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Things Get Worse at Fukushima
An anonymous reader writes "Radiation levels are skyrocketing around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant as reports indicate that a radioactive core has overheated and melted through its containment vessel and onto a concrete floor. Radiation levels inside reactor two were recently gauged at 1,000 millisieverts per hour — a level so high that workers could only remain in the area for 15 minutes under current exposure guidelines."
This is part of the planned failure mode of the reactor. To be sure, it's fairly far on the "stuff is breaking" scale, and there are definite consequences (such as fears of leakage into groundwater). But this is not going to be a Chernobyl-level catastrophe.
However, fingers crossed that nobody else dies. Japan's already had enough fatalities this month.
Wait! I learned everything I know from Slashdot, and Slashdot says nuclear power is safe and no one will get hurt.
None of this leaking stuff can be happening. La-la-la-la . . . I can't hear you!
Speculation, followed by may's, possibilities, and the usual unknowns. Glad to see that journalism continues to reach greater heights by failing to actually know what it's talking about.
Just to be clear, they are absolutely not implying it has melted through the containment, but, rather, the reactor pressure vessel.
Then why didn't you predict it?
They've set back nuclear energy for decades, at a time when we most need it.
Guess we had better get used to more carbon dioxide.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes, and when the World Trade Center collapsed, killed thousands, that was part of the "planned failure mode" of the buildings.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
There are, as well, media sources that say this *isn't* so, and that this is mostly a Media Hysteria. For example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/29/tv_news_goes_hollywood/
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Or, from the Beeb:
Best Slashdot Co
This is truly the end of fission Nuclear power plants. Even if this doesn't turn out to be as big a disaster as the media makes it out to be, many people will say hell no - not in my backyard. Already countries, including China and US, are canceling projects. Good time to sell the uranium companies short I think.
This disaster will very likely change the way that nuclear power generation plants are approved and evaluated in the future. Unfortunately, a promising technology will almost certainly be set back, perhaps irreparably. The silver lining, however, is that alternative nuclear technologies may finally get a fair shake. Alternate fuels and reactor types offer so many possibilities to possibly exceed the efficiency and safety levels that we put up with today but have thus far been unable to obtain funding compared to the currently developed reactors. That confidence in our current strategy is being eroded rapidly. This isn't some second-rate system like Chernobyl, it is close-to-state-of-the-art.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
"The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards."
This is what I see on this board.
It is an interesting mix to be sure.
The situation seems very bad, but headlines screaming "radiation at 10,000,000 times the safe limit" (which turned out to be wrong) are not helping.
Worse seems to be the nuclear fanboys ignoring the fact that that plant is fsked, in precisely the manner that antinuclear folks said could and eventually would happen.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Can someone explain this to me? I didn't think it was ever possible to walk inside a reactor vessel. I didn't even think the "reactor vessel" itself was large enough for a person to "walk inside" I thought the "reactor vessel" was thousands of degrees.
Calling all blowtards from the past 3 weeks confidently predicting that containment breach was inconceivable.
look sig is kool
Given the progression of events thus far, I'm not certain if we can really rule this scenario out.
May the Maths Be with you!
I can see the comments on Slashdot a year from now "The people of Tokyo are not glowing AS BRIGHT as light-bulbs! They only give off a light green glow visible late at night. This is all just mass Hysteria by the green movement!
Most probably Fukushima Daichi will have to be sealed. The nearby communities will eventually be safe. But uncertainty about nuclear power travels FASTER than the nuclear fallout in all cases. A state election in a premium German state was lost by the reigning government because it supported nuclear power plants...
It's a bitter sweet evolution, if you ask me. Yes, current last generation plants are unsafe and should be closed down the sooner the better, but this will definitely hurt industrial research for future IV generation power plants which are definitely safer than any other form of major power generation...
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
It really were 10 millisiverts per hour but the workers had to abort, before they could confirm it.
See e.g. here for a start.
He didn't have to. Have you SEEN the ANIME that has been coming out of Japan for decades? Thousands of Manga authors already predicted it! Let's hope the predictions of two-wheel-drive electric motorcycles and sexy, sexy robots also come true.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Nuclear (and coal) energy always seemed to me like old mainframe computers and renewables like Internet (distributed), modern, interesting, R&D. We just need to jump to new and abandon old. It will be difficult, but I think it is FAR from impossible. I know there are lots of people here on /. hypnotized by how great nuclear is. but I just prefer distributed everything better (including risks) as opposed to centralized.
839*929
Radiation levels inside reactor two were recently gauged at 1,000 millisieverts per hour — a level so high that workers could only remain in the area for 15 minutes under current exposure guideline."
So the right thing to do would be to change the current exposure guideline. Right?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
1. This is actually proves nuclear is so resilient.
2. We should build more nuclear plants.
3. It was designed for the biggest quake we ever thought could happen.
4. It was the big bad tsunami that caused the damage, not the earthquake.
5. Nothing has happened, nothing is happening, and nothing is going to happen.
6. We can trust whatever TEPCO is saying.
7. People fall off of roofs.
8. Windmills kill people.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I've been wondering, as we watch this problem evolve, why they didn't insert robotic remote hands ASAP. This is Japan, after all. What am I missing?
My favorite post was about changing the nuclear rating scale to number of Godzilla's produced.
For those keeping track, this is 1 yellow square on the XKCD chart.
Heard something on BBC News this morning. From the Guardian "radioactive iodine have been detected at its air monitoring stations (in Oxfordshire and Glasgow) over the last nine days ..."
"...bravery and quick thinking have turned a potential Chernobyl into a mere Three Mile Island"
This is speculation by ONE guy in an article in the Guardian, hardly a bastion of calm, rational, journalism. NONE of the other usual online sources have corroborated this at all.
An actual meltdown, with the core sitting on the floor of the building, would be front page news across the world, yet only this one article says this is the case.
I want my harem of 18 year old Rei Ayanami clones!
Although a few cat girls would be a groove too.
