with the ten thousands of dead/missing and hundreds of thousands of homeless people at that point (which is fair IMHO, prioritising a nuke plant which MIGHT kill a few thousands even in a full scale chernobyl style explosion over hundreds of thousands of starving/freezing people would have been insane)

I just want to say that the entire thing saddens me, the trouble with nuclear power is that post Three mile island and chernobyl, people are to affraid to allow for newer and safer reactors to be built, yet their energy demands make it impossible to get rid of all the older outdated reactors, had public opinion on nuclear power been less scared-cattle like, we might have a much safer and greener power situation right now (ironically)

(posting anonymous to preserve moderation)

Re:you don't say!

[GooberToo]

Thanks for your most excellent response.

I just want to say that the entire thing saddens me, the trouble with nuclear power is that post Three mile island and chernobyl, people are to affraid to allow for newer and safer reactors to be built, yet their energy demands make it impossible to get rid of all the older outdated reactors, had public opinion on nuclear power been less scared-cattle like, we might have a much safer and greener power situation right now (ironically)

This very fact is something I've been attempting to hammer home hard here. The reality is, anti-nukers have effectively created self fulfilling prophecy by actively preventing newer, safer reactors and literally mandating certification extension. Sadly, I've either been troll moderated or seemingly, un-read and left alone.

People don't seem to understand that nuclear keeps energy prices low, dramatically reduces demand on existing energy supplies, is extremely clean, and is a primary component of base load energy. And yet, they maintain their energy demands while actively preventing newer, safer, more efficient reactors from coming on line. That in turn actively prevents older, deprecated models from going online; which creates the extremely high demand for certification extension. In the US alone, we have over sixty reactors which likely would have been depracted, phased out, and replaced with newer, safer, more efficient reactors if it were not for the environment solely created by anti-nukers. Furthermore, anti-nukers are actually increasing world-wide pollution and needless deaths.

Anti-nukers are very successful as scaremongering, but the reality is, they are the primary cause of tens of thousands of needless deaths every year and are actively pushing to ensure ever higher energy prices. Because baseload can't expand, we're forced to grow based on much more expensive peak load technologies.

There isn't an anti-nuker alive who isn't living in the middle of the woods, who doesn't deserve our loathing and disgust.

Re:you don't say!

[sirsnork]

Except it didn't withstand a 9.0 quake. The 9.0 quake was quite some distance out to sea, but the time it got to Japan it wouldn't have been nearly as strong as that

Re:you don't say!

[jmorris42]

> It literally would have been trivial to have a generator, or a series of generators delivered within the first twelve hours.

Or for that matter just airdrop complete self powered pumps and hook those up. Before the area became a radioactive hell on earth just how hard could it have been to drop in a pump, hook it up to the inlet and let it rip. Hell, in the DAYS that elapsed with no water in those reactors we could have flown a single pump from New Orleans that could have put enough water into those things to blow the fracking tops off the steel containment vessels and created geysers a thousand feet high over all four of those damned reactors. And it is a veritable certainly that somewhere in Japan existed an equally powerful pump or three. The investigations and recriminations over this pooch screw is going to go on for decades.

Re:you don't say!

[Altus]

Because Japan has 2 incompatible power grids a large scale transformer is apparently what would have been necessary to hook up those generators and I guess they didn't have any sitting around. The generators from this part of the country (the ones that would have worked) were likely mostly damaged in the Tsunami and the ones that were not are probably keeping the lights on in hospitals and such.

Re:you don't say!

[Rei]

You know, at this point, I'm almost tempted to say who cares what's damaged or not? The contamination is happening, no matter what the cause. Residets of Iitate, 40km from the reactor and outside the exclusion zone, are getting a free dental X-ray (40 microsieverts) every 4-6 hours (including pregnant women and children). That's merely considering radiation from external sources; if they feel much like breathing or eating, they'll be getting internal accumulation and exposure, which is orders of magnitude worse.

Sure, what exactly failed matters for the cleanup and post-mortem, but regardless of how it happened, Serious Problems Occurred(TM) that have to be dealt with.

Re:you don't say!

[lennier]

The absolutely obvious stupidity is jaw dropping.

Yes, isn't it? And the really scary part is that the 'obvious' stupidity in the design was done by General Electric and approved by the best nuclear regulatory authorities in the world.

