Slashdot Mirror
Fukushima: What Happened and What Needs To Be Done
IndigoDarkwolf writes "The sometimes confused media coverage around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant left me wanting for a good summary. Apparently the BBC felt the same way, and now delivers an overview starting from the earthquake and concluding with the current state of the troubled reactors."
The Japan Times reports:
The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan released a preliminary calculation Monday saying that the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant had been releasing up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive materials per hour at some point after a massive quake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan on March 11.
The disclosure prompted the government to consider raising the accident's severity level to 7, the worst on an international scale, from the current 5, government sources said. The level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale has only been applied to the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe.
If the levels they are reporting are correct then every hour (for a few hours) Fukushima was releasing roughly 0.1% of the total release from Chernobyl. If those levels were maintained for a day (which they were not), that would be almost 2% of Chernobyl per day.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The waste is the biggest problem?
1. No civilian spent fuel was ever accidentally or on purpose released into the environment, even though transportation of it is common. Soviet military waste was sometimes dumped directly into rivers, but this is really unrelated to nuclear power.
2. The only person that ever died from civilian spent fuel was a guy that got ran over by a train during an anti-nuclear protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_S%C3%A9bastien_Briat
3. If someone used only nuclear electricity (average U.S. electricity consumption) from present reactor technology for their entire life, he would generate about a soda can of waste.
4. Vitrified nuclear waste is completely insoluble in water. It's rather hard to spread it over a large area. Even if it was just dumped into the ocean, there would be no harm to humans - the waste would bury itself in the seabed. We are not using this solution because Greenpeace and other assorted clowns do not understand anything about marine biology or oceanography. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/seabed/seabed.htm
5. Even if the waste does somehow escape into the environment, it is very easy to detect this. Radiation detectors are very cheap and compact compared to the laboratory setups needed to analyze chemical pollution - so cheap and compact that every radiation worker has their own detector that keeps track of their exposure. This fact facilitates cleanup operations.
I can understand the uneasy feelings, but let's have some perspective. This isn't even as bad as the hazardous chemical waste we already have to deal with (e.g. from semiconductor production, mining and metallurgy), which unlike nuclear waste will remain toxic forever.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I agree with most of your first three paragraphs, but the second two dealing with the UAV photos I have to rebut.
Note the object sitting on both pipes. ... guess it's width. Now look at he edge of the item. Care to guess how thick it is? ... Under the dust layer it is clearly Yellow. Care to guess what it is and where it came from?
You're implying that it's part of the containment vessel. Let's look at a specific picture for comparison: http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/pict10.jpg
My origin is at the upper left. The object you're describing is at X:20%, Y60%. Note the thickness of the cut off pipe at X:70%, Y:30%. This is thin walled stuff. In other photos you can see the twin pipes are at the same level as that raised section, and similarly supported. The containment vessel is very thick and heavy. If that was the dome or another section of the containment flung from #3, it would have destroyed or at least damaged the pipe. My analysis: It's just a chunk of wall, similar to the chunks laying in front of #4.
... look next to the reactor 3 building where the pile of plumbing is lying next to the building. All that plumbing is uniform is size. I'm thinking that is scattered fuel rods from the cooling pond.
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp/pict6.jpg - Are you referring to the stuff to the lower-left of the steam, and similar-sized stuff strewn across the top of the turbine hall? I think it's too big to be fuel rods, and too small and mangled to be fuel assemblies. It looks like structural steel from the building.
Lastly, if the stuff flung up in the explosion was fuel rods or containment chunks, we'd be seeing much higher radiation levels in the vicinity of the #3 building. Instead the high levels are centered around #2, where there *was* an explosion inside containment that caused a breach.