The article above seems to be fear-mongering. This washington post article discusses what seems to be a more plausible failure mode. Apparently there are gaskets around the control rod penetrations in the bottom of the vessel, and the temperature may have increased enough to damage them allowing primary water to escape into the concrete containment structure. There are also many other penetrations in the vessel for plumbing that may have been damaged during the quake.
Our sun, a nuclear fusion source which is already working reliably for more than 5 billion years, produces an extreme amount of energy. Within 6 hours, deserts on Earth receive more solar energy than we use in a whole year globally. Why do we keep ignore this most power full energy source? For the world energy demand (18.000 TWh) we need only a surface area of 188 x 188 square miles with Concentrated Solar Plants. This is a small thumbnail on the map of Africa. Germany has seen the light and is investing 500 billion euro's in Desertec. A CSP plant runs 24 x 7 hours on full power (even when the sun is away because it can store sun heat in molten salt). These CSP plants can easily replace nuclear and coal power plants.
And they probably don't know either.
The reactor may have melted through the base of its pressure vessel, but it's hard to tell. The high radiation levels could either be from a melt-through or from a leak as attempts are made to force water into the reactor pressure vessel. The latest JAIF status report contains almost all the hard data that's coming out. Everything else is secondary speculation based on that limited data.
No data seems to be available about pressure or temperature inside the reactor. That's listed as "unknown" for unit 2. The sensors involved were probably destroyed in one of the fires, explosions, or building collapses. Pressure in the containment vessel for unit 2 is listed as "low", whatever that means.
A full meltdown is now a real possibility. The JAIF chart has been showing "Fuel rods exposed partially or fully" for units 1, 2, and 3 for ten days now. Reactor pressure vessels are tough, as are containment structures, but ten days of no core cooling is well beyond design limits.
Understand that the water spraying operation refers to the containment structure, which is normally dry. Inside the containment is the reactor pressure vessel, which is a boiler. Getting water inside there, which is needed to cover the core and achieve cold shutdown, requires forcing it in against steam pressure. This has to be done in a highly radioactive environment, in a fire-ruined building where the walls and beams have collapsed, the pumps are damaged, and valves which are usually operated remotely have to be operated by people turning handwheels. Some people are trying very hard to do that. Some of them will probably die. If they succeed, there will be a local mess, but it will be manageable. If they fail, there will be a meltdown.
I know, they should of pre-seeded the area with Radiation eating nanobots
IAEA Briefing on Fukushima Nuclear Accident (29 March 2011, 16:30 UTC)
http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html
Fresh water has been continuously injected into the Reactor Pressure Vessels (RPVs) of Units 1, 2 and 3. From today at Unit 1, the pumping of fresh water through the feed-water line will no longer be performed by fire trucks but by electrical pumps with a diesel generator. The switch to the use of such pumps has already been made in Units 2 and 3. At Unit 3, the fresh water is being injected through the fire extinguisher line.
Always the same moronitude, grow up.
Just because someone states it is safe in moment X it doesn't imply he's stating it is safe in moment X+1.
Oh wait, it really is that bad, and getting worse by the hour?
Maybe you should carry on, and ignore all the nucular fanboys and their willfull ignorance.
That sounds bad, until you stop to consider that it's barely 0.001 kilosieverts per hour. No problem.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
he's stating it is safe in moment X, and look at all those idiots worrying
when he should be saying we better start worrying about moment X+1
and i'm the moron?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Start sending out resumes NOW!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There's a whole raft of practical problems and misconceptions with what you suggest.
As soon as they started injecting seawater, the reactor was toast as far as re-use.
And why would you want to dump something like concrete into it that would be less effective at getting rid of heat? (Let alone the fate of the poor schlemiel you'd get to direct the stream of concrete into it.). You wait until the fuel has cooled and isn't generating so much heat before entombing it if it comes to that. Trying to cast concrete around a major heat source contained in a water filled pressure vessel is a great way to make a bomb.
Besides, it already is surrounded by concrete. It's called a containment. Chernobyl didn't have that. And at least some of it is getting out of that regardless.
This is similar to when someone from outside of the computer field has suggested how to handle a software problem. From their view, it's obvious and has got to be easy. From the developer's view it's usually completely the wrong direction.
This misinformation has been bandied about quite a bit, but the fact is that while Reactor 1 had reached the end of its operating license in March, the Japanese government had actually just extended the license for another 10 years in February. The "entire complex" was not by any means scheduled for shutdown, particularly units 5 and 6, which are undamaged and will likely be restarted at some point.
Yes. "They" are always screwing things up. I wish we could figure out who "they" were in advance so that we could stop them beforehand.
Except for what you tell us, right?
Oh wait. You're an AC. How will we know you from the untruthful ACs on $other_side?
Well, we're Fukushima Daichi-d.
Google: molten salt solar
It would be soooo easy and fast to build hundreds of these solar plants in the USA Southwest. Once they're up, all the "fuel" comes straight from the sun. And you get electricity 24 hours a day.
Think about the phrase "acceptable risk". If you accept the risk, you have also accepted the disaster.
The argument that things like nuke plants are safe is disingenuous. Of course they are safe, when they are built and maintained correctly. The problem is, they contain a HUGE potential for danger. No amount of regulation or technology will reduce that potential - all we can do is stack the odds against the events that unleash it. Therefore, do not tell me that these things are safe. If you want my support, figure out how to eliminate the HUMAN problems that might cause a massive disaster.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine I build a device that will kill me and those around me. Now, this device will NEVER go off unless the button is pressed, and it is built such that the deadly potential is clear to everyone who comes near it. It is easy to argue that no one will ever press the button, so obviously we can say that this is a completely safe device. Despite this, it would be stupid to own it. The fact that it is USEFUL for something is just a distraction.
I'd say the "they" in this case were the geniuses who built backup generators on the coast of Japan with just a 12-foot wall to protect them from a tsunami (and all clustered in one place on low ground, no less)
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...a level so high that workers could only remain in the area for 15 minutes under current exposure guideline.