The lesson is that 40 years ago, when Top Men told us that commercial fission was perfectly safe, they were either unbelievably stupid, or lying, or both.

But those same companies and organizations are perfectly trustworthy today?

Re:you don't say!

[rmstar]

Completely agree. Regardless of the specific solution, the fact no solution was attained within hours seems to scream extreme human incompetence.

Precisesly. In theory, everything is safe and works. In practice, things are more complicated because people are shocked after a tsunami, incompetent, or both, or absent for other reasons. Perhaps there were other reasons than "incompetence", and things aren't actually as simple as they seem from your vantage point in your moms basement.

That is the fundamental reason why nuclear energy is unsafe. You need things that work well in theory to work well in practice.

They don't, of course.

Re:you don't say!

[khallow]

It's like a nuclear disaster started in slow motion and everyone ran around in circles waving their arms like Keystone Kops

Let's keep in mind that that's how all disaster response starts, especially on something this novel and of this scale. It's disorganized, confused, and nobody knows what's going on. Please recall that there hasn't been a potential core melt anywhere in the world since Chernobyl, 25 years earlier. Nor has there ever been a core melt with ongoing disaster recovery from a magnitude 9 quake.

We'll probably find all sorts of serious errors, miscommunication, and other problems when we study this in hindsight. But on this scale, you expect them and deal with them. As I've said before, I think the response has been remarkably effective and efficient given the scale and novelty of the problem. It's not going to look like a slick Hollywood production.

Radioactivity?

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:Radioactivity?

[polar red]

Radioactive fishes. radioactivity will accumulate in the top of the food-chain.

Re:Radioactivity?

[Fibe-Piper]

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.

Makes sense to me. The problem is, through concentrated disinformation, the corporation in charge has been very good at minimizing the extent of the issues their lack of preparedness has caused the people of Japan.

Everything is being relayed in terms of what they are doing to prevent this or that nuclear side-disaster; nothing to do with the effects of the disaster that has already occurred and continues to occur.

Re:Radioactivity?

[sjames]

I would say the best way to contain the threat is to not go fishing in the reactor building.

Re:Radioactivity?

[sznupi]

Japan might be getting used to "accumulate in the top of the food-chain" deal: Japanese schoolchildren fed toxic dolphin meat ... containing dangerous levels of mercury, Dolphin meat causing dangerous mercury levels in Japanese diners - a flawless revenge on the part of dolphins, given their circumstances? (even if only post mortem one)

On the bright side - I, for one, welcome upcoming wave of Kaiju overlords (and maybe even more posters in such style, from my part of the woods)

Re:Radioactivity?

[fnj]

But what you wouldn't expect is plutonium to be found in the environment. You wouldn't expect that unless the fuel rods have been damaged and some of the radioactive fuel has escaped.

And what you overlook is that the report is not that there is water loose that is radioactive, but that there is water loose that is 100,000 times more radioactive than normal for water INSIDE THE REACTOR. Not in the environment; not in the building, but IN THE CORE.

"half-lives measured in hours or days"

[amazeofdeath]

Technetium-99 has a half-life of over 200k years. Of course, it's still days, just a lot of them.

Re:"half-lives measured in hours or days"

[ZombieWomble]

And decays to technetium-99, so almost all the initial technetium-99m from the fission reaction while the reactor was active has almost certainly become plain old technetium-99 by now.

Re:"half-lives measured in hours or days"

[Artraze]

As others pointed out, they're probably referring to Tc99m, which has a short half life. The fact that ground state Tc99 has a half life of roughly forever is probably why it's not mentioned... It's so long that you need a lot of it to get a lot of decays. It's also fairly unreactive and doesn't form any particularly soluble salts (as best as I can tell), so the exposure possibility is limited. Finally, it decays with a fairly low every beta (294keV) and only very rarely emits a low energy gamma (90keV @ 0.0006%).

Compare to Cs137 which has a 30yr half life, so it has the same decay rate as 7,000 times as much Tc99. It forms highly soluble salts and can be absorbed by the body and concentrated in plants. On top of that, it has a much higher decay energy, and usually emits a strong beta (514keV) and gamma (662keV). It makes the Tc99 look like so many bananas. So, they aren't technically correct, but Tc99 isn't really important.

