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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."
One minute every channel has the exact same thing, then a few weeks later you go "Wait a minute..." and its like it never happened or it would seem so. Good ol'BBC gets it though.
Japanese families are more nuclear than American families.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Pity that the nuclear problems seemed to overshadow all the vastly more important and tragic aspects of the quake and tsunami.
It's a generalization, but I can summarize what needs to happen in three words: "Evacuate, contain, bury."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The reactors did not blow up. The reactor vessel is located inside of a concrete containment structure, which is inside of another building. The explosions happened in the outermost building due to vented hydrogen.
There was a massive earthquake followed by an equally massive tsunami that buried the plant under 10 feet of water. That's what happened.
Earthquakes of that magnitude are rare. There have only been 6 in the world since 1900, and none of those were in Japan.
http://nei.org/newsandevents/information-on-the-japanese-earthquake-and-reactors-in-that-region/ they have good daily updates. at the bottom of the current days update there is a link to the archives
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 "building" that blew off is just a light screen around the reactor building itself. It's very light weight panels hung on an equally light frame, designed to screen the reactor building from view. Nothing else. A relatively small explosoin would blow the panels off. They did not "prevent" the second explosion; it was a calculated risk necessitated by a release of steam and hydrogen from the overheated core.
If you've been following the IAEA blog it's serious but not out of control.
The amount of destruction from those explosions was tremendous.
What does that mean? What got damaged? Looks to me like they were right, the damage was to stuff outside the reactor which was mostly superficial.
As an armchair nuclear plant operator, it sure seems like they have done a very poor job trying to reign in control of the situation.
Suppose you were in charge. How would you get power for cooling reactors and for the hydrogen discharge systems on these reactors? I don't see you doing any better, because the problem wasn't them not doing a poor job, but being unable to do what needed to be done for several days after the tsunami.
I see your post as an example of confirmation bias. You were looking for them to dissemble or show incompetence, and you saw what you wanted to see.
This comparison is misleading, even if the raw amounts of radiation are comparable. The radioactive materials released from Fukushima Daiichi when those readings were taken have a half-life of minutes and don't pose a health hazard outside of the really close vicinity. The materials released from Chernobyl were much more dangerous, as they have a half-life of a couple hundred years, and only negligible amounts of those have been released from Fukushima.
Bottom line: this accident is not at all like Chernobyl, even though the "OMG RADIATION SPEWING FROM REACTORS!!!!!!" media likes to think so.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
Slashdot will be swamped with nuclear power industry apologists pretending "Not much and nothing" happened. Dissent will be modded to oblivion.
Reality will continue to disagree.
Then, as per Slashdot's usual and customary behavior, nuclear power haters will chime in with some hyperbolic argument in the opposite direction, citing such illustrious sources as YouTube, Wikipedia and the Daily Mail.
Meanwhile, someone will opine that it's George W. Bush's fault (or Dick Cheney, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or the Easter Bunny). Several hundred posts will go back and forth covering exactly the same arguments and counterarguments as the last 200 times these subjects were brought up.
The minuscule but apparently earth shattering differences between Democrats and Republicans will be brought up again. Op Cit.
An obscure component manufacturer somewhere in the Pacific Rim announces a major order for some bleeding-edge piece of technology that could conceivably become part of an expensive, digital-lifestyle-enhancing nerd toy.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Day 1 - pro-nuclear activists claim there's nothing wrong, there's no danger, containment is fine, no radiation will leak
Day 2 - pro-nuclear activists claim there's nothing wrong, there's no danger, containment is fine, radiation leaks are minor
Day 3 - pro-nuclear activists claim there's nothing wrong, there's no danger, containment breach hardly matters
Day 4 - pro-nuclear activists claim there's nothing wrong, there's minimal danger
...
Day N - pro-nuclear activists claim nobody could have predicted a Tsunami on the Japanese coastline
I think the biggest mistake in the handling of the disaster was to leave the plant in the hands of the company. While it might be true that they know their plant best, once an incident like this happens, one should immediately bring the best people in the world or maybe Japan to handle the disaster. These should have basically unlimited funds and resources which in the end would probably be paid by the company. The reactor is or can affect a huge area, and it shouldn't just being the hands of the power company to fix it. These people could drop by with good radiation suits and possibly a portable diesel generator. Basically the nuclear fire brigade made up of specially trained Feynmans and McGyvers.