Hmmm. Where have I heard that before? About 25 years ago, I think. Time to get the sand, boron, and concrete, and start building a sarcophagus.
Proverbs 21:19
The situation at the plant is fucked by any rational standard. If the owners hadn't been so concerned with covering up how bad it was maybe the worst could have been avoided. Also if they had taken note of the safety concerns if might have been avoided. Saying oh it's not so bad makes me feel worse about nuclear power not better. How bad does it have to get before most on Slashdot will admit there was a a serious problem? Apparently anything shy of Chernobyl isn't all that bad. Here's a scary 411, Chernobyl could have been a lot worse. If we aren't willing to admit there are problems then there's zero hope of the problems being addressed and we better can future reactors until some one takes off the rose colored glasses and we handle it safely instead of waiting until there's a problem then denying it's all that bad. Saying the reactor wasn't breached is asinine. There's Plutonium in the environment so the rector was breached, period!
One obvious problem with that plan is the concrete generates heat when mixed with water; and heat is the main problem they are trying to deal with...
I dunno if it's a signifigent amount compared to the reactor itself; but I don't see it helping.
Paraphrased since it was hours ago and I was driving... "Traces of plutonium have been found around the Fukushima site, and although the amounts discovered were no higher than if the soil samples were taken from any random soil around the world, the scientists determined that the specific isotopes of plutonium found were from the plant." They then continued to explain why it was super dangerous.
What I heard was "DANGER DANGER! The soil around the Fukushima site is identical to the soil in your backyard. That's not a good thing! You must Fear It! Fear It!"
Just imagine how much nuclear engineering will advance with such a worse-case scenario to study!
finding #1, leave your hubris at the door...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Construction on the Fukishima reactor began in 1967 (wikipage). It is easy to forget that Plate Tectonics was only accepted as a reasonable explanation of geological phenomenon in the 1960's. According to this excellent New York Times article,
"After an advisory group issued nonbinding recommendations in 2002, Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant owner and Japan’s biggest utility, raised its maximum projected tsunami at Fukushima Daiichi to between 17.7 and 18.7 feet — considerably higher than the 13-foot-high bluff. Yet the company appeared to respond only by raising the level of an electric pump near the coast by 8 inches, presumably to protect it from high water, regulators said."
The tsunami that overwhelmed the plant recently was 46 feet high, far higher than anything they seemed to expect. If you read the NYTimes article, you get a sense that the nuclear safety bureaucracy hadn't adequately integrated modern plate tectonic theory into its safety programs. The 18 foot high maximum tsunami prediction is symptomatic of this.
From the article, it seems that Japan had based its tsunami predictions on historical records, instead of predictions from Plate Tectonic Theory. Computer simulations of plate movement would have given far larger predictions for maximum tsunami heights, predictions that would have agreed with the height of the recent tsunami. I think a strong argument can be made that Japan's nuclear bureaucracy had not taken into account modern Plate Tectonic Theory in its safety practices. They seem to have instead relied on past records of earthquakes and tsunamis. I am not suggesting that individual people were unaware of Plate Tectonic Theory, but instead that their bureaucratic rules didn't seem to acknowledge it. Since construction on the reactor began in 1967, planning of the reactor must have begun much earlier. It is easy to imagine that the initial reactor designers were unaware of the Theory of Plate Tectonics and its implications.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
This is definitely Gaia's fault. She should have sent a sunami large enough to wash the entire nuclear plant into the sea. With the reactor cores dragged into deep water by the sunami there would not have been any overheating problems and any radioactive material leaks would have been safely diluted in the vastness of the oceans.
Posted this above as well, but Unit 1 at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another 10 years in February.
The fact of the matter is that a utility will always apply for an extended operating license and will almost certainly get one. The only plant shutdowns I know of in the US, apart from TMI Unit 2, were when something too expensive to repair needed replacement, such as the ComEd Zion plant outside Chicago, which needed a new $460 million steam generator. So since there is so much better in the way of designs available, why aren't utilities rushing to replace these ancient reactors instead of asking for extended licenses, you ask? Economics of course - an existing plant is almost all sunk cost, and the utilities are in business to make money. They will build new reactors only to add capacity, and they will build the cheapest design they are permitted to.
My main objection to nuclear power is that these plants are operated by businesses. Unlike a solar farm or even a coal plant, the worst case failure for a nuclear plant is very, very bad. You have a business trying to maximize profit knowing that the worst case failure costs will be shifted to the taxpayer. This is a recipe for disaster. I have no issues at all with the state of reactor technology, and the US military operates dozens of reactors that *move around* and has for 50 years without a major accident (the Russians haven't had as much success there, though). If these things were being operated by some agency like the military with those levels of discipline, perhaps we could all rest assured. When it's some utility executive who wants a bigger bonus, I am not at all confident.
So, you're saying you'd like the 14 year old ones?
Hope you're still in high school or it'll be a rough time in prison.
Acording to the IAEA link you posted:
The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan suggests that higher activity in the water discovered in the Unit 2 turbine building is supposed to be caused by the water, which has been in contact with molten fuel rods for a time and directly released into the turbine building via some, as yet unidentified path.
If the sea water that is being used to cool the facility is coming in contact with the fuel, than the pressure case must be cracked, or if the fresh water that is being used to cool the core is pooling out side of the containment system, than the pressure case must be cracked. Either way, it sure sounds like the RPV has been breached.
Not to be alarmist, but it seems like we just slipped from "I've got it! I've got it!" to "Oh shit, I don't got it". Which is still a long way away from the "HOLY CRAP RUN LIKE HELL!" stage.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The only way to ... Oh wait.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Does anyone know if we have the technology to extract a molten core yet or are we just going to bury this?
Sustainable power sounds great until you actually do the calculations.
How many windmills do you need to replace one nucleair reactor? How many to replace a complete nucleair plant?
That's a big number. Now calculate the amount of land you need to place all those windmills. That's a big plot. And you've now only replaced _one_ nucleair plant.