For reference:
Tc99m: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=430399
Tc99: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=430099
Cs137: http://ie.lbl.gov/toi/nuclide.asp?iZA=550137

Re:"half-lives measured in hours or days"

[russotto]

The ones you need to worry about are the ones which are decaying rapidly, i.e. the ones with short half-lives.

The ones with very short half-lives are not so bad either, since they only need to be contained for a relatively short amount of time until they aren't dangerous anymore.

The worst are the ones with half-lives short enough that they're pretty energetic, long enough that they'll stick around, and which can bioaccumulate. Cesium-137 and Strontium-90, for instance. Or several plutonium isotopes.

I heard it on TV!

[joocemann]

They said we're all gonna dieeeeee!!!!!

But apparently I find out how, after these commercials... damnit! Now I gotta hang around this channel all day!

Re:I heard it on TV!

[radtea]

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.

Re:I heard it on TV!

[Beelzebud]

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.

Re:I heard it on TV!

[Beelzebud]

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.

Re:I heard it on TV!

[Wyatt Earp]

People and animals do live in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone though.

Thousands of people, many of them elderly, refused to leave 25 years ago, now about 4-500 live there.

Animal life is exploding there as well, with very little animal mutations seen so far.

Re:I heard it on TV!

[BlackSnake112]

I can tell you this, 200 years from now, everyone who is alive today will be dead.

Except Cher, who will still be around.

Re:I heard it on TV!

[HungryHobo]

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.

Re:I heard it on TV!

[kevinNCSU]

motorcycle (n) - The minimum mechanical parts necessary to achieve lethal velocity on a road

Re:I heard it on TV!

[Andy Dodd]

"How about we just put the money in to them to actually modernize them and make them safe?"
The problem is anti-nuclear zealots like yourself fight new reactors tooth and nail.

The end result - To meet power demands, old reactors get service life extensions instead of decommissioning.

This greatly increases the risk of an incident compared to building new plants that have significant improvements in safety design. The problems at Fukushima most likely would not have happened if the reactors were ABWRs due to having a gas turbine to handle SBO situations in addition to batteries/diesel. They definitely would not have happened with an ESBWR or AP1000 since they are designed to passively manage decay heat without any electrical backups at all.

Look at Russia - since it's so hard to get new nuclear plants built, they still have RBMKs in operation that don't have any containment building. RBMKs!!!!

I'm fine with nuclear power.

[Beelzebud]

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.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

It appears that this reactor was poorly designed in the first place (the technology was new for them and they did not know what they were doing). If they had known what they were doing, they would have worried more about Tsunamis.
It also appears that the company operating it had a *very* cosy relationship with the people responsible for safety. Used elements were simply left on site and had been for years. The safety people apparently did not bother coming around and actually checking.

Recent news indicated they were on top of the problem. Nope, the news was apparently manipulated.

I hope to hell their counterparts in California are learning from this debacle.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[danlor]

I'm not.... not sure I ever will be again. I have long supported nukes for power as a good alternative to our many other heavily polluting technologies. But I was over looking a major detail. The systems are not and cannot be fail safe.

At the same time, there is no other competing technology that has anything close to the potential downside that nuclear energy has. I always worried about reactor control, and never really gave much thought to the holding pools. But the pools have much more fuel, and are not heavily protected. If cooling is disrupted, even when everything is "shut down", you are looking at a horrible disaster. Its not worth it.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[0123456]

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.

Like Chernobyl?

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[evildarkdeathclicheo]

We don't have a power crisis, we don't have peak food, peak oil, or peak facebook views. We have peak people. Radioactive water is a solution, not a problem. -W

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[antifoidulus]

Couple that with a culture that tends to frown on whistle blowing and reporting your superiors and you have a real problem on your hands. While this is the first major nuke incident in Japan, there is a long record of serious safety violations and technicians and engineers not willing to go behind their bosses back to report them. In 2003 TEPCO was caught forging documents at ALL 17 of it's reactors. This is far from an isolated incident.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[gman003]

Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.

The only real problems are the lack of strong oversight (as you mentioned) and the fact that the reactors were very close to the end of their designed lifespan anyways, and were due to be shutdown within a year (a month, for one of them) due to their age.

The solution to the latter is simple: start shutting down old reactors and building newer, safer ones. Solving the problem of the government and corporations being too close, especially in Japan (seriously, while it's bad in the US, it's even worse in Japan), is a bit less trivial.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[H0p313ss]

If anything, this demonstrates how safe nuclear power it.

