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Nuclear Risk Expert: Fukushima Fuel May Be Leaking
An anonymous reader writes "Three weeks after the nuclear crisis began at Japan's Fukushima Dai-1 power plant, there's still a real danger of melted nuclear fuel escaping the reactor buildings and releasing a large dose of radiation. So says Theo Theofanous, an engineer who spent 15 years studying the risks of nuclear reactors. Theofanous believes that melted nuclear fuel has already leaked through the reactor vessels and accumulated at the bottoms of the primary containment structures. All attempts to keep the reactor buildings cool may not be enough to prevent the overheated fuel from eating through the concrete floors, he says."
HAHAHA
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Problem is that they can't shut it down unless they get control of it first, and that's what they're trying to do right now
That's why people are basically committing suicide by still working there, because if they don't continue their work the end result will be so bad that it'll make people forget that lil thing that happened in russia.
Then, quite appropriately...OMG GLOWING PONIES!
I couldn't imagine that they had 8 hours to get a generator to the site of the plant, and yet failed to return any service for days. The idea of having an eight hour backup is that you'd expect to have a mobile generator on site in that time. I might have missed it, but can anyone tell me why the couldn't drag or fly power to them in less than, what 3 or 4 days? Was it that cut off? Are they just that bone headed?
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I'm not sure this is an april fools post sadly.
As posted in the last story, stories in this site are posted on tomorrow's business after Midnight GMT which was 8pm EDT. We're done with the jokes, now back to serious business.
"Eat" pretty much is the right word... we've got rods so radioactive and hot they're melting concrete all the way to vapor. Damn that's powerful when it works right, but damn that's trouble when it's not under control.
Yup, maybe next year they could be really clever and not do anything at all. However, I did kinda like the mad lib function, sorta wish that there was more to it.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
In Uranium mining, there is a technique called in-situ leeching.
In summary, it involves drilling a hole, pouring an acid or alkaline into the hole to dissolve the resource, and pumping it back out.
Once it's out, in the case of uranium, there are a couple of steps involved in turning it into yellowcake.
Given the probability that it is now leaking onto concrete, an alkaline solution would be more ideal.
What would be needed is something like an oil drain pan that resists the chosen alkaline.
The solution would be pumped in and out of the pan into an recovery tank. Uranium in this format is quite similar to the safe-to-handle yellowcake.
Very little reaction would occur - not much more than in nature. Depending on the speed of this chemical reaction, the size of the current breach, and the rate that it eats the steel, it might be possible to use the reactor's own cooling system to supplement the removal process. The key is to remove the fuel, and separate it enough physically that the reaction 'stops'. At this point, damaging the building is no longer an issue. The only important thing is to recover the resource to stop the reaction.
Obviously the rods are no longer able to be removed as one complete unit, or it would be well under way.
We need some miners to step up and advise of the fastest method to dissolve uranium in a steel container and pump it out.
Nuclear engineers are trained in how to make reactors work. Not in how to mine for resources which is exactly what we need right now.
Miners stand the best chance of leaving the area safe.
Contamination only means that there are radioactive elements mixed in with the safe dirt.
Miners are the only experts who know how to extract these resources. If they're gone, then it's safe again.
Even if they replace radioactive contamination with chemical contamination, chemicals are usually easier to deal with in the longer run.
Compare an oil spill to the land around Chernobyl. Chemical spills are problematic for a decade or so.
Anyhow, that's my view. We should treat it like a mine. Mine the resource, make it safe. Get it to a reprocessing facility. Just make sure it is no longer in the reactor in a self sustaining fission state.
Another hopeless optimist. Japan is a high-tech country. Japan is not hampered by an anti-nuclear movement. Japan builds new reactors. Japan's reactors are highly regulated for safety. None of that has prevented them from having aging reactors, operated by a corrupt company. If this can happen in Japan, it can happen anywhere.
Now it's not just a matter of "sealing it and shutting it down": If the core melts through the floor, how are you going to seal that up? The crux with nuclear power is that even undamaged reactors are high maintenance for decades after they've been shut down at the very least. So far nobody has figured out what to do with the "spent" fuel and other radioactive waste. Attempts to bury it have repeatedly resulted in unforeseen accidents with the result that even more radioactive waste needs to be dug up and stored above ground, essentially forever. This stuff isn't just radioactive, it's also extremely toxic and chemically aggressive.
No nuclear facility is insured to an amount that would cover all damages which an accident could cause: No insurer is willing to take the risk. The risk is entirely on the shoulders of the public, who cannot reject it, thanks to representative democracy and bought politicians. The exception to the rule is Austria: In a fluke of common sense, they held a referendum before Austria's first nuclear power plant (completed and ready) was going to be activated: The Austrian people rejected nuclear power and they have not reneged so far.
In hindsight their emergency diesel generators should not have been at such a low level. If they had been out of reach of the tsunami they would have been able to continue running to keep the cooling water flowing. And yes, I realize that it's very easy to sit at my desk and point this out now that everything has gone to hell in Fukushima. Let's hope this is as bad as it gets and that things don't get worse for them.
It isn't operating. It was shutdown automatically during the earthquake 3 weeks ago.
How is it under that rock?
Thats a businessman for you I guess. The current CEO of TEPCO, whom pretty much has just hid out in his office ever since the quake, got to the top due to his relentless cost cutting. I guess buying a modern, safe nuclear reactor wasn't really on the top of his to do list, and mothballing the Fukushima reactors before the quake would have been unthinkable, they provided about 20% of the total power used in northern Honshu. It's going to be a rough summer.
Monstar L
an 'america syndrome' ?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
No one at Fukushima has received a radiation dose that require treatment for radiation sickness let alone received a fatal dose. Two workers received a dose that exceeded their yearly dose limit and were removed from the site. Perhaps you are getting this situation confused with Chernobyl.
-- Back to the shadows again...
Jesus Christ Slashdot. You're meant to be a news site.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
that lil thing that happened in russia.
Perhaps you are getting this situation confused with Chernobyl.
Which didn't happen in Russia.
sounds like mr burns I hope he does hard time for trying to bribe his way out of this.
From TFA:
But the drywell's concrete floor is probably 5 to 10 meters thick, so Theofanous says there's not an immediate risk of a release of radioactive materials via this route. "A lot of melting has to take place before you get through 5 meters of concrete," he says.
And:
"We don't really know where the fuel is," he says
.
Also:
Theofanous found that as long as there was a typical amount of water in the drywell--about half a meter--and that water was continuously cycled through to prevent it from heating up and boiling away, the nuclear fuel would not immediately make its way out into the environment. "We showed that if there's a severe accident, you must make sure there's water in the drywell," says Theofanous.
So, yeah... Article is hype but the summary is outright lying.
See... these are the moments when I wish that I was religious.
So that I could find some modicum of relief believing that there is a special hell for people who are hyping up these stories just so they'd get more fucking clicks and page-views.
You know... Trying their best to make a cent or two from their fellowman's suffering. Cunts.
Oh look, another volunteer. Since they're not dying on the spot, what's holding you back? If a little cancer is not worth mentioning in a discussion, it certainly isn't a reason not to help out, is it? People like you disgust me. The workers couldn't even do their job there under the normal limits. The limit has been increased to a quarter of a sievert. The workers incur the limit dose after just 15 minutes of working in some of the areas. Just one hour in the same area: Radiation sickness and 10% dead within 30 days.
The IAEA is reporting that measured soil concentrations of Cs-137 as far away as Iitate Village, 40 kilometers northwest of Fukushima-Dai-Ichi, correspond to deposition levels of up to 3.7 megabecquerels per square meter (MBq/sq. m).
Compare this with the deposition level that triggered compulsory relocation in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident: the level set in 1990 by the Soviet Union was 1.48 MBq/sq. m.
From http://www.japan.org
The first problem is that TEPCO isn't telling anyone what they know (to save face and because they're freaking out)
The second problem is that whatever they are telling, they're telling to the Japanese government and no-one else (even their own workers, who they convinced to wade through radioactive water without boots, go into radioactive buildings without radiation badges or suitable gear, etc).
The third problem is that the experts are working with minimal data - and what they do have is suspect
The fourth problem is that TEPCO has been trying to salvage the reactors at the same time as spraying them with seawater (which would be corrosive) and after the outer shell had exploded on three of them (causing untold damage to electronics, shock-proofing, etc)
On top of all that, TEPCO allowed the hydrogen build-up in the first place. They could have burned it off with a controlled burn. This would have prevented the explosions, reduced the spillage and possibly prevented the fuel leak. (Reducing pressure may have reduced water temperature and may have conserved some of the cooling pools.)
As for building the reactors ALONG the fault-line, despite advice not to by their own chief scientists, and building a tsunami wall far lower than the historic tsunami wave-heights....
This accident was stoppable at so many points in so many ways. The problem wasn't so much the reactor alone as the mindset together with the reactor.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Russia and the Ukraine were both part of the USSR but the place was effectively run by Russia anyway.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The plant operators seem to have followed procedure by shutting the plant down right after the quake, but I wonder if things would have turned out better if they had not done that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You meant _ineffectively_ run by Russia, right?
eom
From what I read Tepco, their regulators and the general government in Japan has ignored all 3 items in my subject.
For doing that they will pay the huge price of a 10-20 year cleanup with enormous damage to their economy and the respect the people have for their institutions.
It is not only the Middle East that may see governmental changes in the near future.
Japan is not hampered by an anti-nuclear movement.
Their anti-nuclear movement blocked several plants back in the 90s.
The exception to the rule is Austria: In a fluke of common sense, they held a referendum before Austria's first nuclear power plant (completed and ready) was going to be activated: The Austrian people rejected nuclear power and they have not reneged so far.
Right before a reactor starts is a great time to have a referendum. I wouldn't call it common sense, but dangerous hysteria that hurt a lot of people.
The authorities don't know how the water is leaking out and don't know the upper bound on the total amount of radioactivity released. The lower bound is already rather staggering. In addition, radioactive materials have already leaked into the ocean and the ground water. TEPCO said the level they measured in the ground water was the similar to the high levels found in the turbine buildings and the tunnels outside the plants. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said those readings were way too high so they asked TEPCO to measure again more carefully.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the bottom of the containment vessel.
The radioactivity released at Chernobyl escaped upward into the air. This made it easier to get a handle on the magnitude of the total amount of radioactivity released. The release at the light water reactors at Fukushima is for the most part traveling downward, to basements, tunnels, ground water, and the ocean. This makes it extremely difficult to get a handle on the total amount of radioactivity that has been released. They really don't know of the bulk of it is in the thousands of tons they have already discovered or if that is just the tip of the iceberg.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Oops. You are right.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That's correct Russia did not exist when Chernobyl happened. The U.S.S.R. existed.