Solar isn't going to cut it either. And it's not because of the efficiency of the cells, it's just that we use way, *way* more power than we could ever hope to actually get from solar energy.
If you really want to solve the energy crisis, invest in *modern* nucleair technology. Those are a lot safer than the decades old plants we use now.
will this drive Japan to vigorously develop, and become a leader in renewable power ? (wind, solar, wave, ocean thermal, geothermal ? )
or will they bankrupt themselves buying foreign fossil fuels as a increasingly energy-hungry world goes through peak oil, gas and coal ?
kite power FTW!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The government in Baden-Württemberg was down and out on the floor from the Stuttgart 21 fiasco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21 . In case you missed it television, it showed police spaying peaceful old grandmas and little kids with pepper gas. Those images were difficult to stomach. The catastrophe in Japan just put a final nail in the government's coffin.
And, no, I am not an anti-nuke type. I think that only by researching and investing in all technologies, including nuclear, will we ever be free of the oil yoke that we are carrying.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
One thing I guess I can predict is that this is not going to generate a lot of new support for ocean wave power :-(
Well, at least they've got the Japanese Miracle to help clean up the radiation?
If you have a concrete that can set in that environment, and maintain integrity versus the decay heat that under that blanket of concrete, you should be up for a Nobel Prize.
You mean something like concrete made with hydraulic refractory cement? You can even pump it into place through a pipe.
Can I have the prize sent to me, or do I have to go and get it?
Putting moderation advice in your
So many people here are concerned with the public image of nuclear power, seemingly more than the problem itself.
What if an asteroid hit one of these new nuke plants you love? What if all the workers were killed somehow? Could it safely run itself? What is the long term disposal plan for nuclear waste without relying on future generations to figure it out? Do you really think you can predict the scale of every natural disaster that might happen in the next 200 years? Have we really tried to implement wind and solar? I think not.
And where were the fanboys before this disaster hit? Were they calling for the dismantling of the old reactors or were they so concerned with public relations that they were afraid to speak up?
Nuke it from orbit. It is the only way to be sure.
You got the touch!
Well, according to wikipedia (referencing a publication of the University of Arizona), CSP is still ten times as expensive as nuclear.
After checking on NHK and IAEA websites, there is no such information about a cracked pressure vessel, the contaminated water found may merely have passed through leaking valves, pipes, or suppression torus system. Remember this is a BWR, the coolant goes all the way to the turbine building and back, many paths for leaks if valves not doing their job or pipes cracked. The condition of the reactor vessel is at this point still unknown, premature to go off half cocked.
Ill just leave this here: http://www.xkcd.com/radiation/
Now we just need to get it onto major news networks, and possibly sanity will be restored.
The quote from the Guardian, from one guy who used to work for General Electric - "The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest..."
This is not hard data- it's a GUESS.
Why are so many people emphatic about how few people have been hurt by the Fukushima disaster? You can picket with your "Death Toll = 0!" signs AFTER the situation has stabilized.
It seems to me the critical corner that was cut was the emergency electrical power to the plant. If the tsunami hadn't knocked out the backup generators and left units 1-3 without post-shutdown power to run the cooling pumps, they'd have had a safe scram and we wouldn't have even heard of Fukushima. Everything else that's happened at that plant is indirectly related in one way or another to that critical failure.
And Japan should know better. They've lived with a major seismically active subduction trench just offshore for long enough, and *they gave us the word for tsunami*, that they should have been expecting a large magnitude quake with a closely following tsunami at that site. Why they even built a nuclear plant on the eastern seashore is beyond me, but since they did, they should have planned for tsunami-resistant uninterruptible backup power. Anyone with half a brain can tell you the grid is going to go down in a major quake like that. Whatever other faults the BWR Mk I may have, this at the very least should have been handled better.
The hell it is! This is one of the main things you want to prevent when you're operating a Nuclear reactor. The reason you don't want a core melt-down is so that this won't happen. There is a containment vessel around it to prevent the release of radioactive materials into the environment, but of course that is damaged as well, and it now appears that radioactive water is leaking from the site into the environment. This is very, very bad, and it is not a "planned failure mode" whatever that means. Every plan they have is to prevent this kind of thing from happening, there is nothing planned about this event. Under no circumstances was this in any way planned. Now can we all please stop downplaying the ramifications of this disaster?
There have been many comments on the previous articles stressing that so far no one has died as a result of this nuclear disaster. Sadly that is no longer the case. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japan-struggles-to-contain-radioactive-spread-at-stricken-plant/2011/03/29/AFbQOUuB_story.html
All the fan boys of nukes say that if only they had new plants everything would be peachy and the old plants would be taken off line.
WRONG: Tens of thousands of coal, gas, wind, water MW have come on line in the last 30 years, very few nukes have closed. So new nukes mean closing old nukes? NO.
WRONG: New nukes cost more than any other plant to build, old nukes cost nothing (already built) and the Price-Anderson Act externalizes any meltdown cost to the replacement of the power lost and pocket change. Economically it is cheaper to run the old nukes until they break than to do an expensive powerdown, cleanup, nuke waste move and replace capacity. Income from electric generation and a free buffer zone of 20-50km of land or more (who pays for it? no one) and free killin's of the slow and unlucky that do not escape as well as any worker death vs. massive expense of shut down and replacement generation. The economics are inevitable since safety is not even in the equation.
WRONG: What happens if the get caught with safety violations by the NRC? A "massive" fine of what? (Cue "Austin Powers") A MIIILLLIONN dollars? Economics means running the plants not only dangerously but actually until they BREAK. Until EVERY ding-dang plant breaks. As well as the "new" plants which have the same economic externalized "accident" costs so in 30 years when they are "old" they will run them until they light on fire too.
Nukes are dead end tech, like the Hindenburg.