I hope that you can come back in five years and say that with a straight face. I think it's fair to say that at this point we have no idea what the long term issues will be with this reactor and the contamination.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[0123456]

Is that supposed to refute what I said?

Chernobyl was run by a government with no concern about 'profit margin', and that lead to the biggest nuclear power disaster in the history of the world. So why do you think the world would be better off if nuclear reactors were run without regard for 'profit margin' (i.e. by governments)?

Back in the real world, reactors run by companies concerned about 'profit margin' have killed far less people than coal power. Even in this case, from what I've read I believe a failed hydro power dam has killed more people than the nuclear reactors which have had to handle a quake and tsunami far larger than anything anyone ever expected.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[vlm]

Actually, from what I can tell, the reactor design was "outsourced" to companies that had been doing it for some time, like General Electric. And the operating company had cooperated with them several times before at other plants.

And the initial business decision to install GE BWRs was made shortly after losing a world war. And coincidentally one of the biggest corporations on the winning side was selling ..... BWRs.

Theres also some hard core national security type stuff going on with respect to commercial plant design vs military plant design. Its such a struggle to balance experience with security. From a safety standpoint you should be better off exporting what you use in your subs, except that subs inherently are not as susceptible to loss of coolant (unless you literally beach one, I guess). On the other hand you don't want to export your top sekret designs, because, uh, just because.

I don't think PWR design would have helped too much. PWR containment is stereotypically believed to be better (but stereotype and gossip is not truth). In this situation that merely means when it split open it splits more violently, hard to say. Or it pops the top of the primary exchanger. On the other hand, BWRs are famous for making their turbines radiologically filthy under "normal" operation conditions, so they have plenty of practice at low level cleanup and monitoring, which is good in this situation. A PWR does not enjoy having no power to the pressurizer. On the other hand circulation when "not quite full" supposedly works better on a PWR, some inherent hydrodynamic thing. On one hand, a BWR certainly has fuel rod design that tolerates a bit -o- boiling (duh) on the other hand a PWR doesn't have to handle boiling loads so theres less fatigue. Completely depowering either a PWR or a BWR is going to pretty much F it up rather seriously.

Re:I'm fine with nuclear power.

[swb]

Chernobyl was run by a government with no concern about 'profit margin',

You mean a party with no official profit philosophy.

High level party officials are always profit minded. Diverting building materials, concrete, and workers to their private dachas or for sale on the black market was quite common.

"No problem..." is what we'll read here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"No problem..." is what we'll read here

[vlm]

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?

I know you're trying to be sarcastic but unfortunately you're correct. The ones that melted down had sorta-crappy Mark I containment structures. They were planning on building replacements on site with much better containment structures... To some extent its just bad luck, but note how they blew up almost in order of construction and the newest ones pretty much shrugged it all off.

Re:"No problem..." is what we'll read here

[jmorris42]

> The politicians should definately tell them to STFU, nothing gets in the way of a good democracy like voters always yappin'

Yes it is time to tell a small but noisy bunch of socialists (scratch a green, find a red. Not every time but often enough, and the odds grow the higher ranking the green is) to STFU until they come up with a solution instead of mindlessly objecting to every single energy source. And until they are willing to lead by example, other than the admirable way they have at least given up on procreating more of their stupid kind. Give up the cars, planes, mansions and such. And no, driving a hybrid doesn't make it all right, ain't one yet that is net positive. Same for putting up solar panels subsidized by the taxes of people poorer than the sanctimionious pricks installing them.

Pick an energy source that actually works and doesn't cause side effects. Now promise you won't start bitchin as soon as it actually starts providing a non-trivial percentage of the national energy supply.

Oil? Oh the horror.... unless we are paying Petrobras to drill so we can import from them, then it must be ok.

Natural gas? Nope. Coal? Ick, dirty... except this mythical 'clean coal' that will never be viable.

Hydroelectric? Nope, harms fish.

Geothermal? Causes earthquakes.

Solar? Not even in the desert is it ok to deploy on a commercial scale. Great for preening greens to put on their roofs though, just as long as it isn't economically viable it is ok. And we won't worry about the ecological problems from producing photovoltaic cells until it goes into commercial production.

Biofuels? Hello, converting commercially significant amounts of farmland is causing food shortages already and we aren't even getting much of our fuel from it yet. The Four Horsemen will ride long before we got off dead dinosaurs.