We all use electricity. And we're using more and more of it as time goes on. Coal releases tons of radiation and kills miners as well as being horribly dirty (there is no such thing as clean coal). We're running out of oil and it pollutes. Wind isn't always blowing or in the right place, sun isn't always shining or in the right place, water isn't always available for dams or in the right place and kills huge aquatic populations, not all of the population lives where tidal generators are a possibility... we're running out of options if we want electricity. Nuclear is great for providing a base generating capability, and there's not a whole lot else right now that's feasible or economical, especially considering the amount of nuclear waste we're planning on storing under a rock in Nevada.
Hell, the Fukushima reactor mostly survived the 4th largest earthquake since 1900. And that's a 40 year old design. We're talking the same year that the Intel 4004 was released. That's a hell of a testament to the design of modern nuclear power plants that are more efficient and even safer.
Yes, shit happens. Fukushima failing is horrible. But it's like being afraid of flying when you're perfectly ok with riding your bike, even though you're much more likely to die.
It's not "nuclear apologists". It's realists who want to maintain our standard of life, and understand what acceptable risks are. Life is all about risk management, and flipping out about the word "nuclear" is very poor risk management.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
It's nice that the Beeb has released this fairly calm and unbiased recap, but less sensationalistic coverage from the start would have been a whole lot nicer.
I've been watching the coverage of this story on a bunch of different sites for the past few weeks, and this is the best I've found - the MIT nuclear science and engineering site. Well written factual articles about the situation, almost entirely devoid of speculation and fearmongering, along with background articles on stuff like how toxic Plutonium is, how radiation doses are measured, etc.
Unfortunately Ivo Vegter is entirely correct: Every mainstream journalist out there should hang their heads in shame in regards to how their profession has covered this incident.
In fact a nuclear facility near the sea in a seismic zone was not equipped to properly withstand a tsunami.
It was a big quake but it was 200km away, so dispersion of energy occurred.
You're right it's not much. Standard f*ckup. In other places, buildings that should withstand a quake fall down, killing students (Abruzzo quake).
I recall a video interview with a scientist made before Chernobyl. EVERYTHING that the scientist had said was still true and accurate after that disaster. But in practice somebody thought it was ok to run some test disabling the safeguards and Chernobyl happened. In practice somebody else forgot that in case of flooding the backup diesel generators would also fail and Fukushima happened.
Being against nuclear power is silly, as we depend on a nuclear reactor called the sun, but I have no faith that current government are so independent from interested parties (military, builders, and possibly others) that can do responsible and reasonably safe use of the best nuclear technology. Children playing with firearms.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
>Coal releases tons of radiation
1. Radiation isn't measured in tons.
2. Radioactive coal has been mined, but this is not as common as you have apparently been led to believe.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system. And it most certainly failed, after standing up to catastrophic events far beyond their rated capacity.
So the reactors technically went into meltdown ... and were brought out again before anything actually melted. A number of indirectly neutron-activated elements, secondary byproducts of the fission reaction, were released into the air, and are totally harmless by now. In fact, over 99% of the Iodine-131 is Xenon by now.
In reality, in Japan :
-> Solar power killed dozens of people (people installing them during the quake, and a few people who got smashed by falling panels)
-> Wind power likewise killed a few people, who were repairing a mast
-> Oil based power killed hundreds of people, due to explosions in refineries and power plants
-> Nuclear power actually got close at one point, to (indirectly) kill 1 person. That person is recovering, and will make a full recovery in less than a month's time
Deaths per TWh energy (obviously discounting little details like the gulf wars, which only the absurdly naive claim have nothing to do with fossil fuels)
So ... which is the safest energy source ? Nuclear power is FAR safer than solar power. More than 3x as many people have died from the consequences of using solar power than have died from nuclear power. This is taking into account that we have solar for 10 years, and nuclear for 60, and solar power is not contributing significant energy right now. In other words : the number for nuclear power is likely to not rise at all, and the number of deaths due to solar power is very likely to rise phenomenally.
In any sane society or media, Fukushima would be a very strong argument about how extremely safe nuclear power really is, and how it can stand up to disasters far bigger than what it was built for. In a sane media articles like this would be published, because any panic about nuclear effects will easily kill 10x as many people as the nuclear incidents themselves, just due to traffic accidents.
Additionally, without nuclear fission reactors, we would not be able to do half the medical scans that yearly save tens thousands of lives in the US and all over the world ... Tracers in blood are dependant on nuclear power reactors, for example. In reality nuclear power saves FAR more people than it kills.
Any sane society would build more nuclear power reactors, and pour money into further research into things like nuclear fission, fusion, and whatever. Cheap, safety is far beyond any other power source, portable, absurdly small amounts of fuel needed, and, ironically, less toxic than solar panels, and far less mechanically dangerous than wind power, and let's just shut up about fossil fuels and their wars, or coal ... what possible other thing could you ask for in a power source ?
And why the fuck are we focusing on this ? Some 10000 people died due to many different reasons, all of which basically boil down to direct effects of the force of nature. To all of the media their deaths are merely a tool to implement their preferred policy, which is, for reasons I cannot fathom, anti-nuclear.
Everything depended on the assumption that the coolant had a backup system.Once that assumption was mooted by the tsunami, the flaws in the rest of the system became known.
Not really. The real assumption that failed was that even if there was a complete loss of power in the plant, power could be reasonably quickly (8 hours) provided from outside the plant. The problems escalated because no supplies were available due to tsunami devastation, not even freshwater. The power grid was so damaged that an extra cable had to be laid to get any external power.
One of which is that once you lose cooling and can't get it restarted, you will inexorably have to vent hydrogen into a closed space full of air. Another is that there is no way to vent it to the outside to reduce the effects of an explosion.
The hydrogen was vented inside the containment on purpose, to allow activation products to decay. It could be vented outside the containment, but this would increase the radiation emissions, which the operators desperately wanted to minimize at that point. Hydrogen explosion was deemed an acceptable risk. It looks like this kind of mindset, "reduce public radiation exposure at all cost", is what caused the situation to escalate.
Another is that if the cooling system is completely bunged, there's no way to throw external coolant on the thing that has any effect.
The design assumption was that once cooling completely fails, the reactor will be drained, sealed and allowed to melt down. But this would necessitate a very costly cleanup which TEPCO wanted to avoid.
And another is that they stored the "spent" fuel rods in bunches in what is basically an open swimming pool, so that any chance it gets to evaporate the water around it will result in a fire.
Storing them elsewhere would necessarily expose the workers to more radiation. The point of the temporary storage near the reactor is to allow the fuel to lose most of its radioactivity before it is moved to a longer-term storage location.
What's criminal here is that these things were known to be bad assumptions long ago, but these reactors were operating as originally installed.
Each of the design considerations had a lot of thought behind it. The real problem is that the nuclear safety regulations are not based on a realistic risk analysis, but on fantasies (e.g. child drinking maximally contaminated water for an entire year, or somebody eating exclusively spinach for an entire year). As a result, the operators focused minimizing public radiation exposure rather than on stabilizing the facility, which was actually counterproductive.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
put it into perspective will you. to replace all four permanently damaged reactors at fukishma japan will need to replace roughly 3,000MW of generating capacity.
Wind turbines are roughly 25% efficient in the real world. that means on average a standard 5 MW turbine is really only good for 1.25 MW.
which means to replace the 4 reactors you need roughly 2,500 5 MW wind turbines. or three times the size of the worlds largest wind farm built to date which covers nearly 400km2 of used land area.
to replace just 4 nuclear power plants you literally need an area roughly the half size of rhode island.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
We need to accept that we are not capable of cutting through the BS and making clear decisions where highly toxic, unstable, and corrosive substances are handled in a complex manner for great profit (hundreds of millions of dollars).
Put another way, we need trusted technologists to tell us if things are safe or not. Apparently these can be bought when there is lots of money to be made.
At best, people don't think clearly. At worst, we are being lied to and as a result people die and whole regions are rendered toxic.
They screwed up venting the the reactor into the containment building because they were afraid of needles moving on radiation detectors half a mile away. They though they were doing good PR, buying time for very short half-life isotopes to decay, but instead they got an explosion. From a structural point of view it doesn't matter, but from a practical point of view it is harder to work in a building in which there has been a recent explosion than one that hasn't. Oh, and the PR backfired, explosions suck more than temporary radiation spikes.
The pressure had to be vented, and they made the wrong call.
The story of Fukashima is don't build nuclear plants in places that can get hit by both an earthquake and a tsunami. Nothing more, nothing less.
According to the Nuclear Energy Agency the majority of the radioactivity released at Chernobyl was in Xenon-33 with a half-life of 5 days. This was followed by Iodine-131 (half-life 8 days) and Tellurium-132 (half-life 78 hours). The next most active element released (measured in Becquerels) was only 3% of the Xenon released, and it has a half-life of 13 days.
If I read the report from the NEA correctly then ISTM I was comparing apples to apples.
Furthermore, unless one or more of the reactor cores at Fukushima has gone critical again after the shutdown then any direct product of the fission reactions that has a half-life measured in minutes was gone after the first day of the accident, well before the meltdowns and hydrogen explosions and measured releases of significant amounts of radioactivity.
There are certainly very short-lived isotopes that are part of the decay chain of long-lived isotopes. Iodine-131 is a perfect example. The problem is that they will continue to be created for the duration of the longer-lived isotopes.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
There are a couple of issues I have seen in the reporting and comparing the report to the photos.
First is regarding the build up of Hydrogen. Some hydrogen build up over time is what has been portrayed. The actual is Zirconium is flammable the same as Magnesium and Titanium. All burn in water or steam. If you have ever seen a magnesium engine block hit with a fireman's hose, you get the idea. Powdered Zirconium is considered an explosive. Fine Zirconium wool as used in flashbulbs, but in an oxygen atmosphere. The reaction with water or steam starts at lower temperatures. The reaction is exothermic. The fuel itself adds heat. At temperatures near 800-1,000 C the reaction changes to a fire. This rapid oxidization of the Zirconium is the source of the rapid and LARGE release of Hydrogen. In the presence of burning Zirconium, there is no free Oxygen so in the presence of this ignition source there is no ignition of the Hydrogen in the Hydrogen/steam cloud. After the Zirconium burnt, the air in the room was then able to come in contact with glowing fuel pellets. This resulted in the ignition of the hydrogen.
From a few days ago, there was a report of some fuel rods found up to a mile away and was bulldozed under to shield them. They don't say much about the containment in #3 other than to say it may have been breeched. That is an understatement. Look up and spend a good amount of time watching videos of demolitions of buildings. Note the blast and resulting dust. The flash happens first then the building breaks. Explosions in #1 and #4 are consistent with the shell and a hydrogen explosion inside. The flash is over before the building ruptures. The ejected material is limited in distance and the blast shape is relatively uniform.
Watch the video of #3. There are some striking differences from anything already seen. First as the building ruptures, there is a large flash, much of it is OUTSIDE the building. Ignition may have been triggered by the blast and was due to the blast. Second using Newton's laws, look at the stuff ejected in the blast. This blast is far from uniform from a blast in the top of the building. At the end of the video, note the very large amount of heavy objects falling from the top of the blast dome. Unlike the other blasts, there are large holes from large heavy objects falling on the turbine hall. These are not from the roof of the building. The blasts from #1 and #4 do not have large heavy itmes falling out of it.
Examination of the high resolution UAV photos raises some more concerns. The containment may have been breeched, but most reporters are citing a lack of evidence of this. I'll tell you where to look. Look on the two pipes that run along the turbine buildings. Look between the turbine hall for #4 and the #4 reactor. Remember those pipes are about 10-12 feet in diameter each. Look for onsite vehicles for size references. Note the object sitting on both pipes. It is covered with dust from the #4 unit explosion. Zoom in and take a good look at it. Knowing the width of each of the pipes and the fact it is resting on both of them, guess it's width. Now look at he edge of the item. Care to guess how thick it is? Now note that it has a painted surface. Under the dust layer it is clearly Yellow. Care to guess what it is and where it came from?
While looking at the high resolution photos from the UAW, 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. I think the cooling pond is gone and the steam rising form #3 is not from the pond, but form the containment known as the dry well. I can not tell from the photo if the reactor lid is in place. I'm guessing either a hydrogen buildup in the dry-well exploded or the lid to the reactor blew off. This resulted in the outer containment breech shown in the video. This breech then released the contained Hydrogen which then ignited, This is seen as the flash outside the building.
The truth shall set you free!
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 humbly submit the radical notion that instead of a need to produce more electricity, people could learn to use less.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Radioactive coal has been mined, but this is not as common as you have apparently been led to believe.
Sir, I give you this link for consideration. It was the first link in my google search, which took me 10 seconds.
Currently hooked on AMP
GE's AP600 and AP1000 designs will automatically trip and if they lose coolant flow and start to over-heat will automatically blow some explosive operated valves and start a shower of water falling on the steel containment building for 72 hrs without human intervention, which will maintain safe core temperatures. After 72 hrs you need to have somebody refill the coolant pool on the roof of the containment to keep things stable and it's a lot easier to pour water into a reactor coolant pool when the reactor isn't puking it's guts.
Anyways if you going to be in a zombie apocalypse, why not go full-monty and be in a nuclear mutant zombie apocalypse? Seems to me it would hurt less having you brains sucked out through a straw than it would having your skull ripped open and your brains eaten like popcorn!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Help yourself.
I was a disaster preparedness officer with the US Air Force for a number of years. I would not allow foreigners on my disaster site either. What with the language barrier and unfamiliar equipment someone would be sure to get killed, and then you really have a PR disaster.
In the vast majority of single point disasters, a small well trained group can do much better than a large poorly coordinated group. Something about a mythical man-month, except that people die when you screw up.
So what you're saying is that proponents of nuclear power consider this type of leakage and dispersal of radioactive material to be acceptable and unremarkable.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Tons can also mean a lot. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
Radiation released by coal, of course, is harmless and does not elevate cancer risks, right? Has only a short half life, does it? Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons):
Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235)
Thorium: 2,039,709 tons
Currently hooked on AMP
As compared to producing similar power from other methods, especially coal? Yes. Over the lifetime of the average power source (coal-fired plant, nuclear plant, wind turbine, etc), how much pollution of all forms will it generate from inception, through building, through useful life, to cleanup, per unit of power (say, per TJ)? I would guess here that coal would be among the worst for nearly, if not actually, all forms of pollution. Forms that are espoused as "environmentally friendly" do not produce enough power reliably usually, so they're only marginally interesting.
Of course, anything that can be done to improve any form of power generation overcome their risks/pollution is also interesting. For example, better nuclear designs that make the likelihood of a radiation leak reduced, or better scrubbers for fossil-fuel-based plants, or methods to reduce the bird-kill from wind turbines, or better efficiencies on solar power.
If Fukushima were using Candu reactors, would there have been a radiation leak?
"Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system"
You are 100% wrong.
"A nuclear meltdown is an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency[1] or by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.[2] However, it has been defined to mean the accidental melting of the core of a nuclear reactor,[3] and is in common usage a reference to the core's either complete or partial collapse. "Core melt accident" and "partial core melt"[4] are the analogous technical terms."
And although nuclear reactors might be safe while they're operating, they still produce a lot of radioactive waste. This is waste that has to be stored for over 10,000 years. No one on this planet has done anything that could possibly qualify them to design a vessel to store radioactive waste for a period of 10,000 years. Our knowledge of everything from how materials degrade to geological events that could happen simply is not accurate out to 10,000 years. Sure, I guess we could try to maintain the storage site for 10,000 years, but consider that no civilization on this planet has lasted even half that long. (China comes close at 4000 years).
Generating large amounts of nuclear waste is simply reckless given the problems it can cause and how qualified we are to deal with it.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
citing such illustrious sources as YouTube, Wikipedia and the Daily Mail.
AFP
Kyodo earlier reported that preliminary figures from the country's Nuclear Safety Commission revealed the battered plant had released 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive material per hour for several hours.
That calculation prompted Japan to consider upgrading the accident to the highest level -- something that has only been given to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster -- Kyodo said, citing unnamed government sources.
According to the International Nuclear Events Scale, level seven incidents are ones with a "major release of radioactive material with widespread health and environmental effects requiring implementation of planned and extended countermeasures."
BBC News
"Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) may face as much as 2 trillion yen ($23.6bn; £14.5bn) in compensation claims, according to JP Morgan.
The company has been grappling to contain the radiation leak crisis at its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
On Tuesday, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency raised the severity of the nuclear crisis at the plant to level 7.
Washington Post
Japanese authorities planned Tuesday to raise their rating of the severity of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis to the highest level on an international scale, equal to that of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to the Kyodo news agency.
Officials reclassified the ongoing emergency from level 5, an “accident with off-site risk,” to level 7, a “major accident.”
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
One milli-sievert = 100 millirem. Chest X-ray = 10 millirem=.1 milli-sievert.
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.
Hydro's good in NZ, but it can't meet demands everywhere - there just aren't enough large rivers running through conveniently damable canyons. Even in NZ, you're apparently falling off the program: "The plan in 1959 to raise the level of Lake Manapouri to increase hydro-electric generation met with resistance, and the Save Manapouri Campaign became a milestone in environmental awareness. Later hydro schemes (such as the Clyde Dam) were also controversial, and in recent decades coal and gas-fired thermal stations have been approved in New Zealand, while renewable energy schemes in general have been turned down because of the unpopular effect they have on the environment." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_New_Zealand
When our power sources "have an accident", perhaps they break down, and other stations pick up slack. Absolute worst case, power goes out in certain regions, big deal.
Big-scale engineering comes with risks. Dam failures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam - 171,000 dead, 11 million homeless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situ_Gintung - 100+ dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakidor_Dam - 70+ dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gusau_Dam - 40 dead, 500 homes destroyed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_di_Stava_Dam_collapse - 268 dead
Also, aside from the body counts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_dams
So in a disaster in Japan that's killed tens of thousands - including quite a few in burning oil refineries - how many are dead from nuke power?
I'm not saying hydro's universally a bad idea, but even in areas where it does work it has substantial risks that you're ignoring.
Anyway, if you'd care to look at the risks objectively, here's a great chart of deaths per TW/h:
161 Coal - world average (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
278 Coal - China
15 Coal - USA
36 Oil (36% of world energy)
4 Natural Gas (21% of world energy)
12 Biofuel/Biomass
12 Peat
0.44 Solar (rooftop) (less than 0.1% of world energy)
0.15 Wind (less than 1% of world energy)
0.10 Hydro (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
1.4 Hydro - world including Banqiao) (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
0.04 Nuclear (5.9% of world energy)
(from http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html)
I'm all for wind, solar and hydro, but they're limited in quantity and geography, so we have to find something else to fill the gap. All the other options but one involve burning stuff at considerable cost to human life and the environment. For all its faults, nuclear just isn't that bad compared to all the other alternatives.
"I've never seen a pro-nuclear activist claim any of these things."
Aside from the obvious Slashdot postings... the article here:
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/modified-version-of-original-post/
Originally stated, in unequivocal terms, that "there will *not* be any significant release of radiation" (that's pretty close to an exact quote). It was widely circulated, widely quoted, and even posted on Slashdot (a few days late, of course). It has since been edited to remove such predictions, but you can find originals on the web.
Your statement that you've never seen such cavalier dismissals does more to damage your credibility in my eyes than any anything. You're apparently not paying any attention. If that's the case, why should I believe what you have to say about nuclear power?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"It's not a building, it's a falsework designed to hide the building. Big difference."
Citation needed. Everything I've seen suggests the structures damaged in the explosions were the top parts of the building housing the reactors. These are not the secondary containment (the thick concrete "drywell" surrounding the reactor pressure vessel) but they very much are buildings. In particular, they cover the storage pools holding the spent fuel.
http://www.gereports.com/how-it-works-white-paper-on-mark-i-containment/
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.