The thousands of tons of water already *outside* the plant give off enough radiation to give a worker their emergency lifetime dose of 250 mSv in 15 minutes. Spending 8 hours near the water will give anyone a fatal does of radiation. This water has completely stopped efforts at restoring the cooling system of the leaking reactor. At a manhole leading to one tunnel the highly radioactive water is within 10cm of ground level. Yesterday TEPCO *reduced* the water they were spraying on the reactors in order to prevent this highly radioactive water from spilling out over the ground which would be disastrous to any hope of fixing the problems. This in turn caused the temperature of the *outside* of the #2 reactor to rise by 20C.
The armchair quarterbacks are fighting the Chernobyl disaster not Fukushima. At Chernobyl the moderator was graphite and the main vector of the release of radioactivity was upward via a fire in the graphite. Covering the reactor at Chernobyl stemmed this flow of radioactive materials. At Fukushima the moderator is water. Water is less likely to burn than graphite but while fire and smoke and heat go upward, water moves downward. Everyone is looking upward for escaping radioactive materials but then major vector for the release of radioactive materials from Fukushima is *downward* via this highly radioactive water. The authorities know that at least 18,000 tons of highly radioactive water has escaped the plants by calculating the volume of the three tunnels that are filled. There is a much greater volume of highly radioactive water in the turbine buildings (one is waist deep) but this doesn't technically count as beyond the containment system. They have no idea if this is the majority of the leaked water or if it is only the tip of the iceberg. If you look at the levels of radioactivity that was measured in ocean water 30 km from the plant (7 -- 19 bq/L), it is quite likely that more radioactivity has leaked into the ocean than is in the tunnels and turbine buildings filled with deadly water.
Covering the Fukushima reactors with cement is unlikely to stem the massive flow of highly radioactive water. In fact, the cement would probably make it more difficult to fix the leak(s).
All of the information above, except my speculations about the futility of covering the plants with concrete was obtained from NKH World broadcasts and from The Japan Times Online.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I realize this was not a chemical reaction, however, I still can't figure out that reaction was stopped at the time of earthquake according to various sources. Graphite rods were inserted into the core to stop the reaction.
So where is this heat coming from. Is the fission on going, wouldn't that mean the reaction wasn't stopped, it is still on going!
Can someone explain this to me?
It may be more difficult to fund installations where you cannot promise an ever-increasing margin of profit based on artificial scarcity. After all, if one guy wants to raise his rates, another guy can build a new collector. But with fossil and nuclear stuff, there are barriers to entry that protect the existing markets.
It may be that in order to get that much money moving, you have to promise a constant increasing rate of return. Which implies control. And no one controls the sun.
Just a guess....
1000 mSv = 1 Sv. I can understand that common media fails to get this straight, but this is /. ..
Please watch were you are walking.
Thank you that is all!
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
This is ridiculously stupid. The core control rods have been in since the quake. A BWR cannot go above 250C as long as water flows even without the control rods. The fuel rods take act least 2200C to melt. The reactor vessel would contain it even if somehow you managed to make the control rods disappear completely and there was no water. Is this the same reactor as the original brouhaha was over over or a different one. Can't be the same one since its core was exposed on purpose to sea water which would make in non-operational. So what is claimed is not possible.
There was some circumstantial evidence of some melting shortly after shutdown at quake time due to residual heat of secondary reaction products. But those decay very very rapidly and drop temperature. Also coolant was restored and the reactor was flooded with cold water which would remove all heat. So this article is pure bullshit FUD and any geek that pushes such to slashdot should have their geek card revoked. I have had enough of this crap.
This was not the fault of nuclear energy. The problem was that the reaction required monitoring and intervention to be safe. If the pumps had not failed there would have been no problem. Better Yet pick a reaction that requires no pumps.
We need people all over the world to run safe power plants that are safe and can run unattended. But do not take my word on this Google it. Thorium the new Green power source. People have been saying this for years, but the people with the cash are not getting it. I assume they like raking in the cash from the "bad" energy sources.
Guardian is just speculating.
Why dont you read jaif.or.jp theyve been releasing daily pdf's with numbers. Also mitnse.com gereports.com world-nuclear-news.org all report that the scram occurred successfully in all reactors so the problem has only been residual heat, as soon as ge gets those portable generators on site hopefully they'll be ready to get the active cooling systems running. jaif shows that they're all still not functioning in reactors 1-4, and 4's sfp might be the most serious, jaif reports the pool temperature as immeasurable. hope theyve got a good supply of boric acid cause it boils at those temperatures. Also look at the pressure reported in the jaif reports, as of 29th reactor 1 is at ~0.5Mpa much higher than the others which is surprising as it should have been much less of a problem than reactors 2/3, because of its lower thermal power spec and so significantly lower residual heat.
Remarks from jaif report of 29th, ..........
Progress of the work to recover injection function
Water injection to the reactor pressure vessel by temporally pumps were switched from seawater to freshwater at unit-1, 2 and 3, since adverse effect such as erosion is concerned.
High radiation makes difficult the work to restore originally installed pumps for injection. Removing water with high concentration of radioactive nuclides in the buildings of Unit 1through 3
was partly begun on 26th but is considered to take time to complete. (3 workers were sent to the hospital after heavily exposed on March 24 and discharged on March 28.)
Function of containing radioactive material inside the containment vessel
It is presumed that radioactive material inside the reactor vessel would have leaked outside the containment vessel at unit-1, 2 and unit-3, based on the investigation of the water sampled
at turbine building.
Cooling the spent fuel pool
Steam like substance rose from the reactor building at unit 1, 2, 3 and 4 is being observed. Operation of spraying water to the spent fuel pool is being conducted.
In my assessment tepco/japanese gov could have responded much faster, the times that nuclear emergency was declared from the recent report;
3. State of Emergency Declaration .........
11th 19:03 State of nuclear emergency was declared (Fukushima Dai-ni NPS)
12th 07:45 State of nuclear emergency was declared (Fukushima Dai-ichi NPS)
it seems that Fuk Dai-ichi took many hours for a proper response, in that time there was no active cooling and the situation might be significantly better with the prompt helicopter delivery of several concrete trucks. this may have taken days. also General electric contacted them with an offer of generators which they apparently first didnt accept and I believe have still not been delivered, going on 3 weeks in.
i truely hope that the loonies at godlikeproductions.com are mistaken and significant amounts of Pu hasnt made it into the water table, although it sounds like theyve been voiding water, which may have Pu.