Nukes? Please, you guys have been hatin on that since forever, mostly with FUD.

Wind? Not anywhere greens can actually see the windmills... which happen to be where the energy tends to be needed, so until we can get better transport of electricity it is a problem, and the cost/benefit still blows. (ok, that was horrible)

Tidal energy will almost certainly kill some rare fish in 100% of proposed locations.

Re:"No problem..." is what we'll read here

[kevinNCSU]

On the flip side if you fuck up a coal mine you may have to abandon an entire town as the earth underneath it burns in a raging inferno for 50 years straight and going: Centralia, PA. Nuclear is just scarier psychologically because it's threat is invisible and slow. It's a lot easier to eventually psychologically deal with he fact that you weren't one of the 10,000 people killed (the dead ones don't have to) then it is to deal with the wondering if you're at a higher risk of cancer or if you're getting radiated right now without knowing it.

Re:"No problem..." is what we'll read here

[Andy Dodd]

"and we would be able to get enough if you f*cking idiots would permit drilling" - 5-10 years of gas drilling using hydrofracturing techniques has contaminated more groundwater and sickened more people than the entire history of non-Soviet nuclear.

weird. are you paid?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:weird. are you paid?

[Rei]

That's the ever-overlooked aspect of these "invulnerable to failure" design scenarios. They seemingly never account for "unknown unknowns" (aka, we didn't realize tsunamis could get that big when it was built, and so simply assumed that they couldn't) and for human error.

One of the new reactor designs calls for a giant bathtub of water to be positioned overhead so, in the case of failure, it opens a valve and floods the reactor, keeping it cool for days. And in case of valve failure -- hey, they thought of everything, right? -- there are multiple valves. Great. Except...

  * What if the valves are designed wrong? It doesn't matter how many "wrong" valves you had.
  * What if whatever environmental factors caused one to fail -- corrosion, electrical short, whatnot -- was affecting all of the valves?

In these sort of cases, your redundancy turns out to be an illusion. This is what took the Challenger down. There were multiple layers of O-rings; a failure of one would not automatically cause a failure of the rocket. You'd need two failures in a given SRB segment to destroy the rocket. Well, at low temperatures, it turned out that a failure in one O-ring would automatically cascade on to the next. There was no redundancy, just an illusion of redundancy.

Design defects aren't the only kind of production human error that can really screw you up. Think for a second about the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), a much hyped, no-containment structure reactor (let me stress that part). You've got tens to hundreds of thousands of fuel pebbles flowing through the core, with pebbles regularly being evaluated and replaced. Great.... except that when you're talking about such vast number of fuel elements, you're pretty much guaranteed to get manufacturing defects. Pebbles will have poor cladding and leak (and what they leak will make their coolant -- whether in the core or as spent fuel -- contaminated, and potentially corrosive). Pebbles will be missized and jam, causing all sorts of problems (this already happened in Germany). Pebbles will shatter, and you better damned well hope that shattered remnants don't build up in the core, increasing its density. Jamming in the core could potentially be as problematic, leaving the pebbles unable to expand properly from heat stresses.

And here we are just talking about one type of failure mechanism (manufacturing defects) on one component (fuel pellets). I have much to gripe about that design and any other "we're so good we don't need a backup" (aka, containment structure) schools of thought (back to the space shuttle: there was no launch abort stack because, hey, it's so safe, why would they need that?). In the case of the PBMR, I also have serious issues with the "we can't have fire because the primary coolant is helium" claims. Leaks are inevitable in heat exchangers in thermal power plants of any kind. Your primary coolant will NOT stay pure helium. I've seen some Chinese designs, and there's a secondary water loop (even if there was not, there's atmospheric moisture to contend with). Graphite that hot (graphite being the PBMR moderator) reacts with water to produce... you guessed it... hot hydrogen. Without a containment structure, a hydrogen explosion would completely shred the core the same way it did the top of the Fukushima reactor buildings. Even without water/water vapor/steam in the core, a leak will let in oxygen, and contrary to many claims I've seen, nuclear-grade graphite *does* burn (once it's been contaminated/irradiated for long enough, at least). Burning graphite spread the radiation at Chernobyl.