Not the point, Chernobyl is in Ukraine. You wouldn't say that something that happened in London while it was part of the Roman empire happened in Italy, would you? They're not even originally a part of Russia, Ukraine was one of the states in the Soviet Union.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I wish I had mod points.
Momento Mori
I've read this three times and still can't parse meaning from it. Are you saying that there are helium containers at Fukushima that should have been triggered but weren't? Or, are you saying that there should have been helium containers but there weren't any? And in either case, how does helium block radiation?
There's a real simple shutdown plan.... trigger the explosives that release helium from containers that were designed to be broken in a case like this into the reactor zone, and you've got a tight seal that radiation can't pass through.
Downside to that plan is if you do it, that reactor is offline for good. Power supply in Japan would go down, and that's an economic impact.
What are you talking about!? Helium? What is that supposed to do? How does helium make a seal?
TEPCO has no hope that these reactors can ever be brought back online - they lost all such hope back in the beginning when they pumped seawater into them. Releasing helium won't make it any worse or better.
April fool!
What? Oh.
Damn. Can we go back to the silly stories? :-(
The Mark I reactor has always had He containers built in that could be triggered to make a quick emergency seal. Once this is done, the reactor is offline forever... but these reactors should have had an orderly shutdown long before the quake hit simply based on their age.
The plant operators seem to have followed procedure by shutting the plant down right after the quake, but I wonder if things would have turned out better if they had not done that.
Well, INANE, but I'm pretty sure we'd be looking at a different outcome if the control rods hadn't been inserted during the quake...a much worse one.
Long term planned failures seem to do that. Seeing it worked for 30 years is cause for celebration, but it should also have been a going away party. Agreed, A/C in the affected areas is going to cost more this summer.
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." -John Adams
Nuclear power has one thing going for it:
Nuclear power also has several strikes:
Even if a superior reactor design comes along, there's an incredible financial incentive to stick with the technology that was first developed and deployed (see the Wired story on thorium).
The best argument in favor of nuclear power is that "it may have problems, but it's all we've got". Nuclear advocates rightly point out that, compared to coal, oil, natural gas, and even hydropower (complicated), perhaps nuclear isn't so bad. Coal is abundant but dirty, oil is expensive and dirty, natural gas is cleaner but still poisons the ocean with CO2, and hydropower has it's own challenges.
But the one "black swan" that never gets talked about is "disruptive technology" that changes the entire energy equation.
One example: I've mentioned Global Resource Corporation's Microwave here before. This device uses specific microwave frequencies to release gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons from solids, such as coal (diesel, propane, butane). The company had a prototype that worked on tires, but they fell apart before they could get commercial versions of their technology to market. Luckily archive.org has a copy of their website: http://waybackmachine.org/*/http://www.GlobalResourceCorp.com. I remember reading about a cool patent that used Magnetic Resonance to figure out what specific microwaves a given sample of "trash" would need to be broken down...
GRC's site talked about applying the technology to tar sands, to coal mining, breaking down hundreds of millions of used tires piled everywhere... How would the energy equation change if harvesting coal and tar sands didn't require massive amounts of energy?
Here's something else: according to an old story on money.cnn.com, the largest single use of electricity in southern California is pumping water. And very large amount of water is used to generate electricity.
So, with these twin issues... What if Raphial Morgado's MYT (Mighty) pump really is as good as he says it is? Suppose you could get 25% more water pumped for the same amount of electricity, or generate 25% more electricity with the same amount of steam?
Whereas Global Resource Corp's special microwaves haven't reached market because it was torpedo'd by mismanagement (or maybe there's a technical problem - I'm pretty certain that the science is sound), Morgado's pump is in limbo because he hasn't yet found anyone who'd lend him $4-million or $10-million to build a factory. He has plenty of offers to buy the technology outright, but he has the audacity to presume that he should be the one to profit from his invention.
Imagine if the demand for energy suddenly plunged by more than 25%. Oil is only going for $100/barell because demand roughly matches supply. If supply exceeds demand by a significant percentage, we'd be back to $1/gallon gas in a heartbeat.
These are just the two technologies that
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
The plant operators seem to have followed procedure by shutting the plant down right after the quake, but I wonder if things would have turned out better if they had not done that.
Well, INANE, but I'm pretty sure we'd be looking at a different outcome if the control rods hadn't been inserted during the quake...a much worse one.
But if the plant had continued running would there have been power to run the cooling system?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The lesson is we (humanity) should learn, it that we have only this one nest.
If we don't solve that problem, we deserve whatever happens to us.
We can't afford to foul it up (that is, any more than we have already.)
So you'll be turning off your computer and lights in 5, 4, 3... Oh, yeah, I forgot. Solar, wind, and geothermal will give all six billion of us all the electricity we need, so I guess you can leave that stuff powered up.
I am sick of the idiots saying "seal it". What the fuck do you think that means? The core material has most likely melted through the inner steel vessels and probably in places through the concrete containment (at least that seems likely) - as a result, highly radioactive water is leeching out into the drainage tunnels and out to the Pacific Ocean.
How exactly can you "seal" that? Furthermore, even if you could, what makes you think that sealing it before you've cooled down the corium material is a good idea? I mean, if it's been hot and radioactive enough to melt through concrete, how exactly do you "seal" it?
The whole point is it needs to be cooled down enough and stabilized so that it's not melting through anything on an ongoing basis, and only then do the existing leaks need to be sealed up as best as possible, or at least mitigated so that whatever has escaped stays relatively localized.
As for "shut it down", it was shut down within seconds of the original earthquake. It's just that it needs ongoing cooling even after shutdown for quite some time - and once the fuel rods have melted down, it needs even more cooling.
...And what power source would you recommend? Coal, which is pretty much the only other viable alternative to nuclear energy at this point, which kills over 5 thousand workers each year just mining it, not to mention all of the health risks associated with burning coal for power. On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred. Quite honestly nuclear power is the safest type of power we have at the moment.
And we have to realize that the disaster at the Fukushima plant isn't normal. Rather, this was the fifth largest earthquake to be recorded in modern history. Not only that but it had a huge tsunami to go along with it. Could TEPCO have handled this better? Yes. Could the Japanese government have handled this better? Yes. Should TEPCO have built this reactor to withstand larger earthquakes? Yes. But is nuclear power more dangerous than coal, oil, and every other power source that can be used in large quantities? No.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Why would someone with no insight into the current status at Fukushima throw wild guesses around. This sounds more like an religious agenda then science.
He teaches chemistry at UC Santa Barbara.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
First sentence says it all: "It's Theo Theofanous's job to worry about worst-case scenarios." The rest of the article is a description of a worst-case scenarios that is not entirely 100% impossible, but quite implausible. The cautious language also reflects this.
At this point, it seems the bigger risk is a steady stream of isotopes from the fuel pools which are still not full and still steaming hot, and possibly some more from cracks in the reactor containment. It's going to be challenging to isolate it all from the air, given the contamination levels above and around these fuel pools.
and now the tea baggers are trying to do the same thing to the US govt - cut costs and increase the likelihood of disaster and suffering. Govt is not a business. What CEO swears to provide for the General Welfare, as the US Govt is required to do by the Constitution?
I thought they were wearing special suits to reduce radiation exposure?
Precisely. The problem all along has been that power was lost and no backups were working to provide power to run the cooling systems.
If the reactors kept running, they would have had no trouble keeping themselves cool just as they were before the Quake. In other words, business would have continued as normal.
Hopefully this incident will cause a reevaluation to the auto-scram-on-earthquake rule currently in place. (And of course, for more reliable backups to be in place too.)
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
dude, they had it all considered, they even had barriers to prevent tsunamis from doing what they did. What nobody thought was the possibility that such an earthquake could sink Japan coastline 3+ feet rendering their tsunami barriers useless.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
But if the plant had continued running would there have been power to run the cooling system?
Hadn't thought of it in those terms, but an interesting question. I've been assuming that the plant's power-producing capabilities were impacted by the quake and/or tsunami, but I googled it and couldn't find anything in the timeline that says that the base system was busted, just that the reactors were taken down and the backup systems failed (juice from other plants and the local backup generators). But then I'm a slow reader and it's late.
Yes, I get it. I get that one energy source kills dozens of people every year and spews radioactive waste into the air in the course of normal operation, and the other energy source might or might not cause some localized deaths and contamination when a plant is hit by a 9.0 earthquake followed by a tsunami.
Now, what exactly am I not getting?
Not arguing with you, but if you're counting deaths from mining coal, you need to also count deaths from mining uranium, not just deaths from "nuclear incidents".
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Uranium mining isn't exactly an environmentally-friendly activity. It's been especially tough on native americans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill, for example.
But is nuclear power more dangerous than coal, oil, and every other currently-available power source that can be used in large quantities? No.
There, fixed that for you.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
At Chernobyl, they tunnelled under the reactor and created a huge concrete shield.
It acted as a heat sink, and as a way to reduce leakage of radioactive materials into the groundwater.
300 miners worked on the project.
He's saying that it's the First of April.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It makes you laugh, because all of the people dying of radiation exposure have high, funny-pitched voices.
Humor is the best medicine.
This space available.
How about thorium reactors?
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/960564--thorium-touted-as-the-answer-to-our-energy-needs
"For one thing, there’s enough easily mined thorium in the ground to power the world for a thousand years. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the United States has an estimated 440,000 tonnes, Australia and India about 300,000 tonnes each, and Canada about 100,000 tonnes."
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
it doesnt reduce radiation dose. gamma requires several feet of shielding to bring it down. the suits are just there to prevent particle contamination from getting in/on their bodies.
That's not how a reactor works.. Sure, you "shut it down" by inserting the control rods, but it's not an off switch. It needs days to cool down, all the while still able to heat water and spin turbines.
I don't know what was providing systems power and how that was lost.
mod me funny
The energy content in one ton of uranium using 1960s reactors is roughly equivalent to 16,000 tons of coal. Using newer reactors that consume U-238 as well as U-235, a ton of uranium will produce more energy than a million tons of coal.
Assuming coal mining kills 5000 people a year and uranium mining kills as many people per ton, to produce the same amount of electricity you're looking at less than one mining death every 3 years for 1960s plants and one death every 200 years with newer plants.
OK, so when we get [cold fusion|hot fusion|dyson sphere|perpetual motion] working at a commercial scale then we'll use that. Any suggestions for the meantime?
Hopefully this incident will cause a reevaluation to the auto-scram-on-earthquake rule currently in place. (And of course, for more reliable backups to be in place too.)
Sure, there should be a reevaluation of backup power. But there's nothing wrong and plenty right with the auto-scram feature. If your reactors are in a situation where you don't have backup power, because the earthquake or its consequences eliminated the backup power, then the reactors should be scrammed. Fukushima is a controllable situation because they scrammed the reactors. It might not be, if they didn't!
I guess buying a modern, safe nuclear reactor wasn't really on the top of his to do list, and mothballing the Fukushima reactors before the quake would have been unthinkable, they provided about 20% of the total power used in northern Honshu.
The first reactor was scheduled to be shut down on march 26th 2011., the others over the next decade. You can't do it all at once because you need time to build new plants to replace the capacity.
Which, incidentally, is the main reason that so many old reactors are still running. Nobody will let them build new ones, so how can you shut down the old ones?
There was a post on /. a few days ago about how one of the cores had gone through the containment vessel and was now sitting on the concrete floor, but I have yet to see any news coverage of this. Did I completely misunderstand the post, or was it wrong, or is it just getting no coverage? Can anyone enlighten me on this?
And I believe when people say "seal it" they mean to encase it like the Chernobyl reactors were after they went to meltdown. I'm pretty sure I didn't misread the many articles I have seen on that possibility, but then again INANE....
Member of American Sarcasm Society - Motto: "Like we need your help!"
Except for the fact that the Japanese government rubber stamped a proposal to extend the life of the plant by at least 5 years in February. Had it really been planned to be shut down in 15 days I doubt it would have been running at the capacity it was when the quake struck.
Monstar L
Somebody just shoot this fucker.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Oh japan.org? ... fake rads map ... fear mongering anti-nuke crap ... Good call.
Instead of a brain-dead attack on the messenger, why not try finding out the truth for yourself? It takes all of 10 seconds to go to the IAEA site here and see the numbers quoted by the OP are correct:
The average total deposition determined at these locations for iodine-131 range from 0.2 to 25 Megabecquerel per square metre and for cesium-137 from 0.02-3.7 Megabecquerel per square metre. The highest values were found in a relatively small area in the Northwest from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. First assessment indicates that one of the IAEA operational criteria for evacuation is exceeded in Iitate village. We advised the counterpart to carefully assess the situation.
Why would you say that?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
My analysis of the situation was covered in a different post in this thread.
Something I think deserves more attention is the lock-in phenomenon: once you have an infrastructure around a certain technology, it's very difficult to change to something else, even if it's significantly better. Uranium vs. thorium is one such example...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I saw that too, but the wording is a little vague. It says two things: highest values in a small are in the northwest, and IAEA operational criteria for evacuation exceeded in Iitate. That could possibly mean that the highest value was found in Iitate, but that is not necessarily the case.
Why would they operate a reactor at lower capacity just because it's going to be shut down soon? You shut it down when it comes time to shut it down. It's not like they were decommissioning it because it could no longer generate at design capacity.
Moreover, the extensions are exactly what I'm talking about -- you have to replace the generating capacity before you can shut down old plants. If more newer plants were being built then the extensions would be unnecessary.
vlc 'mms://nhk-world.gekimedia.net/nhkw-highm'
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Don't you know the IAEA is in cahoots with the UN, trying to trick the US into abandoning nuclear power. The resulting chaos and starvation will then pave the way for UN troops to invade the US and establish COMMUNISM! Invest in canned food and ammunition NOW! ... or something.
Fukushima is a nuclear meltdown.
Chernobyl was essentially a dirty bomb.
Thank you very much for that :-)
From the Japanese government "not wanting images from American drones to get out", "is there a leak, isnt there a leak" etc... I think I'll just have to wait and see "what the truth is" once its all over and done with.
---
The world's largest concrete pump, deployed at the construction site of the U.S. government's $4.86 billion mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River Site, is being moved to Japan in a series of emergency measures to help stabilize the Fukushima reactors.
"Our understanding is, they are preparing to go to next phase and it will require a lot of concrete," Ashmore said, noting that the 70-meter pump can move 210 cubic yards of concrete per hour.
Putzmeister equipment was also used in the 1980s, when massive amounts of concrete were used to entomb the melted core of the reactor at Chernobyl.
"It will be too hot to come back," Ashmore said.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I follow your logic, however there is a slight wrinkle unaccounted for. Coal is ready to go out of the ground. You dig up a ton of coal and you have a ton of coal. Uranium doesn't work that way. The ore needs to be processed, refined, concentrated. One ton of uranium ore does not give you one ton of uranium.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The government has been reported that HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE WATER detected at the No. 2 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is due to a PARTIAL MELTDOWN OF FUEL RODS there, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Monday.
Emphasis added. Please don't panic. If you feel the highlighted words are over sensationalizing the situation then I suggest you address your concerns directly to the Japanese news media and the Japanese government.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
you know, when 200 square miles of Japan is contaminated for the next 200 years along with substantial groundwater
contamination, I hope that you'll still be here telling the rest of us how it isn't that bad.
Absolute statements are never true
Earlier this week I saw them first break the news that thousands of tons of highly radiactive water filled tunnels outside the reactors. This was the first report of massive loss of containment. They then cut to a clip from earlier in the day where the head of the Cabinet was saying there had been no substantial loss of containment.
So sure, the actual situation might be worse than what the Japanese government is saying but I think it is a safe bet that the situation isn't a lot better than what they are saying. Yet here on Slashdot it is considered sensationalist garbage.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
There are, but they only prevent exposure of alpha and beta particles. Caesium-137 which is the most dangerous emitter currently causing the problems is a gamma emitter against which you can't protect yourself. Fortunately it's no where near as prevalent in the area as other radioactive materials such as iodine (a beta emitter against which the plastic suits work splendidly).
Irrelevant. In the metric of deaths per TWh for which nuclear has 0.04 and coal has 161. If capacity increases this death RATE should remain constant. You get more energy out of uranium so you need less of it.
All is not rosy, though. Many people died or were displaced in the tsunami, and grief among the survivors is intense. Electrical power shortages are likely to be troublesome for years, hampering manufacturing. There are some concerns with export shipping. And there may be some power plants that need some maintenance from the Earthquake and tsunami. We will learn more over the coming months as further events unfold, but that's already enough major projects to get started on.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My analysis of the situation was covered in a different post [slashdot.org] in this thread.
That stuff is just speculative efficiency improvements. Sure, you take what you can get, but that's not always enough and you can't just count on a black swan event occurring without any assurance that it will.
Moreover, there are some things that you just can't make significantly more efficient. Good luck trying to improve the efficiency of a space heater. And it's not like demand for energy goes down when efficiency goes up anyway -- try making engines more efficient and see what happens. You might get some small reduction in demand, but really people just buy bigger cars and put more miles on them.
It's even possible in some cases for efficiency improvements to cause actual total energy consumption to go up. Suppose there are two ways of doing something, but one is labor intensive and the other is energy intensive. Hardly anyone uses the energy intensive method because it's very energy intensive and the labor intensive method is slightly cheaper. Now you improve the energy efficiency of the energy intensive method by some amount which is enough to make it cheaper than the labor intensive method. So you've got e.g. a 20% reduction in energy consumption per unit, but you're immediately doing 5000% more units because a relatively small efficiency improvement can cause a massive spike in demand when you cross the threshold of being cheaper than a substitute.
Something I think deserves more attention is the lock-in phenomenon: once you have an infrastructure around a certain technology, it's very difficult to change to something else, even if it's significantly better. Uranium vs. thorium is one such example...
It's definitely real, but it's not like it's just a cognitive bias that we need to get over. There are reasons for it. Making a car that runs on gasoline and is 20% more efficient than existing cars is way better than making a car that runs on methane or hydrogen and is 20% more efficient than existing cars. If existing cars ran on methane or hydrogen the reverse would be true.
The problem isn't just that people are accustomed to existing technologies (although that's part of it), the bigger issue is that conversions are extremely expensive. You have to retrofit fueling stations, mechanics have to buy new tools and go back to school, manufacturers have to retool their plants, we need a new distribution network, etc. So in order for a new, different technology to be adopted over improvements to the existing technology, it has to be not only better but a lot better -- enough to exceed the (substantial) conversion costs. And most aren't.
I don't think they really had a choice. The diesels were apparently in the same area as the generating plant itself so it looks to me that the main generators would have been knocked out by the tsunami as well.
Getting the power back on should have been a national priority. I don't understand why TEPCO wasn't on the phone with the SDF right away asking them to bring in generators by helicopter.
Coal particulates in exhaust from coal-fired power plants kills 13,200 people in the US alone every single year. That's a more useful statistic than simply mining, which as has been pointed out affects both coal and uranium.
At least three workers received severe burns after wading through irradiated water while trying to reconnect power to the cooling systems of reactor 2. They've been sent to the hospital.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Badly run uranium mines in third world countries are highly likely to kill people yet none of those have been accounted for. Your numbers are based on the wrong premise.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is for April Fools who do not see reactor number and post.
hilarious
IMO it really is the best source for finding out what is really going on.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Well I've truly appreciated your comments so far :-)
:-)
I think I will find myself mentioning this time in coming years, as my New Zealand definition of "partisan", where person X will scream and shout about their viewpoint, and person Y will (apparently, to be fair) go on about THEIR viewpoint, and its ALL based upon something that should be a FACT.
Either the thing IS or IS NOT leaking. Either it IS or it IS NOT a gigantic disaster. Either it IS or IS NOT a reason why we should NOT go Nuclear. Either it IS or IS NOT a reason TO GO Nuclear...
I was staggered by the first comments I saw online about the situation. And I'm talking mainly of Slashdot too, which is a knowledgeable crowd, I tried to avoid YouTube comments etc
Some were vehemently fighting that this showed Nuclear was SAFE.... "it didnt kill a billion people, its safe!", others, who I would include myself among, were of the opinion if this thing was doing A QUARTER of what was reported, it was terrifyingly bad.
I have not been keeping up with the cooling system woes, it seems absolutely, 100% out of control to a layman like myself, of absolute pulled-out-of-their-ass measures, of plugs not fitting, of using sea water (mental image of people dipping plastic buckets into the sea, passing them human-chain style to the site and emptying over glowing rods...), and of the government not wanting the truth to come out. Of International Atomic institutes saying that this disaster should be rated as higher on the "shit's outta control" scale, played down in an attempt at face saving.
I'll check the sources you mentioned periodically, but will look forward to when its all over, as those involved directly will. I have one or two friends in Japan, they are safe, I have friends and family involved with the recent New Zealand earthquakes, and they too are safe. I wish those battling this Nuclear disaster all the best, I wish I could help.
I believe if the facts could be stated clearly, then that would be a huge boon to everyone, regardless of your politics.
---
21 meters is about seven or eight stories.
I guess the only reasonable thing would have been to move the plants further away from the sea, but then you don't have the emergency source of cooling water.
Or maybe they could have put multiple rings of sea walls up? Say 4 stories tall and ten meters thick, way out beyond the perimeter, 6 stories tall and five meters wide at the top, in about two hundred meters, and then the 8 story wall, three meters wide, about another two hundred meters in, about two hundred meters from the perimeter of the actual plant compound?
Hind sight is twenty-twenty, as they say. (It isn't really all that accurate, just seems so, which is part of the problem here.) Now that we know how it failed, we could have stopped it. But it's too late.
So, do we do like Greenpeace and others say and shut down all the high-growth industry and let all the current people with power stay in power for ever?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
So, you admit you are still a student.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I'm not sure how material the distinction is. The difference in energy content is still measured in orders of magnitude.
Also, the mining thing is a bit of a red herring anyway. We have tons and tons of U-238 sitting in cooling pools next to older reactors and plutonium from decommissioned bombs that we need to get rid of. We can build new reactors that run on the waste from older reactors without having to dig anything new out of the ground.
The battery backup in commmercial nuclear plants does NOT run the large scale cooling equipment, that is what the multiple independent channels of diesel backup power (which failed along with offsite power) are for.
The battery backup is for instrumentation and control only, including computer monitoring systems, process control computers, some valves, etc. At a typical GE BWR (like fukushima, I was an operator at a newer GE BWR myself) the entire basement of the control/auxialiary building is filled with lead acid batteries (multiple THOUSANDS of car battery sized cells) and large UPS's (27 of them at the plant I worked at) for backup power to intrumentation and control only.
The RHR (recirc heat removal pumps, used for both emergency and normal shutdown cooling) are huge beasts, batteries could not possibly keep them running. They are 4160v multiple 1000 horsepower motors (can't remember exact size), no way lead acid batteries can do that (let alone the UPS's), simply no way. One easy way to vouch for this fact is that the UPS's only produced 270VAC power!
There is the HPCI and RCIC systems driven by decay heat steam from the reactor itself (via small to mid sized steam turbines), and in the fukushima situation these likely functioned until control power was lost (assuming piping to these stayed intact). After control power is lost, these systems shutdown or break, or overspeed, can't remember, probably varies with the individual plant. Either way, no control power, no HPCI or RCIC
The spent fuel pool is another matter entirely. It has a separate electric motor driven pumped cooling system, but once again, batteries do do not drive these, these pumps are something like multiple 100Hp 480v pumps, once again outside the range of what even a ton of lead acid batteries can manage for any significant length of time. (see paragraph about heat sink below too)
The loss of offsite power, followed by the loss of the diesel backup power is really the root failure, and you need BIG diesels (or gas turbines even) to manage this load. At the plant I worked at, there were 4-4+ MW diesels onsite for a single reactor. 2 at a minumum were needed to keep things cool if offsite power was lost (assuming no other failures). We had fuel for approximately 2 weeks of run time of each diesel within the control building (about 200000 gallons, with another million available in a non safety rated tank outside the buidling). 4Mw locomotive or marine sized diesels cannot be simply trucked or helicoptered in, these are BIG machines, not to mention replacement fuel (they're thirsty!). In my plant's case, each diesel was a 5000Hp, 16 cylinder twin turbocharged monster that was originally designed for use in diesel electric cargo ships!
Perhaps if they parked an aircraft carrier right on the coast and somehow ran cables that could have made up for the loss of power, or maybe a dozen or so diesel electric locomotives, a few large diesel electric container ships, etc. but nothing smaller than that could have handled this load (original design Nimitz class aircraft carriers have about 20Mw electrical generating capacity INCLUDING their 4 emergency diesel generators at 4160v 60Hz, and remember they need some of that to keep their own engine room and other ship functions operating in this sort of scenario). But even then you would need some hellish power cables and functioning switchgear and control power in the plant itself BEFORE you could consider turning on a big cooling pump
Oh yeah, you would also need a functioning "service water" system (part of the normal seawater cooling system for the plant, not the emergency seawater cooling that is being used, provides cooling water and makeup water to cooling towers at some plants), those pumps (assuming control power AND intact piping again), needs another megwatt or so to operate. If you don't have service water, you don't have a heat sink even if you get the cooling systems inside the plant building operating.
Most people have no idea of the scope of the pow
AFAIK they did, mobile generators arrived on the same day but that wasn't enough.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
In the metric of deaths per TWh for which nuclear has 0.04 and coal has 161.
Coal doesn't have a tendency to poison huge territories for millennia. Mining is dangerous, but the baby on the surface, above the mine, is not in any danger. We also have a good idea how to make mining safer (by using robots, for example, once we learn how to make them good enough.) A lot of coal is mined in open pits; this method is efficient and not very dangerous.
With nuclear energy you are one accident away from losing your country. Japan is a small country; we are yet to see the aftermath, but I wouldn't be surprised if agricultural activities, if not residence, will be prohibited in some most contaminated zones. They didn't have any land to spare to begin with, so this will hurt.
The chance of such an accident is small. The planet experienced only two large ones so far. But the damage from them {was,is} considerable, counting long term effects and denial of land and writeoffs of huge amounts of materials and resources. The question is simple - is the country willing to bet that nothing bad happens? Note that it's not enough to safeguard against technical flaws and personnel errors. You also need to safeguard against the nature, and against determined terrorists.
Certainly this depends on the size of the country. A large one, like the USA or USSR, can survive an accident with "acceptable losses." If need be, they can throw money, men and resources at the problem because they have all that. But we already see that Japan is overwhelmed by their accident. It certainly didn't help that they had the earthquake and tsunami at the same time. But the previous nuclear incident in Japan was also handled pretty bad, and there was no earthquake to hinder the efforts.
Extensions aren't necessarily motivated by capacity, there's a huge lobby interest in those things. Here in Germany the liberal-conservative govt extended the running time to keep the 7 oldest plants online even though we have enough power surplus to shut down 9 nuke plants before we need to import any power. Now they've suspended the extension as an election tactic. It backfired, they're getting sued for damages by one of the plant operators, their election results hit rock bottom (the conservatives lost control over a state they had been running for 60 years to a social democrat-green coalition where the greens are the majority party, the liberals dropped out of the parliaments completely) and now they're firing guys left and right.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Reactors scrammed automatically as planned when the quake hit, and the pumps were using a battery backup to hold them over until the diesel generators came online and took over.
The problem is that the tsunami took out the generators and the batteries ran dry. Meanwhile, all the other plants in the area were also scrammed and the transport and power infrastructure was trashed by the quake/tsunami combo, so hooking the pumps up to an outside power source wasn't an option.
It was more a case of Murphy's Law rolling a natural 20 than a case of outdated reactors or corruption.
Our country is as unlikely to support Nuclear Power as "Capital Punishment"
Nuclear power as capital punishment? That's a pretty harsh form of criminal justic - oh, "as unlikely". Oops.
In short, what the hell is going on?
In short: leaky reactor is leaking. In full: nobody seems sure just how much damage or how long term it'll be. Worst case scenario is probably permanent uninhabitability of the current 20-30km exclusion zone, potentially damage to Japanese and/or international fisheries as well (radioiodine readings in the seawater are high, though so far spot checks of fish are more reassuring).
But I've been pretty stunned by how epic bad the mass media coverage has been. Not just "blowing out of proportion" bad, but "getting basic radiation units confused, and reporting news from two days ago as if it's breaking now" bad. At the moment the best repository of technical information I think is the Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Thank you very much :-)
:-) ) flying through the air, and all you can do is lock your door and strap paper to your head? Imagine walking around like that, not leaving your house, never knowing if The Evil Cloud was about to hit you!
:-)
An English friends wife is Japanese, she had been very depressed about the news as it broke, I believe she had family members who were among those told to "stay indoors, keep a paper mask over your mouth" (the masks are somewhat common in Japan)... that is terrifying on a scale I could not comprehend. To be told that there MIGHT be an "invisible cloud of radioactive shit" (not literal shit
In New Zealand, we have not been concerned about it directly affecting us. I have however been keeping up with US news, with those on the West coast who believed it would get to them... and those who outright deny that "anything bad" is happening.
Its a crazy world, especially when we cannot even know what IS or IS NOT going on!
---
Thank you very much :-)
An English friends wife is Japanese, she had been very depressed about the news as it broke, I believe she had family members who were among those told to "stay indoors, keep a paper mask over your mouth" (the masks are somewhat common in Japan)... that is terrifying on a scale I could not comprehend. To be told that there MIGHT be an "invisible cloud of radioactive shit" (not literal shit :-) ) flying through the air, and all you can do is lock your door and strap paper to your head? Imagine walking around like that, not leaving your house, never knowing if The Evil Cloud was about to hit you!
In New Zealand, we have not been concerned about it directly affecting us. I have however been keeping up with US news, with those on the West coast who believed it would get to them... and those who outright deny that "anything bad" is happening.
Its a crazy world, especially when we cannot even know what IS or IS NOT going on! :-)
---
I'm not in a panic. I'm reporting what is being broadcast by the Japanese government and TEPCO on Japanese television.
I have a feeling the problem is that you don't like the news I'm reporting so you're attacking the messenger.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Coal, which is pretty much the only other viable alternative to nuclear energy at this point
Global nuclear power capacity is ~376GW, Global wind power capacity is ~200GW and growing at a much faster rate than nuclear. I've yet to hear about a catastrophic wind leak from a wind farm.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This tsunami was by no means medium-large. It far exceeded anything they could have been reasonably prepared for.
Other outcomes could have included less damage to the local infrastructure to make the loss of the generators a non-issue, not losing the generators at all, no tsunami or a tsunami small enough to have been within the generous design allowances, or no earthquake at all.
Eu Nuclear energy secretary or someone - right at the start of the incident, said something like 'the biggest disaster of the century' or something.
Eu is generally staffed with social democrat bureaucrats which tend to bluntly retort the uncomfortable truth regardless of how it disturbs any country, private interest or population. Im trusting what was said from that source - definitely not american government or hell - main stream media which was rather noticeably too quick to drop fukujima issue from the headlines.
For there to be 1000-3000 times normal amount of radiation in ocean water around the plant and fishing in a 40 km radius being banned, there has to be something that went really wrong.
And werent they pumping sea water to cool that plant ? The water to cool a nuclear plant has to stay in closed circulation. In this case, it was evaporating. Yet, we were assured that it would not be harmful. And this is just one of the shady explanations. you go figure the rest.
Read radical news here
Excuse me but this is above any argument. Nuclear power, is like maintaining a glass full of nitroglicerin in your bathroom because it fulfills some of your crucial ass wiping needs - it may be the cheapest way to fulfill your needs, but, it is also a ticking time bomb :
A lot of nuclear reactors are dotted around the world. And this planet is a moving one - there are always constant earthquakes :
http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php
See. Its like a gamble. So far, we are alright because one of those quakes didnt chance up on a critical installation. This japan quake could have been much closer, and all of those 6 reactors could have been already totally shattered and we would be sucking iodine tablets right now.
Germany did right. At a time when the planet was showing rather increased activity, they shut down all of their 10+ reactors, around 30% or so of their power. They are going to replace nuclear power.
Indeed. It is the biggest folly of this civilization to rely on VERY dangerous, catastrophic things, because they are cheaper than alternatives. No - these are really dangerous - because ONE failure, may be enough to wreck our civilization and decimate populations. You go figure how the rest will come down with domino effect - it will come down, but the question is, how much it will. All depends on the level of the disaster happening on the next reactor. It may even be this one.
Read radical news here
They're not even originally a part of Russia
Hey, maybe he meant Kievan Rus'
Mining is dangerous, but the baby on the surface, above the mine, is not in any danger.
Except for all the emissions from coal plants (not just CO2, but cancirogens as well, including radioactive ones).
The difference between coal and nuclear is just as you say - in nuclear, it is largely contained in the plant. Every now and then accidents like this happen, and then everyone panics - but don't forget that a crapload of nasty stuff is dumped into atmosphere and spread around from coal plants in the normal course of operation. No-one freaks out about it because it doesn't happen all at once, but rather steadily. But it's actually worse for you in the end.
For the non-germans, it might be worth stating that Liberals around here are more of a rah-rah- free-market-rah-rah-cash-toÂ-our-corporate-overlords-now-party, more small-l libertarians. Just before the usual liberal bashing starts-... :P
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Mining deaths is a useful statistic also, because you need to mine much more coal for the same amount of energy (but then mining uranium is more dangerous?).
Anyway, this has all been counted many times, and the conclusion is inevitably that aggregate death toll from coal is much bigger.
No one knows for sure. A senior GE safety engineer suspected as much. No one has entered the drywells, but they have radiation readings in the 20-60 Sv/h range from there - basically instadeath levels... Either the drywell is full of vented crap, or the pressure vessel is indeed breached. I tend to believe the latter by now.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Devil's advocate: you need tens of millions of dollars of rail infrastructure in place to deliver coal to said power plants (I take it you've seen a coal train or two in your time). In some cases coal travels over the same lines as freight, but in many remote areas, that infrastructure had to be built out at the time of the plant's construction. A similar, expensive (refining) infrastructure exists for uranium.
moox. for a new generation.
Argh, this rumor needs to be put to rest! The generators arrived, but the fuel got contaminated by sea water from the Tsunami, which only allowed the generators to run for a few hours before they were eaten up by the saltwater.
moox. for a new generation.
HA! The IAEA has a reputation for fearmongering now? Jesus Christ, What do you actually need to acknowledge that the shit has hit the fan? God descending from heaven and telling you personally? Or rather Pluto ascending from Hades, I guess...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Chernobyl was more like a nuclear bomb than a dirty bomb, wouldn't you say?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The best guess of NE's seems to be that the radiation levels and the patters all point to at least one of the contentment vessels having been melted through.
The really interesting part of the linked article is the idea that when you are cooling the uranium that has melted through the steel and is now sitting on concrete is that the uranium can create a shell between it and the water and the uranium can melt the concrete which would then cause an insulation layer to form between the uranium and the water.
The article implies that we should know by the end of May if this has happened or not. This is like watching a car crash with time stop technology, and no way to communicate with the people in the crash. Just awful.
By the way, to recap, an earthquake hit closer to shore than anyone ever expected, so the force of the quake was greater than anticipated, the tsunami was larger than they thought could happen, and things are failing more or less as designed, we are now at about the end what is known, and what happens from here on out is what most plants in the US will need to start planning for, as a worst case scenario, whatever that may be.
Work bio at MMWD
Except the worlds largest sources of uranium aren't in third world countries, and the coal numbers above for coal can be separated to include US only. Oh Look, it's 15 deaths/TWh just in the US alone 3 orders of magnitude higher than world wide nuclear.
There's a lot of negative things to be said about nuclear power, but in terms of human death coal is orders of magnitude worse regardless of how you neysayers try to skew the statistics.
Good luck trying to improve the efficiency of a space heater.
That is completely trivial. It's called a heat pump. Direct electric heating is almost always stupid.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
But if the plant had continued running would there have been power to run the cooling system?
No. The generators are linked to the grid. The reactor was not built to work as an "island" power system.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
In terms of long term destruction of land, what part of you get more energy out of uranium than coal for equivalent weight do you not get?
Chernobyl is the only area on the planet currently destroyed by a nuclear accident and the exclusion zone is 15km radius around the site, Fukushima is not yet an unlivable wasteland and probably won't become one. Yet you could replace 10 coal mines with 1 uranium mine, a statistic which is still still massively in favour of nuclear when considering longterm land destruction.
Chernobyl was more like a nuclear bomb than a dirty bomb, wouldn't you say?
No, dirty bomb is the correct description for Cherobyl. A dirty bomb simply blows up radioactive material, thus distributing it widely. A nuclear bomb produces vast amounts of energy, translated into heat and a physical shockwave by initiating fission in the nuclear material.
this was the fifth largest earthquake to be recorded in modern history
This is true, the magnitude being 9.0 at the epicenter site.
However, the magnitude at the Fukushima plant was between 6 and 7. Pretty high, still. But not 9 as a lot of people like to mention. (Was 5 in Tokyo).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
NOT.
Privacy is terrorism.
Yet no one can explain to me why there isn't a failsafe. Why don't they fail in a safer manner? They fail in a state that directly leads to a meltdown with a single diesel generator backup system. But while failing (and before meltdown) it generates enough heat to run a pump to circulate the coolant. So why don't they add in some extra backups? Either a smaller generator that can generate local electricity, or a direct mechanical pump.
But no, if the power from the grid is down and the generator doesn't work, then there is a meltdown, every time. It's not just an unfortunate accident. It's an inherently unsafe design where the engineers declare that it's good enough for nuclear safety when it's no better than the setup at my NOC where I'm responsible for nothing other than a few data connections and some servers.
Learn to love Alaska
If the reactors kept running, they would have had no trouble keeping themselves cool just as they were before the Quake. In other words, business would have continued as normal.
The generators of almost all large power stations shut down if they lose connection to the grid. Typically, only smaller power stations can run their own power "island".
You can argue that the power stations should have been built to run in island mode, but there are a lot of other things which are done better on more modern reactor designs.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
And they were released from said hospital last week already... funny that this bit wasn't mentioned in the US media.
On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is suggesting going all coal power instead, apart from you.
Nuclear power does provide good baseline power, it doesn't cause huge numbers of deaths, in spite of several serious accidents, but it is very expensive and it does cause some deaths and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Fukushima still has the potential for serious pollution of the surrounding land, and we should not downplay the situation there. Here is a good summary of the situation from a guy who handled recovery at TMI:
http://www.fairewinds.com/updates
Given the lax regulatory environment in some countries which have a lot of nuclear plants (the US, China and former USSR), ageing nuclear power plants are at serious risk of problems and many have had their lifetimes extended past their intended operating lifespan (as Fukushima did). There are plants in the US for example which have had warnings of serious failures in safety for decades, and *nothing* has been done about it. Here is one example:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/28/us-entergy-indianpoint-idUKTRE72R60W20110328
This is a serious concern, which could perhaps be alleviated by building more modern plants, but there are other concerns with nuclear power which I believe should be addressed first. For a start, the astronomical costs of decommissioning, fuel storage, and accident clean-up (which are currently borne by governments, not the nuclear industry), mean that fission is not really economically viable IMHO. That doesn't mean it warrants scare-mongering about fallout or banning all nuclear plants when we don't have alternatives, but we should be frank and open about the dangers and costs involved rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet. Opponents of nuclear power are not always irrational fear-mongers.
If we have no alternatives right now, we might need to keep these old fission plants running, but we should be clear about the dangers, and urgently exploring alternative sources of power (fusion, hydro etc), not trying to cheerlead for a nuclear industry which does not have our best interests at heart, has a focus on profit above safety, and depends on government largesse to deal with its problems of waste storage and decommissioning. There will be serious economic consequences from Fukushima for hundreds of years for Japan and further earthquakes there make it questionable whether you can safely site nuclear plants in the country.
Decommissioning costs for Sizewell A for example (2 reactors, which shut down normally), are so far £1.2 billion, and are ongoing, while build cost was £65 million and decommissioning was first estimated at £500m but has since ballooned in cost. It recently narrowly avoided meltdown in the spent fuel ponds due to an unobserved leak, which thankfully was found in time by chance (a contractor doing his laundry). That would have been very expensive to clean up and could have created something similar to Fukushima (on a smaller scale). Sellafield (another plant in the UK) has estimated cleanup costs of £31.5 billion. Those
On the other hand, we've had about 63 deaths occurring directly from nuclear incidents since nuclear power started. Now, while others have obviously had larger cancer risks and such resulting in death, but it is nearly impossible to be 100% certain about how many of those have occurred.
As you obviously know from the caveats you include after this statistic, the deaths from Chernobyl are in the thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, which you discount because 'it's impossible to be 100% certain'. So why do you repeat this misleading figure of 63? Like the climate change debate, debate on nuclear power has been poisoned by both sides attempting to distort the statistics. You're not going to persuade anyone by producing obviously cooked statistics or attacking straw men - no one is suggesting going all coal power instead, apart from you.
Nuclear (fission) is not the safest type of power we have at the moment, for that, you'd have to look at solar or wind, fusion or perhaps hydro (though globally there have been some accidents with that). Those alternatives have not been fully explored yet, and perhaps we should spend more money on exploring other options than building new nuclear plants? Thermal solar for example could provide good baseline power on a large enough scale, with zero risk of pollution or serious accidents.
Nuclear power does provide good baseline power, it doesn't cause huge numbers of deaths, in spite of several serious accidents, but it is very expensive and it does cause some deaths and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Fukushima still has the potential for serious pollution of the surrounding land, and we should not downplay the situation there. Here is a good summary of the situation from a guy who handled recovery at TMI:
http://www.fairewinds.com/updates
Given the lax regulatory environment in some countries which have a lot of nuclear plants (the US, China and former USSR), ageing nuclear power plants are at serious risk of problems and many have had their lifetimes extended past their intended operating lifespan (as Fukushima did). There are plants in the US for example which have had warnings of serious failures in safety for decades, and *nothing* has been done about it. Here is one example:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/03/28/us-entergy-indianpoint-idUKTRE72R60W20110328
This is a serious concern, which could perhaps be alleviated by building more modern plants, but there are other concerns with nuclear power which I believe should be addressed first. For a start, the astronomical costs of decommissioning, fuel storage, and accident clean-up (which are currently borne by governments, not the nuclear industry), mean that fission is not really economically viable IMHO. That doesn't mean it warrants scare-mongering about fallout or banning all nuclear plants when we don't have alternatives, but we should be frank and open about the dangers and costs involved rather than trying to sweep them under the carpet. Opponents of nuclear power are not always irrational fear-mongers.
If we have no alternatives right now, we might need to keep these old fission plants running, but we should be clear about the dangers, and urgently exploring alternative sources of power (fusion, hydro etc), not trying to cheerlead for a nuclear industry which does not have our best interests at heart, has a focus on profit above safety, and depends on government largesse to deal with its problems of waste storage and decommissioning. There will be serious economic consequences from Fukushima for hundreds of years for Japan and further earthquakes there make it questionable whether you can safely site nuclear plants in the country.
Decommissioning costs for Sizewell A for example (2 reactors, which shut down normally), are so far £1.2 billion, and are ongoing, while build cost
Just how many backup power sources do you need before you're happy? The primary power source is the reactor's own turbines. Then you have the local power grid. Then the diesel generators. Then eight hours of batteries. What else do you want? A team of oxen tied to a dynamo? A hundred workers hand cranking generators? Unicorn tears and bunny farts?
The bottom line is that this was an extraordinary incident that nobody could have planned for. They already had three redundant backups in place, and in the face of the biggest disaster in the history of the developed world, they all failed or weren't enough. Anything else they could have installed would have been knocked out by the tsunami too.
Or do you think that thirty foot walls of water that travel at freeway speeds are something you can just build infrastructure to withstand?
i've seen plains full of wind turbines in Austria and i must say it was a very sad view. Beautiful grassland, hills and mountains in the background - a place where you'd imagine to see stereotypical cows grazing, but everything is overshadowed by tidy rows of huge towers. Landscape is destroyed aesthetically and on top of that at any given time 10-20% of turbines were broken, which means they are very costly and labor intensive to maintain. And how many square kms of windfarms you need to match single nuclear facility?
Wind is unstable, it will never be used as a core source of energy, unless you build also expensive infrastructure to buffer tons of overproduced energy for the times when wind doesn't blow.
Another thing: wind turbines are reported to kill birds and bats even with the pressure waves they create, if the animal gets too close their lungs simply explode, no physical contact is required to maim.
Their anti-nuclear movement blocked several plants back in the 90s.
Yep, old reactors like this were to be shut down and replaced by newer, safer designs. All the activists did was keep old reactors going.
It's not just Japan, but the rest of the world. Old reactors are still running in America and Europe because the movements forced governments to not build any new reactors.
There's no such thing as irradiated helium, or at least, none that has a half-life time of over a second.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
Haha, yeah, and please put the most positive spin you can think of on whatever you read. If you read "It's a disaster" you must consider that the translation might be defective.
Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way
What I think you are saying is, well, maybe it is a disaster, but they had a hell of an excuse!
That (i suspect willfully) misses the points completely. The reactor was not supposed to fail. Yet it did, and the results are impressive, to say the least. That a catastrophe that manages to make a reactor fail also severely hinders you ability to deal with the situation is a new thing we have learned. And that in fact nobody has a good plan for a situation like this is also suddenly in plain sight, although is nothing that wasn't known before.
Fukushima is a nuclear meltdown.
Chernobyl was essentially a dirty bomb.
These two things aren't mutually exclusive. Chernobyl was a meltdown too -- an uncontained one. Just what Fukushima appears to develop into. And Fukushima isn't a standard meltdown as foreseen in the reactor manufacturer's books. If this continues, then Fukushima is a time-dilated dirty bomb, And the severity of the event relative to Chernobyl essentially depennds on "dirtyness" property, not on the "bomb" property.
You're not asking, but I'll tell you.
I lived through the Kobe earthquake. I was out on the edge, and I had to work, no time to go in to try to help clean up. I know how long the cleanup took, I know about the traffic getting in and out, I know about railroads that had to be cleaned up and inspected, I know about whole city blocks that were flattened, if not by the quake, then by the fires that came later. My wife and I were going to meet in Sannomiya that morning, and by the time we had planned to meet, the (huge) department store we had planned to meet at was rubble on the ground. All five stories of it, and most of the block it was on and the blocks around it.
The quake up north was two orders of magnitude worse and followed by tsunami. We were spared the tsunami down here. But it was still two weeks before people could even begin to move in and out of Kobe and several other cities around here. A trip that normally takes less than an hour by car during those two week took at least seven hours, even for emergency and relief vehicles.
You can be disgusted with it all if you want to.
Perhaps I'm feeling guilty because I have the time, but I don't have the train fare to get up there to help this time. Maybe that's why I'm willing to cut the TEPCO employees and management some slack. But they are working in very difficult conditions.
I have a suggestion. If you want so much to help out, call your old lab up and see if they can arrange a shipment of dosimeters, which you can volunteer to pay for. I can guarantee they'll need them, if you can figure out a way to get them there.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The community and future communities have and will pay the bill for any accidents and waste in money and natural environment. Companies divert responsibility, governments depend on the community.
Besides, you completely disregard the casualties of nuclear waste, the enormous problems storing nuclear waste (hello Germany) and not to mention the cost of nuclear facilities, which is far beyond breaking even. A nuclear facility is proven to be a terrible investment and an economically bad choice. Say, let's not make nuclear power the only solution and final consequence.
Any thoughts on how this will affect the fisheries of the Northern Pacific and Bering Sea, since the current flows directly past the plant and will pick up all 200K gallons a day they are leaking?
Yea, and why do you suppose Chernobyl exploded? Because the meltdown caused a steam explosion.
The same (or worse) could happen at Fukushima.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I would like you to back up that statement. They don't even KNOW if any radioactive material has escaped the concrete containment, so I find it damned difficult to believe anyone could know anything about how much ground is contaminated.
Besides that, 200 miles is a fucking ridiculous claim. Chernobyl literally BLEW UP and spewed chunks of uranium and it only has an exclusion zone that covers about 225 sq miles. What happened there =/= whats happening here.
So? Those are already built into the complex. That's a pretty standard feature now.
And that's not concrete. It's a special material that will melt when the core drops into it, and convection will circulate the fluid. It still needs (massive) external cooling to keep the whole mess tolerable, else it will just exacerbate the problem when it melts through the bottom of that containment pool.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
And as we know, all civilizations and empires rise and fall. What will happen when the current civilization goes down with existing nuclear power plants that require decades of cooling.
Even a regional conflict, causing interruptions in power and other supplies, will result in several nuclear power plants melting down, potentially affecting wide regions on earth.
Après nous le déluge in its worst form.
You have lots of sock puppets today?
Haha, no. Not even one. I am good old rmstar, and post only under that handle.
It remains a fact that they ignored crucial advice. Hadn't they ignored it, none of this nuclear disaster would be happening.
The solution is to fix the risk management issues. I'm surprised nobody talks about that, although it is the fat gorilla in the room. Once that is done, yeah, go ahead and build nuclear plants.
True, and irrelevant. It wasn't the quake itself that damaged the reactors. It was the five 20 foot high walls of water loaded with ships, bodies, cars, houses and other debris. It prevented them from getting fuel to the diesel generators operating the cooling pumps. It prevented them from getting portable generators hooked up (because the interconnect points were under water).
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This tsunami was by no means medium-large. It far exceeded anything they could have been reasonably prepared for.
If that's the case, then it was irresponsible to build nuclear reactors anywhere near the coastline in the first place.
I'm not sure how material the distinction is either. The point though is that you may need to dig up orders of magnitude more uranium ore to get the same energy as a ton of coal, thus exposing miners to orders of magnitude more danger. I don't know the numbers. Perhaps a ton of the lowest grade uranium ore has more energy than a ton of coal. Perhaps you need a thousand tons. Again, not arguing. Just want to make sure apples are being compared to apples.
Also, the stuff we have sitting in cooling pools was dug out of the ground at some point. Just because it is ready to go now doesn't mean that there aren't death statistics associated with it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
undoing bad mod.
Even if the code permits doing so as an AC (and I'm too lazy to check whether this is possible), it would be more appropriate to post this under your own ID.
Supply never exceeds demand for very long in an oil market. Where would the oil be stored?
You leave it in the ground. What supply and demand means in this context is the ability to supply. If you have more supply capability than demand requires you have to run your facilities below capacity which means they make less money and so you want to lower your price slightly to sell more of your product and increase your profit (obviously at some point this ceases to work which is when you go bust).
If anyone is reading this, and hasn't seen the 2010 film 'Into Eternity', they should seek it out, and watch it.
The film documents the nuclear waste storage facility under Finland that needs to last 100,000 years.
It seems easier to explain the perils of long term nuclear storage to children than adults.
Wrong. Chernobyl exploded because a sudden power spike in the void-coefficient positive RBMK reactor flashed some of the cooling water into steam, blowing the roof off the containment building.
After that, the graphite moderator rods caught fire and burned for a week, releasing massive amounts of radioactive smoke.
Fukushima has long since been shut down. It's still a complex and difficult disaster to manage to be sure, but there doesn't seem to be the kind of blow-the-top-off-and-start-a-fire energy available that Chernobyl had.
Right now it's a question about keeping spent fuel sufficiently cool, not about managing an active reactor.
Nuclear power has more than one thing going for it. In particular you are forgetting zero green house gas emissions from operation and the vast reserves of fuel available - assuming we build some breeder reactors (although these do have some security implications because they create and burn plutonium).
I'll agree that the downsides are pretty significant but at the moment it is the only current technology capable of meeting our power supply needs without _guaranteed_ huge environmental impact. So either we use it, develop something better (e.g. fusion), live with the environmental impact of coal or learn to like living in the dark.
Fix the management issues how? You are volunteering?
Do you want to see another disaster? One that could have been avoided with the appropriate management decisions? (... we can always say in hindsight.) One that is leaving behind a huge mess to clean up? That has also caused evacuations and has taken lives?
Here.
A little explanation. Check the links at the bottom of that page for more, because it wasn't just Sendai.
(I assume you will find the Japanese no problem to read?)
Oh. And if you are having a hard time finding the latest information on the nuclear power plants, look here. The IAEA also has some information, although you might find it rather cryptic.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
If it could not have been reasonably prepared for, then the reactors should have not been built there, as tsunamis larger than that are known to have hit the coast of Japan before.
Read the interview with a mother of one the Fukushima workers and then come back:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/03/mother-fukushima-worker/36240/
They will all die gruesome death, they even don't have enough dosimeters.
Maybe you run your coal plants to third-world standards in the US, wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. Around here, we filter out flyash, which, by the way, doesn'T contain more radioactivity than normal soil, but heck, you got your talking point out, so what. The flyash is subsequently used as filler for concrete and blacktop. When it test to elevated heavy metal levels, which can happen with some coal, it is used as filler in mining, way beyond the water table. Yep. Crapload of nasty stuff there.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Maybe it rained downwind? Or dust settled?
Take off every 'sig' !!
Sure, no one knows if any radioactive material has escaped the containment. All the iodine, cesium, technetium, plutonium, neutron-capture activated chlorine... heck they just rained from the sky in a freak coincidence. No, nothing to see here. The containment is fine. You guys are getting beyond pathetic by now.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
May I suggest you put filters in your coal power plants, as every civilized nation does? Oh, civilized, forgot about that , you are talking about that 3rd-world shithole USA....
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It is highly doubtful that you could keep a large generating plant like that on-line with the only load being that for running the plant itself. You would need to find a way to dissipate the excess power being generated.
No way is that his real name.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
It does not take hindsight to know that. For example, the Chicago building codes do not allow you to put emergency generators in the basement, even if you take all precautions against flooding and provide sump pumps powered by emergency power.
The tsunami walls protecting the power plant were known to be lower than the largest predicted tsunamis, but was considered an acceptable risk because the frequency of such occurrences was figured to be low enough to get away with. (That sort of reasoning assumes that you are doing a one-time calculation, ignoring that the rare occurrence will eventually happen, and discounts the cost of a failure in favor of the probabilities.)
Insightful my fat arse.
Here in Germany the power companies basically had a choice: either they shut down all their reactors by a set date or they transfer operational time between reactors so newer and safer ones can run longer, and older could be shut down sooner.
What did the power companies do? They transfered the operational times from new reactors to old ones since they were cheaper to operate, already written off decades ago and thus generated pure profits of about one million euros every operating day.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Also, the stuff we have sitting in cooling pools was dug out of the ground at some point. Just because it is ready to go now doesn't mean that there aren't death statistics associated with it.
Right, but the cost has already been paid. Building plants to use the fuel we already have won't cause additional mining deaths because it won't cause additional mining. We could build newer reactors, run them for their entire e.g. 50 year lifespan and still not have run out of the U-238 that we already have.
You have failed to improve the efficiency of a space heater. All you've done is add a second energy source. A heat pump needs a heat source. If you count the energy required to warm the heat source then the efficiency is the same: 100%. In some cases this can bring about a cost savings, because the heat source is provided by an energy source less expensive than electricity (e.g. the sun), but it isn't an efficiency improvement.
More significantly, in important cases there is no trivial heat source available. You usually want a heater because it's cold. But if everything is cold, where is your heat source? There is a reason most buildings in cold climates don't use heat pumps for heating.
Here in Germany the liberal-conservative govt extended the running time to keep the 7 oldest plants online even though we have enough power surplus to shut down 9 nuke plants before we need to import any power.
The idea that you have 9 plants worth of surplus capacity sounds extremely suspicious to me. My intuition is that you export the extra power to neighboring countries. Do they have enough enough capacity that you can shut down the plants? Just because you have enough for your own country doesn't mean you want to cause a regional shortage or instigate a diplomatic incident by cutting off electricity to neighboring countries that don't have alternative sources.
The reason that most buildings in cold climates don't use heat pumps is that other forms of heating are cheaper or that the investment does not pay off.
Even Greenland is implementing air-air heat pumps, and thermodynamically they would do much better by using sea water. In Sweden, they use "bergvärme" (drilling down ~100m to get to temperatures constantly above 0C). In Denmark direct electric heating is not legal as the primary heat source for a home (with some exceptions).
The amount of people living in climates colder than Greenland is insignificant, and the population density in such places is often low enough that they can get by entirely on cheap renewable energy anyway, so efficiency is not something worth worrying about.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I don't know how to fix the management issues. That does not in any way invalidate the point that there are management issues. If I knew how to fix them, I would try. One possible way might be to invite members of the local community to be present at the safety checks, and to be involved in safety policies.
I don't know any japanese. Thanks for the links anyway. I have a ticket for a (now canceled) flight to Sendai, I was supposed to go there tomorrow. I really hate what happened there and i have cried watching the news about the tsunami.
There is a lot that can be improved in industrial safety in general, and I think we should aim at it. One important difference is that the area around that refinery (i am guessing here, i couldn't read your links) will be safe in a couple of months, whereas the area around the F. plant will not be so for a very long time. Also, this thread is about the nuclear plant. I don't want to downplay the rest of the disaster.
I was rather curious on why this particular researcher was relevant as all of his thoughts seem to be nothing more than conjecture.
So you're saying what is currently happening is all that's important, and we need not worry about what might happen? Conjecture, the way you seem to be using the word, is the reason things like safety mechanisms are designed the way they are (or at all). This seems to be very educated conjecture, with knowledge of the structure of the reactor and the behavior of the materials involved.....
FYI most large, modern coal fired plants are built at the mine and transmission lines run to the load. Costs are lower but still in the 10s of millions.
Hasn't always been the case, so you do still see coal trains.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Of course you know that most of the radioisotopes/heavy metals stay in the bottom ash and no nation has found an economical way to capture the mercury from burning coal. Don't let that stop your talking points.
Treat bottom ash as low level radioactive waste and the coal industry becomes much less economical. Then again bottom ash is about equal to low grade uranium ore so it could be treated as a resource if we could get a more nuke plants running.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Assuming coal mining kills 5000 people a year and uranium mining kills as many people per ton
You're neglecting one small issue: both uranium ore and metallic uranium are incredibly toxic to humans and animals. Now, most of the uranium mining happens in third-world countries so we don't know the death rate, and the companies running the mines don't want anyone to find out, but it's generally reckoned to be fairly high.
Kyshtym
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Wrong. There are plenty of fuel reprocessing methods and breeder reactor designs that make spent fuel a non-issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
The "proliferation" concerns for any country that already has nuclear weapons is bunk. So what if we make a bit of plutonium reprocessing fuel? We already have enough to destroy the world many times over, and you're worried about us getting a few pounds more? Der...
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
If it did we would all be using it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's not about additional deaths, but about the total number of deaths caused to produce that kilowatt hour of electricity. You have to count it otherwise you are introducing a bias into the statistics. A death from mining is a death from mining. It doesn't matter if the fuel is used now or three hundred years from now.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Those aren't redundant backups. If the connection to the grid is lost, the turbines can't run without the load it supplies. The diesel generators are a redundant power source, except that as we saw here it's easy for them to be taken out by the same catastrophic event that also took out grid-supplied power. The batteries can only be used as a stopgap until one of the other power sources is restored, which as we discovered TEPCO wasn't competent enough to manage, and may not even have been possible once something catastrophic enough to destroy both generators and grid interconnects had happened.
That stuff is just speculative efficiency improvements. Sure, you take what you can get, but that's not always enough and you can't just count on a black swan event occurring without any assurance that it will.
Black Swans are unexpected because most aren't looking for them.
The irony of the present energy situation is that the established companies don't and can't invest in Research & Development, because if they made a breakthrough their cash cow (the hydrocarbon-based energy economy) would disappear.
How much does Intel invest in R&D? Apple? Microsoft? Energy companies only invest a tiny fraction of their profits in R&D (mostly focused on hydrocarbon-extraction), the rest gets distributed to shareholders.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
They KNOW radioactive material has escaped, but the question is how dense will the contamination be? If you spread it equally all around the world there might be one or two deaths. Compare this to a boiler room explosion at a steam plant that can and has killed way more than this before, using a technology we developed hundreds of years ago.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Cite please.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I will bet you that building code is an example of hindsight.
I will not do any research as to what happened before that code was written until we agree on a forfeit (preferably public and embarrassing) for the loser.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Go back and read the later articles, anyway.
Fair enough. Here are two articles from today's Japan Times Online
Tepco dumps concrete to plug radiation leak at No. 2
Sea contamination traced to cracked storage pit connected to reactor
Although the pit is small, it contains highly contaminated water with a radioactivity exceeding 1,000 millisieverts per hour that is leaking into the ocean from a 20-cm crack, Tepco said.
This number shows that the highly contaminated water apparently draining from the plant has spread.
Irradiated water swamps Tepco
Restarting cooling systems takes a back seat to storage, disposal
The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. have been struggling for three weeks to end the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear crisis but are being stymied by the need to remove massive amounts of highly radioactive water.
Radionuclide analysis of that water showed it contains not only volatile iodine-131 and cesium-134, but also the more stable lanthanum-140 and barium-140. All four substances are believed to have come from atomic fission, meaning "some part of the pressure vessel is probably damaged," Misawa said.
I believe these two articles are pretty much saying exactly what I reported and what I predicted. One person's stupid is another person's prescient.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The primary power source is the reactor's own turbines. Then you have the local power grid. Then the diesel generators. Then eight hours of batteries. What else do you want?
Oh, no. From my understanding, the turbines in the reactor supply zero energy to the plant. I've asked that question after this and was told that impression (given to my by a nuclear engineer at Comanche Peak nuclear power plant) was correct. The generators supply power too high to be used locally and require the plant be in proper operation for them to work (i.e. they are designed to be completely shut down when the plant isn't operating normally). And batteries are a temporary measure. Again, as I said, they have nothing any better than what I have in a NOC that's supporting nothing any more important than a few bits. They are a nuclear power plant and have no backup better than my NOC. And what's worse is all the people defending them as if that's sufficient.
Mains. Temporary batteries. Diesel generator. If those go down (and the batteries are temporary, so you only need the mains and generator to fail), you have a meltdown every time. And every place I've ever seen that considers itself a "real" NOC has all three of those already. For nothing other than a few bits of data. And you assert that wanting more than that is somehow an undue burden on a nuclear power plant in a seismically active tsunami zone.
Learn to love Alaska
This is the last measuring from TEPCO:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/nu/monitoring/11040205a.pdf
Radiation Dose measured at Monitoring Post of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (Sv/h)
Until the recovery of automatic transfer system of measurement data, data will be reported based on visual observation by regular patrol of monitoring posts.
Date of Measurement MP-1MP-2MP-3 MP-4MP-5 MP-6 MP-7 MP-8
2011/4/2 PM 18 56 61 62 130 200 370 280
2011/4/1 PM 19 59 69 68 150 210 390 300
Where in the fucking hell are the measures of deadly levels or radiation? Even at the main Building that does have the highest levels of radiation at 840 Sv/h, most people working there have not still reached the maximum limit of 250,000 Sv for workers in a emergency situation. This is bad, many heads at TEPCO should roll but people here shouldn't be parroting infotaiment reports.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
This tsunami was by no means medium-large. It far exceeded anything they could have been reasonably prepared for.
If that's the case, then it was irresponsible to build nuclear reactors anywhere near the coastline in the first place.
As irresponsible to build oil refineries, ports and cities around the same coastline.
That said, since they had previous studies calling for a improvement in the seawalls, if they have done it instead of losing the 80% of company's value they would be talking about the impressive returns of that 100 million dollars seawall.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Nuclear Ginza [google.com] is a documentary describing how the Japanese nuclear industry kills people annually as well. They actually hire homeless people off the streets, send them into reactor cores to perform yearly maintenance, and then let them die in obscurity, offering hush money or threatening them with Yakuza violence if they complain too loudly when their teeth start falling out. That's how humans handle the responsibility of nuclear safety.
Sorry, but while I agree that this would be an outrageous scenario that would demand immediate and drastic action, it also falls into the category of "extraordinary claims" that require "extraordinary proof." An amateur documentary on Google Video isn't sufficient.
Except that reprocessing is currently more expensive than uranium mining and breeder reactors are very difficult to build and maintain. If operators would be forced to reprocess fuel and to actually pay for complete dismantling of old reactors, nuclear power would be suddenly way more expensive than solar power.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Because the reactors successfully shut down (stopped reacting) before the tsunami even got there. The tsunami interrupted the post shutdown cooling because it was a power driven (not a passive) cooling system.
Sorry -- just can't crank up the dudgeon until I hear this from multiple credible sources. Too much competition for my outrage these days.
I can find some pretty damned goofy stuff from "professional journalism photographers" on YouTube, any day of the week. And we all know how credible eyewitness testimony is.
This isn't wikipedia.
This from the same idiot that demanded a citation earlier.
It recently narrowly avoided meltdown in the spent fuel ponds due to an unobserved leak, ...
They don't have an automatic water level monitor on the spent fuel ponds to sound an alarm?! That's irresponsible to me.
I never said the Fukushima plant problem was the earthquake itself.
This is merely of correction of the data posted here and there about the magnitude.
The tsunami itself - the main cause of the plant problems - is an indirect cause of the earthquake located in the sea bed, near the epicenter.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Nonsense.
What is usually going on in cases like this, (and they are far more frequent that you'd suspect) is that you're not going to look simply because you don't want to feel 'wrong' about something. In your mind, you honestly believe that if you don't see it, then you can maintain your illusion of reality. Most adults reach the emotional maturity of a five to eight year-old and then stop developing, and this is why such childish systems of management are so common among adults. This is not your fault. Society does this to you by design to keep you weak and ignorant.
It is the result of growing up in a hyper-competitive culture, in a school system which pits children against one another, causing them to build emotional and mental shields for protection.
I've done the work to move beyond that. As a result, I don't care about winning arguments. I care about knowing reality and sharing that knowledge with others who don't have it, such as yourself. I don't want your outrage and I certainly don't mind what you go away thinking.
But until you explore the world and the (easily) available material on a subject, it means your opinions on that subject are worth exactly nothing.
Those who profess wisdom while refusing to explore the world are insignificant. This is a sad truth. You can fix it, but it is a rare, rare thing when people actually do.
It takes a monumental amount of work to take down those walls and build new systems of spiritual management which will then allow the processing of actual knowledge.
I could be wrong, of course, but I'm probably not. In any case, please feel free to ignore and forget the preceding. This is for the benefit of others reading here as much as for your own.
Good luck.
That'll happen right around the same time your ass is a valid source of information.
Yep, those plants basically were nothing but exportable over-capacity. However, I haven't heard anything about shortages anywhere in Europe since we shut them down, so basically everyone was able to increase their output to cope.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
That's a longtime to wait to go home...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Obviously reading skills aren't the high point of your life either. Otherwise you'd know I wasn't talking about the iaea.
Om, nomnomnom...
Really? I think that's you not understanding the situation. They know that some radioactive isotopes are loose outside the building. They also know that they're in such small concentrations that they would have come from the steam they vented while trying to prevent a meltdown previously.
They DO have a full fledged meltdown happening. IE, the fuel rods are now a pile of goo on the floor. However they don't know if they've left the concrete or not, and won't even be able to guess at it until those robots from the US get there, as radiation levels/isotopes inside the building, as far as they can currently get in to detect, won't change much whether the fuel has eaten through the floor or not. They're readings have spiked high enough that they know for sure that the fuel has melted its way through the first metal containment vessel. Beyond that they haven't got a clue. No one does.
Get your head out of your ass and pay attention sometime. You might learn something.
Sorry, but that is not reality. We wish it were so, the movies we see tell is it's that way, but the real world is different.
That's what bugs me about ...
Well, let me tell you what my wife pointed out to me in the newspaper yesterday.
There are breakwaters and bulkheads in the ocean around most of Japan, specifically to take the force out of tsunami. Some are relatively small, giant toy jacks one or two meters across. Others are huge blocks, in the range of ten meters tall.
If you're thinking of an American football gridiron, you're thinking ten long paces is not so big, but stand that on end and it's about three and a half stories up.
So we have areas with these ten meter breakwater blocks sunk under the surface and lined up in dashed walls, to slow tsunami down. This tsunami bowled a bunch of those walls over. Does that give you a picture of the scale of things yet?
There are several towns that have been practically wiped off the face of the earth. I'm not sure how it turned out, but there were some towns that lost their town halls and the buildings with the backup records and enough of the people that they were/are worried whether they would even even know who was missing. That's part of the reason they have more than a thousand bodies that they can't identify.
The generators they needed were too heavy to lift in by the helicopters that were available. They eventually got the right generators in, but they had to find the equipment to move them with. If you're looking for heavy equipment after a quake like that, you're looking at unburying cranes and stuff from the wreckage, cleaning it up, inspecting it, and standing it back up before you can use it, or at having it trucked in from a hundred kilometers away, over roads that, in the damaged zones, are blocked by landslides (mountainslides), holes, and in some cases fault seams ripped a meter or more wide/deep into the earth.
Does that help you understand what is going on here? the logistics of what you're demanding that management must be able to have done?
About the only thing that they could have done ten years ago to start preparing for this kind of tsunami would have been to have started rebuilding and de-comissioning the reactors, using designs that the anti-nuclear lobby has been adamant in preventing them from testing. Or tell everyone to move out of Tokyo and de-commisioning the reactors without replacing them. (And what do they do for power where they move?)
Actually, moving people out of Tokyo is a great idea, but if you think moving trucks over broken roads is hard, try getting bosses of IT start-ups who are desparate for customers to leave the best market they know of. This kind of politicis is intractable, without some sort of evidence. Well, we have the evidence now, and it's still not going to happen in just a few months. And there's going to be a lot of what will just be shifting the problem, companies moving to Osaka or Kyoto or other population centers instead of realizing that they can telecommute from places like the middle of Tottori or Awaji Island.
Woops. What's going to happen to Awaji if we have a tsunami of this scale hit this area?
Actually, they do have a lot of the processes going to get people and companies to move out of Tokyo, and they do have a lot of the processes going to change over to so-called renewable sources of energy, but it takes time, and they have to keep fighting with social and economic pressures from companies that are being squeezed by the economy and trying desparately to make enough money to make payroll.
I'm not even scratching the surface of the problems that you want management to solve with a snap of their fingers.
We suppose that God could do that, but even God apparently does not. Usually. (Or you could say that this tsunami was God trying to get us to get a move on it, if you are inclined to think that way.)
So, do you still think it's worth making yourself angry about all this?
I think there are better ways to help solve the problems.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
For what it's worth, and maybe you were aware of it already, but I was talking to a guy at church yesterday who is a member of the Japanese SDF, but was not one of those who went up to the Tohoko area to help out.
We were talking about how, if I wanted to go up to help, I'd have to pack in and pack out like a scout going on a long-term campout. Bedding, tent, clothes, food, being ready to hike from the nearest operating train station to wherever you're going to try to help. Plans and contacts, if you expect to be able to do any good.
The SDF here sent more than half their staff, and the rest want to go, but somebody has to stay behind to mind the base. It looks like it will be a month or so before they can start scheduling shifts in and out, because of the time it takes to figure out where to help and how once you get in there. Also, manpower seems to be less of a problem than supplies and logistics for the time being.
They do have need of certain kinds of specialists. If you were one of those, that would be especialy frustrating to have your flight cancelled.
If you get up there and need help with the Japanese, I can try to help by e-mail.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Part of the problem was multiple sources of information. A lot of that information was coming from people who knew abou things that could go wrong, and were willing to guess about, what was happening before we had enough facts to know which of the scenarios were close to what was really happening in there.
And, as far as wild optimism goes, a lot of the "facts" circulating were (and are still) "wildly" pessimistic. Doomsday scenarios that seem to assume these reactors were the same type as the one at Chernobyl, and tirades about management that seem to assume that the same extremism is inducing coverups. Sometimes it's fallen walls and such keeping you from getting to information, not incompetent management.
They put some temporary measures in place on agricultural products that were a wee bit early. Because of the leak, some of those measures will end up being necessary. Later.
The leak was theoretical. Now it is known to be real. But it still isn't poisoning the entire food chain for the whole hemisphere like certain alarmists are saying.
The radiation level in the ocean is going to be a local problem, and they are struggling to fix it and keep it as local as possible.
They need more radiation hardened robots capable of working submersed. You have any of those? Or concrete that hardens in moving water tainted with radioactive acid? And they need tracers to find other possible leaks, but I think they have those.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Get your professor to get you in contact with someone who can talk to the people in charge up there, to see if they could use your software, or to see if they could let you go up to take samples and analyze it.
Those guys are busy, of course, so it may take a while to get a moment with someone who can make that kind of decision, but it may be worth the effort if it can help them shorten their analysis turn-around time.
Remember, though, that if they let you go in, you're likely to need to carry a backpack with extra food and clothes and maybe even sleeping bag and tent. And you'll need to pack your tools in, as much as possible. They need all the supplies they can get, so people who go in to help need to be as prepared to take care of themselves.
Oh, good hiking boots, too, because there will be a lot of places you won't be able to get a car or bicycle through, and the trains probably aren't going to be able to take you all the way in.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
There were and are a whole lot of people guessing. That's a big part of the problem here, too many people guessing based on not enough information.
Yeah, other people were worried about cracks and leaks. However, most of the worriers were also screaming about how this was going to be worse than Chernobyl, a comparison that only gets in the way.
You do understand why that comparison just gets in the way?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
"Star Wreck: in the Pirkining" Russian built Star Ships with reduced warp drive abilities. :) Chernobyl tech applied to starships. ;)
I need to say seriously That I apologize for my past, present, and future jokes. My condolences to people suffering because of these conditions and disasters that had friends or/and family members die or get cancer for these disasters.
Thanks for your reply. I suppose since this is not proven, that is why I have not seen it on any of the news shows I watch/read (not that "not knowing for sure" has evr stopped reporting before).
Member of American Sarcasm Society - Motto: "Like we need your help!"
"My" coal power plants? I'm not from the US. Where I live we rely on nuclear power more than the US does (26% versus 20%).