Also read the plans;
http://www.ansn-jp.org/jneslibrary/BWR_Safety_Design.pdf
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/basic-ref/teachers/03.pdf
Man just kind of chill out with these type of stories ok ?
Solar-powered rail guns.
1. We shoot our garbage to the sun,
2. It joins the fusion reaction, which creates energy, which comes to us as sunlight,
3. Which powers our rail guns, which shoot our garbage to the sun,......
4. almost forgot.....PROFIT!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
yes, that's the official line, and if you look at cancer rates in the surrounding area it seems to be true. But if you look specifically at areas downwind of the plant during the event, it's a different story. But you won't hear the industry or the so-called regulators discussing that.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
There was a report published a few years ago by a website called 'Sense about science'... much more informative about radiation than the daily news. Now if only the public would read it...
NHK World was reporting that each tunnel contains 6,000 tons of water but I think they missed a decimal point either in their calculation or in their translation to English. The tunnels are about 100 meters long. If they had a rather spacious cross section of 2 meters by 3 meters then they would each hold 600 cubic meters of water which weighs about 600 tons. This is still a big problem and it is proof positive that all levels of containment have failed since large quantities of radioactive material have already left the plant and will now enter the environment.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
...someone else heard it as "there's plutonium in your soil! some terrorist could make a dirty bomb out of dirt!"
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
they are discussing that. they just dont tell the press about it because the press will spin it as "industry thinks their plants will have 100 mile fallouts everywhere and the chickens will mutate and become the new dominant species"
Bieber.
The GP means the BBC, which is sometimes called "the Beeb" in the UK. Or... do I get a "whoosh!"? :)
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
What did the Japs do whilst containment was failing?
Radiation levels inside reactor two were recently gauged at 1,000 millisieverts per hour — a level so high that workers could only remain in the area for 15 minutes under current exposure guideline."
10000 mSV = 1Sv
Very bad for the workers... well beyond what could cause cancer in 1 hour. the 1000 mSv reading is no doubt an average, or "what they've seen" so far. Spontaneous spikes are possible.
Symptoms of acute radiation (dose received within one day): 1 – 3 Sv (1000 – 3000 mSv): Mild to severe nausea, loss of appetite, infection; more severe bone marrow, lymph node, spleen damage; recovery probable, not assured.
3 – 6 Sv (3000 – 6000 mSv): Severe nausea, loss of appetite; hemorrhaging, infection, diarrhea, peeling of skin, sterility; death if untreated.
6 – 10 Sv (6000 – 10000 mSv): Above symptoms plus central nervous system impairment; death expected.
They're saying 15 minutes under current exposure guidelines. But in reality, workers could die if there's a sudden jolt to 100000mSv/hour.
Nuclear Power = Nuclear Weapons
Nuclear Weapons = Nuclear War.
The only solution is to outlaw all nuclear technology. The knowledge must be destroyed. Anyone who has the knowledge must die for the sake of humanity.
We can, must, and should put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and bury it forever.
> but there's only so much you can do when the fundamental reactor design is antiquated.
Advanced is not the same as safe.
Often some of the advances are made cutting corners to reduce safety redundancies or combine safeguards so that one compensate for another failure -- until that one-a-million years real big earthquake happens and is followed by a gigantic tsunami.
Too many improbabilities can defeat any design -- or better, too many improbabilities can defeat any economically viable design.
After the accident, people would justify themselves:
-- Who can foresee everything?
-- If it is made to prevent any accident, it would be unfeasible.
None of these excuses seem to ressuscitate dead people nor reduce radiation levels. BTW, if pro-nuclear people were half as good at designing reactors as they are at making excuses and justifications, maybe there wouldn't be accidents...
And what's the idea with the repetive comparisons with oil, coal? Use another energy source, Einsteins. You got brains, now go and use them!
Nuclear is better than coal, yadda, yadda... Well, having my legs amputated is better than dying, but somehow I want a better solution in which I stay alive with my legs, thank you very much.
If you want measured reporting, go to the main source, http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/tsunamiupdate01.html .
IAEA is the International Atomic Energy Agency, this is where ALL nuclear accidents and incidents are reported to, not the news agencies..
Don't build along a coastline. And what were those back-up generators doing on the outside with NO protection from a tsunami. They should have been in reinforced water tight concrete buildings.
Parent post suggests a mechanism that would improve nuclear power plant safety:
That might inject a little more of the missing accountability into these situations.
Hmm. There really is no good reason why this should not be implemented immediately and retroactively. It isn't like we have a shortage of people who are willing to collect big bucks for pushing atoms around on paper.
Will
No such information from the primary source, TEPCO, as of this morning : http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11032912-e.html
because the efficiency isn't high enough to get anywhere near the numbers we need.
Based on current numbers, we would need 10,000 square miles. a square 100 mile to a side. And thats just for US demand.
Not that we shouldn't do it, but we aren't anywhere near to getting the numbers you need out of it.
You do know that solar power is only grabbed from a narrow spectrum of light?
Do you ever think for yourself, or do you just blinded repeat what people post on web sites?
Hmm I suspect you are astorturfing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Because they are unreliable, un-economical and lead to starvation. They are unreliable in that in many parts of the country, you can't have solar because it is often cloudy, or you can't have wind because it isn't windy enough. And even in parts of the country where it is sunny or windy 80% of the time, what about the other days when it isn't? You have to have enough traditional power plants to fully cover your electrical needs on days like that, unless you have want to have a blackout.