Let's cast aside the hubris and be humble when designing things capable of causing such devastating economic damage (note the word "economic"; nuclear disasters are primarily economic disasters, not life-takers, because radiation exposure is a slow thing).

above post: example of techie vs public disconnect

[circletimessquare]

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

This event totally altered German elections ...

[acidfast7]

it's nice to see people not only get upset about something once in a while, but to actually vote against it as well. The greens had double digit gains here in German elections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_state_election,_2011

The real problem

[Pumpkin Tuna]

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.

Re:The real problem

[blueg3]

Fission is always taking place in nuclear fuel and spent fuel, as long as there are unstable isotopes present. It's just not very much fission.

You can certainly have materials with a half-life of "days" two weeks after fission is "stopped". If the half-life is one day, then there's 1/2^14th as much as there used to be. While one part in 16 thousand or so is not very much, the detection threshold for radioisotopes is very low. How much they detected matters quite a lot.

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[vlm]

That's not a very well informed argument, although your target selection is not too bad.

The unwashed masses stop listening because they want to be scared. They want to be scared because anyone whom doesn't watch garbage like the mainstream media produces... does not watch that garbage.

You know how much of a pain in the ass it is to sit next to the guy at the magic show who spends all his time telling everyone around him how its all fake and I bet I know how it works? Or the guy at the horror movie whom feels the need to tell everyone around him how its all fake and none of it is real? What a PITA for the folks whom want to be entertained.

Same way with the TV news viewers. They literally don't want the truth, so stop trying to tell them. They want to be scared. If you somehow convince them not to be scared about this thing, they'll be pissed that you've "ruined the fun" as they wait for the next scary story.

With a memory best measured in days or weeks, I don't think the opinion of the general unwashed masses really matters for nuclear power, at all.

Now on /. its OK to tell the truth about whats going on. Some of us actually want to know. But keep the non-fiction here and the fiction out there on the TV news where it belongs.

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[maztuhblastah]

I can't help but be amused that your post berating someone's attitude closes with "congratulations jackass"...

Old news - see this from 1995

[UBfusion]

When I first saw this last week, I was weeping in silence the whole day through.

" Nuclear Ginza" - Japanese 25 min documentary (english narration & subtitles) from 1995 on poor ignorant people working to maintain Japan's reactors. Warning: cannot be unseen.

see how powerful the disconnect is?

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:see how powerful the disconnect is?

[sweatyboatman]

actually I thought the GPs point was valid and well made. it's this:

You know how much of a pain in the ass it is to sit next to the guy at the magic show who spends all his time telling everyone around him how its all fake and I bet I know how it works?

CNN/Fox/et. al. have access to many qualified, tv-friendly experts who could put the Fukushima accident in perspective, but they choose not to. Why? Because their audience is not interested in reporting, they are interested in "news". They want the "magic" and "horror" of real live disasters. They are not interested in seeing the "magic" or "horror" revealed as neither magic nor particularly that horrifying.

Not everyone who fears/hates nuclear power falls into this category. Not even everyone who watches cable news channels. But it does seem an interesting insight into why the cable news channels prefer talking heads who hype the disaster over experts who would offer a more even-handed and sedate assessment of the situation.

Still not looking good

[Animats]

The best reports on reactor status are at Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, which publishes a status table every day. This is addressed to people in the industry. They just list the facts, without explanation.

The good news for March 28 is that Unit 3's containment is now listed as "undamaged" instead of "possibly damaged". Unit 2 is listed as "damaged and leakage suspected", and that's now the most worrisome unit.

There's finally a fresh water supply for cooling. That's a big relief. Sea water cooling in a boil-off situation leaves tons of salt behind, and there was a real worry that the seawater cooling would stop working once too much salt accumulated. Fresh water cooling can continue indefinitely. It's not clear where the water is coming from. Hopefully they have a water line to a reliable source by now, and aren't just bringing in tanker trucks.

The cores in units 1,2, and 3 still have exposed fuel rods. Until water injection into the core is working again, the reactor can't be brought to cold shutdown. Remember, the reactor vessel is pressurized and contains a mixture of water and steam. Injecting water into a boiler is inherently difficult. Injecting water into a damaged boiler in a ruined structure in a highly radioactive area is very tough.

The spent fuel pool situation on reactors 3 and 4 is marginally under control. Seawater spray continues, but if they have to keep putting water in, the situation is still bad.

They're weeks from a stable emergency shutdown.

