Slashdot Mirror
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!
Just to be clear, they are absolutely not implying it has melted through the containment, but, rather, the reactor pressure vessel.
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.
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!
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"
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
Please don't betray your ignorance. Really, there's a reason that there is concrete below the containment vessel. Even Glenn Beck gets this. Pulling out snarky red-herring analogies to skyscrapers as if their design has anything to do with a nuclear reactor is childish.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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
Actually, the failure mode was that both buildings withstood the initial impact. It was the heat melting structural components that was not planned for. If the material could have withstood more heat, the towers may have been standing today.
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?
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 ..."
Tsunami killed 10,000
Reactor so far 0
My local natural gas power plant killed 3 workers when they fell from the smoke stacks while hanging giant snowflakes for Christmas.
Too bad there is no -1 for I don't get it. It could be applied to your post.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"...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.
As a serious question: Is the bottom lined concrete thick enough to stop any radiation from leaking through it? if not, then the 'planned failure mode' has a significant flaw IMO.
likewise, what if the core melts through that concrete?
And I am being serious with these questions and not trying to be snarky. They would seem to be relevant things the design would have considered and we don't generally hear about this from the press or the gov't sadly.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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
I don't think the fear about Fukushima is the *current* state, but the possible future states. I would also say that there are worse outcomes than deaths. Generations of birth defects, rare cancers and cell mutations, toxic metals accumulating in a localized food chain; I tend to think of those things as being worse than death.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
18 year old
Yeah, 18. *wink*, *wink*.
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.
Start sending out resumes NOW!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The core absolutely cannot melt through the concrete. The melting point of concrete is an order of magnitude higher than that of the containment vessel - the fuel cannot get this hot, short of a nuclear reaction. There are legitimate concerns regarding the structural integrity of the concrete after the hydrogen explosion, but this would be from cracks forming in the concrete, not anything that the fuel itself could possibly do.
Rest assured that the concrete container is designed exactly for this eventuality. It would be a pretty poor design if it was incapable of holding that which it was created to contain.
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.
"There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Ok. You don't get it.
But I wouldn't mod you down just for that. That's epidemic around here.
Yes, the floors were designed to pancake if a controlled demolition was done after specific weakening of the structure, but instead the support beams softened more than they predicted from the heat of a huge fire.
That was unplanned.
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.
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.
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.
RTFA. The fear is that the hydrogen explosions have already caused a failure in the concrete which is why radiation is being detected in water outside of the plant.
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
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!"
I was under the impression that four workers had died already at Fukushima, but I could be mistaken (no, I don't have a citation handy).
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
As a serious question: Is the bottom lined concrete thick enough to stop any radiation from leaking through it? if not, then the 'planned failure mode' has a significant flaw IMO.
Yes, it's thick enough. It's also designed so molten fuel that melts through the reactor vessel into the concrete containment (which is what appears to have happened in reactor 2, at least) can be cooled by water and probably boric acid, and it also spreads the fuel out to help cool it down. So far, it's doing what it was designed to do - contain molten fuel 'lava' that has breached the reactor itself.
The problem is, the containment vessel (sort of an inverted concrete lightbulb) was also damaged when they vented hydrogen - which exploded - from the reactors when they first had trouble with the coolant flow (very hot fuel+not enough water caused the water to literally boil instantly and some of it broke down into hydrogen). Most of the damage was done to the building roof, not the main containment, as it was designed to do, but it would appear there is a leak of some sort in at least one of the containment vessels, the most problematic of which is reactor 2.
likewise, what if the core melts through that concrete?
Bad stuff. In order for that to happen, the fuel would have to mass together sufficiently, without enough cooling or control rod remnants mixed in to allow the fuel to reach criticality again - i.e. restart the nuclear reaction in an uncontrolled fashion, which may make it hot enough to melt through the concrete containment floor, and keep on going until it hits groundwater causing serious contamination, or if it hits enough ground water, a steam explosion spraying radioactive material into
the air. That's not terribly likely though, especially if they can keep pumping coolant into the reactor and the concrete containment.