And that of course leads to the fact that they are uneconomical. Besides the fact that you need to build all these extra traditional plants as backups, they just cost more for the amount of electricity they generate. We would not have wind or solar at all were it not for massive government subsidies. No one can produce large scale power profitably using those technologies.
And lastly, in the case of some renewables (ethanol), they cause people to starve, destroy the environment and waste more energy. Corn ethanol is generally found to be an energy negative in most studies, meaning it takes more fossil fuel energy to make than it gives us. If that weren't bad enough, diverting absolutely massive amounts of midwest farmland to fueling cars instead of people is driving up food prices and causing starvation in poorer countries. And also, because of the demand for corn, farmers are now planting it every year instead of doing traditional crop rotation, which is really bad for the land and environment. Corn is one of the hardest plants on the soil in terms of its nutrient demands, and it badly needs to be swapped out with soybeans every other year to replenish the soil. But now many farmers aren't doing that, and are dumping huge amounts of ammonia on the ground as fertilizer, which gets into the water (my aquarium test kits have found elevated levels in my tap water) and into everything else. Corn based ethanol is one of the WORST ideas around, bar none. And yet the government massively subsidies it to keep the bad idea going, because they are scared to death to say no to farmer special interests.
So that's why we don't just use renewable fuels. Given the current state of technology, what we should do is drill for a lot more oil to drive the cost down, use coal (with standards to scrub the pollutants out of the exhaust), and best yet, build a bunch more nuclear. But the key with nuclear is to use the newest containment vessels (not the flawed Mark 1 like Fukishima), do not build on sites likely to have huge natural disasters (ie - let most of the country use nuclear, but let earthquake prone San Francisco and Hurricane prone Miami use oil), and build only 1-2 reactors per site, rather than six like Fukishima. That's one of the untold stories here: anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan made it hard to find new sites to build on, so they kept building reactors at the same sites, and then if you have a catastrophe likely all will be affected, and it will be that much harder to get things under control when you are trying to fix six reactors at once instead of being able to focus on one or two.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Then why didn't you predict it?
Many of us did. We were drowned out or modded to invisibility by the pro-nuke lobby.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I thought that was a good idea once, until I realized that eventually mines will probably run out, and then where will we get our raw materials to build anything with? Assuming we didn't launch trash into the sun, then the landfill will be the next frontier in mining and raw material extraction. And if we did launch it all into the sun, we are toast. So I recommend burying it in the dirt until we can figure out how to harvest it.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Worse Than Chernobyl: When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater
by Tom Burnett
Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl.The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won’t admit it.
The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it.
If reactor 3 is in meltdown, the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.
Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense – it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different – a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That’s probably a bad solution.
A nuclear meltdown is a self-sustaining reaction. Nothing can stop it except stopping the reaction. And that would require a nuclear weapon. In fact, it would require one in each containment vessel to merely stop what is going on now. But it will be messy.
Fukushima was waiting to happen because of the placement of the emergency generators. If they had not all failed at once by being inundated by a tsunami, Fukushima would not have happened as it did – although it WOULD still have been a nuclear disaster.Every containment in the world is built to withstand a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake; the Japanese chose to ignore the fact thata similar earthquake had hit that same general area in 1896.
Anyway, here is the information that the US doesn’t seem to want released. And here is a chart that might help with perspective.
Making matters worse is the MOX in reactor 3. MOX is the street name for ‘mixed oxide fuel‘ which uses ~9% plutonium along with a uranium compound to fuel reactors. This is why it can be used.
The problem is that you don’t want to play with this stuff. A nuclear reactor means bring fissile material to a point at which it is hot enough to boil water (in a light-water reactor) and not enough to melt and go supercritical (China syndrome or aChernobyl incident). You simply cannot let it get away from you because if it does, you can’t stop it.
The Japanese are still talking about days or weeks to clean this up. That’s not true. They cannot clean it up. And no one will live in that area again for dozens or maybe hundreds of years.
© 2011 Hawaii News Daily
Dr. Tom Burnett is a frequent contributor to the Hawaii News Daily.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
[citation needed]
As long as President Dover continues to act stupid, it borders on criminal for ANYONE to pretend that at least 4 Japanese reactors are not melting down. Maybe B.O. is not acting. This problem will dwarf Chernobyl. Don't let anyone lie to you.Lethal radiation has barely begun and the shit is flowing all over the place. It is still low , but not too low. Certain individuals recently have been striving to bring on major disasters. They should not be encouraged and must be recognized and dealt with. Contrary to their beliefs, they do not have the right to try to end earth or make it appear so. Severe negative reinforcement once our idiot government is displaced by something else seems certain.. It appears that the U.N.and their S&B, Q of E cheer-leading squad have been behind much of the stink recently and, of course, are wating in the wings to swoop in and rescue pin-head America from Congress' mewling panic and incarcerate the rest of us or worse.
And who is this anonymous coward? Someone already stole all of my past emails. Howard T. Lewis III is my name. That S&B Howard Lewis is not my son and judging from his age, I never met his mother. And I sure did not name myself. Anonymous coward? How? I demand an answer.
No. The French DID build them and they still have one going. Good idea on paper in the 1960s - bad idea in reality in the decades spent trying to get the things to work.
There's a useful thorium idea that some idiots call a fast breeder in an attempt to pretend that fast breeders have merit. It is of course a completely different thing.
As for why the plant is Japan is actually one of the newest plants - it was clear by the 1970s that it was impossible to get a positive financial return from nuclear power without cooking the books and sucking money in from elsewhere so banks and increasingly governments were reluctant to spend the enormous amounts of money to build the things. As for governments - while you get thousands of megawatts it takes more than one political term to build a plant so that's a lot of money to put down so that some other guy in the future can claim the credit for it.
The abandonment by TEPCO and Nippon Government of Fukushima on the meltdown of 4 reactors will mean about 1,000,000 refugees and a sizble part of Tohoku, including the city of Sendai, to be declared uninhabitable for the next 300 years.
Shinkonsen and regular rail transport lines and automobile line will by necessity be abandoned.