That's just the beginning. The situation isn't safe until there are again redundant closed loop cooling systems working. The current cooling hacks dump radioactive water into the ocean.

Then comes decommissioning. The spent fuel pools have to be cooled for three years or so, and then the fuel rods transferred from the wrecked buildings to dry casks. It will probably be necessary to build another containment building around unit 2, at least. Units 1,2, and 3 are all too damaged to ever de-fuel normally. It's not clear what will be done there. Unit 4 wasn't fueled, but it had a hydrogen explosion while cooling was lost, and will probably never be restarted. Units 5 and 6 can potentially be restarted, but it's doubtful that they will be.

Re:Still not looking good

[Tailhook]

Great post. One issue with it:

Units 5 and 6 can potentially be restarted, but it's doubtful that they will be.

The history of nuclear power accidents does not support this. Three Mile Island No.1 reactor is still in operation in Pennsylvania. Chernobyl No.1, 2 and 3 reactors were operated for up to 14 years after No.4 blew up and contaminated Europe, and there are 11 other RBMK reactors still in operation elsewhere. The power reactor at the Windscale site was operated for 46 years after the graphite fire in the weapons reactor.

Nuclear reactors represent astonishing capital investments by their builders, and by that I mean the companies, governments and citizens. Japan is dealing with rolling blackouts. This is intolerable in a nation that relies on meeting the demands of the export market. The No.5 and No.6 reactors represent about 2GW of generation capacity they desperately need.

They'll bring those reactors up at some point.

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[sjames]

Sincere question for the sensationalist media: Show us one person who shows any sign of actual harm from this nuclear incident. Now stand him next to any of the many people harmed by the tsunami.

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[khallow]

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".

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[circletimessquare]

you don't understand human psychology

here's a guide to help you get started as to how and why you are so out of touch with the subject matter:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/weekinreview/27johnson.html

Measured by sheer fury, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that damaged the reactors was mightier than millions of Hiroshima bombs. It shoved the northeastern coast of Japan eastward and unleashed a tsunami that wiped civilization from the coast. But explosive power comes and goes in an instant. It is something the brain can process.

With radiation, the terror lies in the abstraction. It kills incrementally — slowly, diffusely, invisibly. “Afterheat,” Robert Socolow, a Princeton University professor, called it in an essay for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “the fire that you can’t put out.”

Nuclear scientists speak in terms of half-life, the time it takes for random disintegrations to reduce a radioactive sample to half its size. Then a quarter, an eighth, a 16th — whether measured in microseconds or eons, the mathematical progression never ends.

When traces of radioactive iodine were found last week in the drinking water in Tokyo, officials expressed the danger in becquerels, the number of nuclear disintegrations per second: 210 per liter, safe for adults but high enough to warn that infants should not drink it. As the government began distributing bottled water, the level fell significantly but not the fear. As far away as California there was a run on fallout detectors.

As these hypothetical microthreats ate at the mind, rescue workers were piling up real bodies — 10,000 so far — killed by crushing waves or their aftereffects, deaths caused by gravity, not nuclear forces. These dead will be tabulated, mourned and eventually forgotten. The toll will converge on a finite number.

In Chernobyl, the site of the world’s previous big nuclear accident, the counting continues, like languid ticks from a Geiger counter. A United Nations study in 2005 concluded that about 50 people had been killed by the meltdown but that 4,000 would ultimately die from radiation-caused cancer — victims who do not know who they are. The most debilitating effect, one investigator said, has been “a paralyzing fatalism,” a malaise brought on by an alien presence that almost seems alive.

human psychology, smug techies. learn it, or be irrelevant

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[Hijacked Public]

You are going to have to smack them quite a bit harder.

And then only for my amusement, as they are incapable of understanding your point here. My dog gets it, they don't and won't.

okay, let's go with this observation

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:okay, let's go with this observation

[AJH16]

Let me start by saying I agree 100% with your argument that having an ego about knowledge is not a way to educate people but rather to get them to become more polarized against the knowledge you are trying to convey. That said, I do think you are overlooking the fact that some people do not want or care to have things explained to them. This can be seen in many different areas and I am sure that the reasons that people do not want to understand vary from case to case. (Though I would hazard people's dislike for change and feeling that their understanding is correct is a strong contributor.) People like to hear confirmation that they are correct and do not like to hear that they are wrong. People also like to have things to fight against and it is something that is bread in to us to make us mailable.