The biggest current risk, as we're seeing, is that radiation leaks from the hydrogen explosion damaged containment vessel; stopping them patching the breach, and sufficient radioactive material escapes containment via the leak and manages to escape the building via another route, also contaminating groundwater, but by nowhere as much as a complete failure of containment would mean.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
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
10,000 deaths are an estimate: 28,000 are unaccounted for after the tsunami. The tsunami death count will be revised upwards in the future vastly more than the number of people the Fukushima problems may be linked to the deaths of, long term. About half a million people are homeless after the tsunami - that's a real, ongoing crisis.
I would also say that there are worse outcomes than deaths. Generations of birth defects, rare cancers and cell mutations, toxic metals accumulating in a localized food chain; I tend to think of those things as being worse than death.
And these are very real problems in science fiction movies. Also, giant, radioactive ants. They suck. Communist construction of nuclear power plants also sucks (but communist construction of dams sucks worse, and has killed more people than any other modern disaster), but that's not what Japan is facing here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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)
So far it's zero! Well, duh. Cancer isn't something that kills you instantly.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
As someone with a health condition that may actually be tied to that sort of thing, it is not. I would rather be alive and at risk of rare cancer than dead.
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.
Nuclear reactors confirmed for being safer than christmas?
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.
Oh I'm sorry, I forgot that on Slashdot people treat science as though it were a religion and are opposed to any kind of skeptical thinking.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Does anyone know if we have the technology to extract a molten core yet or are we just going to bury this?
There are legitimate concerns regarding the structural integrity of the concrete after the hydrogen explosion, but this would be from cracks forming in the concrete, not anything that the fuel itself could possibly do.
I can occasionally understand people not reading TFA, but come on! The post you responded to was 4 sentences long, and one of them was specifically addressing the point you brought up.
I'm not saying that the situation is perfectly safe, or even moderately okay. I'm simply saying that it's ridiculous to worry about the concrete containment vessel melting, and that the nuclear engineers who created the concrete containment vessel surely thought through the possibility that it would have to contain hot material.
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!
Tsunami killed 10,000
Reactor so far 0
My local natural gas power plant killed 3 workers when they fell from the smoke stacks while hanging giant snowflakes for Christmas.
Rather like the way in which a big fuss is made about plane even train crashes. Even though the most dangerous form of vehicle is the private car.
We also saw a similar response to Three Mile Island in 1979. But no comparable protests in response to the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988.
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
more power hits the earth in terms of sunlight in a single HOUR than we use in an entire YEAR as a PLANET. Simply a matter of collecting it (easyish) and storing it for night time (harder).
I even give you sources for my claims:
From Solar Energy Absorbed
The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year. Photosynthesis captures approximately 3,000 EJ per year in biomass. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.
There won't be a single replacement solution. But using renewable sources we can easily meet our current and future power needs.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Well, according to wikipedia (referencing a publication of the University of Arizona), CSP is still ten times as expensive as nuclear.
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.
RTFC. He mentioned that same point, then continued to answer the questions posed about melting through the concrete, which will not happen.
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
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
What if an asteroid hit one of these new nuke plants you love?
What if an asteroid hit a mountain filled with un-mined Uranium deposits? I for one would rather have the Uranium mined, enriched, then purposefully decayed down into lighter metals before it gets spread all over the place by your hypothetical asteroid.
What happens to your wind and solar during a "nuclear winter" scenario caused by an asteroid hitting ordinary soil? Less sun. Presumably less wind since there's less solar energy to drive the weather.
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....
Concrete does not melt. It turns to powder starting at about 400 C and any rock and sand in it will melt at 800 C to 1200 C. When it turns into a powder, it doesn't have any structural integrity. It disintegrates and would allow anything to pass through it... (? China syndrome...)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
Communist construction of nuclear power plants also sucks
I can't see capitalist construction faring better here ...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Really?
Massive earthquake plus tsunami did this much damage. Chernobyl did it all on it's own. Of course the containment building and Chernobyl didn't leak because it didn't have one.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Except that none of those things are going to happen. You are pretty much into the realm of SciFi worries.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
WHOOSH.
the problem is not communist or capitalist, it's human nature: why is such an old reactor-design even online ? it would have been on-line whether Japan is capitalist or communist.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
No. Safer than giant snow flakes.
You have to wonder what they where thinking. We are in Florida after all. Giant snow flakes are an insult to nature!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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...
"BWR cannot go above 250C as long as water flows even without the control rods."
I think the point is that water wasn't flowing...and probably was not covering the fuel for a while (due to evaporation).
"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."
Reactor 2 was 784 MWe. A 30% thermal efficiency means it must be ~2.6GW thermal. After 5 hours you would expect ~1% decay heat, or 26 MW thermal, going out to around 10MW after 10 days. That is still a lot of heat to deal with.
However I have a feeling if the fuel melted, it happened on day 1, and it is only recently people have been able to get in close and see leaking highly radioactive water.
The other issue is that the hydrogen explosions may have damaged the fuel assemblies leading to their collapse onto the reactor floor.
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
the lines to the turbine and back are sealed. when there is a full loss of offsite power, the reactor protection system relays and isolation system relays and solonoids lose their charge. the moment that happens the reactor auto-shuts down and isolates. there are 2 sets of isolation valves, one inside the containment, and outside the containment and in the reactor building as a backup. In other words, the containment is almost completely sealed from the outside world. One major issue is the torus isnt as well protected as the containment drywell and wetwell. it sits outside the drywell containment and in this pseudo containment that isnt sealed as well. if that's leaking that could be the source.
...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.
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.
In other words: you don't know how many workers got killed in that reactor during its normal operation. (Like falling down from somewhere or dying to an heart attack)
I give you +5 Insightful.
angel'o'sphere
P.S. the safety regulations and/or the spirit following them must suck in your "local gas powered plant"
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Or...
You can pull your head out of your arse and join the rest of use in the real world.
No it is not thick enough. ... we all know that since 9/11 ... it gets very unstable and can't hold anything over roughly 800 degrees celsius ...
A melt down can not be resisted. That is the fucking problem. Everything before a melt down is happening is a "GAU" - a maximum credible accident.
When a melt down is happening you are in gods or devils hand, depending on your believe system.
For fuck sake, you wrote it yourself: contain molten fuel lava that has breached the reactor itself.
You can not contain lava with concrete.
I don't know what you guys learn in school. But: something which is hotter than the melting point of its surroundings obviously melts its surroundings and drops through it. In the case of concrete
If the reactor core is melting down it has only one single chance of not going boom: while the lava hits the ground of the containment it needs to get dissipated in a way that it can form several pits which cool down individually.
That might happen ... or might not happen ... in the later case -> boom! (As soon as it hits ground water or as soon as it gets critical)
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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
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
"...A BWR cannot go above 250C"
um, what? yes, it can.
Sea water doesn't make the core non operational. It makes it unusable, the core still generates heat. and a hell of a lot more then 250c.
"Also coolant was restored and the reactor was flooded with cold water which would remove all heat."
What? You might want to call TEPCO and let them know.
While this article is pure FUD, the rest of your post clearly indicate you are a geek.
Meaning that you will rant on about something you don't know about so you can actually feel like you know something and seeth your righteous ignorance. Comic book guy would be proud.
I'll stick to being a nerd, thank you so very much.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
WOOSH this reactor failed because it was hit by a disaster outside of what was expected. Take a look around at the other structures around that failed as well.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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..."
My information of birth defects and rare cancers doesn't come from science fiction movies, it comes from personal contact with people who were exposed to underground testing in the American Southwest.
All that farmland that got flooded, I wonder how much of Japan's total food output that represents? I wonder how much of that farmland is in danger of being irrigated by contaminated water?
One thing I actually worried about more than the nuclear plant; there was a refinery fire on the day of the quake. I read one report a few days later that said it wasn't under control yet. I wonder about that, what kind of toxic exposure comes from a burning refinery, or if any chemical plants had any big releases, that kind of thing. It's really hard to get a lot of detailed information from Japan. Obviously they have more important things to do than give English-language reports to people whose only connection amounts to morbid curiosity.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002, this was more energy in one hour than the world used in one year. Photosynthesis captures approximately 3,000 EJ per year in biomass. The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined.
Let's go with those numbers. 3,000 EJ per year is the amount captured by all the world's forests, plains, farms, golf courses, backyard gardens, and jungles. These are machines tuned by a billion years of evolution.
Current energy usage is 474 EJ per year, and doubling every 20 years or so. Let's say we're willing to sacrifice 25% of the world's photosynthetic land area (ignoring oxygen) to solar panels (currently 22% for top-notch silicon stuff).
Besides the fact that humans have never done such a massive undertaking, and that we don't have the raw materials, how long would this meet the needs of the population?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
by god, it's 'hard'. we should just quit and not try.
Sorry, I'll actually try to solve the issues. The OP's point was that there isn't enough solar energy to meet our needs. I, and you, clearly demonstrated there is many times over enough energy available.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Sorry, I'll actually try to solve the issues. The OP's point was that there isn't enough solar energy to meet our needs. I, and you, clearly demonstrated there is many times over enough energy available.
Yeah, the insolation numbers work out, but you have to wreck a significant percentage of the environment to 'save' it. Besides all the forests destroyed for this vision, you've seen what rare earth mines do to the environment, right?
To stay on topic, the safe nuclear designs don't suffer either problem. IFR-type designs are actually nuclear waste clean-up machines. So, you can have your energy needs met and have a better environment. And by time the waste clean-up is done, the fusion systems ought to be ready. That's all win.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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.
read this:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
solar sounds lovely but until we have self replicating machine plating the worlds deserts with free pannels it's going to remain a toy source of power for niche uses and status symbols like those ones you see on peoples roofs in canada.
Yea, and E=mc^2, so there is more than enough energy than we need in a few tons of trash. Gathering and converting the energy is a *very* important constraint.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
...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!
WHOOSH back to you. -->outside of what was expected--- the expectations where wrong, THAT's a human factor, NOT a communist/capitalist factor.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
And I never said we had to stay at current technology levels. Again, plenty of energy hits the earth, we just need to work on our ability to capture it.
It's hard, but I believe we can do it. But we won't if we don't try.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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!?
And these are very real problems in science fiction movies. Also, giant, radioactive ants. They suck. Communist construction of nuclear power plants also sucks (but communist construction of dams sucks worse, and has killed more people than any other modern disaster), but that's not what Japan is facing here.
Maybe you should have a look at the research your country did (assuming you're a US citizen here) on the survivors of their bombings (the wikipedia article paints a much prettier picture of the ABCC's research than the museum in Hiroshima did if my memory serves)
And while on the subject, maybe you should visit said museum, you will change your tune about the after effects of nuclear exposure.
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!
You are absolutely correct there are all those isolation systems (and actually more than that, the GE BWR is in many of my classic nuke engineering texts), but after repeated huge internal explosions *assuming* that all that is still functioning, intact and ship-ship isn't wise.
all you have to do is close your eyes, clap and wish real hard.
build a working von-neuman machine and set it to work building panels in the sahara and you might get somewhere, until then solar is still a toy energy source and we're a while away from that yet.
How are these things different?
Which is relevent to the nuclear plants in Japan. Discuss. Or just go on chanting "scary scary nukular scary", if that makes you feer intelligent and sophisticated.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
For large-scale solar power production, you don't use solar panels, you use concentrating solar plants. They don't use any exotic materials, but simply use mirrors to concentrate sunlight (hence the name), boil water, and use the steam to drive turbines.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Corium lava (molten mixture of fuel rods, cladding and control rods) is not real lava - it's liquid metal, and can be up 2400 degC. Melting through the reactor vessel itself takes away heat energy. When it first encounters concrete, sure it starts to eat into the concrete - but that takes up a lot of energy, and it rapidly cools the corium. Combine that with it spreading out into a thin layer instead of a hot ball, and water pumped into the concrete containment, and the corium lava melts into the concrete somewhat, and then is cooled sufficiently until it can no longer decompose concrete. And is Contained. That is why they call it Containment.
The problem is if it becomes self-sustaining again, and generates more heat, rather than just having the decay heat left over from the initial meltdown. Then all bets are off. But if the mass stays sub-critical, a sufficient depth of concrete plus water WILL contain corium meltdown.
