Slashdot Mirror
Robots Enter Fukushima Reactor Building
swandives writes "For the first time, a pair of remote controlled robots have entered a reactor building at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power hopes the iRobot Packbots will be able to provide data on the current condition inside the buildings, although the company hasn't yet released any information on what they found inside."
I object to letting our robotic overlords have control of nuclear material.
Allow me to be the first to say, "domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!"
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
I'm not even pro-nuclear (I'd call it the lesser of two evils), and even I take exception to the assumption that the realists about Fukushima (or Chernobyl for that matter) must be nuclear industry shills.
There is a general trend of alarmist hysteria surrounding nuclear power, and slashdot is one of the few places I read where there are people basically telling the alarmists to stow it. A few of these people shouting down the anti-nuclear sentiment are strongly biased in favour of nuclear power, but most are simply more informed about the risks involved than the general public. Dismissing the anti-alarmist commentators as "nuclear industry PR folks" is essentially throwing reason out the window in favour of fear.
(Just to preempt the inevitable accusation that I am "one of them", my own view is that nuclear power plants should be built in lieu of coal power plants. See the "lesser of two evils" sentiment above. I'm all in favour of solar homes and where local conditions permit I support hydro, geothermal or other means of power collection. In the long run I think fusion offers our best hope. Nuclear power is a stopgap.)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
It is not Chernobyl, but still a level 7 disaster with 1/8 the amount of radiation leaked (very very large). Chernobyl is so radioactive that it can't be inhabited for at least a few centuries.
If the core and its steal containment structure is melted with radioactive material with water leaking through cracked concrete from it, then indeed the situation is much more serious. Radiation is going up in the sea outside the plant right after a 5.9 aftershock. This was after it fell when the leak was plugged. This points to a crack through the foundation where this is leaking into the groundwater and sea.
Either way, it is very rational to view this as a catastrophy and these robots will be needed to find out what is going on and how to fix the plant. If the worst fears are true and that the metal reactors themselves have melted then I do not know how it can be fixed. It took 20 years before people could enter the reactor after 3 mile island shutdown to actually see the partial meltdown to confirm it.
Not something to laugh about and forget by any sense of the means
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Geothermal is also nuclear power. It relies on the intrinsic fission of elements within the Earth's mantle, and legacy heat from prior fission as well as legacy friction from planetary formation. It's implemented by steam turbines also, or turbines driven by the flash evaporation of some other coolant.
The difference betweent fission, fusion and geothermal is that geothermal requires no fuel creation or elimination. You dig two deep holes fairly close together and force water down one of them. The heat of the Earth heats the water, which comes up the other hole - usually as steam or superheated water that will become steam when the pressure is released, but sometimes just as much hotter water. Naturally after the energy gained is tapped, the hot water is then re-injected. For new water some use sewage effluent and solve two problems at once. There is no ash, no spent fuel to rot in casks 100,000 years under close supervision of a non-proliferation task force. There are no mining deaths because there's no mine. There are no refining risks because there's no refining. There's no proliferation risk because there's no nuclear products onsite. The cost of dealing with the emissions are well understood because there aren't any. Geothermal plants require a much smaller geographic footprint than even nuclear plants, because they can mine energy from several miles in each direction and there is no risk.
With geothermal power in the event of a disaster of the worst possible sort: a Geothermal plant is simultaneously attacked by terrorists, crushed by a 10.3 earthquake and inundated by the subsequent 90m tsunami at the exact moment that a Justin Bieber album goes platinum, the worst that can happen is that some steam will vent and electricity will stop being generated, and Justin Bieber gets a slot on Dancing With the Stars. That's not a lot of downside risk, relative to fission and fusion.
There are established economies on Earth that can't provide 100% of their electrical energy needs from geothermal sources. Some parts of Africa, the US East Coast, Brazil. Japan, though? Yes, they could. Their entire nation is a chain of active volcanos. They are geothermal rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Conservative estimates (Areva) point to at least 60% meltdown in three cores, mobilization of about half the cores' inventory of solubles and of essentially all gases.
That's way more material than a Tsar Bomba or three (remember, the Tsar Bomba was high-altitude, 90-something % fusion yield). I'm not even counting the three cooling pools with unknown amounts of water in them which are steaming and outgassing in the open.
Is it more than Chernobyl? Certainly not, in terms of heavy metals and activated carbon released, so the long-term effects (heavy metal toxicity, mostly) will not be as pronounced.
I see, howewver, an estimation of 1T Bq/hr being released. That's definitely going somewhere and with the monsoon season starting, that somewhere is the southwest of Japan (Kanto will be hardest hit, if this is a regular monsoon).
I have reason to believe that additional cancers, birth defects and miscarriages over the next 30-50 years or so will not be correctly reported, nor, indeed, correctly attributed should they be detected. Even simple facts such as radiation measurements are being withheld or obfuscated.
Also, you yourself are spreading untruths. The plant was on an approved 10 year life-extension that had just started. The earthquake was definitely not the biggest earthquake ever and its magnitude at Fukushima was even lower than that, because of distance from the epicenter mainly.
The #2 reactor is cracked. That could not have happened because of the tsunami (not enough energy), nor can it be because of the hydrogen explosion ("wrong" blast pattern). That leaves only one culprit - the earthquake itself, which indeed exceeded the puny 7.5 Richter design maximum.
There is now talk (from TEPCO) of flooding the reactor buildings. They are not designed to hold water in the first place. They are already compromised, structurally, by a massive earthquake, two aftershocks and an explosion each. Will they hold if another quake comes?
No need to answer that, of course. Just go back to your dreams of "energy too cheap to meter".