All farming, i.e. rice cultivation will be halted across Tohoku.
All industrial and commercial activity will be halted across Tohoku.
The real cost will exceed 600 trillion dollars.
Japan will be plunged into the greatest depression ever seen, in human history.
In 2016 the government of Japan will broker a deal with China for Nippon to become a province of China.
In 2071, the official language of Nippon Province will be Manderin.
The rising Sun, has set. And we are witness to history.
You can read press releases from TEPCO:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/index-e.html
These releases document the "official" status of the plant. Believe what you will.
Let's be optimist and say the situation doesn't get worse than it is right now, and the company operating the powerplant gets back in control of the whole thing.
What will happen next in term of containment ? Will they have to shutdown the whole site due to resilient radioacivity ? Will they have to build huge concrete boxes around the reactors ? If so, how long will those boxes have to stand before it gets back to an acceptable radiation level ?
You might displace some garden snails, scorpions, or spotted owls by putting up a solar farm.
http://gameangrybirds.com/ http://www.gamesforgirl.org/
Hi, OP here, I didn't say there isn't enough solar energy in theory, but that we can't get enough energy out of it. It doesn't matter how many Joules the Earth gets baked with. It matters how many of those Joules we can harvest for our own purpose. And those two figures are severely different.
But don't take my word for it, DO THE MATH. There is no point arguing over this, when a simple back-of-the-envelope sum says it all.
It boils down to: how many square miles of land do you have to completely cover in solar cells to replace even one nucleair plant? Don't guess, do the math, it isn't hard.
...which emits plenty of radiation as well as killing people through mining incidents, respiratory problems, and climate change... (see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste)
Here's some real science regarding the number of deaths caused by chernobyl. Note that the study was completed more than 20 years after the disaster. It takes a long time to experience, record and document the effects of radioactive contamination.
This past April 26th marked the 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It came as the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear government officials in the United States and other nations were trying to "revive" nuclear power. And it followed the publication of a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the Chernobyl disaster.
Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment was published by the New York Academy of Sciences.
It is authored by three noted scientists:
Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president;
Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and
Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.
Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist long involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.
The book is solidly based -- on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports -- some 5,000 in all.
It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.
The book explodes the claim of the International Atomic Energy Agency-- still on its website that the expected death toll from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book shows, is under-estimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
So, who's been hurt? So far, nobody.
What kind of sociopath would go on an international public forum like this and deny that anyone had been hurt just to win a pro nuclear power debate. People have been hurt.
Or don't burns, hospitalisations and the potential of greatly increased cancer rates count as hurt to you? Not to mention the two who are 'missing', tell me with a straight face that you believe someone can go missing for weeks in an area where radiation suited workers are allowed to go for only 15 minutes per year and still be alive. The government is warning people for many mile around not to drink the water, and this in a disaster stricken region where access to water might be hard for many people anyway. Sometimes I despair of the human race. Nobody has been hurt!?
In 1989, I knew a man on the island of St. John in the US Virgin Islands who wanted to build a house at the far end of the island in Coral Bay, but the local power authority said it would cost him $65,000 to run power lines to his new home.
Instead, he spent the $65k to outfit his house with a state of the art (at the time) DC power system, using DC appliances powered by solar & wind w/battery storage. He also had passive solar for hot water, and I believe he also took delivery of LP gas once a month for cooking.
Basically, he told me that he had wired his house like a big sailboat, using DC power instead of AC, and DC appliances like you can buy for any large sailboat. Living in the islands, he was very familiar with this type of power generation, since it is very common on sailboats. He just scaled the tech up for his house.
His home was beautiful and with all the creature comforts of a luxury home. There was nothing spartan or inconvenient about it.
All of the 'paradigms' for energy management in the western world start with 'big science' style power generation and distribution. The technology existed in 1989 to go off the grid (though expensively at the time), so it's a shame that we've moved even farther away from a distributed power generation model since then.
If more R&D had been done to develop energy-efficient DC technology for home appliances in the intervening 20 years (as well as passive and active solar, and wind generation), TEPCO, et al would have lost their raison d'etre long ago.
Economies of scale would have made the cost per home implementation competitive with "Big Science Power Co, Inc.".
By "more R&D" I mean the money wasted on such things atomic and 'clean coal' technology development, instead redirected towards solar/wind/battery tech. Oil, coal & atomic power have such huge hidden government subsidies, if the true cost were honestly revealed, people would be up in arms.
Remember that GE, #4 on the Fortune 500, paid no income tax last year. This is but a glimpse of the 'free market' reality regarding energy distribution in the Western world.
If a guy who owned a hardware store in the Virgin Islands figured out a way to go off the grid in 1989 with off-the-shelf components, and sailboats have been effectively using the technology for decades, why isn't everyone else moving in the same direction?
Simple: it threatens the status quo.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
When my car breaks down, I don't talk to the guy that assembled it, the person that sold it to me, or even somebody that worked on the design. I talk to people who diagnose and fix cars.
When my nuclear reactor threatens to meltdown, I don't talk to the guy that installs it and walks away, I talk to somebody who runs and fixes reactors.
Many people seem thinking that current situation at Fukusima is bad luck for Japan. This is not true, they are extremely lucky. Imagine wind is blowing not into the ocean but in the direction of 14 million Tokyo. Calculate deaths. Imagine evacuation of 14-million city. Also, someone thinking this situation is because of bad management. Nope. Chernobyl were in USSR, at the peak of USSR power, it were managed very well with smart people not thinking about money at all. Three Mile were in USA, under completely other government system, and it is still disaster. Problem is in nuclear industry itself. Some guys are thinking that other forms of energy generation are worse. This is not true again, as nobody really knows how bad nuclear incident may be. Chernobyl is certainly not a worst case, and actually USSR spent enormous amount of resources to soften aftermath. Almost all researchers in country were thinking about accident, 10000's of people were in there because they were just ordered or because of their own ideas. It is just not affordable in any style of government except communist. So, results may be much much worse.