Decomposition of concrete and volatilization of the alkali metal compounds consumes substantial amount of heat. The fast erosion phase of the concrete basemat lasts for about an hour and progresses into about one meter depth, then slows to several centimeters per hour, and stops completely when the melt cools below the decomposition temperature of concrete (about 1400C).
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Ah, good point. The environmental impacts are lower and the efficiency can be much higher. The required land use is still astronomical, though. Or 'planetary', I guess would be more apropos.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
there is more to your analysis than just a raw EJ number. You completely ignore efficiency improvements and conservation as even passingly possible to contribute to this situation, and you just assume energy usage will continue to double indefinitely, which seems a bit shortsighted. We can't keep doubling energy usage with ANY energy source indefinitely, why should renewables be held to that standard?
We can double energy efficiency for our cars simply by leaving internal combustion behind. building energy usage can be drastically reduced with current techniques and technology, today, without much economic impact.
I have a 3,000 sq ft office/shop, in a cold climate (Maine), with a cold climate heat pump heating and cooling the space year round. a 9kw PV array (that's just what would cover my roof) with rough back of the envelope calculations should provide 1/3rd of the total energy requirements of this shop, including heating, cooling, ventilation, five person computer workstations with servers, lights, hot water, nighttime illumination, etc. And we didn't even design for real passive solar benefits.
so with CURRENT technology, I can provide more power than an equivalent residence should need with 3x the footprint of the building in PV. Storage, of course, is an issue but that's an assailable technical hurdle, and no one says ALL our energy has to be JUST PV... still have hydro, wind, tidal out there for more kicks, plus biomass thermal energy for heating needs. If you want to add a couple of commuter cars to the mix, do the math, but I doubt that multiplies the panel area by an order of magnitude or anything like it.
so while we may not be completely PV soon... we could make a pretty serious dent with a combination of PV and a transition to more efficient technologies, now.
According to Wikipedia, the yearly energy usage of United States is about 29 PWh. On the other hand, nearly all of United States gets over 5 kWh/day solar energy. Assuming the plant is even 20% efficient makes this 1 kWh/m^2/day of electric energy. There are 365 days per year, so that makes it 365 kWh/m^2/year. There are 1,000,000 square meters per square kilometer, so that makes for a 365 GWh/km^2/year. And 29 PWh/year / 365 GWh/km^2/year makes for 79,452 km^2.
Now, the land area of United States is 9,826,675 km^2, so you'd need to cover less than 1 percent (0.8%, to be exact) of it with solar power plants to power it entirely with sunlight. Note also that the 29 PWh includes energy needed for transportation, so we're talking about complete self-sustainability and zero carbon footprint here. And finally, note that solar power typically works best in deserts and such, so it's not like you'd need land that had any other use. And finally note that you could also produce smaller units to be mounted on top of buildings and such.
In other words, the project is expensive but entirely doable, especially since all the space now taken by all other energy production would be freed. And of course you wouldn't tear down existing dams and such, and nothing stops you from supplementing solar power with wind etc.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That sounds about right. I'd once estimated covering 1/4 of New Mexico would be sufficient.
Some omissions in the calculations, though:
If human life is a major factor, it's best to abandon the rooftop panels concept. Roofers have one of the highest fatality rates - a massive solar rooftop program is estimated to be more deadly than coal mining.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
None of these are "forgotten", since we're not talking about solar panels but mirrors. The dust factor is the only one that does and even then we're talking about a non-charged glass surface, so the dust won't stick. Simply "park" the mirror vertical at night and dust will fall right off.
...I guess that where you live, roofs are neither build or maintained, but simply appear from thin air in perfect condition and stay that way.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
None of these are "forgotten", since we're not talking about solar panels but mirrors.
OK, fair point.
So:
This isn't to call it impossible, but you have to revise upward your numbers to account for the increased space needs for maintenance and for the energy costs that go back into building and maintaining the project. ...I guess that where you live, roofs are neither build or maintained, but simply appear from thin air in perfect condition and stay that way.
That's a silly thing to say - if this were the case there would be no roofer fatalities. Increasing the amount of time that people are working on roofs increases the fatality rate - gravity is a bitch. I don't see how that can be disputed, but please try.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)