Fear and having an enemy is unifying and people like to feel that they belong with the group. This is the exact same reason that making someone feel academically inferior makes them feel like they are not part of your group and that you feel they don't belong in your group which is why they reject you and your "group" (viewpoint). This is what I think vlm was trying to get at, though I would agree his method of conveying it was flawed and did display what you were decrying, it does not make his point invalid. What he may be missing is that it is valid for everyone to some extent, for example with him, it may be he wants to feel like he is part of the smarter group and challenging that is something he would no doubt rebel against. Education only works with those who want to be educated and not everyone wants to be. It is an unfortunate but none the less true reality. Some people will ignore you for being an ass, others will simply ignore you because they don't like what you are saying.

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[lennier]

do you want nuclear power to be widely adopted?

No.

your attitude helps kill nuclear power

Excellent. Go right ahead snarking, Slashdot. The sooner fission gets shut down, the fewer catastrophic 'once in a million years' leaks every twenty years we'll have.

Re:Why is it taking so long to secure the reactor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to pull the cores you need working cranes and you need somewhere to store the hot core. Hot in both senses - and still generating a LOT of heat.

There's no power - the cranes are damaged, all the systems that lift the tops off the reactor so the core can be accessed are damaged, and the core is filled with hydrogen and steam at 300C - and the steam is full of fairly nasty short lived isotopes.

The storage pools are damaged and likely leaking highly radioactive water .....

Frankly I'd be leaving the damned things closed and hoping they go away on their own as well ....

And note this is now a very bad situation, hot salt water is incredibly corrosive, it'll have been leaching material from the damaged cores. There's a lot of water gone in, it has to have been going somewhere. And despite the cries of "It's all good" from the Nuke lovers in the crowd - all is not good - losing track of hot core material is a "very bad thing (tm)", this is not small quantities of short lives isotopes, it's a mix that'll be dangerous long term . It's gone somewhere, it's either in the soil around the reactor, in the groundwater around the reactor, or in the sea. And there's more than trace amounts of it - all that water that went in went somewhere afterwards.

In an area that eats a lot of fish - that's going to have effects for years. Maybe not deaths from radiation, but the economic damage will be considerable.

And before you say "This can't happen here", what happens in the US if you have a "Mt Saint Helens" and end up with 3m of ash covering a reactor ?.
No incoming power, your diesels are choked with ash, and you can't get more fuel in anyway.

The problem with current reactor designs is that they don't just stop and cool off on their own, they need continual human intervention to stay safe.

I have no objection to Nuclear power, but I do object to it being featherbedded - if it can't cover the downside costs on it's profits, it's not economic. And that's the situation in Japan and the US - The operators walk with the profits and the govt. in both places (i.e. the taxpayers) carries the risk when shit happens.

one slight problem with your math...

[slew]

Although the Richter scale is base 10, it is the log of the amplitude of the moment of movement, the actual energy of the earthquake is approximatly proportional to 1.5 power. So effectively the energy ratio is about base 31... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale
Not that anyone uses this scale anymore (they use the very similar moment magnitude scale).

Using your argument, that's about 15.8 times which is more than an order of magnitude, but probably less than many orders of magnitude.

Re:above post: example of techie vs public disconn

[brizzadizza]

The risk to the multi-billion dollar nuclear power industry and their 42billion dollar stimulus is pretty great considering the events in Japan. All of you posters are arrogantly speaking about nuclear power as if it is a closed issue for any 'educated' person. It is not. An hour of unbiased research demonstrates that the nuclear industry suffers from significant corruption within their corporate culture, as do all highly subsidized, centralized power generation industries. All of the tech nerds running around stroking themselves off about the beauty and wonder of nuclear engineering need to realize quickly that what is at issue is the ability of for profit corporations to implement safe nuclear reactor designs, not whether safe nuclear reactors can be designed. According to the relevant experts (TEPCO and the IAEA) this is rated as the second worst nuclear accident in history. We are seeing a failure rate on reactors that approaches six percent, whether the failsafes kick in and prevent tragedy is immaterial. The nuclear industry has not addressed the concern of waste storage, waste transport, or waste disposal. A responsible industry would figure out its supply and maintenance infrastructure before implementation, not afterwards when they have to store 64,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel.