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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
"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 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.